Platform, device version and operating system:
Android
What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
It’s been a year since Treasure Guardians were added to the game ( 7.2 Update: Hidden Treasures ), and I still don’t have a single Treasure Guardian Troop despite averaging 9-10 Guardian battles per week (around 500 battles over the year). I expected to have found some by now, despite the fact that the drop rate continues to be hidden from the playerbase.
What should we check on our side to determine whether this is a bug?
It has recently come to my attention that different GoW servers can have different deployment versions since Lunarelleon was in my Soulforge a few minutes before it appeared in some other player’s Soulforge ( 8.1 Update: Quests, Maps & More - #118 by TheIdleOne ), so it would seem prudent to check whether all GoW servers have equal probability of rewarding Treasure Guardian Troops upon winning a Treasure Guardian Battle.
Due to precedent, tagging @Kafka in the hopes that this is at least looked at before being dismissed as “Not A Bug”
The 7.5 Update was in May 2024 ( 7.5 Update: United We Stand ), but the corresponding achievements only triggered simultaneously on my end in July 1st despite downloading the update as soon as it was available, and both requirements (Join an Alliance & Defeat 10 Citadel Guardians) being completed in the shortest possible number of days.
Not sure how achievements are processed (client or server) but this could also suggest an issue with the GoW server I’m connected to receiving the Achievements part of the update late.
Just terrible luck to be fair. I’ve got 2 but 4 of the same one. The whole sentinel thing is a joke to be honest. No point worrying about collecting all troops anymore though so theres that
Yup, bad RNG is the main suspect, but now that we know the servers may not all be identical, we have to ask the question (which could extend to other aspects of the game such as Hoard Mimic maybe)
The Powers That Be don’t consider this a bug; they consider this a feature.
Look at it from the developers’ point of view. The absurdedly low drop rate is their idea of “motivation” for you to spend more in the Underspire. More time, more effort, more currency (gems, and maybe the RL funds to purchase them). They don’t want you spending 900-ish gems in a week (6 x (50 + 100)) to complete the seven dragons and then to lollygag through a couple of dead-ends on Sunday; they want you spending 2100 gems (7 x (50 + 100 + 150)) per week and exhaustively fighting every last battle except maybe for a handful of dead ends that don’t have a Guardian boss in them. They don’t want you only fighting 9-10 Guardians per week, they want you looking for all 18 even if you’ll only find 15-16 in most weeks if you search everywhere.
My recollection from the community data-mining thread (to which I also contribute my results) is that Guardians are roughly a 1.5%-2% drop with a bias towards (slightly) higher odds in the higher-rarity chests that are few and far between. So your experience as described falls under “lousy RNG luck”, but not necessarily a bug. Much like how somebody who fights a fair amount of high-difficulty Explore but who hasn’t yet received a Hoard Mimic is experiencing “lousy RNG luck”. Or somebody who has pulled 36 eggs of a particular gem dragon type without getting all six is experiencing “lousy RNG luck”.
The developers want to convince you to keep shoving quarters into that machine with the flimsy grabbing arm hoping against hope that you’ll be able to find that one plush toy you want and further hope that it’ll keep its’ grip on the thing until it drops into your lap. Which can only happen so long as the thing doesn’t drop into your lap.
It sucks, but it’s the way that it is. My coping mechanism for this – I have similar experiences to you and have only found two Guardian troops the entire time – is that I focus on the guaranteed stuff I get from the bosses, use the free weekly Lantern to double up on Glory orbs (alternating Medium and Major), and anything beyond that is gravy. I’ve got almost all of my mythic troops to Gold Elite status at this point, so I feel I’m doing something right in that regard.
Easy solution for this would be to get “sentinel tokens” from treasure rooms in Underspire. Every chest gives 1-10 tokens and when you have enough, you can get a sentinel in the soulforge for 100 tokens, 500 jewels of their respective color and 5,000 souls.
Many are tired of the low drop rates and maybe just maybe the grass is greener on the other side.
Not everyone has a strong enough cope to handle what the devs are giving.
Although it appears the developers have all of the power, that power only exists as long as there are players left to pay their bills to keep the game going.
They can do what they want and the player base will act accordingly.
I believe the maximum per zone is three, as detailed through exhaustive crowd-testing. I’ve never tried to break down the distribution of Sentinel rooms; rather, when I’m doing some clean-up with remaining torches on the weekend I’ll stop exploring a zone once I reach three.
I suspect the majority is three, but I wouldn’t want to put a percentage on it or try and guesstimate what the “average” number is.
I spend 50 + 100 every day when I’m still working my way to Diamantina. Some weeks, I don’t have to spend on Saturday; most weeks I do; some weeks, I am even required to spend a little bit on Sunday just to get to that last boss. On weeks when my spending is done early, I’ll sometimes spend a little bit on Sunday if I feel like it, e.g., if the room(s) revealed by my last torch includes a Sentinel.
I probably find somewhere between five and twelve Sentinels a week, but there’s a lot of variance in there both based on my pathfinding luck and based on just how much I spend.
I’ve basically stopped doing treasure rooms entirely, and focus on using my torches to find the boss rooms. Trying to get Sentinels (with their 0.00000000000000000000001% drop rate) feels like a colossal waste of time when the boss room rewards are actually decent.
I had a general randomness idea I wanted to throw out anyhow, and it doesn’t need to be specifically linked to the Sentinel drops, just anything that is super rare.
I don’t know if this is “Gambler’s Fallacy” or possibly the inverse of it, but it seems to me the randomness in this game is kinda funky.
My general beef is that I have played Underspire to completion probably 3 in every 4 weeks, finishing maybe 6-7 treasure rooms minimum per week. I have got precisely zero Sentinels. A lot of guild mates have had many drop, and they can’t be playing that many more battles than me. There is sadly nothing I can do in game to be able to check if this is working as intended or something is stuck or odd behind the scenes.
(Edit: based on the rest of the thread conversation, it warrants a mention that I don’t have Hoard Mimic either. However it’s in the realms of probability that’s not completely unreasonable as I’m not a hardcore Lvl 12 Explorer.)
So, getting to the point …
What I would do, if I were a dev, is implement some sort of modified randomness.
If a drop is supposed to be, say, 1000-1 then after 2000 fails, bump it up for that user to 100-1.
If 200 more fails pass, then 10-1 etc. etc.
Those odds above are just made up, but something along those lines with some more thought behind the precise maths.
That way, the odds gradually gravitate towards certainty but not quite. Maybe cap it off at 10-1 using the above example, but never 1-1?
The way the rest of the world handles this is to have pity counters, you are guaranteed to find the carrot after having failed a fixed very high number of times. Gradually improving the chance doesn’t help if you still keep failing, especially if the numbers don’t get disclosed, can’t be verified and are handled by a company with a long track record of first messing up their loot boxes, then refusing to acknowledge it until proven by the community beyond any doubt.
Nope, that’s an “unlucky coincidence that could have happened to anybody”. We’ve already got “unlucky coincidences” with a chance of less than one in a billion hand-waved away, because anything is possible when chances are involved.
Fun fact, back then the community used an undocumented server feature to prove that chest loot tables had been set up incorrectly, after several official responses claimed everything had been checked and found to be working as intended. After having to admit defeat, the first thing that happened was said undocumented feature to get removed, because it was “confusing players”.
