Zhul’kari is a nice place to fight in. Many hybrid dark elves.
I skimming this tread… this week is a big challenge.
I think the Developers were trying to encourage diverse play, but they need to incorporate a carrot to adjust behavior. Currently they have the Stick (No Stones) if playing the non featured weekly activity (like PvP)
- Provided the developers are satisfied with the current Stone requirements
- Increase the number of Stones need to be collect weekly by 50%-75%.
- (Remove Stick) ALL activities will allow the player to collect Stones.
- (Add bigger Carrot) The specific weekly selected activity (PvP, Explore, etc) will give x2 Stones.
Players can grind it out in a non optimal mode or reap the x2 rewards by doing the featured weekly activity. Obviously some of the weekly criteria should be looked at as well. But consider that: This is real still the first major version of the weekly event. They have revisited other aspects of the game in the past (Im sure they will here as well).
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I understand that using quests would “have a huge amount more”, but that’s how @Nimhain said it worked previously on this forum. Using the screenshot below I just generated, based on your description, it would have been one of the challenges but with all 4 troops randomly substituted? Alternatively, what I’m suggesting, is that it could work the way the devs said and simply used Silverglade quest battle #14 (“Pet Shop Boys”) and replaced troop #4 (Rakshanin with Valkyrie).
I think the latter scenario is more likely, but I’ll let the evidence speak for itself (unless the devs want to chime in). But if you have examples of teams with more than 1 substitution which don’t match any of the challenge/quest teams I’d love to see them, since I love learning more about the inner workings of the game.
Silverglade ultimately proved to be more productive than Zhul’kari for the reason @Mithran stated.
I completed the event in 91 battles by using the Difficulty trick and only taking fights worth 3 stones.
Okay, after doing some more testing, I can see that quests are definitely used as a base occasionally. However, the chance at a quest being rolled versus a challenge seems to still be much lower. Using the difficult swap trick to refresh explore, I quickly went through 50 more explore screens. Of these, I was able to correlate 43 of them to a specific challenge with one troop swapped.
I’m willing to be the other 7 could bet correlated to quest teams with one troop swapped. Here are the 7 anomalous teams that I saw:
Based on this, I now concur that quests are indeed the mix, but it is heavily weighted against seeing them. Based on the numbers I’ve recorded and hazarding a guess as to how it works based on my personal experience (even this number of battles that cannot be correlated to a specific challenge in the mix seems high to me), it may be that a random quest has about as much chance to be pulled as a base team as any specific challenge, or, basically, 1 out of 8 chance to get any specific challenge and another 1 out of 8 to get a random quest which is then pulled from either all quests or a smaller pool of eligible quests. If not, then the chance of getting a quest team as the base team is purposely weighted against by some other amount.
I know 50 explores isn’t a huge sample size, but were quests 1:1 with challenges as being pulled as explore base teams, 7 out of 50 is one hell of an outlier. Either way, challenges make up the bulk of the base for explore teams.
Side note, for anyone using difficulty change to force the explore to change, you only need to enter the difficulty screen and back out, you don’t need to actually change to another difficulty and you definitely don’t need to change, exit, and change back. This makes it much quicker to get the troops you want (but equally as abhorrent a gameplay mechanic in my eyes, so I hope they never make an event this restrictive again.)
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Exactly, I think I mentioned that earlier (maybe not). Click on the difficulty icon on the world map and then click on the X in the upper right - Explore teams reset.
Using Ashtender’s Kingdom page we can confirm this.
Team #1: Vincent Van Goblin with Sir Snothelm swapped out for Keghammer.
Team #2: Parfumiers with Corrupt Sorceress swapped out for Elwyn.
Team #3: Shiny! with Krystenax swapped out for Berserker.
Team #4: Snake Eyes with Naga Queen swapped out for Elwyn.
Team #5: In Shining Armor with Knight Coronet swapped out for Satyr Musician.
Team #6: Snake Eyes (again) with Marilith swapped out for Faunessa.
Team #7: Leathergoods with Gorgon swapped out for Carnex.
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Awesome data, thanks. As @Ozball mentioned, the outliers are confirmed as quests. But the reduced weighting was something I suspected but hadn’t been able to prove yet. Great info!
7/50 is 14%, but it will obviously take a lot more samples to know if it’s actually 15% vs say 10 or 20. But using 15% for now, average Elfs per battle is 1.3 for Silverglade and 1.16 for Zhul’Kari (and .34 for FThorns).
202/250 here.
Well, I tried exploring for the snotstones a bit…
Explore in Silverglade: 5 battles, 0 elves
Explore in Zhul’kari: 3 battles, 0 elves
Explore in Forest of Thornes: 1 battle, 0 elves
Lots of dragons though.
I guess this weeks event is just not for me. Back to PVP for me…
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I have 200+ Snotstones so far… just use the difficulty exploit above and stick to Silverglade…
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Couldn’t agree more.
Option 1 - Play endless maps for very little rewards and farm explore going back and forth between different menus.
Option 2 - Play PvP and put the gold towards guild tasks so everyone gets the rewards, ignoring the monotony of certain events.
A clear winner for me.
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sounds nice, but i think if i wanted to change events - the first thing id like to see is some way that would stronger encourage ppl to change pvp defense teams weekly 
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I don’t understand why people are saying you have to enter the Difficulty setting to get the Explore team to reset. I just Retreat at the beginning, and when I go back to Explore in the same kingdom, it’s a different team next time. I’m not goingto the Difficulty setting at all. What am I missing?
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With the difficulty change, you never need to start the match and retreat, you just do it once you see the team on the scouting screen. It’s generally quicker than starting and then retreating, but has the same effect.
Assuming you are VIP2+ and have scouting. If not it is cheaper to start and retreat instead of paying 50 gold every match.
Are you saying you’re backing out of the matchup screen and it resets? If that’s the case, then your experience is different than everybody else here.
If you’re saying you’re entering the actual match and then retreating, the difficulty trick is much, much faster.
That’s true.
More kingdoms is not better.
–Scroll across the map
–click on a Kingdom and wait for Kingdom to load
–click Explore and wait for the server to open the Explore menu
–choose Explore (again) and wait for the Explore team to open, but see no Event targets
–exit and wait for the map to load
Who wants to do that more times?
This event is terrible.
If this were every event (or even every other) I’d probably stop playing GoW and finally try out a new game.