Maybe they could add more things like pity keys where you get a tiny amount of credit toward a bigger goal when going after something rare or random
and as a reward for all this constructive detailed feedback, those of us that have kept civil all get a copy of the new mythic right? 
There’s a huge amount of feedback that is “being kept track of”, usually by “forwarding it to the team”. It all has one thing in common, the community never hears anything back again. It’s sort of a recurring theme, some new player will eventually repost one of the dozen or so ever popular improvement topics, because they just make sense, with the same tumbleweeds result.
I know, I know, it’s going to be a complete waste of time, but I guess I still can’t resist trying it yet again. Is there any chance this might for once play out differently? That someone from the community manager team actually engages with the community? Maybe shares some design insight about the Hoard Mimic? Why the weird trait set? Why only make it available through a crazily lucky roll that might even take the most dedicated gamers years to achieve? Why can’t it be changed within the next 18 months, even if you wanted to?
Personal feeling, I don’t mind the random lucky shot much, it just desperately needs some fairness calibration. The whole mimic mechanic feels streaky, a lot. Even if the chance to encounter one is, say, 10%, word has it that it can streak way past 100 boss chests without a mimic fight. That’s like several kicks into the Cedric whenever it happens to you, never mind that you might luck into three mimics in a row later on.
A common design approach is to limit the amount of bad luck, either through pity timers (e.g. 10th boss chest without mimic fight is guaranteed to be one) or cumulative odds (e.g. every boss chest increases the mimic fight chance by 10%, resets once you find one). Same can be applied to the hoard mimic fight and ultimately to finding the hoard mimic troop, so that even if you don’t get lucky you at least make some progress towards your goal.
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The point is another thing for the players to chase while they continue on PQ3 and let gow die.
Don’t be foolish enough to continue, especially by spending money.
The reason community managers do not engage as they used to is because they really have no idea what they are talking about. It is better for them to stay quiet and look like they do, than open their mouthes and remove all doubt.
Mythic pulls obviously have to revolve around some kind of RNG, but RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG is pretty insane. On top of having to do 6 battles for mythstones x amount of times just to get a boss chest for a shot at that RNG?
In week 1 of the new patch I did 8000 trophies worth of explore 12s, found the hoard mimic once. This last gnome week I did 13000 trophies worth of explore 7s for gnomes, found the hoard mimic 3 times. But I have a guy in my guild who got the troop on his first encounter with the hoard mimic.
This has been pretty painful. And no the solution is not hoard mimic bait for RL money, just sayin. But I hope you figure something out soon, because dedicating all of my time I have for gaming to this troop and getting that many trophies with nothing to show for it is a pretty big kick in the… you know.
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To be clear, I also wish community managers would interact with the community in a meaningful way, but can we admit to ourselves that part of the reason they don’t is because any time they say literally anything they get blasted, and called stupid and incompetent? Not to mention the age-old conspiracy theory of them secretly trying to kill GoW or absurd requests like this:
Unfortunately I am an internet stranger and can’t expect people to listen to me, but I’ll try anyway - please be polite and respectful. It’s a match-3 mobile game. Any staff you talk to on these forums don’t call the shots. I get disagreement, concern, voicing opinions, asking for change. But being rude will (and already has) pushed community managers from speaking meaningfully here. Don’t make it worse.
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The Gems of War and PQ3 development teams are completely separate teams.
Gems of War has its own development team who do not work on PQ3 at all.
It is exciting to release a new game but Gems of War is still our baby.
When it comes to RNG we tend to start conservatively.
The community has often surprised us with how hardcore they go at new features and have in the past absolutely shot past our expectations and we’ve had to nerf things to rebalance things in a healthy way. NO ONE likes nerfs, not you, not me, not the designers making those calls. We can all agree it’s a bad time for everyone involved.
If something gets released and it has undershot the mark, it’s better to have to buff it rather than overshoot it and then nerf it.
I’m not saying that’s the case here with the Hoard Mimic drop rates, the data will show the team what they need to know regarding that. I’m just trying to give some insight into some of the decision making.
When I spoke to the designers they’d already started brainstorming about what/how they could possibly make the Hoard Mimic experience a better one. There’s been no decisions about what if anything will be done at this time, which is why I was more focused on collecting feedback and making sure you all knew I was in the thread doing that.
While it is frustrating to have to wait, we try not to make knee jerk decisions on Gems of War, we give things time, we listen to the feedback, we watch the data, we consider the multiple options to improve or solve a problem and how that would impact the game in the long term and any future plans or ideas we were hoping to implement.
This is what the CX team mean when we say we’ve passed your feedback on, or are taking notes and paying attention to what you’re saying. We have indeed, passed on the feedback, the team are listening and they are considering everything they need to consider before making any kind of decision, and they’re giving the time and consideration it deserves and not just throwing the first thing they think of at the wall and hoping it sticks.
Sometimes it might be a super simple solution (hello Soulforge), sometimes it might mean tweaking the numbers on the RNG, sometimes it could mean a feature gets changed, sometimes it means doing literally nothing at all (what do the numbers say? How will this impact future features/content/plans?).
The risk of making a post like this is that it’s easy to take what I’ve said as a promise, when I’m just sharing a little insight and at this stage can’t make any promises or guarantees that anything will be done at all. All I can tell you for sure is it’s something that the team are aware of and are considering, but I’m not sure which way things are going to go right now.
When I know you’ll know.
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Thanks for this post, for me as a player it is nice to get some insights in these kind of considerations. And I agree, that it is better to start of slow and buff instead of overshooting and nerfing. I also have to say, that I am fine with new content, that is not available to me after a few days of grinding. Maybe I will have to wait a bit longer for the Hoard Mimic, it´s not a problem, I also had to wait a long time for Zuul for example.
However, there is one thing which I don´t understand. Maybe the reason is, that English is not my native language or maybe your wording was not 100% accurate… Considering the Hoard Mimic drop rates, you say that “the data will show the team what they need to know regarding that”. This confuses me. Why does the team need any data to judge the drop rates of the Hoard Mimic? I mean, the drop rate is not unknown to the dev team, is it? I would assume, that one of the guys must have put it somewhere in the code. But as I understand it, your post implies, that also the dev team needs to wait and see how these drop rates develop over the first few weeks. As I said, this confuses me, so either something is very strange about that or I did just understand something completely wrong.
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Not to speak for Kafka, but I interpreted that as saying the data on how many players are actually getting the Hoard Mimic would help to guide their assessment to of whether the drop rate needs to be adjusted.
(and seconding the thanks for the thoughtful post; it’s interesting to see a little of how balancing decisions work from the other side of the screen.)
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Thank you for taking the time to write that Kafka! Always good to get some extra insight onto what the team is doing.
Thanks for the feedback Kafka. I’m an end gamer but don’t feel I should necessarily be able to unlock all new content in the first week after it is released. But I do strongly support the idea of some kind of ‘pity’ mechanic given the random nature of the drop with very long odds. Personally I always prefer something I feel like I can progress towards even if that progress is very slow rather than all-or-nothing. And it will get demotivating for players who have been grinding E12 for months and getting nothing while seeing others around them get lucky on their first run
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I already liked the post, but I think you also deserve a separate post. Thank you for sharing insights on what’s going internally @Kafka, much appreciated!
Historically, this illustrates how this company prioritizes what the data says (probably wise) while ignoring the individual player’s experience (arguably less wise, and evidenced by the lack of pity counters in things such as Cursed Gnomes and Hoard Mimic Chests): this is why many players will be frustrated indefinitely, whereas if e.g. ~5-10% of the players have received the new Mythic within the first week, the drop rates are acceptable for what is intended to be a long-term element of the game.
As a rule of thumb, any time they refuse to disclose the drop rates it’s best to assume the item in question does not exist if we wish to avoid the frustration arising from trying to farm it: if/once we get it, we can be pleasantly surprised while avoiding entering the intended frustrarion-begets-purchases cycle behind the undisclosed drop rates.
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Maybe I wasn´t able to express myself clear enough… My point is, if I know a drop rate, I don´t need to wait for any data to judge, how many drops I will have after how many tries and so on. At least if I am talking about a large sample size (and the whole GoW player base should be sufficient to produce a large enough sample size), I can simply calculate what I have to expect before I even release the mechanic. The math needed is not a simple 1+1=2, but you also don´t have to involve rocket science to do it.
With a given drop rate it is for example possible to say something like “x% of all players will be able to achieve something in y tries (or less)”. Then one can decide, what numbers for x and y are “good”. And if something is “good” is of course always a matter of the individual point of view. We players might argue, that something is not “good”, while it is exactly working as intended from the dev point of view. Of course, the exact values chosen for x and y clearly influence the players experience of a new feature. If 80% achieve something in 100 tries or less, a lot of people will be super happy with their luck - but it is also kind of boring, if no real effort is needed. If only 2% achieve it in 5000 tries or less, it is of course a carrot, that is very hard to reach for most of us - which might then cause a lot of frustration. This point is then just a design decision, which can of course always be debated.
But my point is not the specific design decision itself. To me, Kafka´s post sounds like devs decide for a certain drop rate, release it and then wait a few weeks how the data evolves without further (mathematical) considerations of the consequences a certain drop rate will bring. Based on the data, they then discuss, if the drop rate is “good” or if it is too frustrating and has to be changed. I consider my mathematical background to be a bit deeper than average, so for me the idea, that a new mechanic could be designed this trial-and-error way is just… frightening? That is why I had to ask, if I understood this right 
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@Djimbalimbl not that you are arguing this, but I don’t think the devs could also release something based on pure math only. The main problem is that they don’t know in advance how popular a particular game mode will be and therefore, they won’t know how much that probability will be exercised in a given time frame.
The devs probably have a goal something like the following: in the first week of hoard mimic release, x% of the playerbase gets it. In the first month of the hoard mimic release y% of the playerbase gets it. To see whether this holds, they have to wait a week and then a month and look at the final data. No amount of math can actually tell you (for good) whether you hit these goals or not. They do probably come up with the initial probabilities with some assumption on how much this game mode will be played, so they would use the statistics and math there. But seeing how it really reveals requires waiting and then looking at the actual data.
Another reason that they are likely not releasing the actual rates is two reasons:
- If they do, it would be more difficult to for them to change (e.g., based on data). This would need additional communication.
- If they do, I am sure that many players (I would imagine more than 95% of the playerbase) would complain that they did not get the drop after X tries (put the expected number of tries to get 1 drop) since they don’t understand how probability and randomness works. This is one of the reasons people go crazy when they won’t get a mythic e.g., in 4000 gem keys, although there is still 1.8% chance of not getting a mythic in 4000 gem keys. People love to assume that they should get 1 mythic in 1000 keys, and although this will hold on average in large amount of rolls, in truth, you have a 36.8% (a pretty good) chance of not getting it in 1000 keys.
(To be clear, I am sure you know and understand these. It is just surprising how little of the population actually understand this)
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I would fully agree, if the game was new or released only 6 months ago or so. Then you can´t judge the player base and releasing by pure math will maybe result in undesirable outcome. However, after so many years, I would expect the devs to have a lot of data available of how many battles are done in which mode and so on… But I understand your point.
However, I fully agree with the second part of the post and I think you nailed the reason, why not all drop rates are public. I was watching a video of a GoW-youtuber about two years ago, who was chasing a specific mythic in a certain kingdom with event keys. It was back in the times, when several kingdoms had only one mythic troop and event keys were a great way to target specific mythics. I don´t remember the exact number of keys involved, but many commentators agreed, that “he would really have deserved to get that mythic”. I remember doing the math of it and his chance for missing was still well above 20%. I stated this in the discussion, but reactions were “yeah, but with THIS huge amount of keys, he would really have deserved the drop”. I didn´t bother to get further involved in the discussion 
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That Hoard Mimic is a terrible Troop anyway. LOL
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The problem is that there are so many things the team “are aware of and are considering”, for several years now. Broken daily offers, forge scroll availability, detrimental weapon upgrades, just to name a few. The community receives an “update” whenever too many pitchforks get raised, which always boils down to everything still being considered super important. The team just needs to meditate yet another year on the perfect solution prior to getting off square one, because “a band-aid fix would surely cause issues in the future”.
I believe the community expects that the community manager serves as a relay between the community and the team, in both directions. That includes pestering the team until something to communicate shakes loose. Preferably a date at which an issue is finally getting addressed in some way, but even an “out of scope” would be better than nurturing false expectations that something is actually going to happen. From community perspective “the team” might as well be a label on the trash bin, given that nothing ever comes back from there.
Let’s suppose a bunch of players are planning to spend several dozen hours on farming for the Hoard Mimic. This would obviously be a colossal waste of time if farming were to become fairer any time soon. Since the team is considering changes, would you recommend to hold back with that time investment or go right ahead? If you don’t have enough information right now to give such advice, at which point in time do you suppose you will? There is some kind of project planning going on, right?
Have you considered asking the community how hardcore they would go if a new feature were released in a certain way? I seem to recall that some patch even added a survey feature to the game?
For a worst case analysis, the Hoard Mimic troop appears to be harmless. Even if it were to drop from every hoard mimic battle, what would players gain? The troop is actually pretty bad, meaning players won’t really run it. They just want it for achievement and collection purposes, for which one copy is enough, extra ones are going to gather dust like Cedric. Technically, the extra copies could be disenchanted, for 150 (?) souls. That’s half an Arena battle, which is insignificant, considering you need hundreds of battles to even get a hoard mimic fight.
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No one will listen to me either but people attacking staff really frustrates me. It serves no purpose. Don’t make it worse.
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it’s first trait should have been something to gain gold…its second trait should have been Invulnerable. This would make it a bit better at taking skulls than Leonis Tower, but not have the stun passive and stun active skills of that troop.