PvE droprates are too low

One bad day = No reason to play. Gotcha. Out.

 

You can trivialize it if you want, but it's not "one bad day" so much as a droprate that is too low. Five rare items with no epics or legendaries in 50 maps would also be too low. Eren just got 3300 gold for 20 PvP matches, today, as a counterexample.

The game has been exposed to a lot of new players now with Kongregate coming online, and what I'm talking about is an issue, de facto. You can dismiss the feedback (it's more relevant what BlueManchu thinks of course) but the feedback is on point. As compared to other games the droprates here don't really appear to favor any kind of endgame PvE experience, unless I'm missing something.

 

Note that this was with the club membership and I got lucky with 2x legendary treasures. (which were in one of the rare chests before chest 11 and the 11th chest's club slot - so that's over 2000 gold for the first 11 chests actually; together with the other treasures I've gotten)
I'm pretty sure analysing the gold earn rate of players like peonprop who get the 20 chests every day would make for a more consistent analysis.

God bless 420 YOLO SQUAD.

 

Discount the legendaries and you're still talking 1300 gold in 20 matches, which is phenomenal compared to what you'd get in PvE. Not to mention the fact that if those weren't treasures, they'd be straight up legendary items ...

 

I think that there is too little incentive for replaying the campaign currently.

In my opinion that there is a problem with PvE drops from beginners perspective. He may not be able to (lack of necessary items) create efficient farming decks which would let him speed-farming, so beating 50 maps by him and beating 50 maps by for example Sir Veza are vastly different things, especially considering necessary time.

 

I agree with Sir Valimont.

It's not "one bad day = No reason to play".

I play this game for 9 months and I have some thoughts to share.

1) I like CardHunter II map and play it every day, and I played 3 lvl6 maps for every day for 7 months .. in all that time from those 4maps I got I dont know 6-7 Legendary items .. say that's 1 per MONTH!!
I had Membership active all the time. Do I actually have to say anything more? You do a repetitive task every day to get 1 Legendary item in a month..
You need to be quite persistent to keep doing it .. take into account that most Legendary items really arent good .. and you get even less reward

2) I even done quest-reset .. and that also was not quite fruitful .. 70 quests redone .. I dont remember how much Leg. I got ( 7 tops I think) but only 1 was playable..

3) Club Membership -> I've had it for 7months .. I think it can give something more.. getting 1 more items in a sea or uncommons .. is quite "meh"

4) Also, speaking of PVP, PVP boosts/nerfs -> nobody mentioned that FS got nerfed .. with that nerf and low drop rates - playing SP after campaign and quests are over
is really not fun ..

5) I understand that game needs money to run ( I have 95% items mostly due to high number of chests bought) .. but take all aside - SP needs more fun/rewards .. Loot Fairy is OK, gives legendary 1-2x a month and doesnt take that much time .. that's like 15-20 Legendary in 10 months .. for players with Membership ..
Bandit - I dont know, as I stopped playing anything than Loot Fairy .. cannot even think of playing 30 maps and getting no reward for that.
I even think - players who have money, PayPal etc .. will give their share if they like the game anyway .. but there are some other players (kids) who cant pay anyway .. and who should be rewarded for playing more than half year. And what's the problem if a kid who did not pay for the game has 93% items after 1 year of farming.
I surely would not farm that long I would have bought some chests..

6) I dont have anything against repetitive farming .. I kind a relax from other work doing that .. but it has to give some rewards .. otherwise its only matter of time

7) I even think that more SP players will join MP once they get lots of items .. and then, when someone has 20/30 Legendary items, he gets addicted ... to collecting, to the game etc ..

8) Resume: Take all aside -> farming SP is not rewarding enough.

 

While I'm not currently an MP player, 1300 gold for 20 matches doesn't strike me as particularly high as compared to running through the entire campaign in SP with a solid farming build and a club membership. You'll find the Bandit along the way in SP, which will deliver an average of 800 gold if you double-dip. Plus you're almost certain to get a bunch of rare treasure, a handful of epics, and maybe even a legendary or two along the way.

Getting to the point that farming efficiently is practical, OTOH...yes, I can see that being frustrating for new SP players, to the extent that many will quit before they get to that point.

Could SP drops be buffed a bit without hurting the economy? Almost certainly. I've been playing for over a year and farming pretty hard for a few months, with a membership the whole time, and I'm still in no danger of obtaining all of the epic/legendary loot that's out there to help motivate me. If that's not a problem for me, then I have to doubt that it would be a problem for more casual players who don't have as much time/money to devote to the game—but better rewards do seem likely to make more of them stick around.

(Edit: no, self, a full farming of SP and 20 matches in MP do not really take "a similar amount of time"...even if you're a really slow MP player, which it turns out I am.)

 

PVE has one more advantage - its dynamic. You play different decks, strategy, enemy .. its far more rewarding in that way than PVP that is quite repetitive, you even learn enemy moves after some time ..

Ok, you do get what ~15g per map ... if you play 50 maps, you'll get 750 + some treasure, maybe few epics and MAYBE even a Legendary .. and that would only take whole day ..
It's like you get 1g for killing a Boar (in that Southpark WOW episode).. and say -> if you kill a 1.000.000 you'll get some decent gold..


I loved all the maps first months, etc.. but if you want SP players to stick around .. you really need some motivation play-vise or reward-vise:

a) new items
b) some way of guaranteed Reward .. (like Loot Fairy) .. or like those 2o wins in MP.. some board-meter .. gauge where if you get enough points you get a Epic Chest.
c) infinite dungeon with nice rewards

or else, most of players will go .. Sir Veza will stay .. I will probably stay .. but we are not majority

 

Just to get some more accurate data (based on well over 10,000 items dropped) in here, here's a quote from our trained statistician Lord Feleran (he works on such stuff in a university), paraphrased from here:

"The probabilities of getting an item with the following rarity are (within a 95% probability) within these limits:
Common: 0.7433 0.759
Uncommon: 0.1896 0.204
Rare: 0.03884 0.04616
Epic: 0.00665 0.00994
Legendary: 0.00063 0.00193"

So about 4% of SP drops from common chests are Rare, about 0.75% are Epic and about 0.1% are Legendary. The numbers in practice are a bit higher as you get also better chests than common ones.

50 maps produces about 130 items without a Club membership.
Expected average drops over the long haul:
Rare: 0.04*130 = 5.2 -> 5
Epic: 0.0075*130 = 0.975 -> 1
Legendary: 0.001*130 = 0.13 -> 0.1

Play 50 SP maps a day and expect to get 5 Rares, 1 Epic and 0.1 Legendaries per day on average, a Legendary per 10 days or so.
The stuff from Looty, Bandy, Quests and Leagues is on top of this.

This is actual long-time data from actual players, not theorizing or anecdotal evidence.

Whether this is enough is another question but what an SP player can reasonably currently expect to drop for her should be around these ballpark figures on average.

A single player for a single run can get whatever, randomness being what is.

 

That is my point also -> 50 maps a day for 10 days .. to (be expected to) get 1 Legendary .. and then, you get a bad one .. that really is not rewarding..
And not to speak of how much time it takes to finish 50 maps a day.. (and how repetitive can it get)

You can actually finish Dragon Age Inquisition before you get 5 Legendary items this way

There -> How much of you would play 500 maps in 10 days in order to get 1 Legendary item?

I think at least Club Membership should speed that up somehow (more items or better drop rate)

 

Club membership does speed it up about 50% + gold chests haven't even been figured in in the above numbers. Also, if you're a regular player surely you're doing Looty at least once per day and that's at least two Rares or better more per day. All told, in practice an active player gets significantly more of the high-rarity items than the average minimums from common chests listed above.

So one doesn't actually currently have to play 500 maps to get one Legendary. If you choose to never complete an adventure or never get Looty, then sure, but who does that?

 

Jarmo, ok Membership and Gold chests do speed up .. but discount "real life" and inability to actually play 50 maps a day every day (even 30 takes a lot of time) .. and you'll come to 1 Legendary per 10 days of quite some time involved in that (and you wont always get that 1 / 10 days)
I have managed to play maybe 60 maps for 2 days (CH Birthday) .. and that's whole day of playing..

(also discount Bad Legendary items (at least 50%), discount duplicates .. and its getting worse)

Have you actually tried playing 30+ maps every day for a month? I did .. for 2-3 months .. got really disappointed by time invested and the returns .. I thoght it was my bad luck .. and then, FS got nerfed and I reduced my farming to just few maps per day .. where I got maybe few notable Legendary items in 3 months .. now i only play Loot Fairy

Sure, ok, I'm not complaining, this is one of my favorite games -> I just say that after finishing Campaign and most of Quests -> SP players have no GOALs to stay/play..
- 1 goal might be collecting as much items .. but in time, that shows quite daunting and too slow (maybe with better Club rewards)
- another might be some Arena/Dungeon that is hard but rewarding
- or something like that PVP 20wins to Epic chest .. so you get a guaranteed reward for your time

 

I got 1000 gold playing only one adventure in SP once, therefore the drop rates are too high and should be nerfed.

Okay, clearly I'm speaking tongue in cheek, but the point is you can't poach data points and use them to make accurate wide sweeping assessments. Also you need to make sure you have your data right, if Eren got 3300 gold in the last 24 hours, he did so in 27 MP matches, which happened to give him 20 wins (I looked at his history), which is a higher win rate than the best CH's career win percentage. So lets say instead he had a 60% win rate (which would still put him in the top 20 overall players of anyone with at least 300 games), that would have required him to play 33 games to get his 20 wins. Now I'll be conservative and say that a MP game take 15 minutes (that's only 7.5 minutes of play for each player) and say that the average wait time to play is 2 minutes (also probably on the low side), this results in 17 minutes per a match, or an uninterrupted 9 hours and 20 minutes AND he identified that he had better than normal drops. The main point here is 1 MP win doesn't not come anywhere close to equaling 1 SP battle. Anyone who compares these is comparing miles to millimeters.

 

Arguing over PVE vs PVP wont get us nowhere.

My point is hard to counter. After finishing Campaign, PVP is not rewarding enough and even if we prove that PVE is even less rewarding that doesn't change the fact that PVP is not rewarding and challenging enough.

Few more suggestions for PVP:
- someone said you dont need best weapons for PVP. That's sadly true. We can make Hard mode, unlocked after Campaign finish .. where enemy has more HP for example (150% HP).. it takes more time to finish a map but rewards are (notably) better.
- or challenging mode (200% HP)
- impossible mode (300%HP)
(so something that you cannot play/finish without good items.. to give players a new Goal)

That shouldn't be that hard to implement and would keep players for longer time..
Players would keep Club Membership until the finish all that.

- Or when you get to finish certain number of maps / points (like every 100-150 maps finished).. a Loot Dragon appears on random map (that is shown) - if you finish it, you get Epic chest as a reward - something like that farming gets a point .. (points dont reset until you get to the goal)
- Or you're collecting "shards" (Dragon Age Inquisition) throughout maps .. when you collect 15 scattered shards you get Epic Chest. (shards stay until all are collected, then they are randomly respawn)

- Or anything that answers problem -> What is my point of playing Melvelous the Magnificent today? To get 8-10g?

 

Nowadays, I mainly play the Loot Fairy maps. It feels like that strategy yields me a legendary once a week.

When I have more time and will, I play all the lower level maps also, up to the Rescue from Shieldhaven Prison. Couple of times I've been lucky enough to find Hidden Bandit even.

I've never felt that this game needs more drops with the epic/legendary department, but I would welcome it with open arms. (and sacks)

That said, where's my first Dark Chain Shirt?!?

 

One way to make PvE more rewarding for new players would be to show Loot Fairy on the actual quest map instead of having to go to an external fan-made website to see where it is. The current system benefits us veterans who know where to find the information but new players probably don't. Bandit should still stay hidden IMO.

 

Side note, I think you've swapped PvP and PvE, but no matter.

I do think if we're talking rewards, balance between SP and MP is important, if we're talking challenges then I fully agree more SP challenges would be wonderful, but I mean that in the sense that more content is always wonderful not that SP is lacking per se. You ask for more challenging modes, and yet what percentage of players do you think have completed 100% of the quests? (Note I'm talking about quests in their official CH terminology not using it loosely to reference adventures in general.) But regardless, I'm all for more content and more challenges. Of course there's no reason we have to leave it up to the devs to make more challenges! BM has given us the ability to make our own maps. Maybe someone who thinks there should be additional PvE challenges should start a club for user created challenges. Farbs already has a great one available that is definitely at least "Hard mode"

 

Great - data.

This just thoroughly proves the point. That it's even a conversation is now surprising.

FIVE HUNDRED MAPS on average for one legendary item is completely ridiculous. The vast majority of players do not want to play 500 maps to get an item they might actually use and will quit long before that.

Part of the difficulty in analyzing this type of issue is that players will have a tendency to overlook the design itself as a flexible element for change. The fact that it's theoretically possible to grind very quickly makes them believe that droprates should be low. The problem there is that it's possible to grind so quickly, not that the droprates are too high. You can't nerf the entire system because an extreme minority of players might otherwise take advantage. All that does is turn off the hundreds of normal PvE players who would otherwise be interested. We're not talking about players who have been here a year and have 90% item collection already. We're not talking about players who only need a few items here and there.

As it is I think the system is extremely clever: you can only play each level once per day for normal rewards. Let the rewards for replaying an exhausted level be very low -- that's fine and discourages the virtually-automated grinding that PvP players in this conversation are clearly worried about. But the first time through any given PvE level daily needs to have better droprates. No question.

Earlier I said that one rare in 50 maps translates into "no reason to play" and the response was I need better data. Well, here is the revised version, with data. One legendary in 500 maps translates into "no reason to play PvE" after completing campaigns. Hopefully BlueManchu thinks about how to adjust it.

 

Basically you just want better drops because whatever.

Please give us a figure (any figure). What would the ideal number of completed maps per legendary drop be, in your opinion?

 

I don't know. A 1% chance to find a Legendary in a chest seems a lot more reasonable than 0.1%, for example.