Continuous drop in pull rates

General Discussion
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In recent times, there is a marked trend for SG to introduce lower and lower hero pull rates wherever they can get away with it. Take the increase in number of legends in some portals (e.g., events), which effectively reduces the pull rates for specific heroes. Or take the shameless .1% “Secret Hero” in the new Legends Portal. Or the nerfing of the costume portal after its initial release and success. The idea, of course, is to milk the whales, but as a community we should really stand up for ourselves a bit more.

Speaking of the introduction of new event heroes, consider that this draws older players to spend more money where they have already spent before, now for much lower chances of what they want. Already spent a couple thousand for Panther? Well, spend again for Gazelle, except now your chance is down to .2%.

So what can we do? Speak up!

Let’s protest, for example, the fact that the new Legends portal does not have a HoTM pull chance, dropping overall legend chances there from 3.8% for almost all portals to 2.6%. What possible reason could there be for the HoTM to not be there, when it’s in every other portal?

Only one reason: greed. Personally, I think that as community we should tell them where we draw some lines. And draw them in practice - for instance not doing gem pulls there unless they fix it and add the HoTM (this is certainly my intention).

If we don’t speak up, they will continue to take advantage of us to an ever growing extent (not that they don’t already, with pull rates that are vastly, ridiculously inferior to any successful gacha I know of). Whatever we accept, they will continue, until it hurts their wallet (and that is coming - many older whales are quitting or reducing spending in disgust these days - doesn’t make sense to spend money when you get nothing for it).

By the way, here is a projection: they will soon remove past HoTM for Atlantis, to push us to pull with these reduced chances at the new portal. They will do so with other steps, diverting us from “old” portals to newer, lower pull rate portals.

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By the way, this is assuming advertised pull rates are even true, with equal chances per pull, which I’m often not that sure of.

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I’ve never been a fan of the low pull rates.
(I don’t even know what the Legends Portal is, did they release that with the new update? Haven’t gotten it yet so I don’t know)

However, I think the advertised pull rates are… “true-ish”… in that I do believe that 1% or 2% or whatever rate of all pulls done by every player combined do actually result in 5* heroes. Just that… sometimes that means one player gets 5 HotM from 100 pulls while another player gets zero from 200 pulls. I’ve seen some people get ridiculously lucky, and that’s when it hits me: that’s why my pulls are usually horrible, they already gave the good heroes to everyone else. :laughing: I kid, but that’s RNG for you. As long as they can show that “roughly” 1.2% (or whatever the going rate currently is) of all the summons total result in a HotM, the odds are technically correct. Even if one single person got all of them and nobody else got any. :man_shrugging:

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True, and I understand statistics, but I can tell you that there are many many of the older players who are a bit suspicious of the “identical rate for every pull” that SG promises, with a very large sample of pulls between these players.

That said, to be precise and avoid cognitive biases, any conclusion should be based on a large database. I plan to start a community project like that, hoping for people’s cooperation. With a large enough sample, stats should converge on their advertised numbers.

Mind even if pulls on average converge to their rates it doesn’t mean every pull has equal chances - there may be surges, as some theorize, for instance with the commonly practiced “Censure method”. So you may be facing very reduced rates on some pulls, and much higher on others (based on time), while overall the stats do converge on advertised pull rates. Hopefully that’s not true since it is definitely deceptive on SG’s part.

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Why not create a thread in feature request category?

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Just a small correction, for the sake of accuracy, it’s 0.1% in Beta, not .01%, i.e. 1 in 1000, not 1 in 10000.

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Yeah I don’t really buy into the “identical rate for every pull” idea… but I also believe in “luck” and some people really do just get luckier than others. I can see the vast disparities in my own alliance, people who have been playing for similar amounts of time and not buying pulls… one of them has a bunch of 4 and 5* heroes, the other one is still limping along with mostly 3*s. And it’s not that one of them is way more active than the other, they’re both pretty casual. Just one of them is lucky and the other one… not so much.

(also seen this firsthand as I do have a couple of alts myself)

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Because this is a more general discussion, but maybe someone should specifically ask for HoTM added there, that’s a good idea!

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@McDaddy makes some interesting points (particularly if it’s read in Captain Picard’s voice) about the dilution of summons gates.

This is different to a generic complaint about summon rates (and associated conspiracies).

Please keep the debate on topic or this is likely to get merged :+1:

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Agreed and you’re correct that this is my focus - please don’t punish me for peoples’ responses though :slight_smile: Being kicked out of Starfleet (we both know that’s what really happened!) was enough.

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Sorry @McDaddy , I don’t want to get your thread merged (I kinda hate it when they do that… I understand why they do it, but it makes it hard to follow a conversation)

So I’ll stick to the original specific topic at hand.

I’ll confess that I know next to nothing (okay, actually, exactly nothing) about whatever goes on in Beta. But it doesn’t make sense to me for them to introduce a new summon portal without including a chance for HotM…? I’m already bothered by the fact that I can no longer get Atlantis coins in chest loot (nice to see the Valhalla coins, but why not a mix of both?).

So YES. You have my vote, HotM should absolutely be included in any new summon portal. I mean, they are supposed to be the featured Hero of that particular Month… why should they be excluded?

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I used to be strong supporter of SG and a lot of my posts from a year ago here were backing up the “you can’t have everything and that’s fine” approach to the odds. I am spender myself, not a whale-tier, but enough to do 50 pulls monthly on average, run the Alchemy Lab, refill for weekly tournaments etc.

Releasing more and more powerful heroes and effectively lowering odds for them is a huge concern of mine. Same as dilluting the offers recently - adding offers where the price for gems is much higher than it used to be for the tier (e.g. the Magpies) or the infamous removal of community’s beloved 10USD + 4 star ascension mat offer to replace it with 10 USD + 3x 3* mats but with 3 in stock. Small things like that really make you lose faith in decency and see brutal money grab attempts instead.

What worries me is that if I feel discouraged, as a spender with disposable income, how do people with lower budget feel. There are paywalls now everywhere. I started quite late (fall 2018) but somehow managed to catch up and get to fight even battles with top 100 alliances or some famous long-time names from the forum and community. If someone starts now, they will never keep up. Panther is now twice harder to get than last year; Finley makes you pull for hoping you won’t get any of the other weak legendaries of that event; Telluria is impossible to get until next year when it’s 0.3%; there’s already a hero in the work for 0.1% chance and something tells me it won’t be the last with that low odd. When 70% of the game’s content (heroes, synergies etc) is not available for 70% of players, they will see that, get bored and leave. If someone is free to play or can only afford some spending, they will never keep up. Same goes for the light spenders who managed to keep up with 20 USD/month budget but can’t really maintain 100 USD/month etc and get left behind. And it’s not even getting left behind the Top 100 etc because that doesn’t matter to anyone in the top 1%. It’s being left behind the “new exciting game content”, limited mostly to the new shiny heroes that finally allow you to experiment with the roster, play the game differently or counter a strong enemy you’ve been having trouble with.

It looks that SG instead of making sure they can pull 10 USD/month from 100,000 players, want to focus on pulling 1000 USD/month from 1000 players. It wasn’t this way in 2018, you could pull enough to get a HotM and be done with pulling. Now there are people in my alliance who pull so much they get to pull 7 HotMs and are still disappointed about the outcome for most of the time. Pull on season, pull on costume, pull on Atlantis & returning HotMs, pull on Season 3… pull pull pull everywhere, have minimal chances to pull something that will make you happy and change your game. I took it lightly after Zynga’s took over, but perhaps those foreseeing huge milking were correct.

And on the top of it, there aren’t enough ways to use all of these heroes even when we have them. Some attempts were made to force some creativity (class quests, raid tournaments, now the legendary quest in the works) but they are incidental and usually lack satisfactory rewards to be considered “game goals” and are more a “to do list”. The core of the game got flooded with the legendary heroes and it just doesn’t have enough depth to provide satisfaction in return. We don’t need new heroes, we need completely new ways to use the ones we have first. But that’s probably a discussion for another topic.

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Absolutely agree. Plying this game for 3 years and it’s going rapidly downhill. Unbalanced heroes and odds it’s what kills this game. I stopped spend any money except VIP ticket which is 6$ a month.

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That portal is around 98% S1. That’s hot garbage odds.

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Good point.

Agree…

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I agree that overall chances of getting the game changing heroes appear to be diminishing. I have been F2P / c2p through the 2 years of playing this game but am really, really starting to dislike summoning.

I used to save up for certain event summons hoping I would get lucky and nab a key 5* but now I don’t see the point as the key heroes I want now have such low odds that I could never pull enough to increase my chance.

Becoming a tester and being able to do 1000 dummy pulls has only made me dislike the portals more after seeing how little you can get from it. I understand that this is a business and needs to make money, I also understand that if everyone got the same heroes it would get extremely boring but there are areas that some tweaks need to be made to make drop rates appealing and rewarding.

2 years of play and I now am missing just 3 s1 legendary heroes, have 3 HOTM and 1 prior HOTM. I am yet to get a single event 5* or any 5* from S2/3 with current odds this will not change and the new tavern will not change that.

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Completely agree, Suicide Bunny! You put it very well, and I think it’s a stupid business decision on their part.

And Grum, I completely agree, they’ve made it so it’s useless to pull. With such low and ever diluting rates, I’ve given up on pulling for the .2% event hero I want, reducing my spending to just the cheapest “deals”, Valor and VIP. This is related to what Bunny said - they are targeting the whales only now, which means they slowly lose the rest of us. I don’t think it will pay off, and it’s definitely not a way to make your paying customers satisfied. But I’m pretty sure SG doesn’t care. I am pretty sure they will ultimately go out of business if they continue on this path, and, honestly, I may be a big happy to see that. The talented game designers can then maybe go work for some more decent employers.

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I remember when I first started playing, I got so excited whenever I’d pull an EHT. They seemed to drop more often back then. Yeah I got a lot of 3s, but also picked up a number of 4s. And I was new, so it was still exciting back then to pull a Grimm or Boldtusk.

Not as exciting later on after you have all of the season one 3s and 4s, along with most or all of the Atlantis 3s… still get a tiny bit excited when I pull a Valhalla or seasonal event 3*… though I know I probably won’t really use them much. Still nice to have a bit more variety in the roster (maybe they’ll come in handy for rare level quests).

At the same time, I also get why they feel the need to limit the number of great heroes. Because they wouldn’t feel as great if most people were able to get them, and then why would anyone bother spending $1000 to get a hero that half the FTP/CTP crowd already has anyway? So they create this artificial scarcity model so that only the biggest spenders (and the very very lucky lower spenders) can get the new shiny toys. Because they’re supposed to be uber rare.

Except that they’re not uber rare. Because there are enough people playing this game who are more than happy to drop $1000 to summon them. And holy crap… as much as I’m personally jealous, as much as I think that’s horrible for game balance and extremely discouraging to lower spenders who can’t afford them… I gotta give credit where it’s due. The company is making a fortune, and apparently a significant portion of their playerbase is also successful enough to continue supporting that model.

Now I may not like that personally, but nobody need take my personal frustrations or jealousy personally. Absolutely more power to them. And I’m content to keep playing the game knowing full well that I’m a very tiny fish surrounded by whales, and that I’ll never ever be able to compete on an equal level with them, no matter how much I “git gud”. Also content to no longer open up my wallet for them either, because

Ordinarily I might be willing to give a game company $10 a month if I can reasonably expect to get something worthwhile in return. Unfortunately, with these odds? Nope. But that’s okay. Because they have plenty of other customers here who will give them more in a month than I probably would total over a number of years.

It’s all good. Now I know, they don’t care about players like me.

thats-aight-no

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Until the new portal actually enters the game, i can only complain about it in the Beta forums. This is the first version in beta, so I hope they take our feedback on it.

If they don’t, I will gladly join in complaining about it because you make valid points in the OP.

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That’s a timely reminder. The new portal is still theoretical :slightly_smiling_face: