Flight Rising Discussion

I sympathize with people who are frustrated about the drop rate. Still, I really do want to urge people - and not in a condescending way, honestly - to take breaks from grinding. If it's not bringing you the enjoyment it did last year, that's not necessarily anyone's fault. People make mistakes. There is always next year, but honestly? you can't know what'll happen then either. At the end of the day, this is literally a game.

@Dalio Yes, no one is arguing that this is just a game. However, as I've said in previous posts, I'm sure that many other people look forward to notn the entire year, like I do. Unfortunately some people's lives are not that interesting and we don't have anything to do on the holidays but grind for chests on a silly dragon game, y'know. We exist. I know it probably sounds weird.

Actually, I've played games where items drop before, and believe it or not the drop rates are coded in the game. I'm starting to not believe the whole "bad luck bad rng" dealio.

We're not talking about a "mistake" here. The staff and way more than competent enough to have gotten the monthly elemental holidays down perfectly. And those happen monthly. So why do they feel the need to change the way notn works every year? It's silly and frankly insulting when people come on threads like this only to say "THE DEVS ARE PERFECT BEINGS WHO NEVER MAKE MISTAKES OR WHEN THEY DO MAKE MISTAKES THEY ALWAYS TRY TO FIX THEM. UR TOO HARSH ON THEM AND UR JUST HAVING BAD LUCK. IMMA GO ENJOY MY DOZENS OF EGGS NOW BYE."

Take a look at the announcement thread, as well as frd, and count how many complaints you see about notn.
this was not a mistake. the droprates were decreased on purpose

Please, Swipp. Give Caterpillar/Hourglass trade ;_; [img]https://i.imgur.com/75p7gsn.png[/img] Edit: Day 5, 2am, Swipp is offering Cloudy Tail Feathers. No other offers on the table. RIP my heart.

I still think the main issue here is how unwilling staff is to communicate
They do something, users wonder/complain/ask/discuss/etc, staff leans back and waits, nothing happens, users get distracted with something else, everyone forgets about the problem, repeat

This NotN is still great for me, other people's bad luck doesn't change that. I got all the previous familiars that I wanted. Perhaps I'm just happy with what I'm getting and more chill about it.

I recommend grinding in the Woodland Path. It's easy, not tedious and you get trinkets, chests and familiars which you can hoardsell, and enough Strange Chests to get an egg or two. I know everyone says Woodland Path, and maybe that's where you've been all the time, but compared to the other venues I've tried, it's the best choice.

I'm afraid I still don't think anything's wrong. Imo it's a combination of temporary bad luck, confirmation bias, the fact that humans are designed to remember the bad better than the good, and some people underestimating the amount of grinding that other people are doing. It's not saying it's 'great', but it is the same as last year.

Last year, the egg rate was about 8 in 100 chests (from my own sample size of 1000 chests, corroborated by other heavy grinders). I'm seeing very similar % this year after opening about 200 chests, and getting 5 eggs in 100 chests is not that bad.

I have been hitting 100+ chests a day purely from grinding and trades, albeit with a great deal of work. It requires being very familiar with keybindings and having a full culex-ish team (which is what Maki's stats are based on) and guess what? Average of 8 chests per hour, which tallies up very well with Maki's stats where venues range from 4-12 chests/hr. It also takes 7-8 hours of full-speed no break grinding, which not many people are willing or able to put in, but that's exactly the same as last year. It generally takes me about 6-7 seconds to get through a battle. If you want to compare, tell me how many chests you're getting in ~4,500 battles.

I did a challenge yesterday - time how long it takes to get one chest in every venue. Took me ~2.5hrs to get those 20 chests, which works out to 8 chests/hr, which is pretty in line with Maki's results (venues dropping 4-12 chests/hr).

The years when there were many, many more chests? They dropped mostly useless junk. Now they always drop a fam/apparel/etc.

Trades showing up is also pure RNG. We've all had to wait weeks for the trade we wanted to show up when one we don't keeps being in the list. Why are people suddenly surprised that it's happening here too? The only thing that's to blame is that there's so many Swipp trades available that the NotN ones are less likely to pop up.

tldr; There's a real easy answer to 'why aren't staff communicating the changes they made?!?'. They did. There just aren't any other than the increased number of Swipp trades over the year and the announced addition of drops to normal fams.

This kind of thread has cropped up every year except the first one. If staff kept confirming 'no we haven't made things harder/changed x thing/targetted y users' they a) wouldn't have any time to do anything else and b) any time they missed one or forgot or didn't have time half the userbase would take it as confirmation that they did change something.

(Edited to make it clear that I don't think anyone here is being unreasonable/I think it's all easy or anything)

@Vendrus

Thank you for making such an in-depth post on this. You said exactly everything I was thinking and more.

Also if they came out and said "We didn't change anything", everyone talking about how they don't communicate would just claim they're lying about not making changes, most likely.

@Thalath
That's very true! The tert picking debacle is an example of exactly that - Staff have come out repeatedly to say it was never possible, the code never existed to somehow glitch into existence, and people just claim staff is lying instead.

@Vendrus Hello, I spend all day grinding (way over 8 hours of no break grinding with 3 level 25 dragons one of which has eliminate). Today I barely managed to get a little over 10 chests from it.

I'm afraid the fact that some people like yourself are having better "luck" than all of us who're expressing our disappointment does not change my mind on the fact that something is wrong, and notn has sadly been ruined.

again, coming on a thread like this and boasting about your great luck, making me and the other people who're having a horrible notn feel like they're just a bunch of crybabies who're biased and love complaining, is not very nice. I'm sorry.

@Cataclasm
I didn't have great luck. I had a typical result from 4,500 battles per day (yesterday significantly more) which tallied almost exactly with the result of many other users and also last year's stats. If only one dragon has eliminate, your battle rate is probably significantly lower than mine, and I've no idea how well you're tailoring your venues to the chest trades.

This thread is about complaining that staff has for some reason sneakily changed something. I'm providing evidence over a statistically significant number of battles that that is probably not true.

I sympathise with bad luck. I didn't get any chests from gathering today, and yesterday spending over an hour without getting any chests was very frustrating. I list a number of reasons why these threads tend to happen at the top and none of them involve people being crybabies. I'm sorry you feel that way, but I've reread my post and I don't see any accusations or boasting in it, just statistics.

Edit: I've tweaked the end of the first paragraph to make it clear I'm referencing the thread title and finished a partial sentence that was supposed to be talking about Maki stats and could potentially have come across as boasting, when actually it was exactly in line with the average.