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Make card droprates more consistent

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by ahotbanana, Aug 22, 2021.

  1. ahotbanana
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    ahotbanana Capt. Latanica Retired Staff

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    This has been prompted by an experience I had today grinding cards, but I think is reasonable in the wider scheme of things.

    I was in the map Camp 3 trying to farm Officer Skeleton cards. According to the library, there are 14 officer skeletons and 6 skeleton soldiers on this map (although in practice, there looks to be a lot more of both). Despite this, I had 10 drops of skeleton soldier cards in the time it took me to farm 5 officer skeleton cards. I recall something similar happening on my bowmaster and my shadower when I farmed these cards on them, although I don't have specific numbers to back this up.

    If we assume I got average luck here (which I appreciate is quite an assumption), that would mean that the drop rate for skeleton soldier cards is around 4.6 times the drop rate of officer skeleton cards. Even if I had horrible luck on the officers and the expected rate would be to get 5 of both cards at a similar speed in this map... that still puts skeleton warrior at over 2 times the drop rate of officer skeleton.

    The question I have, then, is "why?"
    What benefit is there to the drop rates being so wildly different from each other?

    I could understand if it was balanced with something else in mind, like the values of items dropped, or the exp gained, or even just how popular the maps were to grind at before the monster book was implemented, but both of these mobs should be pretty similar in all of those ways and I fail to see a pattern like this in the wider scheme of things. It just seems random. If there is a pattern and I've just missed it, I'd love to hear what it is

    To be clear, I'm not saying to make all of the card drop rates exactly the same. What I am saying is: reduce the drop rates on cards like pinboom that take 5 minutes for the full set and increase drop rates on anything that's super low (like Officer Skeleton seems to be). Would it not be more balanced and more fair to players to normalise these drops rates?
     
    • Agree Agree x 9
    • Disagree Disagree x 5
    • Like Like x 4
  2. Myungsoo
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    Myungsoo Slimy

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    I'm usually in favor of a harder grind, but considering that I also experience burn-out when I'm at alligators for literally 3+ Hours per character to farm cards of a single mobs over multiple characters I lose the enjoyment what a game is all about so I'll agree with this post.

    I believe a game should never let you burn out as it is about enjoyment (I hope). I feel like a good average treshhold would be somewhere between 20 to 50 minutes on ''normal'' monsters. That would make a level 10 ring a little under 200 hours of effort.
     
  3. HollyCrap
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    HollyCrap Capt. Latanica

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    I did 2 t10 while washing the characters (without any help from other character/accounts) and I really cant relate to this. Card hunting seems perfectly fine as it is.
     
  4. OP
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    ahotbanana
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    ahotbanana Capt. Latanica Retired Staff

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    I'm currently grinding my third ring. My complaint isn't that card hunting is too slow, which you seem to be implying. The overall effort to reward seems about right in my experience. My complaint is that some sets take 5 minutes while others take 2 hours and this makes no sense to me
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
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    • Informative Informative x 1
  5. Eighty
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    Eighty Windraider

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    For me, on days I didn’t feel like grinding I skipped the relatively hard ones and some days I sat down to finish them. Knowing the different expected required times actually kept things more varied, interesting and let me play around the time I had, to the say the least. (Hate logging off with a set 3/5 done)
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  6. lv1crook
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    lv1crook Capt. Latanica

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    In the example you laid out, I think your luck is just bad. I have farmed extensively at Camp 3 on one of my characters and while the officer skeleton drop rate is not particularly high, you should still finish around the same time as soldier skeletons on that map. I think the main reason the drop rate is lower is because one of the cards is part of the green set while the other is part of the indigo set.
     
  7. Cerulean
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    Cerulean Brown Teddy

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    This is also part of the strategizing with respect to card hunting though, if every set were equally difficult then there would be no difference in efficiency between those who know what they're doing and those who don't. I am also working on my third t10 ring and have noticed extreme reductions in completion time with each ring, primarily due to better understanding which sets are worth completing vs. which are not, how to maximize cards hunted in a given timeframe, etc.
     
  8. kalash
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    kalash Headless Horseman

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    Try getting deep buffoon cards and talk to me again
     
    • Agree Agree x 6
  9. HollyCrap
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    HollyCrap Capt. Latanica

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    Did on both. Was a nice challenge lol

    There are easy cards and harder cards... you dont have to gather them all. It's not pokemon lul
     
  10. OP
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    ahotbanana
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    ahotbanana Capt. Latanica Retired Staff

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    On the three characters I've done it on, not one of them has finished the two sets at the same time. Either way, it was just an example of a wider design choice that has been bothering me for a while. To be clear, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad design choice, just not one I would have made. If people really enjoy the drop rates being inconsistent, then that is a valid reason to keep them this way, it just doesn't make any sense to me that people would enjoy imbalance like this. As for me being unlucky, what I'm hoping for out of this thread is that the balance team might take a look at the actual numbers for card drop rates and decide if a change needs to be made, hopefully culling the more extreme outliers (if they exist). This doesn't need to be an all or nothing thing. They could pull in the very extreme cards while still keeping a large amount of variance. Everything I'm basing this on is anecdotal or from very small sample sizes (Usually 10-15 card drops, since this is my third ring) so of course, it is possible I've just been screwed by RNG. Kind of unlikely that I've been screwed this hard on the same mob three times in a row, but definitely within the realm of possibility.

    If the different tabs do have different drop rates, then that would be a... reason, at least, but not a consistent thing to go by based on my own observations (and yes, I appreciate I don't have numbers to back these claims). Pinboom, which from my experience is the fastest set to get in the game, is on the orange tab. It's drop rate is considerably higher than anything on the red tab. If this was an intended way of scaling the drop-rates, I'd be fine with it since it makes sense, even though I don't like it, but I'm not convinced this is a thing. Even if it is the case, though, I don't really see that as a good reason. Cards from higher level monsters are already harder because they're dropped by higher level monsters.

    This is fine, but it's punishing players for not knowing something they have no means of knowing (given the drop rates aren't made public and have likely been changed over the years anyway). Yes, I am getting my subsequent rings faster too, by virute of skipping cards that I know are ultra slow, but other than doing actual statistical analysis on drops from multiple people, there's no way for players to know which cards are harder to farm. You can get a feel for it by farming multiple rings yourself, and this will help, but there's no concrete way to tell the difference between a lower drop rate with good luck and a higher drop rate with bad luck. Given the cards all give the same utility, you'd generally expect them to have similar drop rates. Again, maybe this is intended, it's just not a choice I would make in the design of it myself, so I am suggesting it be changed.
     
  11. RegalStar
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    RegalStar Nightshadow

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    I've done the two skeletons somewhat recently (during the anni event) and I don't recall one of them being rarer than the other, so this particular case is just "being unlucky is not a bug".

    Cards with different drop rates are ostensibly used to balance out on how certain monsters are harder to kill in large numbers than others, most notably bosses drop cards way more often than regular mobs, and certain mobs like Tauromacis and Taurospear also drop cards a lot more commonly. This seems to be a handmade process because there are the occasional drop rates that just don't make sense (Ashigaru cards being annoyingly rare, or Bellower Roots shitting out their cards like they have diarrhea), but that's the general logic behind them anyways.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
    • Informative Informative x 1
  12. Winnie
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    Winnie Timer

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    I finished 2 , T10 ring
    There's alot of monster book guide now that says which monster u should do/consider skipping , drop rate is not 100% so there will always be inconsistency between player.
    The reason I don't mind the drop rate/inconsistency is because if you know what card to go after , you can get 300 set in roughly a month or two with about 3~4hr card session a day with good carding route , good level , obviously doing decent damage & how efficient you are when grinding. I believe the average time it takes to get 300set is fairly consistent and that's good enough.
    You should know what you're signing up for , a hell of a grind & at the end it's always worth it.
    The main thing I hope to get change is the Red tab , almost every new player start with it & struggle with something like Red snail & give up. I feel like the Red tab should be easy to help new player get into Carding

    The ring is amazing & you can stop whenever , every 30 set is a checkpoint . If you're burn out from carding , just stop & do something else.
    You're not obligated to finish all Tier 10 , you can always finish it later. The harsh truth is you put yourself in that position & you chose to play this way and feel burn out.
    Don't be fearful that you're missing out just because you don't have a tier 10 ring. Goodluck with yours
     
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  13. -ovv
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    -ovv Horntail

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    Whenever I card hunt, I bring a secondary looter to pick up any extra cards that I might come across in hybrid mob maps. Having the option to skip certain mobs in hybrid maps also help. You can easily generate a list of 300 easy drop mobs and top off above 300 with area bosses so that you can have a 'free pass' on certain annoying mobs.

    Also, map order is a bigger issue. A lot of people just complete cards by progression, but they fail to realize that some easier mobs in certain regions are better off being skipped until the end since later maps will also have those filler mobs. Jr. Yetis, Hector/White Fang, and even Buffoon in Ludi fall in this category.

    Source: 3x tier 10 rings, soon to be 5.
     
  14. Shengo
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    Shengo Slime

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    I cannot agree further with this thread anymore, can we at least have the drop rate published so we will know what to expect during the card hunt?

    I am currently at Tier 2, below is the list of mobs which I find have extremely abnormal drop rate compared to other mobs, some with high count of mobs but some are low count. All takes at least > 1 hour to complete the full set:

    1. Ribbon Pig (high mob count at Henesys Pig farm)
    2. Pig (high mob count at Henesys Pig farm)
    3. Dark Stone Golems (average mob count at Golem's Temple III)
    4. Mixed Stone Golems (average mob count at Golem's Temple IV)
    5. Rocky Mask (average mob count at Excavation Site III) - I would say by far this will be the lowest drop rate I have encountered for an average mob count map.
    6. Red Drake (below average mob count at Dangerous Valley II)
    7. Zombie Lupin (high mob count at Monkey Swamp III)
    8. Jr. Boogie (2 mob count at The Grave of Mushmom) - card drops every 15 minutes? Not a great experience since you have to control the spawn from top of the map.

    I have yet to reach Tauromacis or Taurospear yet, but I am dreading those two.
     
    • Disagree Disagree x 3
  15. Ainz
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    Ainz Zakum

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    I couldn't disagree more. Having public droprates is gonna cause the same sentiment you see in games such as OSRS, where people complain about being 'under droprate'.
    MapleLegends has always kept droprates private information and with good reason. I hope this doesn't change.
     
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  16. Nightz
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    Nightz Supervisor Staff Member Supervisor Game Moderator

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    As someone only in the midst of completing his first ring, is there a certain list somewhere with mobs listed that have a very poor droprate and should be considered skipping?
     
  17. Ainz
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    Ainz Zakum

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    Various mobs are widely implied to have bad droprate merely by exclusion of the multiple monsterbook tier10 threads.
     
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  18. OP
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    ahotbanana
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    ahotbanana Capt. Latanica Retired Staff

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    This is why I'm asking that the balance team just do a quick runthrough of the drop-rates and change anything that is excessively high or low. As I said before, for an individual, it's impossible to tell the difference between a higher drop rate with bad luck and a lower drop rate with good luck, so actual decisions need to be made by people with actual numbers.

    Extreme variability seems to be a common experience from what people are saying, hell, you even said
    so even if my example is just a case of bad luck, that's not super relevant to what I'm saying. It's only the nonsensical drop rates that I'm asking to be changed. If I was just unlucky (3 times in a row) at officer skeletons, then that's fine and their drop rate specifically shouldn't be changed, but you do agree that there are some drop rates that are stupidly high or low.

    Do you actually disagree that the more extreme drop rates should be normalised or have I just misinterpretted what you've said as disagreement?

    This relies on knowing which cards are "easy drops" which isn't reliable. There's conflicting information from different sources on this exact topic and even things said in this thread conflict with my own experience of grinding certain mobs. Drop rates on all items are subject to change without the playerbase being notified, so even if you had statistically significant data to show that x card was fast and y card was slow, that could potentially change. If there was an actual reliable pattern in game to go by for card drop rate, even if that pattern made no sense whatsoever, I would agree with the notion that you can skip bad cards, but there isn't.

    I definitely don't agree with this. While it does make it harder to make concrete decisions, drop rates have always been hidden from players with good reason. What I do advocate for, however, is vague ways we can predict how likely something is going to be. We were given this for the CWK exchange, with items separated into tiers. It would be nice if we could have something like this for cards.

    I... don't actually agree that it is. My second ring was a lot faster than my first because I skipped a lot of the truly heinous mobs. I expect my third ring will be faster still, since I am skipping a few mobs I suffered through on my second ring. If I ever farm a fourth ring, I expect that will be even faster because I'll at least know to skip officer skeletons and anything else I end up regretting doing for this ring.
     
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  19. Shengo
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    Shengo Slime

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    Sorry I rephrase myself, this is what I was meaning to say actually. Other than referring to map sequence hunting convenience, we can also refer to the level of difficulty to decide which card we are going to hunt.
     
  20. -ovv
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    -ovv Horntail

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    Card hunting is probably one of the last remaining exploratory aspects of this game. In my opinion, those who complain about the tediousness of having to hunt are entitled because I think the reward is well worth the time and effort. If you are going for more than one t10 ring, documenting or making mental notes of which mobs are easy/difficult should be a default strategy. If you are solely relying on other peoples' guides and are disappointed with their inaccuracies/inconsistencies, make your own guide.

    As for those who say they're stuck on cards for over an hour, I think most of those stories are highly exaggerated. The only card I struggled with for about an hour was Duku on my initial t10 card hunt and I removed them from my list. All other card sets are obtainable within about 15-30 minutes in my experience. I feel like others who complain about having to hunt hours and hours for one card set are either being super inefficient with their clearing or are exaggerating their efforts.
     
    • Agree Agree x 3

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