Geode's Drop Rate......

[RAIST]

Sigh. The point of citing the weather forecast site was not to illustrate its effectiveness. It was to illustrate the imbalance of fire versus other weathers. How about this. Do you believe that the frequency of fire weather is perfectly balanced (equal) to the others? If not, it should be increased, regardless of how many zones get the weather, regardless of seasonal climate patterns and regardless of weather forecasting web sites.

more or less, yes WHEN IT IS IN SEASON. The point of the site is to watch and actually see how often it really pops versus all these claims about how rare it is. Case in point....it has been out of season for roughly 24 hours. It popped twice last night in Cape Terrigan---windsday and lightsday, two hours in between. Guess what....Fire is forecast for Altepa for darksday/firesday, roughly 8.5 hours after I last saw it pop in Terrigan. Also.. Light is forecast for Darksday for an off-season cycle. That's another one... it pops on a pattern as well, roughly a 4 week window 4 times a year where it's frequency is ramped up.

The point of the site is a tool to help you track the pattern so you can actually see and plan for the increased frequency if that is how you want to do your trials.

As for balance.....the imbalance is NOT in the weather cycles. The imbalance is in the drop rates when the required conditions are present. If there in fact is a hard 5 minute cool down between drops, then you are limited to no more than 11 or 12 drops in a given game day. This window comes around roughly 3 times a day, and you have at least a 1/8 chance of hitting this window each time you log in for 1 hour. Regardless of the weather factor coming in to play, you have 45 game days throughout the game year that you can guarantee the conditions exist for any given element (one day per game week, you always know conditions exist for a particular geode). With perfect timing and kill rate, that means at best you can guarantee up to 495 to 540 time slices for a geode to drop in a 14.4 day window (1game year).

The point is, there are TONS of opportunity for a geode to drop in this game. All of the windows can be tracked and planned for in some fashion or another. The problem is, that even when all the stars and moon align properly and you have created the PERFECT opportunity to farm.....you can still walk away with only one rock for an hour of trying.

The problem is the DROP RATES. NOT the frequency of the windows of opportunity, but the actual success rate for acquisition when that window opens. At least you have a means to determine ahead of time when those windows will open. That is half the battle won, the other part we have no control over. At least we can tell if it is a good time to farm or not. The part we can not predict/plan for is what SE needs to fix first.....DROP RATES.