While everyone else is worrying about energy, something else has cropped up which is starting to affect my enjoyment of the game.
Shock and Fiend levels.
However the current drop rate on minerals is skewed so much that pretty much every level in the past few days and in the next will be one.
Dark Matter, from what I've seen, is dropping more and bigger chrystals than any other, and is now highest in every tier in every new gate being created over the next week.
Now, there's probably no point trying to get people to dump different minerals in different gates, or to pick up the little green mineral when there are five massive purple ones lying around, so I'm at a loss.
I'm currently in tier 2, moving into tier 3, however I don't like to leech so I try new levels solo till I get at least a little bit competent, but it gets difficult when 2 minutes into a level a chair and a fire extinguisher or chain shock puts an early end to it.
Here endeth the sermon.
Mineral drops and gate creation
People mess around with gates because they can. So a full gate of shock of of course people manipulated, I recommend to start doing the same.
Exacaly, either manipulate the gates yourself, or just man up and fight those feind's. They aren't jelly, but hey, I can take down a good bit of T.I.'s.
The current totals in Sapphire Rook which opens in 8hrs are:
186,901 Dark Matter
163,263 Luminite
177,729 Moonstone
169,086 Valestone
174,786 Crimsonite
Whereas I personally favour Valestone, I usually come out of a group run with more Moonstone and Dark Matter.
The problem with trying to manipulate the strata is that if on one strata we manage to change the levels, as soon as a couple of autosellers turn up, all of their dark matter gets thrown into that strata, thus putting us back where we started. It can't be manipulation or just coincidence when every level of every gate is currently shock or fiend.
I agree it can't be coincidence. (At any rate that it's unlikely enough to dismiss.) If it was a uniform random distribution, those numbers should usually be within a few hundred of each other. The drop rate may well not be uniform. My point is simply that this could be due to a player bias, as well. How many players favor dark matter because purple is pretty? I don't know, and neither do you.
As I recall, this didn't start until a few days after the change in gate construction. Some players had already arranged for the then-upcoming royal jelly gate to be entirely slime themed, and everything else was pretty scattered. Then, abruptly, everything was shock themed. That sounds to me more like the work of some guild of malcontents lashing out than what I would expect from a consistent bias in drop rates. Would they have the resources to sustain a 10% difference between dark matter and luminite? Again, I don't know.
I think the appearance of many fiend strata is more recent, still, being only for the last few days. Again, it seemed to me that there was an abrupt change. And I know I observed at least one person actively discouraging people from autodepositing their minerals in one gate, so they wouldn't mess up the all fiend theme. This again smacks of intentional manipulation.
None of that is hard evidence that this trend is player driven or intentional. Another possibility is that the drop rates are biased by stratum, and the abrupt changes are due to changes in which gates are popular as they cycle. Or maybe my perception of a series of abrupt changes is mistaken. That's why I'd like to see some kind of hard data that is as unbiased by player actions as possible, before making conclusions about the cause.
I remember reading somewhere that a stratum has reduced odds to spawn the same minerals it's made of. I have no direct evidence of this, but I'm starting to believe it could be true. Why?
Jelly strata are made of Valestone (green) and Luminite (yellow). The most commonly-farmed stratum is Royal Jelly Palace, a Jelly stratum.
Fiend and Shock strata are made of the three colors that are NOT used in Jelly strata: Crimsonite (red), Dark Matter (purple), Moonstone (blue).
There is just the matter of wondering why Dark Matter out-competes both Crimsonite and Moonstone. You almost never see a Gremlin stratum (red+blue). Then again, Gremlin's anti-mineral is Dark Matter anyway... which would result in either Shock or Fiend again. So even if Dark Matter is THIRD place behind the other two, we're still stuck with the same two strata over and over.
And the anti-minerals for Shock and Fiend? They're the exact two minerals that comprise Jelly strata: Valestone and Luminite. So the anti-minerals are spawning least frequently in the gate that is most commonly farmed. (Notice that Menilos' post shows that there are significantly fewer of these two exact minerals than everything else!)
Boosting doesn't work anymore, so we can't heavily boost Dark Matter in a single stratum as an "Autosell decoy" to get it away from all the other strata. So... are we going to have to reduce crown drop rates in the Royal Jelly Palace to encourage people to stay away from it and the Dark Matter that spawns within? Or maybe raise crown drop rates everywhere else to encourage more people to visit other gates...
The consequences disturb me either way. Maybe if gates simply stopped having biased distributions of minerals, we'd see some more variety. Then again, before it was all-Shock, it was all-Slime. (somehow. Not sure how.) So maybe that is just trading one problem for another.
...I got nothin'. :(
EDIT: Oh, and, all-Shock gates happened almost constantly before the gate mineral change. The thing is, the devs/GMs/admins/mods/internetpolice would manually change them AWAY from Shock whenever it would end up taking up a whole tier (by sticking a dev-exclusive "Alloy" mineral into it). They could only do that on strata that were already full on minerals-- but now, strata can never be full on minerals. So you won't see that happening now.
Do you have any hard figures on drop rates? I'm not convinced it's a drop rate bias, rather than a bias in player choices, or intentional manipulation. On the other hand, I have been favoring luminite over other minerals of the same size for a while, and I still have roughly the same amounts of luminite (225), moonstone (233), and dark matter (222). (Valestone and crimsonite are a bit less, but within a standard deviation or two of the average.)
Whatever the source of bias, there is less luminite and valestone being deposited than the other minerals, such that most strata now pay 3 for those minerals and 2 for the others. So anyone who wants to eke out that little bit extra cash for their minerals can currently get 50% more for luminite and valestone. That's worth picking those minerals over the others at the same size, and you break even taking a large (4pc) luminite or valestone over a very large (6pc) crystal of another mineral. Maybe that will change some players' pick up habits.