New Sacred Dye Kit - Drop Rate Bug?

On 3/26/19, I purchased 15 Sacred Dye kits (three 5-kit bundles at a total cost of 1500 gems, equivalent to $18.75 IRL dollars) that was released that day, used the "open all" function to open the kits, and did not receive ANY BL exclusive dyes. I have purchased many dye kits over the years and NEVER experienced such bad odds with prior purchases of BL dye kits. Considering my own personal experience coupled with the limited supply and exorbitant gold prices on the trading post for these dyes, I suspect the drop rates for the BL exclusive dyes for this dye kit may be severely bugged (perhaps the bug is connected to the "open all" function?). It's incredibly disheartening to spend IRL dollars for gems, spend those gems on a a new BL dye kit, and then be on the receiving end of a serious drop rate bug!

I reported this issue to to Customer Service, who encouraged me to also post this issue on the forums since the developers will receive the issue faster via the forums. Supporting screenshots may be referenced via Ticket # 7279557.

(Players - This post is intended to report a potential bug regarding a potential drop rate bug for a new gem store item and am simply following the instructions from ANet's Customer Service. It's not intended to be a complaint. Please keep your "this is what you deserve by gambling" comments to yourselves. Thanks!)

Well, just as there's a small chance to receive the coveted dyes from every dye identified, there's also the chance to receive none.

The prices look pretty normal for newly released dyes. Some kits have had higher prices and others lower.

We don't actually know the drop rate for the dye kits, so it's hard to know what is or isn't a bug.

• Is it 10%? That's the drop rate of all rares from UnID dyes. If so, there's a 20% chance of getting 0.
• Is it 6/25 (equal chances for all dyes). Then it's a 1.6% chance of not getting any.

1.6% is hardly unexpected, no matter how frustrating we as consumers find it.(Plus, I imagine that the rate is closer to 10% if not less.)

The price of 500 gems per 5 kits (or 125 each) is standard for every exclusive dye kit since launch. They are sometimes sold at a discount.

It's never statistically worth it to gamble in the gem shop. The contents are (nearly) always available in the TP at substantially lower costs than buying the kits and hoping to get lucky.

In this case, the total cost of buying all six colors outright is 820 gold. At today's rate of exchange, 3000 gems would be enough. For 1500 gems, you'd get 400 gold, almost enough for the two priciest or the other four. And eventually the price will drop even further.

Update for the Devs - It looks like either ANet stealth nerfed drop rates for exclusive dyes in all BL dye kits or the drop rates were recently bugged. Took advantage of the BL Key sale today and ended up with 33 BL Dye kits of varying types. Out of those 33 BL Dye Kits (this time opening each individually instead of using the "open all" function), I only received 1 BL exclusive dye.

This works out to 48 BL Dye Kits opened over the last 4 days resulting in only ONE BL exclusive dye. This is well below my personal anecdotal experience with BL Dye Kits drops (and in my gut, is much too low of a drop rate for something that people can spend IRL money on).

I've opened many BL Dye Kits since launch (either by purchasing them outright in the gem store or receiving them as BL Chest rewards). This is legit the first time I've ever felt genuinely screwed when opening BL Dye Kits. On the plus side, today's sting associated with the dyes was more than offset by some excellent drops from the Guaranteed Armor & Wardrobe Unlocks. But those who purchase BL Dye Kits outright from the gem store will not get this kind of chance to help offset the sting of poor drop rates.

Hoping ANet's Devs can take a look at this and either adjust the drop rate and/or revamp BL Dye Kits to make sure those who spend IRL money on gems don't get screwed on gem store items and actually feel rewarded for spending those $$ (the devs did a decent job of revamping BL Chests and Mount Licenses, it'd be nice to see something similar to BL Dye Kits).

@"Manoa.5897" said:Update for the Devs - It looks like either ANet stealth nerfed drop rates for exclusive dyes in all BL dye kits or the drop rates were recently bugged. Took advantage of the BL Key sale today and ended up with 33 BL Dye kits of varying types. Out of those 33 BL Dye Kits (this time opening each individually instead of using the "open all" function), I only received 1 BL exclusive dye.

If the true rate is 10%, then there's a 14% chance of getting 0 or one exclusive from 33 kits.

This works out to 48 BL Dye Kits opened over the last 4 days resulting in only ONE BL exclusive dye. This is well below my personal anecdotal experience with BL Dye Kits drops (and in my gut, is much too low of a drop rate for something that people can spend IRL money on).

That has a 4% chance of happening.

This is why it's helpful to post drop rate data from every big purchase, rather than just the ones with bad streaks or lucky streaks. There's no way to compare your frustration at 1:48 with your past luck of x:y, because we don't know X and we don't know Y.

I'm not saying there was or wasn't a change. I'm saying that there's not enough evidence for ANet to even consider an issue; they need more than just the posters who are having bad streaks.

If you happened to have specific numbers of what you used to get, I'll make a note and keep recording. I mostly see people posting 5 or 10 units at a time and then only when they got lucky or unlucky, so it's not 'useful' to track. I can't even take down the 48 examples in this thread, because it's preselected for bad luck. In contrast, my BL Chest data is from people opening 100+ chests at a time, so I'm reasonably confident that it's a random sample.

Ideally, I'd like to have data that shows at least 20 of each exclusive dye dropping, reducing the chance that the data is skewed by a streak (good or bad).

Illconceived Was Na - Are you a dev? No? Then this post is not intended for you. Again, I am following the instructions given to me from Customer Support. ANet's customer service thanked me for submitting a ticket to bring this issue to their attention and asked me to post it to the forums to bring it to the devs' attention faster. That is the only purpose of this post, to bring a potential bug to the devs' attention.

If you want to disregard data from 48 recently opened BL Dye Kits, that's your prerogative. I don't give a lick that you don't think only 1 exclusive dye out of 48 BL Dye Kits isn't important enough data for your own personal statistical analysis. Again, this post was to bring a potential bug to the devs' attention (per the instructions of Customer Support), not to give players an opportunity to poo poo on my post nor to provide you with statistical data for your own personal analysis. And the hell if I'm going to spend gold or gems on something that may be seriously bugged to come up with additional data that you can find more worthy for your personal thought experiment.

Maybe it's a bug. Maybe it's intended. Maybe I'm simply having the worst luck I've ever had. There's no way for us players to know for certain. But whatever the case, something seems like it's changed and it's important to bring something like this to the devs' attention so they can properly investigate just in case there is indeed a bug that may be screwing people out of money.

I think the point is that the Devs are unlikely to check just on one player's possible bad luck streak. They would need more information.Also, the CS Team boilerplate suggests players post in the forums when it's something outside their bailiwick.

Still, good luck.

There have been a couple of times in GW2's history in which ANet has made drop rate errors that came to light because of player posts, such as this one. In each of those situations, players were able to make the case that it was worth a dev's time by using statistics and hard data to back up the claim that "something has changed."

This is one of the key reasons I keep track of other people's posts: in case ANet goofs, we have a way to demonstrate whether it's statistically reasonable or not.

The other reason is to provide enough tools to other players so they can make informed decisions about how best to spend their hard-earned gems (from whatever source, in game or cash) and to help set expectations about what results are likely versus not.

I'm sorry you've chosen to disregard the math. I'm sorry that you're not comforted by the idea that anyone is keeping track of the data. I'm sorry that you think anyone is asking anyone else to spend anything at all for the sake of data. I'm sorry that my analysis isn't helpful to you in choosing whether to gamble in the gem shop or buy directly from the TP.

And most of all I'm sorry that you had such a lousy streak of luck.

However, I'm not in the least sorry for posting in a public forum, to analyze a statistical claim based on a small, non-random sample.

PS In the future, if you want developer attention without comment from the peanut gallery, you can use the in-game /bug reporting tool. That generates an automatic internal report that is looked at by a dev.