Dropping in here with a suggestion that was made while talking to my partner. She came up with a very good point!

It seems like there's a struggle between balancing the current playstyles (Casual vs Grinders). With the new rates my partner thought the following compromise would be good:

For the example, number is 5 tokens, example rates are small for understandability.

1. Players have a highly increased chance of getting the WW interaction. Say this is 1/10 chance to get the encounter.
2. After 5 times (resulting in 5 tokens), the original, intended rate (the one with this new update) is used.

This would make it so people who grind will still have chances of getting WWs rarely in a way that won't demolish the WW economy by flooding it with WWs, but also so casual (but consistent!) players can be guaranteed a WW in say every 20 days, or once a month.

I'd like to hear the dev's intent behind the exact changes made, because currently, I can't see how anything is solved with them. So I'm not sure if I'm just missing something, or if staff overtuned, or what.

• One problem was more casual players having difficulties even finding ww encounters
  • Encounters are now rarer and food is less common, making grinding for those encounters worse
• The other problem was players getting frustrated with failing ww encounters
  • The success rate seems to be at about 10%. Statistically, the odds of you missing 100 encounters in a row is EXTREMELY small. Most people are going to get several ww in the time before they get 100 knucklebones. So this does nothing to help alleviate the in-the-moment frustration that some people were feeling when they missed several in a row.

I certainly do not support making the number of knucklebones needed so low as 10. At a 10% success rate, the odds of getting no ww in a batch of 10 is about 35%. Flipping two coins and getting both heads is statistically rarer. So I do agree the number should be higher. But 100 is simply too high. I would be happy with 50, personally. Missing 30 is pretty clearly in ‘bad luck’ territory (~5% chance), and missing 50 definitely is (<1% chance). If you get to 30 misses, you'll probably be annoyed, but at least you're more than halfway to getting enough knucklebones. It would just feel better overall.

Now if devs felt ww were too common, then sure, things need to be tweaked overall. But personally I would rather see more encounters, paired with a lower success rate, and a statistically logical knucklebone number. Then casual players could feel like encountering ww is a feasible thing that allows them to slowly but surely collect knucklebones. More dedicated ww hunters could be offset by the lower success rate.

I also really don't want to see multiple/variable knucklebones drop per encounter. One of the only benefits of the current system is I don't have to manually keep track of my encounter numbers, I can just check knucklebones. I'd hate to lose that lol

As someone who’s just graduated college and is now on the verge of having a full time job, the rate now is insane. That itself is putting it somewhat lightly. Almost the entire update is a complete u-turn from what the playerbase wanted and was expecting, morale is pretty low and faith in the game is dropping from what I’ve seen. Introducing so many nerfs at once is frustrating and discouraging to a lot of players. Especially those who don’t have the time to invest hours upon hours into grinding. Some suggestions to consider going forward would be:

• Slightly buff the food found in encounter rates. While it was easy to amass food with the constant moth, isopod, and snail encounters, simply reduce the amount you get and slowly go from there. Smaller balances to start out with are generally a good idea (unless it’s game breaking or something similar).
• Either reduce the token rate to 1/20 or increase the chance to befriend. Right now, they feel a bit…. Useless considering the rate is still around a 10% success chance which means that you’d get around ten wild wolves before even being able to use the token. Which, unless your luck is REALLY bad, it becomes useless. Plus the added pebble sink is a tad excessive.

These are just my two cents but I’ll edit it as I think of more things to clarify and/or improve.

Absolutely 100% disagree with lowering the success rate over lowering encounter rate. As someone who's had an 85 fail streak, that was the worst feeling I've had when grinding WWs. Going 3-5 hours without an encounter is way more preferable to me because my bad luck wasn't getting rubbed in my face – sort of a ‘you’re vaguely aware of what you're missing but it's not being rubbed in your face.' Whereas when a WW dOeSn'T lIkE tHaT many many times in a row, it's a really obvious failure and frustration point. So please for the love of god, do not nerf the success rates ever.

With the new reversion and the nerf of knucklebones, I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread and mark as resolve. If you have a new suggestion on the CURRENT 50 knucklebones and the original encounter rate, I recommend to open up a new thread so we don't muddle the suggestions! Thank you!