Spawn rates for Insects were stealth-nerfed

[Jared:3]

Lets be honest here, the best example of this is Pokemon when they snapped half the dex out of existence, and now we have to pay for DLC in June to get new Pokemon, and then we have to pay for Pokemon home which I'm sure they make a lot of money because at the end of the day its business and that's how companies operate

 

[g u a v a]

uhg no wonder i havent seen peacock butterflies

 

[windloft]

i can kinda' understand why they decided not to say anything about the nerfed spawn rates, but then again ... nintendo's a bit infamous for being extremely vague with their patch notes for whatever reason : everybody's still speculating if the amiibo glitch's been completely fixed or not after all.

 

[Volmise]

I'm more of a nocturnal player so I haven't really noticed too much of a difference with bug spawns. I very rarely got to see peacock butterflies to begin with, and tarantulas weren't exactly on my radar either unless I managed to hit tarantula island during Mystery Tours.

Definitely does seem like they're trying to usher people towards turnips or trading online. Which isn't in itself a bad thing, but it can be frustrating for anyone who doesn't have the online service.

 

[sdw4527]

Honestly, this was more of a balance change (or "fix") than anything. The amount bugs were worth sometimes didn't correspond with their rarity. The peacock butterfly for example was five times more common than the Rajah Brooke, Agrias Butterflies, and Sunset Moths, yet were worth basically the same amounts. It sucks since many people were already used to the high spawn rates, but I can't really fault them here. The majority of the adjusted rates fell in line with the sell price of each of the bugs so it seems fair.

 

[R. Planet]

As a LONG time Nintendo fanboy (check the avy. Nintendo Cereal represent) and someone that used to be the lead writer/news reporter for a Nintendo fansite let me make this clear.

Nintendo is barely aware they have an online program. They don't care if you use it. They just don't care. They never ever will care. Nintendo online features will always be half-assed because they don't really care. They do SO little to steer people towards their (incredibly inexpensive. Less than $2 a month) online service that it's hilarious.

They have a vault of classic titles they could easily add to the SNES and NES online libraries at any time. This would be such a major selling point for their online service if they cared to do it right. Do they? No. It's been months and they don't even have Donkey Kong Country up yet. Why? Because they just don't really care. Not at the top level where those kinds of decisions are made.

Nintendo has always been run by a bunch of 90 year old men who are still waiting to see if this whole "internet thing" is just a fad like hoola-hoops and doing the Twist.

They have their reasons (which may or may not make any damn sense) but I promise you they never do diddly nor squat with the intentions of making untold billions on their online service.

They probably just thought it was too easy (and admit it. You know it was just too damn good to be true) to catch a 2500 bell butterfly over and over and over again. They clearly meant for that one insect to be a bit rare. You can tell by the price they gave it. It was odd that we got so many before and now they've corrected it.

Nobody is going to go in-game broke over this. There is no conspiracy.

 

[RedPanda]

Anyone else here only now learning they could have been making bank from peacock butterflies? I guess the good news is I can't feel as upset about it if I'm only now learning of this.

It does sound lame from what I read in this thread though.​

It wasn’t lame. It was fun catching butterflies! It wasn’t so valuable as to be game breaking. It was valuable enough to be worth the effort though, unlike some of the lower value butterflies I have been seeing all day.

 

[avieators]

Now hopefully they don't nerf the spawn rates for rare fish as well...

i will probably cry if they do, at that point it'd be obvious that they're trying to steer everyone towards nintendo online and the stalk market, when i've never relied on the stalk market in 19 yrs

 

[skogkyst]

i will probably cry if they do, at that point it'd be obvious that they're trying to steer everyone towards nintendo online and the stalk market, when i've never relied on the stalk market in 19 yrs

Me too, I'm dipping into stalks for the first time but I'm trying not to get involved with the online madness it brings.

 

[Fey]

It wasn’t lame. It was fun catching butterflies! It wasn’t so valuable as to be game breaking. It was valuable enough to be worth the effort though, unlike some of the lower value butterflies I have been seeing all day.

I read that as them agreeing that it’s lame the spawns were reduced, but I could be wrong.

Also 100% agreed—catching them was profitable but not OP. I’ve been hunting for the available insects for two days now, and they barely feel worth spending my time on.

I think the raised price + frequent spawns were actually balanced pretty well, considering that the cost of things has been increased in general. Today I didn’t even scrounge together enough Bells to buy everything from my stores, much less move a building or work toward paying off my loan >.>’ This update coinciding with day-by-day players’ Nook Store upgrade is just icing on top of the annoyance cake haha

(Apologies for the rantiness—I promise I’m ok lol)

 

[Spooky.]

It's funny...last night I was trying to do a 'catch 5 insects' for nm+ and I was wondering why I couldn't find ANYTHING. I gave up because I couldn't get a thing to spawn for over 20 minutes.

 

[thelonewanderer]

The hard life of a bug catchers.

 

[Soot Sprite]

I noticed way fewer butterflies on my hybrids after the update, I guess that's why. I don't even mind so much that they were nerfed, more that it was done silently. It seems a little shady tbh, but I'd rather have it actually stated next time because it's kind of a bad look for Nintendo. I've TT'ed a little bit but that was mostly just to get my island back to a liveable condition after I terraformed everything to the ground, there wasn't really a need to before when you could easily catch butterflies.

 

[FinnQuill]

Nintendo created those games. That's why they are relevant.

Sony also used to make VCRs, but that doesn't make them reasonably relevant to the Playstation.

Mobile games are not console games, they do not correlate to Switch game design strategies in the least.

To add to my previous post, I think it also doesn’t help that it coincided with the decrease in interest rate. It’s very clear that Nintendo is trying to stop or correct something, but they’re not being upfront about it. Whatever it is doesn’t seem fair to people who earn their bells honestly (and I’m including lots of TTers in that group as well!)

And this is almost definitely where the problem lies... Apparently the lesser mentioned truth of coincidence does not equal correlation needs to be wider spread. Redd was also added in this patch, do you think he's in on the conspiracy too?! Or maybe, the bell interest thing was to fix a different perceived problem than the bug spawn rate thing.

The answer to the peacock butterfly thing is, almost definitely, that Nintendo likely made the spawn rate too high, probably thinking that they would be harder to get because they required hybrid flowers, and then realized that they were spawning like crazy (which honestly, they were, it was kinda stupid how much they spawned once you had even a single blue flower laying around) and fixed the spawn to a reasonable rate. It's not some insane conspiracy...

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EDIT: So I decided to look at the actual numbers... the 90% reduction in Peacock Butterflies is a MASSIVE oversimplification of what happened. In the original code, a ton of bugs had higher spawn rates in March, likely something Nintendo always meant to readjust. In fact, a ton of bugs got a buff to spawns in April, because they were lower than average for April.

Peacock Butterflies have been reduced to the same as all other rare butterflies (I'm going to say a '5-point' spawn rate, because I don't know for sure these are percentages or how those percentages would work in relation to overall spawn rates even if they were percentages). This is the same as every other rare butterfly. Also, it was only reduced from a 45 in March, where most bugs had a higher spawn rate in general. In every other month, it was reduced from 30. That makes this a 25-point reduction in the original intended spawn rate. Meaning it was reduced to about one-sixth the amount it was before (actually, more than that, since for April, it was set to 27 previously).

Looking at the numbers shown, Nintendo absolutely always intended to adjust spawn rates, since March and April were the only months without unified spawn rates across the board. All rare types of butterfly have been evened out to a 5-point spawn rate, which is only down from 10-points for most, and 30-points for Peacock Butterflies. The spawn rates for Man-Faced Stinkbugs and normal Stinkbugs were switched (which makes sense since Stinkbugs are worth less than the Man-Faced variety), and Tarantulas and Scorpions when from 4-points to 2-points.

Looking at the way the spawn rates look, Nintendo definitely meant to adjust them at some point in April, and probably just wanted to get some gameplay feedback to determine how rare they wanted to make rare bugs. Even if the latter part there is speculative, any reasonable reading of the spawn rates for March and April versus the rest of the year would definitely suggest that Nintendo intended to adjust at least the spawn rates for those months, from the beginning.

But you know, that's not as sensational as: 'Nintendo is trying to ruin players and force them to buy Online Subscriptions!!!'

And this is why we can't have nice things (like patch note transparency), because people will pitch a fit over everything.

 

[Cheallaigh]

you know balance is one thing, and stealth nerfing is one of the reasons i gave up on a certain online game(plus ruining servers by starting new ones far too soon/often), but this feels excessive.

around 4 hours of straight playing and my hubby saw 2 peacocks.
i was on my island all day, working on decorating and building gardens, 12+ hours(hey it was sat okay?! i did take some breaks)... i saw 0, as in ZERO peacocks. 5 papers, 1 agrias, 1 orchard mantis, 2 preying, 3 or so face bugs, 2 ladybugs, and i haven't seen a horrible nasty hairy spider try and get me since the update(that part i am so not complaining about). what i did see was a lot of yellow and common butterflies, about a half dozen jewels, a dozen+ citrus, and a lot of stinkers. i have about a 100 hybrids between two areas and i was checking them all day after reading about the stealth nerf. one thing they also didn't mention in those notes is the doubling of shells as well.

so yeah, when i'm seeing it going from overload, to nothing... it does ruin my game a bit.

 

[Sansy]

The biggest reason this stealth nerf makes me angry is... they take the time to do this but they can't add crafting fishing bait in bulk? Or a shopping cart to the Able Sister's fitting room? THIS was what they prioritized?

 

[Bioness]

The biggest reason this stealth nerf makes me angry is... they take the time to do this but they can't add crafting fishing bait in bulk? Or a shopping cart to the Able Sister's fitting room? THIS was what they prioritized?

I mean, adjusting spawn rates is something that likely takes minutes to do. Adding an entirely new interface/function is dozens to hundreds of hours of work.

 

[Dim]

Hoping sharks and other rare fishes won't be nerfed as well, come summer

 

[pocky]

I don't even care about the bells. I just liked seeing all those butterflies flying around in my fields of flowers. Very sad!

 

[sdw4527]

This might sound a bit harsh...but instead of overreacting, I think people should take a closer look at the actual datamined rates. Some of them just straight up made no sense. You'll also notice there were a lot of bugs with even higher spawn rates in March. Almost as if Nintendo was purposely testing the waters to see what sort of balance changes were needed. Some were probably just mistakes too (Peacock butterfly/Man-faced stinkbug). Peacock butterfly has been discussed to death at this point, so I'll mention the man-faced stinkbug. I think they most likely swapped the rates by mistake with the regular stinkbug. There's no reason for the man-faced version to have double the rate of the regular version which has a lower sell price.

Yes it sucks for us end users, but at the end of the day these are fair changes. Honestly, the best way to fix this was to increase the sell price even more for some bugs (such as the rarer butterflies). It's always been an issue in AC games where the summer months are the big money makers while the other months generally aren't. Needs to have a better distribution.