Winter Dragonite Encounter Chance Too Low?

[Heiach]

After experiencing my first seasonal event in Halloween where the Witch Pikachu had a 1/20 chance to be found.. and with the devs adding an area that spawned Pikachu's a lot more frequently.. I was looking forward to catching me an xmas Dragonite, figuring they'd do something similar.

 

I knew it would be rarer than the Witch Pikachu so when I heard that the chance of me encountering one in the Frozen Cave was 1/750.. I figured that seemed about right.. maybe a little too high perhaps but it wasn't out of order. I'd have to grind for about 3 hours to encounter 750 pokemon and 1 of them would probably be my prize.. not too bad.. a lot more than I had to do for my Pikachu, but worth it as Dratinis are naturally about that much rarer than Pikachus.

 

Dratinis seemed to have about a 1/100 spawn chance so that meant that 1/7.5th of any Dratini I found would be an xmas one.. A lot rarer than the 1/20th I experienced with the Pikachus but Dratinis are over twice as rare I guess..

 

I find out about 3 hours into my grinding, after only encountering 2 dratinis that apparently the 1/750 isn't "chance that a pokemon in that cave will be a winter Dratini" but rather "chance that a dratini you find (which is already really, really rare!) will be a winter one"!

 

Seriously? On the very rare chance that I find a dratini, took me almost 3 hours before I found my first one.. there's a 1/750 chance that it'll be the winter one.. what? That must be a bug right? like someone entered in the wrong number or added an extra digit.

 

The chances of finding clone pokemon weren't anywhere near that.. it was 1/20 wasn't it? Granted finding a starter pokemon was hard already but at least there was a 5% chance it might be a clone.

 

I guess this post is just me expressing my alarm and questioning if this is normal? I get that you want some things in your game to be rare.. I get it. This is an MMO but surely that's taking it a bit far? I've heard of rare drops in MMOs before with like a 0.5% or 0.1% chance to drop something, but a 0.0013% chance? Really? Might as well not add it to the list of catchable Pokemon at this point. (That's a 1/100 chance that a pokemon encountered will be a dratini + the 1/750 chance that said dratini will be the event one = 1/75000 or 0.0013%). That's 10 times rarer than a shiny (not quite but close enough at this point).

 

I get that you perhaps don't want everyone to have a winter dragonite but I don't think there are even enough hours of sensible playing time between when the event starts and ends? Presuming the event runs for a month, that's 730 hours.. you'd have to use 300 of those just running around in a cave. That's 10 hours a day! I've heard of dedicated people playing the game for 7hrs a day but I'd imagine they're running through the story or PvPing or something, not running back and forth in a cave repeatedly.

 

I just want to know if I'm insane here.. like is that a sensible and normal drop-chance for an MMO or a Pokemon game?

[Bladermagician]

but....rng

[Prodex]

our luck werent good :<

[Ghostmaster]

haha I have been grinding around Christmas event for at least 30+ hours and haven't even encountered one xmas poke even though its 1/750 and I have encountered many of thousands of Pokemon by now. I have friends with less grind time that have 2-3 now =/ As for Christmas Dragonite I have only seen one on server and it sold for 10mil which is the same as 25 coin capsule's which cost 125$. Which is also saying a lot of people are willing to do anything to find one.