How rare is rare?

[snowcat11]

Hi everyone! I just started playing dragon cave a few days ago and was wondering just how rare are rare dragons? After looking through the wiki I fell in love with the Blusang Lindwurm, and try to check the coast area whenever I can, but I've never seen one. Any advice to finding one/how the egg caves work would be great!

[Kakaru_of_DOOM]

Welcome to the site, then! I actually think this is a fascinating topic - I've been here for awhile and I still have yet to see a gold in the wild. I have a limited understanding of how rarities work, but nonetheless will share what I've gathered about it.

 

As it is mentioned in the Ecology page (on the main site under 'help') the rarity of a breed varies based on a mystical variable widely refereed to as its 'ratio'. There is a magic number of how common a breed should be, which is hidden from all but the creator of the site. If there are more dragons of a given breed, eggs of that breed will become rarer until the ratio comes back into balance.

 

In the biomes, rarer eggs tend to be taken more quickly than common ones, so if you look at random, you are less likely to see them. However, there are more eggs in each location than the three visible at any given time, and they shuffle every five minutes. If you come right after the biome shuffles, you are more likely to chance upon any rare eggs that might be there.

 

For your place as a new user, I recommend checking out The Newbie Gifting Thread and The Gifting Tree threads if you really want to get blusangs quickly. If that's not your cup of tea, good luck hunting in the coast! Blusangs are a pretty popular breed.

 

That being said, I would enjoy a thread for making wild guesses at the ratios and possibly which breeds are significantly out-of-balance. The real answers are unknowable - and probably change every time a new dragon gets introduced - but I have seen significant variations looking between multiple established users' scrolls. Are any of them remotely close to a balanced ratio?

[irrelevantindigo]

This is actually an excellent question— I have found almost all my rares in AP or the Departures thread. But I did stumble upon a paper dragon not too long ago and I've only been here for... two weeks?

 

I feel the wiki could be inaccurate on rarities?

Plus some dragons are REALLY hard to find because of their popularity despite not really beong all to rare. While some are only semi-rare because they're kind of common in the AP and the Departure thread?

I could be mistaken, but I wonder how all these variables could really be accounted for when determining a "rarity" to declare for a breed.

[Fuzzbucket]

The wiki is unofficial. It relies on user experience for its data. So for a long time, blacks showed up as uncommon (ETA I see they still do - odd... they are all over !), as they were almost impossible to find - people were trying for alts. At another point, stripes were hard to find. It depends so much on what is going on with players. I imagine olives are hard to find at the moment because of the holly contest. I can't find balloons. I haven't seen CBs in ages - bt they are "common". Except for golds and to a lesser degree silvers, I don't think anything is RARE as such in TJ's view. But I see a huge list in the wiki.

Edited March 21, 2017 by fuzzbucket

[silver_tiger]

This is actually an excellent question— I have found almost all my rares in AP or the Departures thread. But I did stumble upon a paper dragon not too long ago and I've only been here for... two weeks?

 

I feel the wiki could be inaccurate on rarities?

Plus some dragons are REALLY hard to find because of their popularity despite not really beong all to rare. While some are only semi-rare because they're kind of common in the AP and the Departure thread?

I could be mistaken, but I wonder how all these variables could really be accounted for when determining a "rarity" to declare for a breed.

Ok, so here's how I understand how it works:

 

To start with, the wiki is not associated with DC at all, it's fan-run. This means that a. it's not official by any means, and b. rarities are mostly decided by observation. That further means that even if a dragon is meant to be uncommon (Coppers are my favorite example to throw out there; when they first dropped I swear by all that's holy that the artist claimed they were going to be uncommon. However they're all but impossible to find now; they're user-driven rare, and are classified as 'rare' in the wiki) it might be determined to be rare or even, I imagine, common by the wiki.

 

Also, dragon eggs seem to drop in seasons, or waves. This could be due to ratio movement--a dragon that was common got bred a lot due to how common it was, it naturally became more uncommon, and therefore vanished from the cave--or it could be set up to do that by the mechanics of the game. It's hard to say.

 

A further example: a few years ago, a breed was dropped with three varieties in three different biomes (Pyralspites). The Volcano variant was common as dirt, while the Alpine and Coastal varieties were much harder to find; they were even classified as rare for a while, in the wiki, iirc. A few months ago, Pyralspites in the Volcano suddenly vanished completely. At the same time, the Coast and Alpine saw a lot more, and after a while it all leveled out somewhat, and I would personally classify them all as Uncommon, I see them sit in the Alpine and Coast for minutes at a time. The wiki still classes those variants as rare, though.

 

The upshot of my tl;dr is that we don't know what, exactly, rarity means in this game. All we can say for sure is that Golds and Silvers are rare to the point of being nearly impossible to catch.

[andromedae]

This is an intriguing topic for sure. I've always wondered about precise ratios for each individual breed. I once went nuts hunting for specific rares - trying to see how often they dropped, say within a day. Silvers would show up maybe once every 4 hours, perhaps even twice. I only ever saw a Gold once every 6-12 hours though. For other "rare" dragons the rates can vary far and wide, as well as by time period. Some months, some rare breed might seem more common. Then, the next month they will be more difficult to find. Rarity appears to fluctuate.