no more gem farming?

[Mad Kat]

I have only 80 gems. I liberally use gems to speed up upgrades. I haven’t seen treasure chests at all since a few days :(

I did win a few gems from missions and being thanked.

[farview]

Before a few days ago, The gem chests would show up sometime after an event that I shot gems or barrels (which apparently hold gems). The number of gems in the chests would be the number of gems I shot. But, like everyone else, I haven’t gotten any gems in almost a week.

[ABTABT]

This is obviously a deliberate development by Rovio to get people to buy gems.

[gradientturtle7]

Err don’t think anything’s changed. The analyst is on his honeymoon for two weeks and he’d have a definite answer, so we all might have to wait until he’s back!

[Rumblebee]

Hello there guys,

Thank you for letting us know about this issue! Just to clarify, it was definitely not our intention to cut down your gem chests and we’re currently investigating probable causes for this mishap. It would help us a lot, if those who were affected by this drought of gems would let us know what device they are using to play the game, what is the current version of your OS and if you’re game is older version than the current 1.5.18 or 1.5.19. You can contact us here or here -> https://support.rovio.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thank you very much already in advance for your co-operation, we’ll try to get this thing fixed as soon as possible!

Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Optimus_Pig]

iPad Mini
iOS 8.3
ABT v1.5.19

[20Qmindreader]

iPad
iOS 8.3
ABT 1.5.19

[jman]

Samsung gs4
Android 4.4.4
1.5.18

[farview]

Samsung S6
Android 5.1.1
1.5.18

Besides the gem problem, it has been very, very crashy for about a week or so. That started happening around the same time as the gem problem.

[Anonymous]

Samsung Galaxy S4
Android Lollipop
1.5.18

[ABTABT]

Day 6 no gems. Have sent details to Rovio – let’s see what happens.

[marioandsonic]

I’ve gotten a couple of gems today in chests. However, I got over 40 gems from mission rewards.

[Cerpin]

Got a 2 gem crate this morning, first one in nearly a week!

[Optimus_Pig]

No gem crates for me in around five days now.

Also, does it seem like gem output has dropped in the missions as well?

Although I’m still getting them from missions, they don’t seem to show up as often, and with fewer gems when then do.

For example this morning I claimed from three 12-hour missions, all with five keys, and yet I only received a total of 11 gems from them. Also I didn’t receive any gems at all from the Hard missions portal, even though I had five keys.

In the past, you could count on a 12-hour hard mission to offer at least one if not two opportunities to claim gems (whether or not you actually had enough keys is another matter), but now I’m encountering more and more 12-hour Hard missions where gems don’t show up at all.

Before gem output dropped so dramatically, I figure that I could harvest around 50-60 gems per 24h period, including gems from both the crates and the missions. Of that total, I figure that about 15-20 per day would have been from the crates, so around 35-40 per day from missions.

I’ve probably been accumulating missions gems at half that rate (so around 20/day) over the past 5-6 days.

[Optimus_Pig]

Just picked up a crate (just one) containing four(!) gems. Woo hoo!

First crate I’ve encountered since just before the weekend …

[jman]

Collected gems from missions this morning too give me a grand total of 40 gems……just did three more missions no gems offered and now only have 20 gems total WTH.

[ABTABT]

One gem yesterday. Grand total of three for a whole week. Useless.

[gradientturtle7]

Hello
Got some more details. So yes, the gem chests have been reduced (my bad). Although they will be going up slightly in the near future.
However, the actual gem earning potential has been increased. If you play missions you have more chance to earn more gems and coins than you could previously. So basically we’ve tweaked the system in order to encourage missions. A top tip: if you play missions with only a couple of declared rewards (e.g. three question mark rewards) then you have a higher chance of earning coins, pigs or gems at the end.

[Optimus_Pig]

@gradientturtle7

Thanks for the clarification.

We kind of suspected as much.

“However, the actual gem earning potential has been increased. If you play missions you have more chance to earn more gems and coins than you could previously. So basically we’ve tweaked the system in order to encourage missions.”

Are you sure that the gem output from missions has been increased?

As I noted in an earlier post to this topic, it seems to me that gems from missions have also dropped significantly. If as you say above, gems earned from missions have been increased to offset the decrease in gems earned from random crates, then I shouldn’t be seeing an overall decrease in gem collection, but that’s exactly what I’m seeing nowadays.

Case in point, I just claimed a 24-hour Hard mission a few minutes ago, and there were no gems to be seen at all, only coins, pigs, a Super Rareium and a couple of Anger Chips.

Similarly I claimed two 12-hour missions (one Easy, one Medium) last night and all I got was 4 gems even though I had earned five keys on both missions, and one of them didn’t even have gems as available rewards.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that over the past week or so, I’ve actually earned more gems from the Easy and Medium missions, than I have from the Hard missions, which seems counter-intuitive presuming that mission rewards are supposed to be better from completing Hard missions.

The only missions I do are the 12h and 24h type, with lots and lots of “?” in the potential rewards.

So I’m not sure how it’s really encouraging us to run missions, when gem output from missions is actually lower than it used to be, and only slightly higher than gems from crates?

[dmsral]

If you plan your missions to end around the time an upgrade finishes, then you can maximize those question marks. Upgrade finishes, start next upgrade, THEN collect the mission rewards. With a little luck, your silo will mostly restocked a few minutes into the upgrade cycle. Now you’ll have the luxury of a day or two of long, high question marks missions to stock up on extra coins, gems and pigs. I’ve been using this strategy for a while now and I’m netting an extra 100,000 coins more than I need for the next upgrade, plus the gems and pigs, and I haven’t played in Jenga mode for over two weeks. I currently have 1.7 million coins, 84,000 pigs and over 3000 gems. Currently, my silo is full (except for being one short of two items), three long missions running and 28 hours left on a level 12 upgrade.

Another tip: If you have that long mission running with 3 Rareiums in it, go for a higher level upgrade so you’ll be able to use them all. Example: You would normally be upgrading a character to level 11, but with 3 Rareiums coming up, look to go for a level 13 or higher upgrade instead if the timing is right.

[Mad Kat]

I haven’t seen multi super-rareium missions in several days now :(

I only get single super-rareium mission opportunities.

In my experience, both gem and super-rareium earning rate had dropped in the last ten-twelve days or so.

[Optimus_Pig]

Earning coins and special materials from missions is not an issue for me. I’ve got plenty of both, in fact I’d wager that my coins productivity is higher than it’s ever been, despite the fact that I probably run about 1/3 the nodes that I used to, and haven’t done either a gold dome or an eggbot intercept in about a month.

The only time I’ve ever run out of a special material is when I was rushing to get my TFs up to L11 so I accelerated several upgrades using gems, which meant that I was plowing through my special materials stash. Now that I’m back to one upgrade every 1d16h, having a fully stocked silo is not a problem.

My issue is how few gems are popping from the missions, depsite @gradientturtle7’s assertion that gems from missions were increased at the same time that gems from crates were decreased.

[gradientturtle7]

To clarify, the gems from missions weren’t increased when the gems from chests were decreased. But because there was an alternate source of gems (missions) that didn’t exist before 1.5 then the overall hand out of gems is higher than it used to be.

[Optimus_Pig]

@gradientturtle7

Ummmm, OK. Thanks for clarifying. But I don’t see how that reconciles with this statement:

“However, the actual gem earning potential has been increased. If you play missions you have more chance to earn more gems and coins than you could previously.”

If crate gems decreased, then the only way for “actual gem earning potential” to increase is for mission gems to more than offset the decrease in crate gems, which doesn’t seem to be the case, since I’m actually earning fewer mission gems now, than I was earning from crate gems before the decrease, despite the fact that I’m only running 12h and 24h missions and consistently earning 5 keys in the Easy and Medium missions and 4/5 keys in the Hard missions. I’ll even use pigs to accelerate my missions from time to time as well.

[20Qmindreader]

In my game experience, in the past, gem crates usually generated 1-4 gems, very rarely did a crate generate 6 or more gems. Yesterday, I completed two medium missions (12-hour, one ended in a.m., one ended at end of my day) 13 gems in one, 7 gems in the other. Same for 2 easy missions, one with 20gems, one with a 2+5=7 combo. On the one hard mission 8 gems. So….totally random?

I have had hard, 24-hour missions complete with 3 super radium in gift boxes, ranging with 1-3 super radium in each. Unfortunately, my silo was full, but I received a big coin bonus from that. Strategy outlined by @dmsral above should help in benefitting better in that regard :)