Nintendo suddenly turns the screws on Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp players mid-event
Leaf it out.
Just last week, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp felt like it had turned over a new leaf. Nintendo's anthropomorphic app had new gardening gameplay, a fresh event, and everyone was happy.
Now, the second half of the same event has gone live - and fans suddenly feel under pressure. Elements of the event which rely on RNG - in other words, luck - are now far more prominent.
The Garden Safari event features limited-edition flower seeds which you plant and harvest. Some of these flowers (but not all) will attract a unique butterfly, which you can then catch for unique rewards.
Week one of the event offered two flower types, with a unique butterfly species for each. You could buy one of these flower types very easily, while the other could be accrued through completing villager tasks. Alternatively, you could swap butterflies you had caught with friends.
You don't always catch every butterfly your garden attracts/your friends give you - there's a second layer of RNG on top of which flowers attract a creature in the first place which then decides how many you'll actually manage to capture. But in week one, with flowers in ample supply, this wasn't really an issue.
Week two of the event has added a third flower type on top of the pool of flowers available already. You can only get this from villager tasks, and have to hope you get one instead of the others available already. Week two has also added two new butterflies - both of which only come from this one rarer seed type.
One of the new butterflies is markedly rarer than the other. Worse, the chance of catching any these new creatures feels like it has nosedived:
The game's reddit is awash with players upset at what they percieve to be unfair gameplay and extremely low odds, sharing screengrabs from the game where they have received little or no success whatsoever.
It's the same story on Twitter, too:
It doesn't help that you can, of course, pay a high premium in real-world currency (10 Leaf Tickets) to guarantee your butterfly capture with a catch rate of 100 per cent, and to fast forward the time it takes to grow flowers with fertiliser, so you get another chance at the game's RNG.
Nintendo has demonstrated it will listen to Pocket Camp players' feedback in the past. It's time the company did so again.