First, just to state this off the bat, I actually get some mild enjoyment from islands. I’m not here to pile on regarding the extreme layering of rng for rewards, the repetitive gameplay, or any other aspects of this activity about which others often complain. They serve as a relaxing and chill activity that my wife and I can do to wind down, i.e. we have found a way to enjoy and participate in this activity willingly, rather than begrudgingly as a required weekly azerite “chore”, as perhaps many would suggest.
Second, we were excited to see that twilight dragons were added as natives to the Crestfall island this week. It would seem some sort of feedback must have worked its way through for this to happen, and that’s great! Like virtually any other activity, we are ultimately drawn in by the rewards, and it can’t be a coincidence that twilight dragons, which were quite scarcely seen previously, are tied to a mount.
That said, despite all the other stuff to do in 8.2, we decided to cap azerite from islands on as many toons this week as we could, and to prioritize getting Crestfall so that we’d have as many chances at twilight dragons as possible. This involved leaving when we didn’t get Crestfall, however we both have multiple accounts, so no one else was left hanging. As the week went on we gradually worked our sets of toons towards capping. However, once we got to about 2/3 of cap, it became clear that some sort of logic has been built into the queue to prevent randomness, and force only the other 2 islands to be available to us.
At this point, we reached 28 straight queues before giving up, across 8 sets of toons, without ever seeing Crestfall again. If it was random, or even slightly weighted against Crestfall, this result is virtually impossible. Assuming my math is correct, we had a ~99.99883% chance of seeing Crestall at least once, assuming a flat 1/3 chance on each queue. It does appear others have pointed this out as well, specifically when pirates were a native on Rotting Mire a number of weeks ago.
I would implore you to reconsider the way island queues are handled, and frankly the entire system that results in us going weeks/months without seeing certain islands in the rotation at all, not to mention natives. I’m not sure how to best put it in words other than to repeat an oft used phrase of the developers, which is that it “feels bad” right now, very bad. We really were excited to do islands this week, and it’s hard to understand what possible game design goal can be accomplished by effectively locking us out of a specific island. Deserter penalties for leaving, exceedingly low chances to see certain loot, etc, are all reasonable, but please reconsider whatever additional restrictions/penalties have been put in place.
Thank you for reading.