Stop me if you’ve seen this before. A Pal in Palworld has somewhere between a 35% and 50% capture rate, and yet for some reason it takes 8, 9, 10 balls to capture it, which seems…mathematically improbable to say the least.
Then you say “okay, well I’ll just find 150+ Lifmunk Effigies to make my capture rate better” except it doesn’t, and if anything, it may even feel worse than before. Well, there are growing theories that Lifmunk Effigies may be bugged to do the opposite of what they say, actually lowering your capture rate rather than raising it. This has had some players investigating, like YouTuber Chalenor.
In his video below, he tries to catch low level Pals with low level spheres. On a server with no boosts, he has a catch rate of 53%. On level 10 Lifmunks, it’s 37%. That’s not a margin of error, that’s a significant difference, and the difference between catching something half the time and a third of the time is huge in terms of the number of balls it takes. And with lower percentages on higher end Pals, this would get even worse.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that this is confirmation bias, but it does anecdotally match up with my own experience as I have certainly not noticed my catch rate getting any better, and I could definitely see how it might be worse. I should probably start tracking it. I swear I am getting more and more “final” catch moments where it’s an 85% and still the Pals are breaking out repeatedly.
The comments on that video are full of other “I thought it was just me” comments, and one person says that among their friends, the ones with the least amount of Lifmunks on their character had the highest capture rate on the server.
I think this explains a lot. And I have seen much bigger games with much worse bugs, so to think that this could be an inverse bug through Pocketpair simply missing something. But this is rather important as I’m not about to start crafting a million legendary balls if my catch rate is secretly half of what it should be, or something like that. There are theories that this could be a literal, simple match/code problem:
“I wonder if the effigies are supposed to be a multiplier, like +33% is actually multiplied as 1.33, but they put 0.33 instead.”
Regardless, something is definitely off. The percentages compared to how often things actually get capture simply do not add up, and it does feel like it’s getting worse in time.
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