how to earn emeralds?

emilyprice

title - im earning tons of rocks and sticks but not a single emerald, so i cant upgrade my village 🙁

neoncube

emilyprice They're rare, but they're earned the same way as rocks and sticks! 🙂

Are you reviewing words as well as learning new ones?

Ang

I also wonder how I get the different items. Is there a system or is it pure random? Have got the same issue with the emeralds.

neoncube

Ang Every time you learn a word or correctly review a word, My Little Word Land rolls some dice and decides whether you get wood, stone, or a gem. That is to say that the chance is fixed.

That being said, let me take a look at your account and see if the chances are stacking up like I expected. It's always possible there's a bug! 🙂

neoncube

Ang It looks like there are two problems:

When I was deciding how many gems were needed for each level, I wasn't very systematic, so lower levels generally require too few gems and higher levels generally require too many gems.
Somehow, your account skipped a level. This is probably making things more expensive or less expensive than they should be, although I'm not sure which.

I'm working on a fix 🙂 The bad news is that the fix is probably going to make some people end up with a negative number of gems and they'll have to dig themselves out of that hole, but I think that's okay 🙂

emilyprice

neoncube do you think it would be possible to look at my account as well? still no luck on earning emeralds 🙁

Ang

Well I shall see whether I end up with a negativ number of gems 🙂)

neoncube

emilyprice Sure, let me take a look! 🙂

neoncube

emilyprice It looks like you're just getting very unlucky! :/

However, based on your and @Ang's experience, I'm thinking that I should lower the number of gems that each upgrade requires. When I originally designed the system, I was aiming for the gems in each level to cost around the number of gems that someone "should" have at that point in time, but in retrospect, it's clearly more fun to have an attainable goal than it is to have a goal that's very random. That is, it's probably more fun to already have enough gems but lack sticks and stones than it is to already have enough sticks and stone but lack a gem, since gems are very randomly received indeed 🙂

I'll try to get this update out within the next week, God willing 🙂

emilyprice

neoncube thank you so much for all your help!

neoncube

emilyprice You're welcome, and thanks for letting me know about things like this! 🙂

I just calculated the probability of you having learned this many words and only having gotten 1 gem, and the probability is 4%. That's pretty low, but it also means that one in every twenty five people using the site would run into this same issue, which is a lot! 🙂 I'll have to sit down and really think about how many gems should be required for each level.