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Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 6th, 2012, 12:53 pm
by Fourdegrees
Hello fellow pet collectors! Sorry for the wall-of-text-of-fury, but it's for a good cause! :shock:

I have a plan that might help all of us frustrated by the mess that is CRZ. By now, I'm sure a lot of you have spent enough time hovering in Felwood to realize that Minfernals are on either a very long or some sort of unusual spawn timer. I believe it has been confirmed that the Minfernal is not tied either to the other battle pets in the zone or to the Infernal Sentries in the spawn area. I have an idea, but first some context.

After hunting for one since day one of MoP, then reading threads and posts all over the place about the Scourged Whelpling, I found someone who hit upon a possible revelation. They noted that the SW popped on a server restart and got one, but then they went back the very next day at the same time the server had come back up. Lo, and behold! Scourged Whelplings aplenty again. They hypothesized that SWs have a 24hr respawn time based on when the server last booted. I myself checked it out by going to the spawn area on my own server/CRZ around the same time I knew the servers had come up the previous day. I patiently waited until the precise time the servers had come up and, bang, suddenly there were SWs spawned everywhere! Success! I believe this confirms a 24hr spawn timer for the SW, based on last boot.

My idea is to work out a possible spawn timer for the Minfernal using data gathered from the community. How I believe we can do this is by folks posting spawn and capture information along with details about their server times. Once enough people have shared information and the data has been analyzed, I believe we can work out a pretty accurate timer for the Minfernal (or perhaps discover that's it's truly random). Some might argue that CRZ will prevent this method from succeeding, but I argue that accurate and complete enough data will allow us to account for it.

How this will be most helpful is by giving as many details as possible and using a consistent format to post your success. Note that only actual confirmed spawns and battles are useful here, not things such as "I started camping and time X, stopped at time Y and didn't see a spawn." It's also especially helpful if the pet spawned right in front of you, as opposed to logging in to find one; however, in the beginning any data is good data.

Format:
TDS: Time and Date of Spawn/battle (use Realm time, because it's the CRZ host server's time that matters, not your local time)
HS: Home Server's name (I know that if you're on a CRZ that doesn't happen to be your home server it will introduce inaccuracy into the plotting, but after enough data points, this should normalize)
TSLB: Time and date of Server's Last Boot (be as accurate as possible here based on the latest rolling restart or server maintenance you witnessed and give the time the CRZ host server came back up, which can be different from when your home server came online. eg.) your home server showed as online and you could log into your capital city just fine, but when you tried to log into a toon in Felwood you kept getting the "World server is down" message for a bit. This tells you your home server is up but the CRZ host was down))
CRZ: First-hand confirmed realms you have seen in the zone with you (for plotting out CRZ members and possibly what realms or time zones tend to host the Felwood area)

Example:
TDS: 12-06-12 at 10:47AM
HS: Trollbane
TSLB: 12-06-12 at 10:45AM
CRZ: Elune, Garona, Stormrage, Bloodhoof, Llane

In this (sadly hypothetical) example, I'm saying that I snagged a Minfernal right after the sever came up, I'm from Trollbane, and I saw a few other realms in Felwood at the time.

I think after enough people post in here about their spawns, it shouldn't be too hard to plot out what the spawn timer is, thereby giving all of us a sense of when we can reasonably expect to see a Minfernal pop. Some might argue that this will just cause more people to heavily camp the area around hypothesized times, but really, now that upgrade stones are available, as people succeed in getting the pet, the number of folks after them is going to decrease. Plus, not every single person hunting a Minfernal is going to be checking these forums, so people here should have a competitive advantage. Even if we discover the spawn timer is on the order of days or is an odd increment of hours, that's going to be helpful. I, for one, am probably never setting foot in Felwood again once I get the silly thing, but I want to be sure to help my fellow collectors along the way.

Please make any recommendations for changes and improvements to this idea in the thread. I'll check them out and revise this original post as needed so we can have the best shot of working this out. If statistical analysis of aggregated data could predict the last presidential election so accurately, surely it can work out a spawn timer in a video game! :D

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 7:28 am
by Renmiri
Caught about 5 "spawnfests" all immediately after server restart. like 8-10 minfernals, most poor but i got two normal / white ones. I stopped camping them to let other people catch it, and will use my first pet stone to upgrade it.

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 10:38 am
by TippyKitt
Renmiri wrote:Caught about 5 "spawnfests" all immediately after server restart. like 8-10 minfernals, most poor but i got two normal / white ones. I stopped camping them to let other people catch it, and will use my first pet stone to upgrade it.
Have you camped it since 5.1? The devs said they changed it so they wouldn't mass spawn at server restart. (I can only hope that was a bluff ;^; )


I have read on wowhead the same thing as you Fourdegrees and I'm pretty sure I also read it did work with the minfernal too. I plan to try this out next week after my own realms restart. From what I read (and it probably has to do with campers that just think they got lucky) you need to log in at EXACTLY 24 hours after restart, down the the minute. I'll let ya know how it goes. ^^

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 11:16 am
by Breehit
What a great plan, Fourdegrees! Now we just need SPSS.... :D

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 12:22 pm
by Lighthearted
12/4/12 I was there when the servers came back up on both Thrall and on Aggramar (dual boxing for minfernal).
Thrall i missed the "up time" so maybe no minfernal were left when i logged in at 1:23 (different server time than Aggramar) both realms loaded up at real time 1:23pm DST.

On Aggramar the server came back up at 12:23p realm time, and by my observation, I was alone there for 24 minutes. During that time no minfernal spawned, and only one paw print at all, a tainted rat, almost exactly in the center of the "zone" ffs.

I expect that the developers are tweaking the system, because my macro was not working on Tuesday either.../target minfernal which had previously worked (curse you rare farmers, the least you could do is hide the one you already have) did not see my guild mates Min even when i had it focused.
I'm quite frustrated.
I hope this works.

Fingers crossed.


<question: Is it possible that the 30 minfernal we see when flying over on the taxi are somehow interfering with the natural spawn rate? Skewing the numbers so it doesn't spawn because it thinks there's "plenty" there?>

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 12:27 pm
by Imthedci
Lighthearted wrote:<question: Is it possible that the 30 minfernal we see when flying over on the taxi are somehow interfering with the natural spawn rate? Skewing the numbers so it doesn't spawn because it thinks there's "plenty" there?>
That shouldn't have any effect on the natural spawn rate, since the server that you're on when taxi-ing isn't the same server that you end up on when you land.

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 1:47 pm
by Fourdegrees
TippyKitt wrote:I have read on wowhead the same thing as you Fourdegrees and I'm pretty sure I also read it did work with the minfernal too. I plan to try this out next week after my own realms restart. From what I read (and it probably has to do with campers that just think they got lucky) you need to log in at EXACTLY 24 hours after restart, down the the minute. I'll let ya know how it goes. ^^
I'm not sure if the Minfernal is on a 24hr spawn. I suspect it's longer, maybe 48, 72, etc., especially since listening to the interview with the Blizz lead dev yesterday where he stated something to the effect that the Minfernal is his favorite pet partly because of its style and partly because it's "ridiculously hard to get."

Good luck in your hunt! Let us know how it turns out. :)

Is there anyone who can post a success story with good details?

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 7th, 2012, 1:48 pm
by Fourdegrees
Renmiri wrote:Caught about 5 "spawnfests" all immediately after server restart. like 8-10 minfernals, most poor but i got two normal / white ones. I stopped camping them to let other people catch it, and will use my first pet stone to upgrade it.
Can you flesh this out a bit with exact capture dates/times, server info, etc.?

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 9th, 2012, 12:21 am
by Renmiri
Fourdegrees wrote:
Renmiri wrote:Caught about 5 "spawnfests" all immediately after server restart. like 8-10 minfernals, most poor but i got two normal / white ones. I stopped camping them to let other people catch it, and will use my first pet stone to upgrade it.
Can you flesh this out a bit with exact capture dates/times, server info, etc.?
It was all before 5.1

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 9th, 2012, 2:48 am
by Schaufel
I don't know if this will help any, but this is how it went for me:

I completely lucked out when I got mine. It was November 24th around 12:30 AM. I was fighting a group lead by a tainted rat when a minfernal shuffled into view right next to me, literally on the path the rat I was fighting had been patrolling before I engaged it. I immediately forfeited the fight with the rat group and grabbed the minfernal.

The minfernal hadn't been there in the literal 45 seconds it took me to fly down, engage the rat, and start chipping at the rat's HP. I was about to catch the rat since it was a rare when the minfernal appeared. It had to have replaced the rat once engaged. I flew around after catching the minfernal, but there weren't any others up, and no one else was around (very odd for my particular CRZ).

As I said, not sure if that will help any since it was pre-5.1 =/ Hope it does, though.

TDS: 11/24 - approx. 12:30 - 12:45 according to my Felwood CRZ which is 2 hours ahead of my actual home realm
HS: Feathermoon
TDLB: Not sure; I know server maintenance ended 11/22 at 11 AM server time (1 PM CRZ time), but I don't remember if there were any rolling restarts between Tuesday and Friday. I don't think so, but I'm not 100% positive.
CRZ: I have no idea which one Feathermoon gets lumped into

Re: Minfernal - Help us help you

Posted: December 9th, 2012, 11:10 pm
by Fourdegrees
ZOMG I just got one! I can't believe it. Uncommon quality, 20 sec after logging in to check and making sure my Turnip was slot 1.

Crap, I can't even remember my own format, I'm still on adrenaline, lol.

Date/Time: 12-09-2012 at 10:55pm server time.
HS: Trollbane
Date of last reset: to my knowledge it was 12-06-12 at 10:45am
CRZ: stormrage and elune were in there at the time of my capture (only 2 other people that I spotted)

There was only one spawn that I could see, but I did notice a Tainted Rat while I was flying around after my capture to see if there were any others about (I wouldn't have gone for them, just would have posted in general chat that some were up or maybe checked to see if any were rare, then logged out to preserve them).

This almost indicates to me the spawn is on some sort of 12hr increment timer instead of a 24hr increment timer. I will continue to check this thread even though I got one! I want to help others here get theirs as well. :D