Scaling back faucets makes sense, but I feel like it's another change that harms regular players while still leaving room for farmers.
I can't help but feel like a half or one cent claim with a $20 cashout is basically intending to remove faucets for those players. What's frustrating is that the only people who are still going to play that 1/4000 chance for a cashout are exactly the players that DD is intending to remove with the change. No one who is going to gamble any meaningful amount is going to spend an expected 4000 minutes claiming faucets to get $20. However, if you get 133 zero footers who want to farm, then you can expect one of them to win $20 every day. That $20 going to that single player does nothing in terms of engagement or user acquisition, and the experience of wasting time playing nearly impossible odds is frustrating for the other 132 players. Far better to have a couple more rains per day, have more duck hunts, a better decoy pot, better staking rewards, higher faucets for players with feet, literally anything else.
If the direction that the site is going to move in is making faucets more and more like winning the lottery, then just get rid of them. Especially for zero footers. I would say the easiest improvement would be remove faucets completely for everyone who doesn't have any feet and allocate the savings to the faucets of players with feet. If you really want people with zero feet to be able to get some free money, then replace the tic-tac-toe screen with an ad and monetize like a real faucet. It shouldn't be funded with the house edge of active players.
I have a qualified wager of $40,000 at 3 feet. Assuming I used boosters for all of it at 18% daily rake, 5% weekly and 5% monthly, and that I'm a tier 3 referred user with a maxed out tier 1 (doubt that's actually the case), the site can expect to have made $168 on my $40k of wager. Some of that goes to sniper, some goes to decoy staking, duck hunt, etc. Personally, I DO think that a $.20 faucet 45 times per day is overly generous given those numbers. I think $.06 45 times per day is reasonable, but I would honestly rather have HALF of that value in a way that doesn't require me farming 1 in 333 odds for 45 minutes.
I do think that things like faucets, rains, and duck hunt are more fun than just having better rake, but having mysterious rules with hidden algorithms and bonuses that change when you win too much is an awful user experience. Figure out your expected value on each deposit/wager amount, and set the bonuses available to players based on that from the start. Outside of that, have a fixed budget for getting a limited amount of free money in new player's balances to entice them to keep playing and make deposits. Faucets can't be everything to everyone, but making them ridiculously low with high cashouts makes them exclusively appealing to farmers.