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An Open Letter On Promos
Dear Lusternia,
I love you. When MKO threw me out into the street, cold, naked and hungry, you took me in. I had good times with her, but you treat me better than she did. You make me smile every day. We argue sometimes, but what we've got is real. And its because of that that I feel confident that I can tell you about something you do that hurts me. I know that our relationship can survive this genuine criticism.
This shizzle with the promos has got to stop. Here is my experience of this month's promo:
1) See the words Czigany, Crates, and Coins, in a single sentence and run around the house like I just won the lotto,
2) Calm down and note the price of 100cr per crate,
3) Go to see Jeremiah, and find that he's sold out,
4) Get mad and hit up forums,
5) Find out from various players that a few individuals (the sad thing is that I don't even have to name them here; see my later point) keep camping Jeremiah and buying him out,
6) Figure that the ONLY way I'm going to get crates before my withdrawal kicks in is to be standing at Jeremiah at the turn of the Weave with the bound credits ready and my Enter finger limbered up to spam,
7) Trade in a load of stuff so I can get all my crates in one batch,
8) Find that I misunderstood his respawn time - it's beginning of Month, not Weave
9) Hit forums again,
10) Finally catch him with crates, only to find that the price has now doubled with no clear announcement,
11) Find that, given the current cost of crates I seriously would have reconsidered some of these tradeins,
12) Hit forums again and write this post.
Now, here's a much shorter version of the above experience (and here's the kicker), which seems to be one that can fit the experience for a good many, on a good many months of the year:
1) See a promo,
2) Invest in it,
3) Find that, after you've invested, the promo has changed.
I love you, Lusty, but this isn't good enough. And its happening with enough regularity that it's affecting my affection for you. And it appears to be happening because a few people are abusing (I don't even use this word negatively; they're doing what anybody sitting on a billion bound credits would do) the systems in place, in entirely predictable ways. I mean, honestly, if you have a limited and coveted resource, then what's going to happen to it? Fair and equal distribution? And it seems that in most situations - I explicitly include the current promotion - the 'losers' of the nerf that comes along are not the people who abused it in the first place.
I love you, Lusty, and I want to be constructive. Consider the current promo: How difficult would it have been to make it so that each individual has a personal allocation of... what, 100 crates? (genuine question - I'm not a coder). Or to make Jeremiah's wares respawn more frequently, or at a random interval? Or to make a clear announce post when the information in the previous one is no longer accurate (if this was done somewhere I didn't see - quite possible! - then please accept my apology)? To reiterate, I don't grudge you making mistakes. I make one every now and then. But many of these problems seem to be entirely predictable.
One other suggestion (and I appreciate it's not your decision to make, so perhaps you could pass it up to the Big Boss?): Publish the promotion one week before it goes live each month. That gives you a week for the playerbase to tell you what's wrong with it (cf. TheseCrates; Chaos Discs; those utterly crazy crates in the aethersuit promo; goop scarves).
I love you. I want you. I need you.
E> Versalean, of Glomdoring
I love you. When MKO threw me out into the street, cold, naked and hungry, you took me in. I had good times with her, but you treat me better than she did. You make me smile every day. We argue sometimes, but what we've got is real. And its because of that that I feel confident that I can tell you about something you do that hurts me. I know that our relationship can survive this genuine criticism.
This shizzle with the promos has got to stop. Here is my experience of this month's promo:
1) See the words Czigany, Crates, and Coins, in a single sentence and run around the house like I just won the lotto,
2) Calm down and note the price of 100cr per crate,
3) Go to see Jeremiah, and find that he's sold out,
4) Get mad and hit up forums,
5) Find out from various players that a few individuals (the sad thing is that I don't even have to name them here; see my later point) keep camping Jeremiah and buying him out,
6) Figure that the ONLY way I'm going to get crates before my withdrawal kicks in is to be standing at Jeremiah at the turn of the Weave with the bound credits ready and my Enter finger limbered up to spam,
7) Trade in a load of stuff so I can get all my crates in one batch,
8) Find that I misunderstood his respawn time - it's beginning of Month, not Weave
9) Hit forums again,
10) Finally catch him with crates, only to find that the price has now doubled with no clear announcement,
11) Find that, given the current cost of crates I seriously would have reconsidered some of these tradeins,
12) Hit forums again and write this post.
Now, here's a much shorter version of the above experience (and here's the kicker), which seems to be one that can fit the experience for a good many, on a good many months of the year:
1) See a promo,
2) Invest in it,
3) Find that, after you've invested, the promo has changed.
I love you, Lusty, but this isn't good enough. And its happening with enough regularity that it's affecting my affection for you. And it appears to be happening because a few people are abusing (I don't even use this word negatively; they're doing what anybody sitting on a billion bound credits would do) the systems in place, in entirely predictable ways. I mean, honestly, if you have a limited and coveted resource, then what's going to happen to it? Fair and equal distribution? And it seems that in most situations - I explicitly include the current promotion - the 'losers' of the nerf that comes along are not the people who abused it in the first place.
I love you, Lusty, and I want to be constructive. Consider the current promo: How difficult would it have been to make it so that each individual has a personal allocation of... what, 100 crates? (genuine question - I'm not a coder). Or to make Jeremiah's wares respawn more frequently, or at a random interval? Or to make a clear announce post when the information in the previous one is no longer accurate (if this was done somewhere I didn't see - quite possible! - then please accept my apology)? To reiterate, I don't grudge you making mistakes. I make one every now and then. But many of these problems seem to be entirely predictable.
One other suggestion (and I appreciate it's not your decision to make, so perhaps you could pass it up to the Big Boss?): Publish the promotion one week before it goes live each month. That gives you a week for the playerbase to tell you what's wrong with it (cf. TheseCrates; Chaos Discs; those utterly crazy crates in the aethersuit promo; goop scarves).
I love you. I want you. I need you.
E> Versalean, of Glomdoring
8
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
That was a bit bad that that wasn't done. Only a shout but you may not have been online for that.
Admin were informed that this promo is so abuseable very soon after it came out.
It's the second time something almost exactly like this has happened in the past half year or so, so it's not a one off.
People knew it was broken as soon as they read the post it's why the crates were sold out right after. Also you didn't need to spend a penny to double or triple your credits if you had some.
Tonight amidst the mountaintops
And endless starless night
Singing how the wind was lost
Before an earthly flight
The problem here is that this isn't the first time to happen with the Wheel... or even the second. Basically every time they put up Wheel coins for credits it's put up in such a way that the first few people break the bank and everyone after that is left feeling done over (a huge case of "rich get richer" because those with the huge pile of credits buy out all the stock).
I think this promo added something like 25,000 credits of value (including things like dingbats, wondercrystals, lessons) to the game in the first couple of days... spread out amongst a very small number of people.
That's a lot of credits that came out of thin air / were not paid for.
First, any aethergoop item purchased via ASHOP or GOOP will now trade in for aethergoop rather than credits or dingbats.
. Apologies in advance.)
No one will argue against that this change will cripple the infinite trade-in -> spin loop. But was this really the only method possible to handle this? I mean, this promotion will only last a month. So the problems faced are also temporary. Is it really necessary to adjust the IG economy hereafter? Needless to say Poteens, Genies, Maps are pretty much devalued now.
2.) Why can't we just further devalue another temporary commodity, a.k.a Discs which are supposed to remain around as long as the crates do, instead of the rather permanent Goop?
-Kilian
Edit: I forgot this also hurts, poteens, genies, maps, and urtraps as well.
I'd guess that the point of selling coin crates was grease the Wheel to open up kitten curio trading and to let people with credits get in on the fun. Trying to be nice, really. Instead, the wheel exploded and the used puppy market boomed. I just bought cheap completed curios and spent lots of credits on tailoring curios. Which are also great.
If the whole point of promotions is to entice players to spend money on the game, then I think there's at least some obligation to think carefully about how to walk back an offer that turns out to be too good to be true. As a customer, I don't like feeling cheated about a product that otherwise deserves every ounce of support it can get, regardless of how small my purchases might be relative to some of the others.
While I did receive the credits I purchased on the first day of the promotion as promised, along with the side benefit of the curios, I was buying specifically to be able to take advantage of the advertised coins for sale. By the time that was mechanically allowed, the exchange rate in game currencies had been halved, and the wheel rewards had been lowered twice, despite apparently huge volumes of rewards being generated somehow. Even now, it's very unclear to me exactly how much worse the wheel is compared to what it was before, and communication generally about how the promotion has changed over that time was fairly sketchy.
Some things I would recommend for any future cases like this:
Anyway, my sense is that the whole coin thing was probably just a random afterthought for this month, and was intended in all sincerity to be a generous extra gift/bonus to players that the marketing team was under no obligation to provide. I can only imagine how discouraging the negative feedback has been, if that was the case, and I'm sorry to have added to the frustration felt on both sides.
Let's just hope we can improve the process for next time!
Thats a big thing, I know a few people got screwed over because there was no announce post or changelog informing that the price had been increased or that the wheel had been nerfed at certain points.
Anyway, if you traded in artifacts and want them back or if you feel you were somehow cheated, send me an email and I'll see what I can do.
I think what what most people don't appreciate is that business (and life for that matter) takes time. We can't expect immediate results all the time and if we're willing to hold off a bit and be patient rather than jumping at the chance to make things worse, things will eventually work out.
There are a lot of hurt people in this situation, so thank you for responding even if it wasn't the split second people began demanding it.