ChangeMW
01-05-2014, 04:28 AM
There have been other posts on this issue, but most simply degenerated into long rants and never got anywhere. I hope no-one on here does that with this post: please allow me to encapsulate the issue we had, and still have, in as short and unemotional a way as possible.
CJ, other mods, you have been very helpful in responding to my other post for Transparency. I hope you will engage on this issue as well because many players I speak to are still upset about it; this issue is not resolved and it is not going to go away.
In short, we feel cheated by the way the event was presented to us. I am not talking about the 14 medals that should have been in the individual quest during the war or that everyone effectively got them in the end when you shortened the event. What I and many others are upset about is that we feel lured into spending obscene amounts of gold, and thus real money, chasing an objective that turned out to be impossible to reach for all but a fraction of all players.
The prize on offer was the most powerful individual unit to date. So of course everyone wanted it and people were prepared to spend, spend, spend their way to it - and I am sure that was the plan. Make the prize so attractive, in terms of stats and boosts, that people would stop at nothing to get it.
The only things we knew were this:
There would be 70 medals in total
The last 22 medals would be earned during the war
The Cycle: Warpath to Cube event was listed under the “Individual” goals tab – not faction goals
Right up to the start of the War, every challenge that produced a medal was an individual challenge
At no point did we get any information that any of the medals would be tied up in faction events during the war.
Some of the challenges before the war were insanely expensive to complete. Others, like the crate event, produced only medals as rewards and a pitiful prize for all 25 tokens. A lot of players have said they would not have started or completed some of these challenges, were it not for the main prize in the Cycle: Warpath to Cuba event: the cost was just too much or the rewards not enough to justify the gold.
Yet we kept spending gold - and lots of it - on things we would otherwise not have, because everything pointed to the fact that as long as you were prepared to spend the gold required, you would be able to get the final prize.
So imagine our disbelief, frustration, even sheer rage when the Cuban War started and it became clear that 8 of the final 22 medals were tied up in the faction challenges. Why were we upset? Because unlike the individual challenges, a faction challenge cannot be completed simply by spending more gold. They require the whole team to finish the objectives, and the team can be frustrated by many events outside of its control: impossible to win match-ups that break their streaks (why does this always happen at the very end of the streak?), match-up times in excess of 30 minutes (true), not everyone being glued to their devices all of the time (believe it or not….), etc.
You have the data, you know exactly how few factions have been able to complete the streaks in the past, so you must have known only a handful of people would be able to get the last medals if you tied them to completion of the streaks. And – and this is the real issue – you must also have known that, had you told us at the start that the final medals would be in the streaks during the war, far fewer people would have spent these obscene amounts of gold chasing the medals because they would have known it was an impossible objective for them, or that the odds are too greatly stacked against them.
We feel it was completely unfair that people were allowed to spend these vast amounts of money in the run-up to the war, securing medals that have little value compared to the ultimate prize unless you got them all, only to make the final challenge all but impossible. So my questions are:
Can you understand why we are upset about it?
Why did you decide to hand out the final medals in an event that was so different from the earlier challenges, one that depends on chance unless you are one of the very, very top teams?
Why did you not tell us upfront that would be the case?
Thank you, and as always I look forward to your response.
CJ, other mods, you have been very helpful in responding to my other post for Transparency. I hope you will engage on this issue as well because many players I speak to are still upset about it; this issue is not resolved and it is not going to go away.
In short, we feel cheated by the way the event was presented to us. I am not talking about the 14 medals that should have been in the individual quest during the war or that everyone effectively got them in the end when you shortened the event. What I and many others are upset about is that we feel lured into spending obscene amounts of gold, and thus real money, chasing an objective that turned out to be impossible to reach for all but a fraction of all players.
The prize on offer was the most powerful individual unit to date. So of course everyone wanted it and people were prepared to spend, spend, spend their way to it - and I am sure that was the plan. Make the prize so attractive, in terms of stats and boosts, that people would stop at nothing to get it.
The only things we knew were this:
There would be 70 medals in total
The last 22 medals would be earned during the war
The Cycle: Warpath to Cube event was listed under the “Individual” goals tab – not faction goals
Right up to the start of the War, every challenge that produced a medal was an individual challenge
At no point did we get any information that any of the medals would be tied up in faction events during the war.
Some of the challenges before the war were insanely expensive to complete. Others, like the crate event, produced only medals as rewards and a pitiful prize for all 25 tokens. A lot of players have said they would not have started or completed some of these challenges, were it not for the main prize in the Cycle: Warpath to Cuba event: the cost was just too much or the rewards not enough to justify the gold.
Yet we kept spending gold - and lots of it - on things we would otherwise not have, because everything pointed to the fact that as long as you were prepared to spend the gold required, you would be able to get the final prize.
So imagine our disbelief, frustration, even sheer rage when the Cuban War started and it became clear that 8 of the final 22 medals were tied up in the faction challenges. Why were we upset? Because unlike the individual challenges, a faction challenge cannot be completed simply by spending more gold. They require the whole team to finish the objectives, and the team can be frustrated by many events outside of its control: impossible to win match-ups that break their streaks (why does this always happen at the very end of the streak?), match-up times in excess of 30 minutes (true), not everyone being glued to their devices all of the time (believe it or not….), etc.
You have the data, you know exactly how few factions have been able to complete the streaks in the past, so you must have known only a handful of people would be able to get the last medals if you tied them to completion of the streaks. And – and this is the real issue – you must also have known that, had you told us at the start that the final medals would be in the streaks during the war, far fewer people would have spent these obscene amounts of gold chasing the medals because they would have known it was an impossible objective for them, or that the odds are too greatly stacked against them.
We feel it was completely unfair that people were allowed to spend these vast amounts of money in the run-up to the war, securing medals that have little value compared to the ultimate prize unless you got them all, only to make the final challenge all but impossible. So my questions are:
Can you understand why we are upset about it?
Why did you decide to hand out the final medals in an event that was so different from the earlier challenges, one that depends on chance unless you are one of the very, very top teams?
Why did you not tell us upfront that would be the case?
Thank you, and as always I look forward to your response.