Crystal Cleanse: Could We Have Made it? [SPOILERS: YES]
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,652 Guardian
Another Crystal Cleanse post? Yeah, I said I might have two more, this is the second one. The question that hung over the event like a shadow: was the final milestone set too high? Could we have made it? Did we have any chance at all?
I can answer that question. The answer is: YES.
I wasn't sure this post was going to happen, because I wasn't sure if we would see ranks for individual players. It turns out we did have a final leaderboard, but that doesn't have scores. But individual players did get to see their ranks, if they chose to look (ranks were shown in the reward stash, if you looked before you claimed). I have collected a handful of scores and ranks, to see where players landed. I have removed names, and in some cases the scores are slightly rounded, but they are still accurate enough for this analysis.
(Note: ranks are corrected for Brian Grant's anomalous rank)
Not a lot of data, but actually enough to go about answering the question. If we had the entire list of players, we could try to figure out how much crystals each player opened, and try to calculate how much we needed to open to make up the difference between our final score and one billion points. The difference was 330,302,636. That sounds like a lot. Is it?
Let's look at that table. We have first place (Vern), fourth place (me), ninth place (Smugglin) and a few others I've collected, all the way down to rank 199015 which is very near 1000 points. That's actually an alt of mine, that I deliberately tried to score close to 1000. We can't calculate how many points are represented there for all players above 1000 points, but we can set a lower bound. Take rank 2842. It took about 11500 points to get that rank. That means everyone above that rank scored more points. But everyone lower than rank 1496 scored less than 14800 points. So we can say that the 1346 players between those two gaps scored at least 11500 points each, which means they collectively scored at least 15,479,000 points. If we do that for every rank range represented on that table, we get a total of 454,563,873 points. That's not how much they scored, that is the lower bound for how much they scored. They actually scored more. But they definitely scored at least that much. That means everyone else scored the rest. We ended the event with 669,697,364 points. Everyone lower than rank 199015 collectively scored 215,113,491 points.
If we knew how many players total participated, we could calculate the average points scored by all those players who scored below 1037 points. But we don't know that. Do we?
Oh wait, I forgot an entry in my data:
That's right: one point, the lowest possible score, ranked 785,271. What a lucky break that someone decided to do that. That means 785 thousand players opened crystals during the event. And this gives us the means to figure out the answer to the question: could we have done it.
785,271 total players means there are 586,255 players not represented in my table, that all scored lower than 1037 points. What was the average score of all those players?
545414127/586255 = 367.
Three hundred sixty seven crystals. That's incredibly low. Now, I'm not saying they all scored that low. Many scored much higher than that, but that also means many scored even less than that. About two thirds of the player population scored on average just a couple hundred crystals.
For any one player, there are reasons this might be true. They opened all their crystals before the event started. They didn't know the event was even going on. They just started playing yesterday. But collectively, that's an incredibly low number, and it suggests that most players simply didn't really participate at all. Maybe because they didn't want to, maybe because they were discouraged by others, maybe because they didn't even know what was going on. We've seen how players often just don't know what's happening in the game, even when it might seem obvious to many of us.
Suppose we freeze every score above rank 199016, and ask how much more crystals everyone below that had to average to reach one billion crystals. How many would they have needed to average? 930. Less than one thousand crystals on average from each of those players, which is not even enough to unlock the final milestone, would have *reached* the final milestone.
And keep in mind, these are the worst case scenario numbers. I am significantly understating how many crystals the top 199k players opened. That is the absolute lower bound. The actual number is almost certainly significantly lower. I would not be surprised at all if the actual average needed was closer to 800 crystals. And as I said, that's just an average: we don't need everyone to hit that mark. But certainly, an average number less than the amount required to unlock all the milestones (combined with the extras for the higher performers) would have gotten us there.
So: did Kabam set the bar too high? Well, it is a bit of a subjective judgment to say they set the bar too high, but what we can say with absolute certainty is the bar was reachable. With the number of players we had, and the huge amount of crystals that were almost certainly left on the table, the level of effort collectively required was very reachable, and without asking anything crazy from the playerbase. Some of us went crazy. But most did not need to. They just needed to participate at a reasonable level.
Saying the goal was unreachable was a self-fulfilling prophesy. And listening to those people was self-destructive. One lesson here is: Kabam did not make a wildly wrong guess as to what we were capable of doing. What they got wrong was the ability for the playerbase to be self-destructive, to misunderstand and misjudge what was happening, and fail to rally players enough to reach very reasonable goals. Which is something we should try to avoid in future realm events.
I'll have more to say about this in my week two BGBlitz post, but for those thinking that Kabam is offering "Stark Foundation Donations" because they realize their goals are unachievable, use this analysis as context. They actually got it right this time. They almost certainly got it right again with BGBlitz, at least in a numerical sense. What they got wrong in Crystal Cleanse and is trying to fix in the Blitz is counteracting negative sentiment. We thought we'd lose Crystal Cleanse, so we lost. Kabam is trying to push against that sentiment, hoping it will reverse it. Whether they do or not is a separate question. But to the people trying to say "I told you so" for both Crystal Cleanse and Battleground Blitz: no you were not right. You were wrong, and collectively you helped take down the playerbase with you.
Maybe try not to do that again.
But we can't place all the blame on the doubters, for the simple reason that the vast majority of players do not read the forums, do not read the reddit, probably don't even watch most youtubers. They were not likely influenced directly by them. Maybe indirectly, through sentiment osmosis. If we're going to blame Kabam for anything, I think the one thing we can fault them for, or at least give them something to improve on, is that I suspect players who only opened fifty or a hundred crystals were not likely hoarding and not likely being discouraged from opening. They literally had no idea they were supposed to be opening crystals for an event.
These events are ultimately not about the top performers, or at least not *just* about them. Two thirds of our points came from less than one third of the players. But to succeed the majority of our points needed to come from the masses. The very large, very casual, very uninformed masses. They need to be reached, mobilized, and motivated. Not a huge amount, just enough to get them off the bench.
We will see how this affects future realm events. The *numbers* were not wrong. In my opinion what needs to be improved is sentiment on our part and communication on Kabam's part somehow.
But the TL;DR is this. The people who said one billion was unreachable were wrong, and the people who looked at the numbers and said it was impossible, their math was wrong. Crystal Cleanse was not unreachable. Battleground Blitz is itself almost certainly reachable (at least to the one billion milestone: the higher ones are almost certainly stretch goals), and doesn't require superhuman effort or ridiculous spending. It just requires *everyone* to believe its possible, and do *reasonable* things to get there.
I can answer that question. The answer is: YES.
I wasn't sure this post was going to happen, because I wasn't sure if we would see ranks for individual players. It turns out we did have a final leaderboard, but that doesn't have scores. But individual players did get to see their ranks, if they chose to look (ranks were shown in the reward stash, if you looked before you claimed). I have collected a handful of scores and ranks, to see where players landed. I have removed names, and in some cases the scores are slightly rounded, but they are still accurate enough for this analysis.
(Note: ranks are corrected for Brian Grant's anomalous rank)
Not a lot of data, but actually enough to go about answering the question. If we had the entire list of players, we could try to figure out how much crystals each player opened, and try to calculate how much we needed to open to make up the difference between our final score and one billion points. The difference was 330,302,636. That sounds like a lot. Is it?
Let's look at that table. We have first place (Vern), fourth place (me), ninth place (Smugglin) and a few others I've collected, all the way down to rank 199015 which is very near 1000 points. That's actually an alt of mine, that I deliberately tried to score close to 1000. We can't calculate how many points are represented there for all players above 1000 points, but we can set a lower bound. Take rank 2842. It took about 11500 points to get that rank. That means everyone above that rank scored more points. But everyone lower than rank 1496 scored less than 14800 points. So we can say that the 1346 players between those two gaps scored at least 11500 points each, which means they collectively scored at least 15,479,000 points. If we do that for every rank range represented on that table, we get a total of 454,563,873 points. That's not how much they scored, that is the lower bound for how much they scored. They actually scored more. But they definitely scored at least that much. That means everyone else scored the rest. We ended the event with 669,697,364 points. Everyone lower than rank 199015 collectively scored 215,113,491 points.
If we knew how many players total participated, we could calculate the average points scored by all those players who scored below 1037 points. But we don't know that. Do we?
Oh wait, I forgot an entry in my data:
That's right: one point, the lowest possible score, ranked 785,271. What a lucky break that someone decided to do that. That means 785 thousand players opened crystals during the event. And this gives us the means to figure out the answer to the question: could we have done it.
785,271 total players means there are 586,255 players not represented in my table, that all scored lower than 1037 points. What was the average score of all those players?
545414127/586255 = 367.
Three hundred sixty seven crystals. That's incredibly low. Now, I'm not saying they all scored that low. Many scored much higher than that, but that also means many scored even less than that. About two thirds of the player population scored on average just a couple hundred crystals.
For any one player, there are reasons this might be true. They opened all their crystals before the event started. They didn't know the event was even going on. They just started playing yesterday. But collectively, that's an incredibly low number, and it suggests that most players simply didn't really participate at all. Maybe because they didn't want to, maybe because they were discouraged by others, maybe because they didn't even know what was going on. We've seen how players often just don't know what's happening in the game, even when it might seem obvious to many of us.
Suppose we freeze every score above rank 199016, and ask how much more crystals everyone below that had to average to reach one billion crystals. How many would they have needed to average? 930. Less than one thousand crystals on average from each of those players, which is not even enough to unlock the final milestone, would have *reached* the final milestone.
And keep in mind, these are the worst case scenario numbers. I am significantly understating how many crystals the top 199k players opened. That is the absolute lower bound. The actual number is almost certainly significantly lower. I would not be surprised at all if the actual average needed was closer to 800 crystals. And as I said, that's just an average: we don't need everyone to hit that mark. But certainly, an average number less than the amount required to unlock all the milestones (combined with the extras for the higher performers) would have gotten us there.
So: did Kabam set the bar too high? Well, it is a bit of a subjective judgment to say they set the bar too high, but what we can say with absolute certainty is the bar was reachable. With the number of players we had, and the huge amount of crystals that were almost certainly left on the table, the level of effort collectively required was very reachable, and without asking anything crazy from the playerbase. Some of us went crazy. But most did not need to. They just needed to participate at a reasonable level.
Saying the goal was unreachable was a self-fulfilling prophesy. And listening to those people was self-destructive. One lesson here is: Kabam did not make a wildly wrong guess as to what we were capable of doing. What they got wrong was the ability for the playerbase to be self-destructive, to misunderstand and misjudge what was happening, and fail to rally players enough to reach very reasonable goals. Which is something we should try to avoid in future realm events.
I'll have more to say about this in my week two BGBlitz post, but for those thinking that Kabam is offering "Stark Foundation Donations" because they realize their goals are unachievable, use this analysis as context. They actually got it right this time. They almost certainly got it right again with BGBlitz, at least in a numerical sense. What they got wrong in Crystal Cleanse and is trying to fix in the Blitz is counteracting negative sentiment. We thought we'd lose Crystal Cleanse, so we lost. Kabam is trying to push against that sentiment, hoping it will reverse it. Whether they do or not is a separate question. But to the people trying to say "I told you so" for both Crystal Cleanse and Battleground Blitz: no you were not right. You were wrong, and collectively you helped take down the playerbase with you.
Maybe try not to do that again.
But we can't place all the blame on the doubters, for the simple reason that the vast majority of players do not read the forums, do not read the reddit, probably don't even watch most youtubers. They were not likely influenced directly by them. Maybe indirectly, through sentiment osmosis. If we're going to blame Kabam for anything, I think the one thing we can fault them for, or at least give them something to improve on, is that I suspect players who only opened fifty or a hundred crystals were not likely hoarding and not likely being discouraged from opening. They literally had no idea they were supposed to be opening crystals for an event.
These events are ultimately not about the top performers, or at least not *just* about them. Two thirds of our points came from less than one third of the players. But to succeed the majority of our points needed to come from the masses. The very large, very casual, very uninformed masses. They need to be reached, mobilized, and motivated. Not a huge amount, just enough to get them off the bench.
We will see how this affects future realm events. The *numbers* were not wrong. In my opinion what needs to be improved is sentiment on our part and communication on Kabam's part somehow.
But the TL;DR is this. The people who said one billion was unreachable were wrong, and the people who looked at the numbers and said it was impossible, their math was wrong. Crystal Cleanse was not unreachable. Battleground Blitz is itself almost certainly reachable (at least to the one billion milestone: the higher ones are almost certainly stretch goals), and doesn't require superhuman effort or ridiculous spending. It just requires *everyone* to believe its possible, and do *reasonable* things to get there.
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Comments
The why is something that if you have to ask, you wouldn't understand the answer. Why do I spend time on the forums, when it is literally costing me units? I'm an arena grinder, so in a sense I literally pay to be here. The forums set me backwards far more than they assist me in moving forwards. You could probably say the same thing about many other players, like those that make guides or infographics. Why do that, when there's no positive return? What's in it for them?
They don't need to answer, because I know their answer, and they know my answer. And the players who decide to help the community by doing just a little more than normal to help contribute to realm events don't need to be given a reason. The fact that this seems inconceivable to some is not a failing on Kabam's part, it is just a sad reality.
In between those of us who are driven to contribute, and those cynically pinned to see everything in terms of self-interest, there's the vast majority of players who just go with the flow. They can be influenced to be cynical, but they can also be influenced to be more social. The realm events give everyone an opportunity to pick a side.
I've picked mine.
It is the players below that who were more likely to be lower progress players, more likely to be newer players, more likely to be disengaged or casual players, who opened just a few crystals. And they would have ironically benefitted the most from the rewards. For them specifically, they either didn't know, didn't realize the benefit, or were influenced to have a negative feeling about the event. For those players specifically, having a general sentiment floating around that the milestones were just not achievable could have been a contributing factor to them ignoring the event. And for those same players, the "effort" being asked for is just slightly one step up from getting calendar rewards.
Opening ten crystals at a time is a burden if you're opening 100,000. But if we're asking a player to open 30 a day, complaining that the button only opens ten at a time is not a credible complaint.
Second: the fact that *some* players were more motivated than others and *some* were less motivated is implicitly included in the analysis, because the analysis calculates what players actually did. The calculations say many players - and by "many" I mean potentially hundreds of thousands - didn't even open enough crystals to get the free units. Free units not good enough to open a dozen or two crystals a day?
Most of the players you're talking about almost certainly just opened a thousand crystals and called it a day. There's no way that a materially significant number of players were so unmotivated by the rewards that they chose to not open any crystals at all or forfeit trivially easy to get rewards. I could have started a new account on day one of the event and probably come close to or exceeded one thousand crystals.
Also, no one who has any sort of large stash of crystals has nothing but "precious" crystals. Crystal hoarders, by in large, hoard crystals that for which they can't use the contents, so they don't want to lose the contents to stash. But there are *tons* of crystals for which a hoarder can't use the contents because they *never* will be able to use them. No one will ever be able to use thousands of T3CC catalysts. No one will ever be able to use tens of thousands of 3* sig stones. I never opened those crystals precisely because I didn't need the contents, but I was *never* going to need them. Kabam would have to release a hundred new champs a week for me to have to start tapping them.
Every player is different. For every player there are crystals they can open with no real loss, and those they can open at some material loss. How far into the loss column they wish to go is a personal decision. But I'm saying you do not need to push players to delve deeply into those crystals for us to reach the one billion mark. We only needed players to open crystals for which their material losses would be either trivial or zero, given the relatively small amounts of crystals spread out over the relatively large number of players over a significant number of days.
There are always going to be players who just say "I refuse." Fine. We'll set them aside. That's unavoidable in any game with players. But I assert they are the tiny tiny minority. The vast majority of our 700k+ players are not like that. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But to summarize:
1. Yes
2. Doesn’t matter
3. Possibly
4. Nope, and nope.
Just opened whatever overflow allowed.
Like others said, had the rewards been better could have been a dif story.
Well we kinda knew that; but now we got data.
They could have opened atleast 1k to get an exalted crystal.
I had four accounts in there myself: it is not like I'm unaware of the existence of multiple account players.
There are other complications as well. Some percentage of those players might have quit playing, and thus had no opportunity to open more crystals. But again, to a first order approximation, that's not terribly relevant. Swamping these small sources of error is the fact that, as specified in the post, I used the absolute worst case scenario for crystal opening points for the top 199k players, which places the highest possible burden on the rest of the players. To the extent that the real amount of points they generated must be some level higher, the actual amount of points that would have been required for the rest of the eligible players would be significantly lower than specified. That probably more than compensates for those other corrections, or at least neutralizes them to a significant degree.
While not impossible, the 1B target was certainly a stretch and the gap over best seasons was large enough to demotivate enough players. In that sense, the event design clearly missed the mark. Instead of generating a sense of excitement and togetherness amongst the community, it led to a lot of complaints, despondency and finger pointing to who was doing most of the work. It's only with the influx of additional points over the last few days, there is more excitement about the event. But this is also setting an unrealistic expectation around rewards that cannot be sustained. Ideally, early realm events should have indexed to achievable targets with median participation, gradually driving towards higher goals. We cannot rely on plot armor to get us to the milestones every time, realm event targets need to be more realistic in future events at least until the community learns to come together for this.
Since then I’ve steadily tried to refine these estimates, in particular the participation numbers. I believe I’ve been underestimating participation numbers because of the way I measure them. My measuring sticks are not precise, using projections from solo milestone leaderboards for total population and my own observations of GC leaderboards towards the end of the season.
There’s another factor that I had to estimate that was very difficult to determine, which is the median score during high volume seasons like those with deathless pieces. I now think that estimate was also low.
The actual data suggests participation is either normally higher than I have predicted in the past, or this season has especiallly high participation (or both). To be pointing towards 800m in the first week is beating my original guesses substantially. If my original guesses were correct, we should be pointing much lower, say 600m, with that projection slowly rising to 700-800m during the season.
More data, more refined estimates.
I'll agree by saying sure, you can technically say that it was reachable.
But was it feasible? Reasonable? No.
You're saying it was reachable without the eggs if we all did a reasonable effort. I find that quite disingenuous. I respectfully disagree.
Your data hinges on exactly this happening though. We didn't get close to the goal and the only reason we got where we did (not including the eggs) is because many players did the exact opposite of this. They opened crystals that still hold value to them and now how many people are now sitting with dozens, hundreds, thousands of catalysts that are going to expire in less than a month because there's no possible way for them to use the resources? For what. Some profile pictures we will never use? A single exalted crystal?
It wasn't a reasonable goal to set, because in order to attain it (without the eggs) it's asking an unreasonable request of the majority of people: "Hey, we need you to completely burn these resources you might otherwise actually find valuable."
Except this is also wrong. The entire premise of your post and data collection/presentation is being driven BECAUSE this is exactly what happened. People were unmotivated and disinterested in the rewards. It wasn't worth it to them.
You're trying to tell us this was possible and that approaching it like it was impossible was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That we should have been reasonable. We should have done this. We should have done that. And then turn around and say you refuse to believe that a vast majority of players would do the very thing they did?
Except it IS relevant. It's great (not being sarcastic or malicious - I understand this comes across as super condescending but it genuinely isn't) that you're approaching from a data driven viewpoint. But the psychology itself IS data. It's not some unknown... we can say this for certain because Kabam HAS data on what rewards actually drive people. What interests people. What gets players engaged.
Telling the entire community that it's a test event and the rewards are intentionally underwhelming? That's not a way to get your player base engaged.
It was a "reasonable" goal and we set ourselves up for failure? No. That's disingenuous. Kabam set themselves up for failure because they set the tone of the event. It was never meant for us to complete. Well, your data can give us a pretty good indication of that, so why speculate? How many people do you think there were above 785271 who also had 1 crystal? What was that percentage? Even if you set aside the absolute outliers: Vern and the #785271 rank. There was one Vern. How many above that 785271 only opened 1? How many opened fewer than 10? Fewer than 100?
Or better yet #199016 was 1061 correct? How many people below that failed to open even 1k crystals?
Let's say there's ~500000 players in the range of 1 crystal and (potentially) less than 1k crystals? Too generous?
Would you accept if I approximated around 400k? Because that right there proves that it's not a tiny, tiny minority who said "forget it" and just refused. Alt accounts? Sure, very probably. But that proves the same point - that people couldn't even be bothered to log into an alt account and open crystals they would likely never use in effort to gain rewards that Kabam themselves said were "intentionally underwhelming."
Love the data, but please don't try and spin this on the player base as it was our failure to attain.
One argument that was made is it's an issue of people not knowing the event was going on, so if people knew, we would've reached the final milestone. I could make up a million of these what if scenarios that ignore the fact that we wouldn't have reached the final milestone. (if people played more arena and got units and bought crystals, we could've reached the final milestone. if people made alt accounts and opened crystals, we could've reached the final milestone. if we all finished every solo event and got every solo gold t4c etc crystal and opened them, we could've reached the final milestone. etc etc etc). None of this reflects the reality of what actually happened.
It's the same with BG Blitz. It's looking like we won't reach the milestones. I expect the next post to say well we could easily reach the 1 billion point milestone if everyone scores 5k (or more!), ignoring the fact that during normal play, the vast majority of players won't play this much BGs in a season. It's why kabam has to add free points into the event to encourage people since it seems like we are closer to the end. If kabam felt that event was going well, they wouldn't add free points.
The issue with realm events is kabam seemingly picked a final milestone they think we can reach, while technically we can if the majority start focusing on the event a lot more than they normally would (opening more crystals, playing more BGs) their final milestone doesn't reflect the reality of the playerbase and how much they do certain things (open crystals or play BGs).
I'm not trying to be negative here. I'm looking at what actually happened. Crystal Cleanse would not have been finished, not even close. BG Blitz so far looks like it wouldn't have finished if you remove those Stark points (it may finish now, closely, because of the free injection of points).
Nor would be have the insight to run historical analysis on specific user trends and behavior to factor in, and he definitely doesn't have the internal benchmarks or stretch goals for this exercise.
But he sure does love to fuss with anecdotal evidence. My anecdotal evidence: between 5 accounts in 4 different full alliances, I'm looking at 30ish (including my 5) that did at least the minimum for all rewards. The drop-off after that was precipitous. There's all sorts of caveats there, but that's my anecdotal evidence.
But sure, woulda coulda shoulda.
I counted 7 accounts that opened single digit crystals, then went inactive.
Not everyone had the minimum, or even 300, to open. As in, not everyone's as cool as Mr. Dna.
If you look at "real life" out there not everyone participates at work events at the same level. some never do, some always do but most are somewhere in-between. A more important example is the US election.....not everyone that can vote will vote and it certainly is more important that you go out there and vote.
I would go further than that and believe if you post on this forum you are more likely to have opened more crystals because you are more engaged. Kabam is likely partly doing this to engage more people in the game overall but no matter how hard you try some just are never going to increase their engagement.
However, the vast majority of those players were represented in the data for players who opened more than a thousand crystals (1030ish). The vast majority of the rest of the players, the once who collectively averaged closer to 370 crystals, were not motivation-driven players, because they did not target either "minimum reward."
Now, *some* of those players could have been. If a player scored exactly 1000 or even 700, they could be represented in that lower part of the data. But give the *average* of that entire group was 367, they had to be a minority. Even in the weird degenerate case where *everyone* in that group either scored 700 crystals or 1 crystal, about half of them would be in the group that scored 1, and that most definitely was not the case. If the effective range of that group was 1037 and 1, and the average was 367, it is a mathematically safe assumption that the majority of those players scored below the average due to the unbalanced average.
So if they were not motivation driven players, what were they? Most likely, they were players who either a) were just opening crystals at their normal pace because they had no idea there was an event happening, or b) they were disinterested in the event because the buzz they experienced about the event was itself completely disinteresting.
If they did not really participate to the extent they could have because they had no idea what was happening, that's Kabam's fault mostly. But if they did not really participate to the extent they could because the buzz they experienced was underwhelming, that's the playerbase's fault, because that buzz came from us. It is one thing to decide for yourself that the rewards are underwhelming or participation is not worth it. That's a personal decision. But when you decide to *advocate* that position, you become responsible for the effects of that advocacy.
There are those that will blame Kabam for everything. If *they* are unenthused its Kabam's fault for making them unenthused. If they convince others not to bother with an event, its Kabam's fault they made it an event that they decided to tell others not to bother with. Nothing is their fault. But that's not my position. Kabam is responsible for the design of the game and the events, sure. But the players are responsible for their own actions, their own conduct, and their own reactions to it.
If someone wants to make a facts-based argument for how the one billion milestone was impossible to achieve, they are welcome to it. We can debate if there was a way to convince players to actually do it, and we can have that argument until the end of the universe: there's likely no real resolution to it. But I'm not here to debate that point. I'm here to say, those players who said it was *impossible* were wrong. Not the players who said it wasn't worth it, or insufficiently rewarding. The ones who said it was impossible, or impossible without ridiculous effort, or impossible without asking the players to do more than they could ever ordinarily do - they were wrong.