Best Of

I know there are many posts, but not going past 50 or so posts to try and find them. I’ve literally played this game since Day 1. Know 100% they have done “auto crystal opening” ATLEAST 1 time a few years back, think they’ve done it 2x before. Know 100% they’ve done atleast 1x. They gave same BS reason about freeing servers to make game better?!?! Didn’t ever make game better when they did before, and had “crystal cleanse” event game wide on top of that, now doing again?!?! They say it will make game play better by freeing up servers?!?!?! 100% BS!!!!! Game plays the exact same no matter how many crystals they auto open for players. Again, min 1x (pretty sure 2x they’ve done), PLUS crystal cleanse event. Game ALWYS PLAYS THE SAME!!! Never noticed a single improvement after ANY OF THESE EVENTS happening!!! Several will “disagree” that’s just what they do. Facts are facts, if played for several years?! You will know what I’m saying is 100% FACTS! Game NEVER HAS GOTTEN ANY BETTER BY CRYSTAL OPENINGS!!!!! Period

I was prepared to write this off until you said "facts are facts." So let's add some.

First of all, the crystal cleanse itself is 100% for the players only. It benefits the players only, it doesn't actually do anything for Kabam. What Kabam wants to do is delete old crystals cluttering up the game files, the game client, and the game databases. Every time they add a crystal to the game, the game has to track how many of that crystal every single game account holds. That's all the players playing today, plus every account ever made since the beginning of time. The game has no idea if those people are going to come back tomorrow or not. It has to keep the game accounts consistent with the game. If they never deleted a crystal, the game client would get larger and larger, the account databases would get larger and larger, and you'd have both the game back end slowing down, the game client increasing its footprint, and the developers taking longer to update the game data and recompiling and packaging the game contents. A lot of things would get bigger and slower without limit. This should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about anything.

But if Kabam deletes crystals that players are actually holding, then those players just lose them. The artwork is gone, the place in the crystal vault is gone, the drop tables are gone, the player is holding a ticket to a movie that's no longer playing, that they can't even see, and can't do anything with. That's fine really: the game hums along perfectly fine regardless. But maybe the players don't want to just lose that stuff, and maybe the devs don't want to just vaporize that stuff from players either.

The crystal cleanse events provide two separate mechanisms to help the players out. Before the crystals get destroyed from the game, the players are given a heads up on which crystals are being expired out of the game. This gives the players the chance to open them at their own pace, and manage the resources within them within some window of time. Second, if players don't open the crystals, the game essentially opens them and drops the resources into the player stash before the crystals are deleted.

BOTH OF THESE THINGS ARE TO THE PLAYER'S BENEFIT SPECIFICALLY.

The crystals are going away. That's going to happen no matter what. No one has the right to force Kabam to keep a billion crystals and counting in the game, hurting everyone else just so they can hold a six year old crystal. But Kabam does let players open them themselves, and if they choose not to Kabam gives them the resources they would have gotten before the crystals disappear. All the people complaining about this don't seem to realize this. Just because you buy a movie pass doesn't mean you can force the theater to keep showing that movie forever until you get around to using it. You can buy a casino chip but if the casino decides to retire them you have to trade them in or they become worthless. And Kabam doesn't have to keep a crystal in the game forever. But they can and do try to make sure players don't just lose the contents of those crystals when they delete them. They don't have to.

Now, are you going to see the game suddenly get zippier after a crystal cleanse? No. Crystal inventory data mainly affects things you're much less likely to directly observe. It will have essentially no effect on game fights, for example. And in fact, in the short term it may have no observable impact at all. Much of the speedups will happen in places invisible to the players. And the most direct player-facing impact is likely to be subtle, because deleting all this data from the game databases will not instantly make them smaller. It may not even make them smaller at all. Rather, it will free up that space in the databases to be reused by other new crystals. Instead of the game getting faster, it will just mean that newer crystals won't make the game any slower. There will be tons of space to add new crystals without increasing the size of anything. That's really the biggest win on the player side.

Anyone who knows anything about databases would find this obvious. Anyone who knows anything about managing systems like online mobile games would also find this obvious. But even if you know nothing about anything, the basic idea of not keeping stuff around forever or it might make things worse for the game in the long run should still be obvious. And it should be *really* obvious that if the crystals are going to go away, maybe it would be a good idea to not simply delete them from the game and allow the players to lose them for nothing, and maybe it would be a good idea to give them advance warning so they can open them before they disappear, and maybe it would be a good idea to just hand the players what was in those crystals before deleting them if they don't open them before they go away.

And maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to think for a moment before complaining about complete nonsense and spout off about "facts are facts" when you are not in actual possession of any, because someone might decide to point that out and they might not be as polite as I am when they do it. Because this was a very slow pitch over the center of the plate.