Celebrate the Holidays and a Special Birthday with The Contest! Starting December 1!

Eb0ny-O-M4w

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

And the proposed "fix" doesn't even change it a tiny bit. Just creates another problem for everyone else

GroundedWisdom

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

And the proposed "fix" doesn't even change it a tiny bit. Just creates another problem for everyone else

Spending itself is not an exploit. Never has been. Spending fraudulently is.

DNA3000

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

I have no idea what makes you believe this, but spending on the gifting event is not an exploit. The gifting event is explicitly intended to allow people to spend any amount they want, including zero but with no cap, on sending gifts.

Runavargr

DNA3000 said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

I have no idea what makes you believe this, but spending on the gifting event is not an exploit. The gifting event is explicitly intended to allow people to spend any amount they want, including zero but with no cap, on sending gifts.

Agreed, I think to many people are missing the point, or just want to complain to complain. I can’t wait for the event. My whole family plays this and we always gift each other stuff.

BitterSteel

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

And the proposed "fix" doesn't even change it a tiny bit. Just creates another problem for everyone else

Spending money is an exploit? I've heard it all now. Maybe stick with the "Ebony Maw is the best champ" posts...

DNA3000

JustingBonoko said:

DNA3000 said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

I have no idea what makes you believe this, but spending on the gifting event is not an exploit. The gifting event is explicitly intended to allow people to spend any amount they want, including zero but with no cap, on sending gifts.

what u think of the restrictions DNA? fair? or just lazy quick fix. easiest to code

Do i think the restrictions are fair? It depends on what you mean by fair. They don't go out of their way to target any particular group of players beyond the requirements of the limitations, so in that sense they are fair to the players as a whole.

I think you're asking if the restrictions are fair to the players who attempted to take advantage of the opportunity, and I'm a bit torn on that one. On the one hand, making alts explicitly to farm easy units to gift back to yourself is obviously not intended. Anyone who did that was taking a risk, because that could fall into the range of being exploitive, and when exploits are cracked down upon there's always some collateral damage: no exploit countermeasure is scalpel perfect. So if someone rolled a dozen alts last week to attempt to do this, in my opinion they took their chances and have to accept the risks involved with that kind of activity. I don't have tons of sympathy for those players: that's what risk is: sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

On the other hand, the restrictions are high enough that they can catch other players, particularly new players playing their first account in particular. I do have more sympathy for those players. I have *some* sympathy for players who play multiple alts completely independently of the gifting event as well. I think the limitations are higher than they need to be relative to these players, but I don't know how much lower they could safely be lowered before you start to lose the effectiveness of the limitations in the first place.

When it comes to the level restriction specifically, which I think is probably the most iffy one, I think 30 is too low to be effective, and 40 is probably higher than it needs to be. But everything in between is pretty grey on the trade off between effectiveness and over cautious.

I should point out that the restrictions don't prevent anyone from alt-farming. They act to limit the ability to skim the easiest rewards that were added to the early game experience. Because they are sort of "proof of work" restrictions (to use a term of art in the cryptocurrency community) they aren't going to distinguish between "normal" accounts and "gifting alts" they will distinguish between levels of effort. So a player that wants to put more effort into pushing a gifting alt will meet the requirements easier than a player that has less time to play but is playing a main. That's unfortunate, but I don't have an easy solution to that one.

I did have completely different *ideas* that I thought would work better because they side-stepped these kinds of issues (in particular early game currency) but I don't know if there were technical limitations on that idea, or if I'm just way smarter than the Kabam developers (kidding). And I'm pretty sure if they had implemented my idea instead, there would be tons of people saying it was unfair and I stole their Christmas and probably wishing harm upon my dog (although for the record, I don't have a dog).

DNA3000

JustingBonoko said:

i just dont get the rationale behind 3 gates at the same time, time, lvl and progression

Because each one individually is insufficient, and taking just one of them and trying to make it strong enough would be worse than attempting to combine multiple gates together. The goal is not to prevent alt-farming, because that's borderline impossible. The goal is to make the relative cost of doing so unpalatable, without impeding normal players by too much. A single gate would have to be much stronger, and exclude more players than three weaker gates.

The date gate is of course trivial to bypass, because Brian Grant didn't invent alt farming. It has been going on for some time, not just in terms of the gifting event, but also arena bots. There are probably thousands of alts rolled up constantly for these purposes, and likely thousands available to be used before Brian made his video. Any creation date gate alone catches the burst of people who decided to give this a try right now, but fails to catch people who might have started a while ago, or might be repurposing alts for this purpose (after realizing it is more profitable than whatever they were originally intending). It catches some stuff so it is worth having this gate, but it doesn't catch enough.

The progression title one is also not perfect. We don't have a lot of fine grained control with progression titles. The alt farm accounts are almost certainly going to have explored Act 3. The next higher title is Conqueror with Act 4 completion, then Uncollected with Act 5.2 completion. Uncollected is of course too high of a gate. But Conqueror is not very much higher than what we already know the accounts will do. It proves the account went beyond Act 3. It doesn't prove that wasn't done deliberately just to pass the gate. Once again it catches some stuff (accounts that stop at Act 3) but doesn't catch enough.

The level gate is probably the harshest on paper, but it is also flawed. It is going to catch almost all of the accounts that are hand played to Act 3. It cannot catch accounts that are hand played to Act 3 then botted for XP until they reach level 40. I'm honestly not sure how long that would take, but I'm guessing its possible between now and the gifting event.

The gates each limit the qualifying accounts in different ways to in effect increase the cost of making a unit farm alt. The idea being, to make the cost high enough to make indiscriminate farming not worth the effort. I'm not saying the restrictions do that in the best possible way. I'm simply saying having multiple ones gives more control over the process.

Deucal

Question on the gifting 14 day requirement. I have a friend who is joining my ally once the season ends. He will be 13 days in the alliance when gifting starts. Would he still be able to participate in gifting after his 14 days then? Or is 14 days before event starts, and no participation at all after?

Worknprogress

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Considering the entire event is all about making money, you want them to cap how much money they can make? Not really sure what kind of game some of you think you're playing

BitterSteel

DNA3000 said:

JustingBonoko said:

i just dont get the rationale behind 3 gates at the same time, time, lvl and progression

Because each one individually is insufficient, and taking just one of them and trying to make it strong enough would be worse than attempting to combine multiple gates together. The goal is not to prevent alt-farming, because that's borderline impossible. The goal is to make the relative cost of doing so unpalatable, without impeding normal players by too much. A single gate would have to be much stronger, and exclude more players than three weaker gates.

The date gate is of course trivial to bypass, because Brian Grant didn't invent alt farming. It has been going on for some time, not just in terms of the gifting event, but also arena bots. There are probably thousands of alts rolled up constantly for these purposes, and likely thousands available to be used before Brian made his video. Any creation date gate alone catches the burst of people who decided to give this a try right now, but fails to catch people who might have started a while ago, or might be repurposing alts for this purpose (after realizing it is more profitable than whatever they were originally intending). It catches some stuff so it is worth having this gate, but it doesn't catch enough.

The progression title one is also not perfect. We don't have a lot of fine grained control with progression titles. The alt farm accounts are almost certainly going to have explored Act 3. The next higher title is Conqueror with Act 4 completion, then Uncollected with Act 5.2 completion. Uncollected is of course too high of a gate. But Conqueror is not very much higher than what we already know the accounts will do. It proves the account went beyond Act 3. It doesn't prove that wasn't done deliberately just to pass the gate. Once again it catches some stuff (accounts that stop at Act 3) but doesn't catch enough.

The level gate is probably the harshest on paper, but it is also flawed. It is going to catch almost all of the accounts that are hand played to Act 3. It cannot catch accounts that are hand played to Act 3 then botted for XP until they reach level 40. I'm honestly not sure how long that would take, but I'm guessing its possible between now and the gifting event.

The gates each limit the qualifying accounts in different ways to in effect increase the cost of making a unit farm alt. The idea being, to make the cost high enough to make indiscriminate farming not worth the effort. I'm not saying the restrictions do that in the best possible way. I'm simply saying having multiple ones gives more control over the process.

These 3 requirements bring unit farming on an alt much closer in line with what it would be for arena. Instead of getting 2k units in 6 hours, you’ll have to put 2 weeks or so grind into getting closer to 4k units. Which is much closer to what you’d get from arena.

This gets rid of the easily exploitable units, while allowing people to unit farm if they do desire on alts instead of arena.

Stellar

The Sinister Synergy Crystal is...how can i say that.... interresting...i guess

Syndicated

Epoch Shards could be way better but, event seems cool.

Runavargr

Lol I’m hyped for the gifting event, let’s get it. Some people will never be happy. I intend to enjoy this event just as I did cyber weekend.

Queen_Phœnix

Kabam Miike said:

Raphael2010 said:

Please confirm the anniversary boost (gold & battlechips) will be part of anniversary week. Last year it was specifically mentioned but not present in this post.

Don’t worry Summoners. There won’t be a boost this year, but it’s because we’re still hammering down the details on something else. If you’ve been sitting on your Gold Crystals, keep holding on to them!

Is there any information on alliance gifting cooldown? Because the alliance war season is ending soon and we need to know the date by which we need to be in our alliances. Is it going to be the same as last year i.e. 14 days?

Illusionary

Didn't we get two gifts last year? One for the 6th anniversary, and a Christmas gift? There seems to only be one this year, and I find it hard to believe that the absence of one gift will be made up for by the trade-in store or by the Christmas gift being massive. Respectfully, If there was ever a time for Kabam to be generous, it's now.

GrandOldKai

A question that I'm not sure was answered already:

Are there any restrictions on receiving gifts? Because it might get a little awkward if people start asking for gifts when they legitimately cannot send anything back - though maybe it's not a very big issue...?

MrSakuragi

Queen_Phœnix said:

Kabam Miike said:

Raphael2010 said:

Please confirm the anniversary boost (gold & battlechips) will be part of anniversary week. Last year it was specifically mentioned but not present in this post.

Don’t worry Summoners. There won’t be a boost this year, but it’s because we’re still hammering down the details on something else. If you’ve been sitting on your Gold Crystals, keep holding on to them!

Is there any information on alliance gifting cooldown? Because the alliance war season is ending soon and we need to know the date by which we need to be in our alliances. Is it going to be the same as last year i.e. 14 days?

In game message said 14 days. Which puts it at Dec 6, 2 days before AW ends. Effectively locking in AW players to their current alliance if they want to fully participate in gifting.

DrZola

DNA3000 said:

JustingBonoko said:

DNA3000 said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

GroundedWisdom said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

Kabam Boo said:

Eb0ny-O-M4w said:

So, when can we expect more info on the gifting event?

Fair question. The team is still putting some final touches on it, so we will add some more info when we can!

Just saw the requirements. It seems that it is still missing the info about how the changes will affect P2W players, or players that can easily exploit the event via money.

This was the biggest issue of the event, and always has been over the last couple of years. Yet you've made a chance that literally doesn't affect these people, but rather further punishes everyone else, including people who fairly invest time in playing the game.

Please consider changing it again prior to the start of the event. Either decrease the level requirement to something like 25/30 (which would still do nothing to stop exploiters from exploit it with money, but would at least punish less everyone else), or just cao the ammount of GGC an account can be gifted

Spending money on the Event is not an exploit.

We've saw it in the previous gifting events. Yes, yes it is an exploit.

I have no idea what makes you believe this, but spending on the gifting event is not an exploit. The gifting event is explicitly intended to allow people to spend any amount they want, including zero but with no cap, on sending gifts.

what u think of the restrictions DNA? fair? or just lazy quick fix. easiest to code

Do i think the restrictions are fair? It depends on what you mean by fair. They don't go out of their way to target any particular group of players beyond the requirements of the limitations, so in that sense they are fair to the players as a whole.

I think you're asking if the restrictions are fair to the players who attempted to take advantage of the opportunity, and I'm a bit torn on that one. On the one hand, making alts explicitly to farm easy units to gift back to yourself is obviously not intended. Anyone who did that was taking a risk, because that could fall into the range of being exploitive, and when exploits are cracked down upon there's always some collateral damage: no exploit countermeasure is scalpel perfect. So if someone rolled a dozen alts last week to attempt to do this, in my opinion they took their chances and have to accept the risks involved with that kind of activity. I don't have tons of sympathy for those players: that's what risk is: sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

On the other hand, the restrictions are high enough that they can catch other players, particularly new players playing their first account in particular. I do have more sympathy for those players. I have *some* sympathy for players who play multiple alts completely independently of the gifting event as well. I think the limitations are higher than they need to be relative to these players, but I don't know how much lower they could safely be lowered before you start to lose the effectiveness of the limitations in the first place.

When it comes to the level restriction specifically, which I think is probably the most iffy one, I think 30 is too low to be effective, and 40 is probably higher than it needs to be. But everything in between is pretty grey on the trade off between effectiveness and over cautious.

I should point out that the restrictions don't prevent anyone from alt-farming. They act to limit the ability to skim the easiest rewards that were added to the early game experience. Because they are sort of "proof of work" restrictions (to use a term of art in the cryptocurrency community) they aren't going to distinguish between "normal" accounts and "gifting alts" they will distinguish between levels of effort. So a player that wants to put more effort into pushing a gifting alt will meet the requirements easier than a player that has less time to play but is playing a main. That's unfortunate, but I don't have an easy solution to that one.

I did have completely different *ideas* that I thought would work better because they side-stepped these kinds of issues (in particular early game currency) but I don't know if there were technical limitations on that idea, or if I'm just way smarter than the Kabam developers (kidding). And I'm pretty sure if they had implemented my idea instead, there would be tons of people saying it was unfair and I stole their Christmas and probably wishing harm upon my dog (although for the record, I don't have a dog).

You stole my Christmas and I hope your hypothetical dog gets the runs first thing Christmas morning.

Just kidding of course. I tend to agree with your assessment, and my main lament is excluding newer players <L40 or not quite through Act 4 from what’s *supposed* to be a holiday event. Not quite sure how you masked those accounts, other than providing a skinnied down version of the event just for them or permitting old accounts (say, before 2019) to participate even in a limited capacity. Implementation on both those would admittedly be tricky.

No matter what, it’s inevitable you’re going to make someone unhappy and willing to curse your dog.

Dr. Zola

csexton00

Curious to see how the Lvl 40 requirement effects the income levels for the gifting event this year compared to last. The game play issues may effect that too though.

2StarKing

Kabam Miike said:

Raphael2010 said:

Please confirm the anniversary boost (gold & battlechips) will be part of anniversary week. Last year it was specifically mentioned but not present in this post.

Don’t worry Summoners. There won’t be a boost this year, but it’s because we’re still hammering down the details on something else. If you’ve been sitting on your Gold Crystals, keep holding on to them!

@Kabam Miike It is great to see Kabam employees responding. The location for your informative comment makes it hard for players find relevant information. Perhaps Kabam should bring back FAQs to allow centralization of added info.

SteveM

Deucal said:

Question on the gifting 14 day requirement. I have a friend who is joining my ally once the season ends. He will be 13 days in the alliance when gifting starts. Would he still be able to participate in gifting after his 14 days then? Or is 14 days before event starts, and no participation at all after?

Last year they had to be part of the alliance for 14 days. If they joined before the event but where short a few days they were locked out of the points until they hit it even if that was after the start of the event. There was an alert on the points that would tell the person the amount of time they still had to wait. If it's the same, then your friend would just have to wait a day to be eligible. The pic I included was from someone else's post last year.

Fitnesscw

Will the lunar gifting event be the same as this?

Kabam Miike

No Gold Boost? We'll do you one better: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/289150/permanent-boost-to-gold-in-gold-and-arena-crystals-starting-december-10th-hold-your-crystals

Crine60

Kabam Miike said:

No Gold Boost? We'll do you one better: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/289150/permanent-boost-to-gold-in-gold-and-arena-crystals-starting-december-10th-hold-your-crystals

If you are still here can you answer a quick question about the upcoming shard arenas? I know 6* is restricted to using 1 and 2* champs but what are the champs we can use in the 5* shard arena?

BitterSteel

Kabam Miike said:

No Gold Boost? We'll do you one better: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/289150/permanent-boost-to-gold-in-gold-and-arena-crystals-starting-december-10th-hold-your-crystals

Can’t wait for someone to un-ironically complain about this.

This is fantastic news!