They have made several of my champions useless with AW diversity. R5 NC has no use now because there are R4 5*s in my alliance. Most of my champs aren't even used any more. Ranked up for defense and now only them for arena.
This is what sucks to me. All these good champs i acquired and I am using **** in AW war to meet diversity requirements. I have no desire to chase, acquire and level up new champs anymore once someone else in my alliance has them because you can only use one of each champ on AW defense now.
like many players said, its ridiculous for kabam to introduce a new champs, once realize how good can the players fight with it, they nerf it in the dark, its been many times and its not fair for us to use the units on it and realize the product we bought was a fraud, imagine we been sacrificing our time and effort to grind them on arena for 3 days and finally we got our chance to test them- they been nerfed... and kabam juz remain silence without giving a sxxx.
act 5.3 basically is a units grabber, and the rewards is not convincing from the earlier statement (increase chance of obtaining 5* shads & T2A) and all the increase chance of obtaining them is from the purchase by cash (aren't it obvious its an act of money grab without considering players???)
all the bugs on every update is just ridiculous, can kabam juz hired some staff to play the game? did you ever play the game urself to experience our frustration and the joke u guys made? If its really been tested and yet the bugs still exist everytime, i doubt ur beta tester reliability. Dont out like we beg for compensation, instead you the one that make all the mistake should come out the compensation before the players demand for it, its ur fault so admit it and do it right next time.
and about the war, its no longer who can fight better and how much u u willing to spend to win it, it seems that the way to win a war change constantly and our resources to rank them is not easy as you thought which you knew about it. basically you're just ruining ur own operation and pushing ur users away from u.
I'm a players since the game launch and 2 years later i'm totally not motivated to burn my midnight oil to play it anymore, (why commit to a game that broke all the time and the developer doesnt care at all?)
Actually, players don't object to bugs themselves. Players object to bugs that cost them money. Why should we pay because Kabam isn't doing its job? It's like releasing a credit card that has a bug that charges the user 2% more on every transaction.
Kabam used to have a system where they said, hey, cleaning up bugs is hard. We'll take a while. In the meantime, here are some items so you can overcome the bug without having to pay for my mistakes. That system is gone but the bugs keep coming.
And, while I sympathise with debuggers because I know it is a very tough job, it's still their job. Brain surgery is hard, rocket science is hard. Building a mobile phone that doesn't explode is hard. But the consumer expects to have workable product and shouldn't have to pay extra for a company's mistakes just because "it's hard".
You don’t need to spend money on the game if it’s buggy, and I know it’s their job, but I was trying to remind those who know LITTLE TO NOTHING about programming is that it takes TIME. Debugging can fix one bug, but that fix makes another logic error that needs to be fixed and that can cascade quickly if you aren’t very very careful. The 3 main parts to debugging are finding where in the code the error is even located, thinking of a way to fix it, and then makeing sure it doesn’t make bugs on its own, which it does a lot of the time.
For a game that is free, it is a huge game that I would probably pay as much as your average Xbox game if it was only made for it. The revenue>>kabam budget>>design teams would be better and the game would be fine. But In reality, it’s a free mobile game that has years worth of play value, so I don’t really see why you guys expect so much. Yes, 6* are a little much; yes, we need bases or some new game mode; yes, we need bugs fixed; but think realistically and take a step back.
This is a little irrelevant, but if for such a bad game, you guys sure play it a ton. You say “because it’s bad, I need to spend cash on it”. If it’s a bad game, don’t play it
You're really not paying attention. Ok, bugs take time to fix. But why were they even there in the first place? Within minutes of downloading 15.0 they were apparent. And these forums were flooded with posts.
This company makes literally millions of dollars a month, in profit. There is no excuse dude. Stop trying to make one
Let’s go easy guys and not get this thread locked down, 7k views in 3 days with 100 posts this thread is serving its purpose and I think it’s important to keep it going. Keep up the feedback and despite the here and there I think we are doing well abiding by the rules. Again thanks for all the responses
What pisses me off about Kabam is how lazily they take on their perceived issues.
They had a few god tier champs that were walking through their content. Instead of buffing their content, they nerfed our champs in 12.0.
They had a few god tier defenders that everyone was placing in AWD. Instead of buffing other champs to make them more desirable defenders they nerfed all defenders in 15.0.
The dev team has shown time and time again that they neither play the game nor truly understand it.
I've been thinking about a comment another player had today, they were relatively uneffected by the changes, so they didn't understand our outrage and frustration and that if we didn't like the game then we should just quit...
I must admit I'm quilty of this.
When 12.0 came around my team mates were outraged. And many quit. But not before I had long winded discussions about the progression of the game and necessary adjustments being inevitable.
Sooo.. I was uneffected by 12.0 because I didn't have or invest in any of the characters that were nerfed. I couldn't relate to long term players that were borderline, whales.
I'm quilty of not seeing the work and effort they put in to get where they were, but now that I'm in a position that is effected, grinding and buying and buying and buying to get my very best defender team to all 5/50 and now those very same champs that are useless in any other aspect of the game, have now become useless in the very mode I spent money on them to be dominant.
This game is played around the world, and it would seem there's a thought that the 'whales' dictate the game...I'd disagree. The reason the community is outraged is because the whales are upset that their time and investment is again being nerfed and refocused torwards 'guppies'
Which makes sense, and forgive the term, guppies drive the revenue more then perceived 'whales'
My opinion is the disconnect of respecting long term players and their concerns, because believe it or not, guppies rule the revenue, is what has created this crossroads time and time again.
Recently I have begun to question the time I spend ingame.
Too many characters and too few decent ones. Opening shard crystals is an exercise in frustration.
Nowhere to use 90% of the roster except arena and not enough reward for effort when doing so, grind hard for a garbage champ no one wants or grind for shards for a very high chance of another garbage champ via crystals.
Then do it all again because unduped garbage champs are mostly horrible, at least duped some of them have some value.
No way for progression past R4 4* for daily but casual players unless you are hardcore in AQ/AW and can convince at least 9 other people to do the same or spend lots of money, those that do spend money probably hate how much it costs before you hit the jackpot with a decent champ.
Then, if you're like me, when you finally pull a decent champ, the short lived joy is overshadowed by the rug being pulled from under you via changes that occur almost instantly and without notice but have probably been planned for a long time, time that idiots like me used to spend resources on champions that will become obsolete or heavily diminished in its value.
I cannot imagine the frustration of the guys who grind hard, spend hard and play hard to win early and often because down here in the big pond with the other little fish, its not much fun.
I am not enjoying the game anywhere near as much as I used to and it's a shame, even as a casual player it has found a way to burn out and bore me.
It's amazing how the tone of the forums has changed over the last couple of months.
It used to be about sharing strategies, talking about which champs to rank up, finding a good alliance, making guesses and suggestions on future updates, and getting info from the development team.
Now it's thread after thread about every aspect of the game having bugs. Anything from simply being able to load the game, to being kicked out of the game after a fight, all the way to the point that simple fight mechanics stopped working.
It's hard to drum up enthusiasm for a game when the bulk of the conversation is simply reporting how the game isn't working...
It's amazing how the tone of the forums has changed over the last couple of months.
It used to be about sharing strategies, talking about which champs to rank up, finding a good alliance, making guesses and suggestions on future updates, and getting info from the development team.
Now it's thread after thread about every aspect of the game having bugs. Anything from simply being able to load the game, to being kicked out of the game after a fight, all the way to the point that simple fight mechanics stopped working.
It's hard to drum up enthusiasm for a game when the bulk of the conversation is simply reporting how the game isn't working...
I 100 percent agree. This is my first time reading forums really and I am reading mainly on the issues that is occurring.
Actually, players don't object to bugs themselves. Players object to bugs that cost them money. Why should we pay because Kabam isn't doing its job? It's like releasing a credit card that has a bug that charges the user 2% more on every transaction.
Kabam used to have a system where they said, hey, cleaning up bugs is hard. We'll take a while. In the meantime, here are some items so you can overcome the bug without having to pay for my mistakes. That system is gone but the bugs keep coming.
And, while I sympathise with debuggers because I know it is a very tough job, it's still their job. Brain surgery is hard, rocket science is hard. Building a mobile phone that doesn't explode is hard. But the consumer expects to have workable product and shouldn't have to pay extra for a company's mistakes just because "it's hard".
You don’t need to spend money on the game if it’s buggy, and I know it’s their job, but I was trying to remind those who know LITTLE TO NOTHING about programming is that it takes TIME. Debugging can fix one bug, but that fix makes another logic error that needs to be fixed and that can cascade quickly if you aren’t very very careful. The 3 main parts to debugging are finding where in the code the error is even located, thinking of a way to fix it, and then makeing sure it doesn’t make bugs on its own, which it does a lot of the time.
For a game that is free, it is a huge game that I would probably pay as much as your average Xbox game if it was only made for it. The revenue>>kabam budget>>design teams would be better and the game would be fine. But In reality, it’s a free mobile game that has years worth of play value, so I don’t really see why you guys expect so much. Yes, 6* are a little much; yes, we need bases or some new game mode; yes, we need bugs fixed; but think realistically and take a step back.
This is a little irrelevant, but if for such a bad game, you guys sure play it a ton. You say “because it’s bad, I need to spend cash on it”. If it’s a bad game, don’t play it
No, I totally get that it takes time. That's why I don't think most of us mind if there are bugs if we are compensated.
When I say, bugs cost us money, what I mean is... well, take the whiffing after heavies bug that happened a couple of months back. Several champions were affected and became less effective. This meant that they died more often in AQ. If they died more often in AQ, players needed to spend units to revive them or let their alliance down.
There was a time when Kabam would have said, hey, we know this bug is costing you revives. Here are some free revives. You can use them to keep playing and overcome the bug without having to buy revives. We aren't going to fix this soon, but while we're fixing it you can continue to play without spending on our mistakes.
It's like going to a restaurant and ordering a vegetarian pizza. Sometimes the restaurant will get it wrong and serve up a pepperoni pizza. Most vegetarians would completely understand. But the restaurant doesn't say, well, okay, if you want your vegetarian pizza you're going to have to buy another pizza. They say, hey, sorry man, we'll make you the right pizza at no extra cost and here's a vegetarian snack to munch on to make up for the delay.
I've been thinking about a comment another player had today, they were relatively uneffected by the changes, so they didn't understand our outrage and frustration and that if we didn't like the game then we should just quit...
I must admit I'm quilty of this.
When 12.0 came around my team mates were outraged. And many quit. But not before I had long winded discussions about the progression of the game and necessary adjustments being inevitable.
Sooo.. I was uneffected by 12.0 because I didn't have or invest in any of the characters that were nerfed. I couldn't relate to long term players that were borderline, whales.
I'm quilty of not seeing the work and effort they put in to get where they were, but now that I'm in a position that is effected, grinding and buying and buying and buying to get my very best defender team to all 5/50 and now those very same champs that are useless in any other aspect of the game, have now become useless in the very mode I spent money on them to be dominant.
This game is played around the world, and it would seem there's a thought that the 'whales' dictate the game...I'd disagree. The reason the community is outraged is because the whales are upset that their time and investment is again being nerfed and refocused torwards 'guppies'
Which makes sense, and forgive the term, guppies drive the revenue more then perceived 'whales'
My opinion is the disconnect of respecting long term players and their concerns, because believe it or not, guppies rule the revenue, is what has created this crossroads time and time again.
It's interesting you feel that way. I think the outrage is felt by the late game players (as I mentioned, the early game is still very fun) and because the whales spend so much on progression they are pretty much all late or end game players.
But really, every late game player is a whale in some way. Maybe we didn't spend money, but we sure spent time. We can make more money. We can't make more time. And when our time suddenly becomes worthless, we're sure to be angry.
Human beings place a high value on sunk cost. Because we've put so much into the game, it's hard to just walk away. That's why so many of us want to salvage it (like a relationship!). But yes, eventually, if we don't like the game we will quit.
walking away from this game is not easy & the entire credit of that goes to the original developers, who were in charge before all that 12.0 bs.
the character designs of this game is best among all other marvel mobile game out there. the gameplay is the most simple.
but, the game has gone all downhill since 12.0.
2 pros since 12.0 - 1. new arena system is great, 2. the new aq reward system is great (though there should have been specific full t4cc for a good amount of glory in store)
but rest are all cons
the meta of the game was working fine, there was no need to change that.
yes some too op champions needed to be nerfed, but not all on a sudden, there should've been a fair heads up warning. (but here atleast they acknowledged it, n compensated as much as possible)
then came the double dash back problem. (the compensation n acknowledgements for issues started to dry down from here, they only gave away few potions nothing else)
next was almost a whole day android shutdown. (only people who were doing arenas were compensated a bit, but nothing for others, as if other than arena nothing matters in the game)
now they changed civil warrior & red cyclops (as quoted by kabam, they issue RDTs when a champion in particular is changed, but they didn't issue those in that time. nobody cared bcz those champions simply doesn't matter to anyone. but it was a lapse on kabam's part)
now comes two much requested champions carnage & green goblin & they made sure that both of them are trash, while a marvel nobody gwenpool will be very powerful. (a marvel game should be true to the characters)
visions power burn issue. ultrons sp2 blocking issue.
aw v2.0 , released in a completely untested state without any kind of warning again - all those detection masteries become useless, (but no free mastery rebuild period granted), all ur defensive roster become useless if anyone else has a higher version of them in ur ally(later changed to bg) [no attention paid to multiple request to bring back kills or issuing RDTs]
parry, specials inconsistency. combo inconsistency. characters are using heavies on their own, opponent can suddenly interrupt u within a combo outta nowhere. but nothing is being done to fix these things even after months.
hotfix didn't resolve a single thing. but it brought anther very annoying problem - in game data download.
looking their urge to fix things or compensate for those have completely dried atm. You know what kabam? addressing and resolving issues quickly, not having those annoying features like other games, made MCoC great. But you are completely losing it now, u have lost the "editors choice" title from play store during the 12.0 update, have rarely taken a single correct step to get that back. It has always been 1 step fwd then 3step backward.
Don't do these to your playerbase, who spent so much time in the game. Make MCoC great again!
I have messaged kabam direct with ideas and they thank you for your feed back and then point you to the forums, we’re as it’s already been pointed out they don’t really read just monitor. So it’s a fruitless excesize.
As regards to the current state of the game, I personally think some small changes can fix a majority of the issues.
1. Aq has become more boring than ever with the less tiers, most alliances are now doing the same maps and finishing in the same place week in week out, the old tiers offered mor diversity in weekly aq’s.
2. Aw is now not a war but an excell spread sheet war, I would keep defender diversity as that makes it different rather than fighting the same 6 champs all the time, drop defender rating and now if its a draw go to ko’s to give the 1 point needed to declare a winner.
3. Arena is now back up to the scores of the old arena so at this point a 5* arena would help to lower scores and make it easier for new accounts to get 4*
4. The monthly quests are now become “ just the norm” a mix of the smaller events ie the webslinger quest would help.
5. Phc are now worth so little to the bigger and older accounts maybe a system where 10,000 shards can be used to buy a “ grandmaster crystal”
6. Some new events would be good as there the same week in week out
7. T4b event it would be nice to see maybe a second t4b at 2.2 mil
8. A t4c shard event would be great as well
As regards to what kabam did to aw and drastically effected a lot of the “ aw defender champs” they should really think about a 12.0 compensation package as we have all spent ranking up some pretty lame champs to fit the old aw and now are useless to us, a waste of t4b/ t4c
This will also show that kabam does listen to us and wants us to know they care about us.
Better communication from them would help, the sp missing was a great example of how kabam see us, they were fully aware of this major issue before this current Aq series started but chose to carry on knowing it would effect us badly at our own cost and at the same time they would benefit from this bug, when the extra rewards scandle happened they shut the game down immediately to sort this problem as it was not in there benefit.
This shows that they can do things straight away and showed they only care about there bottom line.
A business course would help them and also how to treat your customer and benefit from great customer relations, after all a happy customer spends more
For me, honestly its a combination of the bugs and the changes to alliance wars. I use to love seeing how many kills my defenders could get and I was grinding so hard to dupe my 5* Juggs or 5* Majik. Now that my Juggs is duped, I’m not even ranking him because we already have one in ever Battle Group. I’m sorry but I cant get excited about ranking a unique defender just to watch them get no kills every war. I know that Kabam was trying to make old champs relevant and bring them in line with the newer champs but this is not how it should have been done. Usig synergy to make champs important would have been a better idea. Like they did with Black Bolt for Medusa.
That and the bugs and lack of in game communication from Kabam has closed my wallet and will eventually make me walk away from the game altogether as it has become very stale and more of a chore.
There was a brief period of time before the 15.0 update when there was a bug that disabled our ability to monitor defender kills in AW. Personally, it was at that point that I lost interest in AW, as I relished the idea that my stout defense with optimal map placement, plus a little bit of luck had managed to throw a monkey-wrench in the opposing team's plans to reach our boss. Well, that bug was soon fixed and then Kabam released 15.0 and told us that Defender Kills would no longer contribute towards our overall AW score. This left me feeling disheartened & utterly disinterested in what had become a major component of the game.
Not sure if this thread had any effect or not but after today, it would be nice to think so. Thank you everyone for all the feedback and hopefully this allowed Kabam to compile feedback and maybe we will see more efforts in the future based on the input we had here
Been playing this game since the day of its launch. It sure is addictive. Or has been. If it weren’t for my sense of duty as leader of my ally I’d happily not log on again and this is relatively new. It’s a worthy question Micklownick. For me, it’s a culmination of various aspects;
The game devs and support are arguably the worst in the industry. If you have any issue whatsoever you’re better off talking to the wall. Same result, less time wasted, less frustration.
I cringe every time there’s an update or hotfix cos it means more and new bugs
The insatiable greed. I’m still burning about item caps and it goes on and on.
Was a time they justified reskins as saving our data. They’ve abandoned that but we are still playing the same stuff. Nothing new, nothing interesting. Very uninspiring.
Yeah, I’ve done ok but my rate of growth is now so plodding it’s all a bit pointless. I think the devs must rely on excitable and innocent noobs. They seem to be victims of their own success, thinking they’re something extra special and we are but ants under their lordly boots. These are my thoughts and I shouldn’t be surprised if i’m Subsequently banned from this forum for saying so
I might add, before I’m banned, that for a long while the cornflakes have been making me bilious n bloated so I recently downloaded some oatmeal and it’s good. I now spend most all my game time eating oatmeal and i’ve found the oatmeal manufacturers, though not perfect, are responsive and helpful. Such a sweet change from years of this cornflake diet and it’s many artificial poisons. Good luck trying to communicate with the cornflakes but i’ve Learned it’s fruitless. I’d urge anyone to grow a new tradition with oatmeal
I was trying to remind those who know LITTLE TO NOTHING about programming is that it takes TIME. Debugging can fix one bug, but that fix makes another logic error that needs to be fixed and that can cascade quickly if you aren’t very very careful. The 3 main parts to debugging are finding where in the code the error is even located, thinking of a way to fix it, and then makeing sure it doesn’t make bugs on its own, which it does a lot of the time.
Most players don't fully appreciate how actual game development works, and in fact what actually happens bears no resemblance to what you're referring to either. Games are built on engines, and usually on systems upon systems upon engines upon engines. There are many layers of abstraction that make the task of debugging a problem something that at no time actually looks like normal software debugging. The abstraction layers make that all but impossible to do in a straight forward manner. I could explain, but I've done that before and it would just bore everyone to tears.
Having said that, knowing what I know about systems development in general and game development in particular, I have to say I'm concerned about the pattern of bugs that have continued to plague the game since 12.0. I was willing to write most of it off as a natural consequence of the accelerated engine swap that occurred when game timing went out the window post 12.0, but that should have settled down by now. And comments made back then about those changes not happening 100% in-house, given what the Vancouver studio is actually supposed to be doing, also makes me wonder.
The kinds of problems we are seeing are the kinds that are supposed to be caught in regression testing. They are supposed to be treated like show-stoppers that would halt the deployment of a build. Or sometimes they are so weird they beg the question of whether the developer that was responsible actually understands the game and is familiar with how it works.
You can't say, for example, that allowing Mephisto's regeneration to scale with max health was just an everyday oops that could happen to anyone. It has been well-known for a while now that Kabam's stated intent was to honor the explicit design rule that regeneration in all its forms would not scale with boosted max health. This was so well-known of a position that many veteran players actually stated their belief that was a bug that would likely be reversed eventually. How does a character creator make that kind of fundamental error, and how does it get past his design supervisor, the producer in charge, quality and assurance testing, and the overall design lead of the game? An entire busload of people had to be asleep at the wheel for that to happen.
Ignoring all of the preferences and complaints about Alliance War, it was simply inexcusable that the diversity point value was set so high that it was *impossible* for a non-unique defender to compete with a unique defender. Originally a defeated unique defender was worth more than an undefeated non-unique defender. That's mathematically ludicrous and the devs knew it when it was pointed out because they changed it quickly - faster than datamining could have determined what the effects of those numbers were.
I understand development schedules and such, and I am the first person to say that content development shouldn't come to a halt while bugs are fixed. But how does a bug like the special attack misfire bug escape testing *and* get deployed? That certainly sounds like a show stopper to me. That the bug manifested at all suggests someone did something very bad or very wrong to the engine or the power systems. But even accounting for the fact that such things will happen (but should happen far rarer than they do happen) there's no excuse for releasing the game in that state.
I think completely separate from all of the complaints about bugs and the need to reduce the number of bugs that are created and improve the time to fix them and discussions surrounding compensation for the worst ones, I believe there should be some dialog between the players and the developers about what constitutes a "show stopper bug." A bug whose impact on the players is bad enough that if it exists in a build that build will not get pushed, and if it does get pushed either by accident or by intent then the players should expect to be compensated for the existence of a bug that bad. I don't think all bugs qualify, but some should.
Back in 12.0 I asked an open question about what constituted a change to the game that was important enough to be mandatory to include in the patch notes. I suggested that the criteria should be "the change affects a player-facing part of the game that would materially impact or alter the game play that players experienced." @Kabam Miike actually responded to say that was actually Kabam's real criteria for patch notes. I noted then and I will note now that this statement is incorrect: not only does Kabam not follow that rule, they have explicitly made statements that contradict that rule. I wish they did follow that rule. However, I think this is another opportunity to ask Kabam what is the rule for deciding that a bug is severe enough that players should not have to experience it, and if Kabam finds it they will not release that build, or at least warn the players that it exists before releasing the build, and the act of releasing a build with such a bug justifies the players requesting some compensation for having to deal with such a bug.
I rarely if ever ask for compensation for game issues, and I'm not specifically requesting it for any particular problem here. The point isn't even to get compensation: the point is to know what Kabam thinks is important enough to be "important enough to explicitly place procedures in place to avoid exposing the players to that kind of problem" and the threshold of compensation is as good of a line as any.
I am in the same boat as the OP. Honestly, after 12.0 I still enjoyed playing. but compare that to the past month, I had to push through playing quests, war and AQ. I used to have time for arena and questing but now i have already thrown arena out of my radar. I am one of the main pilots of my alliance but with all the bugs and the layout change of war. Piloting for war and aq started to be unbearable because the added tiles demanded more allotment of time by having more rounds of piloting for my semi-active team mates. don’t get me wrong though, I think i would be ok with the layout change if I were not piloting. It just put us in a tight spot now. (we just kicked the very inactive accounts and recruited active members.) Being busier now may also have an effect on my enjoyment of the game, but i believe what sucked out my enjoyment is the war changes throwing out skill and strategy in playing war. we were tier 3-5 before but now we dropped to as low as tier 7 because we just do not enjoy playing war the way it is designed now. my gameplay has also downgraded a lot from before because I no longer worry of being KO. What can I say...if this continues I just might fully quit. I found myself selling maxed 3s just last week to get enough 4s shards because I am tired of warring, grinding, doing aq and questing anymore and with the hope i pull something nice and give me some reason to play again.
For me 5.2, 5.3 well ACT 5 in general is a total disappointment. The rewards are terrible, look at Act 4 rewards. I could sleepwalk through that now and get better rewards. But besides the rewards the construct of content is so "Pay to Win" . . . . . I HAVE ALREADY PAID THOUSANDS, have 4, r4 5stars, I still can't beat the ACT 5 content with out significant item use, mainly because i don't have the "right" r4 5 stars. I literally have no incentive to play ACT 5, I don't care about the rewards and even if they release t5b for full exploration, i don't need it, I will have that content beaten by that point. It just doesn't make sense. There should be 4, t2a and t5b's sprinkled along various levels of ACT 5, that would get me to pull my wallet out again, but as it stands i just show up and hang with my alliance mates. Now even that is in jeopardy with AW changes. The solution to AW, is give a bonus of 3600 t2a shards for each bg that 100% completes in tier 1 and scale that down as the tiers drop, then it is a competition but you get a bonus for the 100%. As posters above has said, progression is way too slow, and money required is way too high.
I was trying to remind those who know LITTLE TO NOTHING about programming is that it takes TIME. Debugging can fix one bug, but that fix makes another logic error that needs to be fixed and that can cascade quickly if you aren’t very very careful. The 3 main parts to debugging are finding where in the code the error is even located, thinking of a way to fix it, and then makeing sure it doesn’t make bugs on its own, which it does a lot of the time.
Most players don't fully appreciate how actual game development works, and in fact what actually happens bears no resemblance to what you're referring to either. Games are built on engines, and usually on systems upon systems upon engines upon engines. There are many layers of abstraction that make the task of debugging a problem something that at no time actually looks like normal software debugging. The abstraction layers make that all but impossible to do in a straight forward manner. I could explain, but I've done that before and it would just bore everyone to tears.
Having said that, knowing what I know about systems development in general and game development in particular, I have to say I'm concerned about the pattern of bugs that have continued to plague the game since 12.0. I was willing to write most of it off as a natural consequence of the accelerated engine swap that occurred when game timing went out the window post 12.0, but that should have settled down by now. And comments made back then about those changes not happening 100% in-house, given what the Vancouver studio is actually supposed to be doing, also makes me wonder.
The kinds of problems we are seeing are the kinds that are supposed to be caught in regression testing. They are supposed to be treated like show-stoppers that would halt the deployment of a build. Or sometimes they are so weird they beg the question of whether the developer that was responsible actually understands the game and is familiar with how it works.
You can't say, for example, that allowing Mephisto's regeneration to scale with max health was just an everyday oops that could happen to anyone. It has been well-known for a while now that Kabam's stated intent was to honor the explicit design rule that regeneration in all its forms would not scale with boosted max health. This was so well-known of a position that many veteran players actually stated their belief that was a bug that would likely be reversed eventually. How does a character creator make that kind of fundamental error, and how does it get past his design supervisor, the producer in charge, quality and assurance testing, and the overall design lead of the game? An entire busload of people had to be asleep at the wheel for that to happen.
Ignoring all of the preferences and complaints about Alliance War, it was simply inexcusable that the diversity point value was set so high that it was *impossible* for a non-unique defender to compete with a unique defender. Originally a defeated unique defender was worth more than an undefeated non-unique defender. That's mathematically ludicrous and the devs knew it when it was pointed out because they changed it quickly - faster than datamining could have determined what the effects of those numbers were.
I understand development schedules and such, and I am the first person to say that content development shouldn't come to a halt while bugs are fixed. But how does a bug like the special attack misfire bug escape testing *and* get deployed? That certainly sounds like a show stopper to me. That the bug manifested at all suggests someone did something very bad or very wrong to the engine or the power systems. But even accounting for the fact that such things will happen (but should happen far rarer than they do happen) there's no excuse for releasing the game in that state.
I think completely separate from all of the complaints about bugs and the need to reduce the number of bugs that are created and improve the time to fix them and discussions surrounding compensation for the worst ones, I believe there should be some dialog between the players and the developers about what constitutes a "show stopper bug." A bug whose impact on the players is bad enough that if it exists in a build that build will not get pushed, and if it does get pushed either by accident or by intent then the players should expect to be compensated for the existence of a bug that bad. I don't think all bugs qualify, but some should.
Back in 12.0 I asked an open question about what constituted a change to the game that was important enough to be mandatory to include in the patch notes. I suggested that the criteria should be "the change affects a player-facing part of the game that would materially impact or alter the game play that players experienced." @Kabam Miike actually responded to say that was actually Kabam's real criteria for patch notes. I noted then and I will note now that this statement is incorrect: not only does Kabam not follow that rule, they have explicitly made statements that contradict that rule. I wish they did follow that rule. However, I think this is another opportunity to ask Kabam what is the rule for deciding that a bug is severe enough that players should not have to experience it, and if Kabam finds it they will not release that build, or at least warn the players that it exists before releasing the build, and the act of releasing a build with such a bug justifies the players requesting some compensation for having to deal with such a bug.
I rarely if ever ask for compensation for game issues, and I'm not specifically requesting it for any particular problem here. The point isn't even to get compensation: the point is to know what Kabam thinks is important enough to be "important enough to explicitly place procedures in place to avoid exposing the players to that kind of problem" and the threshold of compensation is as good of a line as any.
If the issues are systemic then the company needs to take a good, hard look at its structure and management. I have no idea how they're set up, but I can see some of how it treats it's community managers.
Look at the list of things they have to do. They have to moderate the forums and act as the conduit between players and the company. Fine, that's what I would expect.
But they also seem to function as the unwilling propaganda unit. I mean, some of their posts read like management has a gun to their heads and is forcing them to sell their ridiculous ideas. And because the ideas are inherently bad, they spend extraordinary lengths of time trying to defend them.
Then, because of the crappy support, they also have to sort out numerous technical issues because players PM them when they don't get satisfactory responses from support. Is that really a community manager's job?
On top of all of that, I am amazed that they sometimes still take time to PM players and try to explain stuff to them, one on one.
And all this is what happens on our end. There must be an equally daunting pile of extra duties on the company side.
Maybe I'm wrong and all this is industry standard. But I can't help but wonder... All the bugs and AW stuff... Symptoms rather than disease?
I was trying to remind those who know LITTLE TO NOTHING about programming is that it takes TIME. Debugging can fix one bug, but that fix makes another logic error that needs to be fixed and that can cascade quickly if you aren’t very very careful. The 3 main parts to debugging are finding where in the code the error is even located, thinking of a way to fix it, and then makeing sure it doesn’t make bugs on its own, which it does a lot of the time.
Most players don't fully appreciate how actual game development works, and in fact what actually happens bears no resemblance to what you're referring to either. Games are built on engines, and usually on systems upon systems upon engines upon engines. There are many layers of abstraction that make the task of debugging a problem something that at no time actually looks like normal software debugging. The abstraction layers make that all but impossible to do in a straight forward manner. I could explain, but I've done that before and it would just bore everyone to tears.
Having said that, knowing what I know about systems development in general and game development in particular, I have to say I'm concerned about the pattern of bugs that have continued to plague the game since 12.0. I was willing to write most of it off as a natural consequence of the accelerated engine swap that occurred when game timing went out the window post 12.0, but that should have settled down by now. And comments made back then about those changes not happening 100% in-house, given what the Vancouver studio is actually supposed to be doing, also makes me wonder.
The kinds of problems we are seeing are the kinds that are supposed to be caught in regression testing. They are supposed to be treated like show-stoppers that would halt the deployment of a build. Or sometimes they are so weird they beg the question of whether the developer that was responsible actually understands the game and is familiar with how it works.
You can't say, for example, that allowing Mephisto's regeneration to scale with max health was just an everyday oops that could happen to anyone. It has been well-known for a while now that Kabam's stated intent was to honor the explicit design rule that regeneration in all its forms would not scale with boosted max health. This was so well-known of a position that many veteran players actually stated their belief that was a bug that would likely be reversed eventually. How does a character creator make that kind of fundamental error, and how does it get past his design supervisor, the producer in charge, quality and assurance testing, and the overall design lead of the game? An entire busload of people had to be asleep at the wheel for that to happen.
Ignoring all of the preferences and complaints about Alliance War, it was simply inexcusable that the diversity point value was set so high that it was *impossible* for a non-unique defender to compete with a unique defender. Originally a defeated unique defender was worth more than an undefeated non-unique defender. That's mathematically ludicrous and the devs knew it when it was pointed out because they changed it quickly - faster than datamining could have determined what the effects of those numbers were.
I understand development schedules and such, and I am the first person to say that content development shouldn't come to a halt while bugs are fixed. But how does a bug like the special attack misfire bug escape testing *and* get deployed? That certainly sounds like a show stopper to me. That the bug manifested at all suggests someone did something very bad or very wrong to the engine or the power systems. But even accounting for the fact that such things will happen (but should happen far rarer than they do happen) there's no excuse for releasing the game in that state.
I think completely separate from all of the complaints about bugs and the need to reduce the number of bugs that are created and improve the time to fix them and discussions surrounding compensation for the worst ones, I believe there should be some dialog between the players and the developers about what constitutes a "show stopper bug." A bug whose impact on the players is bad enough that if it exists in a build that build will not get pushed, and if it does get pushed either by accident or by intent then the players should expect to be compensated for the existence of a bug that bad. I don't think all bugs qualify, but some should.
Back in 12.0 I asked an open question about what constituted a change to the game that was important enough to be mandatory to include in the patch notes. I suggested that the criteria should be "the change affects a player-facing part of the game that would materially impact or alter the game play that players experienced." @Kabam Miike actually responded to say that was actually Kabam's real criteria for patch notes. I noted then and I will note now that this statement is incorrect: not only does Kabam not follow that rule, they have explicitly made statements that contradict that rule. I wish they did follow that rule. However, I think this is another opportunity to ask Kabam what is the rule for deciding that a bug is severe enough that players should not have to experience it, and if Kabam finds it they will not release that build, or at least warn the players that it exists before releasing the build, and the act of releasing a build with such a bug justifies the players requesting some compensation for having to deal with such a bug.
I rarely if ever ask for compensation for game issues, and I'm not specifically requesting it for any particular problem here. The point isn't even to get compensation: the point is to know what Kabam thinks is important enough to be "important enough to explicitly place procedures in place to avoid exposing the players to that kind of problem" and the threshold of compensation is as good of a line as any.
If the issues are systemic then the company needs to take a good, hard look at its structure and management. I have no idea how they're set up, but I can see some of how it treats it's community managers.
Look at the list of things they have to do. They have to moderate the forums and act as the conduit between players and the company. Fine, that's what I would expect.
But they also seem to function as the unwilling propaganda unit. I mean, some of their posts read like management has a gun to their heads and is forcing them to sell their ridiculous ideas. And because the ideas are inherently bad, they spend extraordinary lengths of time trying to defend them.
Then, because of the crappy support, they also have to sort out numerous technical issues because players PM them when they don't get satisfactory responses from support. Is that really a community manager's job?
On top of all of that, I am amazed that they sometimes still take time to PM players and try to explain stuff to them, one on one.
And all this is what happens on our end. There must be an equally daunting pile of extra duties on the company side.
Maybe I'm wrong and all this is industry standard. But I can't help but wonder... All the bugs and AW stuff... Symptoms rather than disease?
For me the biggest issue that limits Kabam's revenue (from me) is the fact that there is a very high bar (time and effort) required to acquire and rank up champs, but they keep changing the game in ways that make you regret spending time or money on building up characters. If they offered a permanent way to rank down characters and get your catalysts and/or sig stones and awakening gems back (I don't really care about the gold or ISO) then you would be able to enjoy your efforts sooner and not regret a decision down the road. Why would anyone invest in 4* sig stones or awakening gems knowing that 4*'s are on the way out? It would be great if you could play around with different characters as you develop or get new champs with different synergies without having to make decisions that end up lasting years in the game. For example, there was a time when it was a good idea (perhaps) to use an awakening gem on 4* Rhino, Cyclops or Ronan since they would only available once in RoL. They they were added as 5*, devaluing those old (and difficult to aquire!) champs. This game would be a lot more fun in terms of being able to play with all of your hard to acquire characters if they allowed rank up/down on a regular basis. You can't (in my mind!) bring in a new requirement like defender diversity and then not allow people to adjust their line-up of champs!
Comments
This is what sucks to me. All these good champs i acquired and I am using **** in AW war to meet diversity requirements. I have no desire to chase, acquire and level up new champs anymore once someone else in my alliance has them because you can only use one of each champ on AW defense now.
act 5.3 basically is a units grabber, and the rewards is not convincing from the earlier statement (increase chance of obtaining 5* shads & T2A) and all the increase chance of obtaining them is from the purchase by cash (aren't it obvious its an act of money grab without considering players???)
all the bugs on every update is just ridiculous, can kabam juz hired some staff to play the game? did you ever play the game urself to experience our frustration and the joke u guys made? If its really been tested and yet the bugs still exist everytime, i doubt ur beta tester reliability. Dont out like we beg for compensation, instead you the one that make all the mistake should come out the compensation before the players demand for it, its ur fault so admit it and do it right next time.
and about the war, its no longer who can fight better and how much u u willing to spend to win it, it seems that the way to win a war change constantly and our resources to rank them is not easy as you thought which you knew about it. basically you're just ruining ur own operation and pushing ur users away from u.
I'm a players since the game launch and 2 years later i'm totally not motivated to burn my midnight oil to play it anymore, (why commit to a game that broke all the time and the developer doesnt care at all?)
You're really not paying attention. Ok, bugs take time to fix. But why were they even there in the first place? Within minutes of downloading 15.0 they were apparent. And these forums were flooded with posts.
This company makes literally millions of dollars a month, in profit. There is no excuse dude. Stop trying to make one
They had a few god tier champs that were walking through their content. Instead of buffing their content, they nerfed our champs in 12.0.
They had a few god tier defenders that everyone was placing in AWD. Instead of buffing other champs to make them more desirable defenders they nerfed all defenders in 15.0.
The dev team has shown time and time again that they neither play the game nor truly understand it.
I must admit I'm quilty of this.
When 12.0 came around my team mates were outraged. And many quit. But not before I had long winded discussions about the progression of the game and necessary adjustments being inevitable.
Sooo.. I was uneffected by 12.0 because I didn't have or invest in any of the characters that were nerfed. I couldn't relate to long term players that were borderline, whales.
I'm quilty of not seeing the work and effort they put in to get where they were, but now that I'm in a position that is effected, grinding and buying and buying and buying to get my very best defender team to all 5/50 and now those very same champs that are useless in any other aspect of the game, have now become useless in the very mode I spent money on them to be dominant.
This game is played around the world, and it would seem there's a thought that the 'whales' dictate the game...I'd disagree. The reason the community is outraged is because the whales are upset that their time and investment is again being nerfed and refocused torwards 'guppies'
Which makes sense, and forgive the term, guppies drive the revenue more then perceived 'whales'
My opinion is the disconnect of respecting long term players and their concerns, because believe it or not, guppies rule the revenue, is what has created this crossroads time and time again.
Too many characters and too few decent ones. Opening shard crystals is an exercise in frustration.
Nowhere to use 90% of the roster except arena and not enough reward for effort when doing so, grind hard for a garbage champ no one wants or grind for shards for a very high chance of another garbage champ via crystals.
Then do it all again because unduped garbage champs are mostly horrible, at least duped some of them have some value.
No way for progression past R4 4* for daily but casual players unless you are hardcore in AQ/AW and can convince at least 9 other people to do the same or spend lots of money, those that do spend money probably hate how much it costs before you hit the jackpot with a decent champ.
Then, if you're like me, when you finally pull a decent champ, the short lived joy is overshadowed by the rug being pulled from under you via changes that occur almost instantly and without notice but have probably been planned for a long time, time that idiots like me used to spend resources on champions that will become obsolete or heavily diminished in its value.
I cannot imagine the frustration of the guys who grind hard, spend hard and play hard to win early and often because down here in the big pond with the other little fish, its not much fun.
I am not enjoying the game anywhere near as much as I used to and it's a shame, even as a casual player it has found a way to burn out and bore me.
It used to be about sharing strategies, talking about which champs to rank up, finding a good alliance, making guesses and suggestions on future updates, and getting info from the development team.
Now it's thread after thread about every aspect of the game having bugs. Anything from simply being able to load the game, to being kicked out of the game after a fight, all the way to the point that simple fight mechanics stopped working.
It's hard to drum up enthusiasm for a game when the bulk of the conversation is simply reporting how the game isn't working...
I 100 percent agree. This is my first time reading forums really and I am reading mainly on the issues that is occurring.
No, I totally get that it takes time. That's why I don't think most of us mind if there are bugs if we are compensated.
When I say, bugs cost us money, what I mean is... well, take the whiffing after heavies bug that happened a couple of months back. Several champions were affected and became less effective. This meant that they died more often in AQ. If they died more often in AQ, players needed to spend units to revive them or let their alliance down.
There was a time when Kabam would have said, hey, we know this bug is costing you revives. Here are some free revives. You can use them to keep playing and overcome the bug without having to buy revives. We aren't going to fix this soon, but while we're fixing it you can continue to play without spending on our mistakes.
It's like going to a restaurant and ordering a vegetarian pizza. Sometimes the restaurant will get it wrong and serve up a pepperoni pizza. Most vegetarians would completely understand. But the restaurant doesn't say, well, okay, if you want your vegetarian pizza you're going to have to buy another pizza. They say, hey, sorry man, we'll make you the right pizza at no extra cost and here's a vegetarian snack to munch on to make up for the delay.
It's interesting you feel that way. I think the outrage is felt by the late game players (as I mentioned, the early game is still very fun) and because the whales spend so much on progression they are pretty much all late or end game players.
But really, every late game player is a whale in some way. Maybe we didn't spend money, but we sure spent time. We can make more money. We can't make more time. And when our time suddenly becomes worthless, we're sure to be angry.
Human beings place a high value on sunk cost. Because we've put so much into the game, it's hard to just walk away. That's why so many of us want to salvage it (like a relationship!). But yes, eventually, if we don't like the game we will quit.
the character designs of this game is best among all other marvel mobile game out there. the gameplay is the most simple.
but, the game has gone all downhill since 12.0.
2 pros since 12.0 - 1. new arena system is great, 2. the new aq reward system is great (though there should have been specific full t4cc for a good amount of glory in store)
but rest are all cons
the meta of the game was working fine, there was no need to change that.
yes some too op champions needed to be nerfed, but not all on a sudden, there should've been a fair heads up warning. (but here atleast they acknowledged it, n compensated as much as possible)
then came the double dash back problem. (the compensation n acknowledgements for issues started to dry down from here, they only gave away few potions nothing else)
next was almost a whole day android shutdown. (only people who were doing arenas were compensated a bit, but nothing for others, as if other than arena nothing matters in the game)
now they changed civil warrior & red cyclops (as quoted by kabam, they issue RDTs when a champion in particular is changed, but they didn't issue those in that time. nobody cared bcz those champions simply doesn't matter to anyone. but it was a lapse on kabam's part)
now comes two much requested champions carnage & green goblin & they made sure that both of them are trash, while a marvel nobody gwenpool will be very powerful. (a marvel game should be true to the characters)
visions power burn issue. ultrons sp2 blocking issue.
aw v2.0 , released in a completely untested state without any kind of warning again - all those detection masteries become useless, (but no free mastery rebuild period granted), all ur defensive roster become useless if anyone else has a higher version of them in ur ally(later changed to bg) [no attention paid to multiple request to bring back kills or issuing RDTs]
parry, specials inconsistency. combo inconsistency. characters are using heavies on their own, opponent can suddenly interrupt u within a combo outta nowhere. but nothing is being done to fix these things even after months.
hotfix didn't resolve a single thing. but it brought anther very annoying problem - in game data download.
looking their urge to fix things or compensate for those have completely dried atm. You know what kabam? addressing and resolving issues quickly, not having those annoying features like other games, made MCoC great. But you are completely losing it now, u have lost the "editors choice" title from play store during the 12.0 update, have rarely taken a single correct step to get that back. It has always been 1 step fwd then 3step backward.
Don't do these to your playerbase, who spent so much time in the game. Make MCoC great again!
As regards to the current state of the game, I personally think some small changes can fix a majority of the issues.
1. Aq has become more boring than ever with the less tiers, most alliances are now doing the same maps and finishing in the same place week in week out, the old tiers offered mor diversity in weekly aq’s.
2. Aw is now not a war but an excell spread sheet war, I would keep defender diversity as that makes it different rather than fighting the same 6 champs all the time, drop defender rating and now if its a draw go to ko’s to give the 1 point needed to declare a winner.
3. Arena is now back up to the scores of the old arena so at this point a 5* arena would help to lower scores and make it easier for new accounts to get 4*
4. The monthly quests are now become “ just the norm” a mix of the smaller events ie the webslinger quest would help.
5. Phc are now worth so little to the bigger and older accounts maybe a system where 10,000 shards can be used to buy a “ grandmaster crystal”
6. Some new events would be good as there the same week in week out
7. T4b event it would be nice to see maybe a second t4b at 2.2 mil
8. A t4c shard event would be great as well
As regards to what kabam did to aw and drastically effected a lot of the “ aw defender champs” they should really think about a 12.0 compensation package as we have all spent ranking up some pretty lame champs to fit the old aw and now are useless to us, a waste of t4b/ t4c
This will also show that kabam does listen to us and wants us to know they care about us.
Better communication from them would help, the sp missing was a great example of how kabam see us, they were fully aware of this major issue before this current Aq series started but chose to carry on knowing it would effect us badly at our own cost and at the same time they would benefit from this bug, when the extra rewards scandle happened they shut the game down immediately to sort this problem as it was not in there benefit.
This shows that they can do things straight away and showed they only care about there bottom line.
A business course would help them and also how to treat your customer and benefit from great customer relations, after all a happy customer spends more
That and the bugs and lack of in game communication from Kabam has closed my wallet and will eventually make me walk away from the game altogether as it has become very stale and more of a chore.
The game devs and support are arguably the worst in the industry. If you have any issue whatsoever you’re better off talking to the wall. Same result, less time wasted, less frustration.
I cringe every time there’s an update or hotfix cos it means more and new bugs
The insatiable greed. I’m still burning about item caps and it goes on and on.
Was a time they justified reskins as saving our data. They’ve abandoned that but we are still playing the same stuff. Nothing new, nothing interesting. Very uninspiring.
Yeah, I’ve done ok but my rate of growth is now so plodding it’s all a bit pointless. I think the devs must rely on excitable and innocent noobs. They seem to be victims of their own success, thinking they’re something extra special and we are but ants under their lordly boots. These are my thoughts and I shouldn’t be surprised if i’m Subsequently banned from this forum for saying so
Most players don't fully appreciate how actual game development works, and in fact what actually happens bears no resemblance to what you're referring to either. Games are built on engines, and usually on systems upon systems upon engines upon engines. There are many layers of abstraction that make the task of debugging a problem something that at no time actually looks like normal software debugging. The abstraction layers make that all but impossible to do in a straight forward manner. I could explain, but I've done that before and it would just bore everyone to tears.
Having said that, knowing what I know about systems development in general and game development in particular, I have to say I'm concerned about the pattern of bugs that have continued to plague the game since 12.0. I was willing to write most of it off as a natural consequence of the accelerated engine swap that occurred when game timing went out the window post 12.0, but that should have settled down by now. And comments made back then about those changes not happening 100% in-house, given what the Vancouver studio is actually supposed to be doing, also makes me wonder.
The kinds of problems we are seeing are the kinds that are supposed to be caught in regression testing. They are supposed to be treated like show-stoppers that would halt the deployment of a build. Or sometimes they are so weird they beg the question of whether the developer that was responsible actually understands the game and is familiar with how it works.
You can't say, for example, that allowing Mephisto's regeneration to scale with max health was just an everyday oops that could happen to anyone. It has been well-known for a while now that Kabam's stated intent was to honor the explicit design rule that regeneration in all its forms would not scale with boosted max health. This was so well-known of a position that many veteran players actually stated their belief that was a bug that would likely be reversed eventually. How does a character creator make that kind of fundamental error, and how does it get past his design supervisor, the producer in charge, quality and assurance testing, and the overall design lead of the game? An entire busload of people had to be asleep at the wheel for that to happen.
Ignoring all of the preferences and complaints about Alliance War, it was simply inexcusable that the diversity point value was set so high that it was *impossible* for a non-unique defender to compete with a unique defender. Originally a defeated unique defender was worth more than an undefeated non-unique defender. That's mathematically ludicrous and the devs knew it when it was pointed out because they changed it quickly - faster than datamining could have determined what the effects of those numbers were.
I understand development schedules and such, and I am the first person to say that content development shouldn't come to a halt while bugs are fixed. But how does a bug like the special attack misfire bug escape testing *and* get deployed? That certainly sounds like a show stopper to me. That the bug manifested at all suggests someone did something very bad or very wrong to the engine or the power systems. But even accounting for the fact that such things will happen (but should happen far rarer than they do happen) there's no excuse for releasing the game in that state.
I think completely separate from all of the complaints about bugs and the need to reduce the number of bugs that are created and improve the time to fix them and discussions surrounding compensation for the worst ones, I believe there should be some dialog between the players and the developers about what constitutes a "show stopper bug." A bug whose impact on the players is bad enough that if it exists in a build that build will not get pushed, and if it does get pushed either by accident or by intent then the players should expect to be compensated for the existence of a bug that bad. I don't think all bugs qualify, but some should.
Back in 12.0 I asked an open question about what constituted a change to the game that was important enough to be mandatory to include in the patch notes. I suggested that the criteria should be "the change affects a player-facing part of the game that would materially impact or alter the game play that players experienced." @Kabam Miike actually responded to say that was actually Kabam's real criteria for patch notes. I noted then and I will note now that this statement is incorrect: not only does Kabam not follow that rule, they have explicitly made statements that contradict that rule. I wish they did follow that rule. However, I think this is another opportunity to ask Kabam what is the rule for deciding that a bug is severe enough that players should not have to experience it, and if Kabam finds it they will not release that build, or at least warn the players that it exists before releasing the build, and the act of releasing a build with such a bug justifies the players requesting some compensation for having to deal with such a bug.
I rarely if ever ask for compensation for game issues, and I'm not specifically requesting it for any particular problem here. The point isn't even to get compensation: the point is to know what Kabam thinks is important enough to be "important enough to explicitly place procedures in place to avoid exposing the players to that kind of problem" and the threshold of compensation is as good of a line as any.
If the issues are systemic then the company needs to take a good, hard look at its structure and management. I have no idea how they're set up, but I can see some of how it treats it's community managers.
Look at the list of things they have to do. They have to moderate the forums and act as the conduit between players and the company. Fine, that's what I would expect.
But they also seem to function as the unwilling propaganda unit. I mean, some of their posts read like management has a gun to their heads and is forcing them to sell their ridiculous ideas. And because the ideas are inherently bad, they spend extraordinary lengths of time trying to defend them.
Then, because of the crappy support, they also have to sort out numerous technical issues because players PM them when they don't get satisfactory responses from support. Is that really a community manager's job?
On top of all of that, I am amazed that they sometimes still take time to PM players and try to explain stuff to them, one on one.
And all this is what happens on our end. There must be an equally daunting pile of extra duties on the company side.
Maybe I'm wrong and all this is industry standard. But I can't help but wonder... All the bugs and AW stuff... Symptoms rather than disease?
I am of the opinion that they are symptoms.