cyber week & "gifting/trading" week
Crusaderjr
Member Posts: 1,059 ★★★★
so is there any possible way that we can get some type of info on how the rest of the year is ganna play out??
cause i mean if gifting event is botched up/ reduced/ or simply doesnt meet standards due to the "exploit" of unit farming with new accounts(even tho that how the game is intended to be right, play and get rewarded?), people can simply invest in cyber week instead.
its safe to say there is a poop storm brewing and the community is ganna take the brunt of it as usual. there is ganna be more bugs, more game breaking events and such. we already have to deal with that... just hope these upcoming deals arent also ruined....
cause i mean if gifting event is botched up/ reduced/ or simply doesnt meet standards due to the "exploit" of unit farming with new accounts(even tho that how the game is intended to be right, play and get rewarded?), people can simply invest in cyber week instead.
its safe to say there is a poop storm brewing and the community is ganna take the brunt of it as usual. there is ganna be more bugs, more game breaking events and such. we already have to deal with that... just hope these upcoming deals arent also ruined....
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Comments
Heck, I’d even take gonnae because that’s how Sir Alex Ferguson says it.
It isn’t as if this game has been rollicking along this year. If the team wants to target “exploits,” then I would suggest it focus on botting, units scams and account sharing—not playing the game legitimately to earn units they themselves set out to be earned in the game. Sweeping restrictions seem like a sure way to anger a significant swath of the community who have actually enjoyed running old content.
My experience suggests the gifting event is one which is often abused. I’m guessing there’s plenty of real, illegitimate abuse of the system to keep someone busy without penalizing players willing to put in an extra few hours of gameplay a week to build an account for end of year events.
Dr. Zola
[Full disclosure: I have an account from mid-2016 I created when I thought I lost access to my main. I’ve been in it from time to time to collect things and run a quest or two. But it wasn’t until this month that I actually focused on content. I can say I never thought I would be as excited to pop a 3* crystal as I have been, and I never would have been excited to pull a 4* Red Skull but for that account and the team’s changes.]
In the end, I think this speaks more to how exhausted people are of Arena/AW/AQ that they’d rather farm new accounts.
And Red Skull crushes autofight.
but even then! they are simply playing the game as intended.
arena bots, mercs, and hackers are a yearly problem that effect all players while this "exploit" is for a week and only helps accounts grow, if the player still sucks at the game the rewards dont mean much imo
I know it is practically a tradition for people on the internet to make up definitions for terms, and I've heard all sorts of interesting ones for what people think "an exploit" is (they run the gamut from hilarious to sad) but an exploit, in the context of online games, is when someone takes advantage of an unintended opportunity to gain an unacceptable advantage. You need two things for conduct to be considered an exploit as the term is normally used. You need an unintended opportunity, and you need an unacceptable advantage.
The units added to the early game Acts were very obviously intended to allow new players (or existing players rolling new accounts) to improve and accelerate their early game experience. They were obviously not intended for people to farm into their existing accounts via gifting. Anyone who says this isn't obvious is intellectually dishonest or intellectually challenged.
But just because it isn't intended, doesn't make it an exploit. Lots of things are unintended, but just represent creativity on the part of the players. Hoarding crystals to bank potions, for example, is completely unintended, but the devs don't see this as an unacceptable advantage, so this is not an exploit. People have played alts for years and then gifted from those alts to their main accounts for years, and this is also not considered an unacceptable advantage and thus not an exploit.
But at some point, the total advantage you can get by rolling a huge amount of alts makes the advantage gained in this way unacceptable, and at that point you have an exploit.
Some people are saying that since they are playing the game "as intended" this cannot be an exploit. They are wrong. An exploit has nothing to do with "playing the game as intended." I'm just tapping on the screen, and since the game intends me to tap the screen, by definition no amount of tapping can be an exploit, according to this notion. Exploits are not about what you do, but about which opportunities you take advantage of. Earning the units is intended. Spending them on someone else is not intended.
Other people are saying that if this is only an exploit if the gifting is huge, then all huge gifting is an exploit. Again: wrong. People spending thousands of dollars on alts, and then gifting back to themselves is not an exploit, because spending thousands of dollars on units is not an unintended acquisition of units. The advantage you get from spending all that money is not unintentional, so this does not meet the definition of an exploit. Similarly, if someone grinds units normally in an alt account and gifts to themselves, that is also not unintended, even if people do it on large scales. Units normally cost a certain amount of money or a certain amount of time to earn, and the exception to that are the huge amounts of units in the early Acts.
I'm sure this will draw a lot of dislikes, which is fine. And if people want to make up their own definition of what an exploit is and dance around it, that's also cool. But Kabam, like all online game operators, don't define "exploit" arbitrarily. They define it specifically in terms of what they have to prohibit in their games. They are going to use their definition, not yours, and they aren't going to honor yours when they decide which things to act upon and which not to. Don't act surprised when they seem to be ignoring all the made up definitions of what an exploit is.
Because I think the answer is significant either way.
Dr. Zola
But most importantly, talking about "blame" is completely missing the point. An exploit is conduct unacceptable to the operation of the game that must be curtailed. Asking who's fault it is is completely immaterial. If it is the players fault, it has to be curtailed. If it is the developers fault it has to be curtailed. The idea that if the developer is "at fault" then the players get to do whatever they want abrogates the developers responsibility to the game. If I'm a game developer and I make a mistake and as a result of that mistake an unacceptable amount of rewards flow into the game, then I will change the game to stop that flow and if the amount is high enough then I will reverse those rewards out of the game, because that's my job. The fact that the players "blame me" for the problem is perfectly fine, because as the developer it ultimately is my fault. It changes nothing about what my job requires me to do.
At no time would I ever say, oh well, it is my fault, so I guess the players get to keep everything. That's ludicrous. If I was a game developer and I had that attitude, I wouldn't be one for very long.
Active accounts is an important gaming metric, is it not?
Dr. Zola
I think having a valid email address to make a Kabam account would add more time and effort for those looking to "exploit" the new account unit farming to the extreme where it would be deemed an unfair advantage.
Embarrassingly, I now see their birthdays come up each year.
Individual metrics don't mean much out of context. Suppose I were to make a bot that just made accounts one after the other, and added say a million accounts to the game. And let's say I kept logging into them somehow so they are also "active" accounts. You could say hey, look at that, the game is adding tons more active accounts, that's great. But you could also say hey, how come the conversion rate (the percentage of players who spend on the game: that are "converted" into paying customers) dropped from 5% to 2%? What is going wrong? I might not be making things actually look better at all (and actually, you could probably figure out what was happening just by looking at the metrics and seeing one change radically and all the others staying the same).
In F2P gaming, "active accounts" is a secondary indicator of performance. It only means something in combination with other metrics that can combine to give a better picture of what's going on. And this doesn't even begin to cover the rabbit hole that is "what is an active player?"
Exploits are rarely associated with unintended actions. They are associated with unintended side effects.
Also, it is possible that they did consider this and were working on mitigation, but was going to remain silent on that mitigation until we were near the gifting event but Brian's video compelled them to respond.