People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units to put towards gifting? F2P players get the shaft.
I think it’s odd that they added the November requirement AND level 40, which seems excessive. More than anything, I’d be interested in seeing the data that led them to determine that this is what makes sense.
Until then, I’m convinced that it actually has to do with the BG video because that’s the simplest explanation I can think of.
I actually think it’s a pro player move that one. Think about it, if Kabam wanted to shut out all alt gifting based on Brian’s video, easy, make the cut off before the video dropped on the 15th. Instead, they chose to make it 5 days after, when people who wanted to grind alts inspired by BGs vid will have already made a few accounts. But, it stops mass exploiters who were going to make 1 account a day, grind it then move onto the next.
However, since it wouldn’t stop any exploiters who made all their accounts the day of Brian’s videos, and was planning on going through each of them one by one. So that’s why the level 40 is there.
The level 40 is still enough to stop mass exploiters, while allowing your average player to grind up to it before gifting. It’s not the perfect solution, as it still does mess with people like @Liss_Bliss_ who have alts from last year. But I’ve still not seen anyone suggest an alternative that doesn’t screw someone else over, but still would stop exploiters. At the moment, all complaints have been “I’m affected, stop it affecting me” and the suggestion to stop it affected them have been change the account date creation, or more numerously, reduce the level I need to grind to. Which would just make it easier for exploiters to get to
Except the restrictions benefit the cheaters above anyone else.
For example, I have 10 alts, all completed Act 3, all around 28-32 level range. All of these accounts are 11-18 months old. I spent about 6 hours exp grinding a level 28 account. It’s at level 33 now. So I’d loosely guess 30-40 will take about 18 hours of grinding.
Consider it takes 12 hours to get to level 30 and through Act 4. We’re looking at around 30+ hours of grinding for about 10 GGC. Which will net someone about 25% of a 6-star and about 60% of a 5-star. Completely not worth it… for a real person.
However, the cheaters mass create accounts. Once you get level 5, you get a 30% beginner exp boost. Then you get 20% exp boost from the free sigil. So these shell accounts will gain exp faster. And all they have to do is bot (or even just a macro of some sort with autofight/restart). Even outside cheaters, those with new accounts created after BGs videos will be in a better spot to grind exp than older accounts that slowly played over the course of months or years.
So what has this requirement done? It completely shut down legitimate grinding and only marginally slowed down cheaters. It slowed down, but still benefits those the opportunistic players that created accounts because of the changes.
With all the data Kabam has, this requirement was lazy and ill-conceived. Once again, it ignores botting.
That would be true if this was the only method to catch bot farmers, which it isn’t. @DNA3000 knows more about it than I do, but (reasonably) doesn’t want to go into specifics, which would enable those bot farmers to skirt methods of detection.
In my view, this method largely targets mass exploiters who would do it by hand to dissuade them from doing it over and over again. Which it is successful in doing.
It doesn’t change that this restriction makes the time effort a poor investment for real people but does not affect bots.
I’m sure Kabam has programmatic code to detect bots/apps; every game does. But that code base is constantly battling the coders of bots attempting to predict and circumvent those detections.
The fact of the matter is bots still exist. And bots have no problem investing more time to meet a requirement where a human won’t.
There had to be a better solution than what we got.
What we got eliminated legitimate grinding and merely slowed down cheaters.
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
People spending the money they earned is about as fair as it gets.
I am honestly curious to see how many of the top alliances or top solo rank reward holders are banned for cheating despite these stringent requirements. Also curious to see how much less prevalent cheating/fraud is with these gifting requirements. I don’t think we will ever get to see the data let alone compare it with previous years. But if it makes some summoners feel good that legit alt accounts may not be able to gift their mains, I guess it’s all good.
I think it’s odd that they added the November requirement AND level 40, which seems excessive. More than anything, I’d be interested in seeing the data that led them to determine that this is what makes sense.
Until then, I’m convinced that it actually has to do with the BG video because that’s the simplest explanation I can think of.
I actually think it’s a pro player move that one. Think about it, if Kabam wanted to shut out all alt gifting based on Brian’s video, easy, make the cut off before the video dropped on the 15th. Instead, they chose to make it 5 days after, when people who wanted to grind alts inspired by BGs vid will have already made a few accounts. But, it stops mass exploiters who were going to make 1 account a day, grind it then move onto the next.
However, since it wouldn’t stop any exploiters who made all their accounts the day of Brian’s videos, and was planning on going through each of them one by one. So that’s why the level 40 is there.
The level 40 is still enough to stop mass exploiters, while allowing your average player to grind up to it before gifting. It’s not the perfect solution, as it still does mess with people like @Liss_Bliss_ who have alts from last year. But I’ve still not seen anyone suggest an alternative that doesn’t screw someone else over, but still would stop exploiters. At the moment, all complaints have been “I’m affected, stop it affecting me” and the suggestion to stop it affected them have been change the account date creation, or more numerously, reduce the level I need to grind to. Which would just make it easier for exploiters to get to
Except the restrictions benefit the cheaters above anyone else.
For example, I have 10 alts, all completed Act 3, all around 28-32 level range. All of these accounts are 11-18 months old. I spent about 6 hours exp grinding a level 28 account. It’s at level 33 now. So I’d loosely guess 30-40 will take about 18 hours of grinding.
Consider it takes 12 hours to get to level 30 and through Act 4. We’re looking at around 30+ hours of grinding for about 10 GGC. Which will net someone about 25% of a 6-star and about 60% of a 5-star. Completely not worth it… for a real person.
However, the cheaters mass create accounts. Once you get level 5, you get a 30% beginner exp boost. Then you get 20% exp boost from the free sigil. So these shell accounts will gain exp faster. And all they have to do is bot (or even just a macro of some sort with autofight/restart). Even outside cheaters, those with new accounts created after BGs videos will be in a better spot to grind exp than older accounts that slowly played over the course of months or years.
So what has this requirement done? It completely shut down legitimate grinding and only marginally slowed down cheaters. It slowed down, but still benefits those the opportunistic players that created accounts because of the changes.
With all the data Kabam has, this requirement was lazy and ill-conceived. Once again, it ignores botting.
That would be true if this was the only method to catch bot farmers, which it isn’t. @DNA3000 knows more about it than I do, but (reasonably) doesn’t want to go into specifics, which would enable those bot farmers to skirt methods of detection.
In my view, this method largely targets mass exploiters who would do it by hand to dissuade them from doing it over and over again. Which it is successful in doing.
It doesn’t change that this restriction makes the time effort a poor investment for real people but does not affect bots.
I’m sure Kabam has programmatic code to detect bots/apps; every game does. But that code base is constantly battling the coders of bots attempting to predict and circumvent those detections.
The fact of the matter is bots still exist. And bots have no problem investing more time to meet a requirement where a human won’t.
There had to be a better solution than what we got.
What we got eliminated legitimate grinding and merely slowed down cheaters.
You don't just have one size fits all solution for botters/exploiters or any other ToS breaking. In some places you will put requirements, in others you will have systems to check for botters, and kabam has a couple weeks at the end of gifting to check that all is in order. You are asking them to take away one of the security measures to prevent exploiters.
You say there had to be a better solution, so what's yours? How would you prevent mass exploitation of these easily accessible units?
Let's say you're in charge of fixing this for Kabam, you've been asked to think up some requirements to stop any player to be able to get lots of units for free, very easily.
Here's the problem, it is easy to get 2 units in 6 hours - what requirements will you put in place to stop that being easily exploitable? And to make something clear, Kabam have set out that they want something to be in place to stop this exploitation, so "no requirements" isn't a good enough answer.
Last year, one could grind about 8 hours and be able to send about 7 GGCs.
This year, one needs at least 30 hours of grinding to gift roughly 10 GGC. What does 10 GGC get? On average, 7k 5-star shards, 2k 6-star shards, 500k gold, a small amount of iso, about 10 5-star sig stones. And people are upset about others potentially getting that after something more reasonable in the 12-16 hour grind range?
8 hours of time for 7 GGC is worth it for some. The new requirements are absolutely not.
This is all because of a change Kabam made in November. People have been grinding on alts for 10 months and now Kabam, once again, changes the goal post.
Sure the old requirements were too low. True level 15s had no business gifting. That is moot because that’s the way it was and has been. One can have a reasonable expectation that things don’t change this dramatically; Kabam explicitly addressed alts in the past and gave the green light.
Many people chose to grind alts over arena. They did so for 10 months. Most people stop grinding an account after completing Act 3. Those accounts, and the 8-10 hours spent on them are completely worthless now. And these players could have spent that time on Arena grinding instead. Think these people are going to stick around after this slap with all the other issues the game has now?
This requirement benefits NEW accounts moreso than old accounts. The people that created a bunch of accounts and stopped them at level 5 will now be able to level up in 20 min to activate the Newbie Exp Boost plus the Free Sigil exp boost at will. They will achieve level 40 faster than an old account sitting at level 25 without those bonuses.
If Kabam didn’t like alts gifting, then fine. Announce after results last year that alts will be banned next year. Don’t make an official post saying alts are okay, go 10 months, then make a massive exploitable change, then heavily nerf players’ progress. Once again, there is a right way to make a change and a wrong way. This is a wrong way.
It seems most people are happy with the requirements. And I’d wager most of these people haven’t sunk hours into alts because alts are far more entertaining than Arena. Time that is now wasted.
Kabam will surely dump time consuming content on us (see also last years Arena). They do every year for the holidays (thanks Kabam). Spending 20 hours on old alts to be able to get 10 GGCs is not something reasonable people want to do during this time of year.
So while most of you celebrate the end of people “exploiting” alt gifting, many others have just had the rug pulled out from under their 10 months of effort. Legitimate players, legitimately grinding hours upon hours. Meanwhile, arena bots are still ignored by Kabam. But not this, this had to be squashed, I guess.
10months making alts loooool and you cant pass on the requirement? Dumb btch thats imposible you dipstick twat
Regardless of what view you take on this matter, unnecessary insults like this are unhelpful to both the conversation and anyone's ability to take you seriously.
But if it makes some summoners feel good that legit alt accounts may not be able to gift their mains, I guess it’s all good.
Say there's a scenario where someone has had an alt for years and won't be able to get to level 40. If someone unironically feels good that this person can't gift their main, then that's just callous. Same with new players that could be unable to get to level 40.
Personally, I think it is definitely a huge shame those sorts of players won't be able to gift. But in my view, and clearly in kabam's otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, it's just being caught in the net thrown in to catch real, game damaging exploitation.
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
But, what does that actually do for the game? People opening their wallets are why anyone else gets to FTP anything at all. And units are a pretty amazingly bad return on value. We should appreciate that anyone is willing to subsidize the fun of others, and learn to live with whatever advantage that gives them. And, to be clear, spenders that opened accounts to buy the monthly unit packs and that first triple unit pack are just as screwed by this.
I think it’s odd that they added the November requirement AND level 40, which seems excessive. More than anything, I’d be interested in seeing the data that led them to determine that this is what makes sense.
Until then, I’m convinced that it actually has to do with the BG video because that’s the simplest explanation I can think of.
I actually think it’s a pro player move that one. Think about it, if Kabam wanted to shut out all alt gifting based on Brian’s video, easy, make the cut off before the video dropped on the 15th. Instead, they chose to make it 5 days after, when people who wanted to grind alts inspired by BGs vid will have already made a few accounts. But, it stops mass exploiters who were going to make 1 account a day, grind it then move onto the next.
However, since it wouldn’t stop any exploiters who made all their accounts the day of Brian’s videos, and was planning on going through each of them one by one. So that’s why the level 40 is there.
The level 40 is still enough to stop mass exploiters, while allowing your average player to grind up to it before gifting. It’s not the perfect solution, as it still does mess with people like @Liss_Bliss_ who have alts from last year. But I’ve still not seen anyone suggest an alternative that doesn’t screw someone else over, but still would stop exploiters. At the moment, all complaints have been “I’m affected, stop it affecting me” and the suggestion to stop it affected them have been change the account date creation, or more numerously, reduce the level I need to grind to. Which would just make it easier for exploiters to get to
Except the restrictions benefit the cheaters above anyone else.
For example, I have 10 alts, all completed Act 3, all around 28-32 level range. All of these accounts are 11-18 months old. I spent about 6 hours exp grinding a level 28 account. It’s at level 33 now. So I’d loosely guess 30-40 will take about 18 hours of grinding.
Consider it takes 12 hours to get to level 30 and through Act 4. We’re looking at around 30+ hours of grinding for about 10 GGC. Which will net someone about 25% of a 6-star and about 60% of a 5-star. Completely not worth it… for a real person.
However, the cheaters mass create accounts. Once you get level 5, you get a 30% beginner exp boost. Then you get 20% exp boost from the free sigil. So these shell accounts will gain exp faster. And all they have to do is bot (or even just a macro of some sort with autofight/restart). Even outside cheaters, those with new accounts created after BGs videos will be in a better spot to grind exp than older accounts that slowly played over the course of months or years.
So what has this requirement done? It completely shut down legitimate grinding and only marginally slowed down cheaters. It slowed down, but still benefits those the opportunistic players that created accounts because of the changes.
With all the data Kabam has, this requirement was lazy and ill-conceived. Once again, it ignores botting.
That would be true if this was the only method to catch bot farmers, which it isn’t. @DNA3000 knows more about it than I do, but (reasonably) doesn’t want to go into specifics, which would enable those bot farmers to skirt methods of detection.
In my view, this method largely targets mass exploiters who would do it by hand to dissuade them from doing it over and over again. Which it is successful in doing.
It doesn’t change that this restriction makes the time effort a poor investment for real people but does not affect bots.
I’m sure Kabam has programmatic code to detect bots/apps; every game does. But that code base is constantly battling the coders of bots attempting to predict and circumvent those detections.
The fact of the matter is bots still exist. And bots have no problem investing more time to meet a requirement where a human won’t.
There had to be a better solution than what we got.
What we got eliminated legitimate grinding and merely slowed down cheaters.
You don't just have one size fits all solution for botters/exploiters or any other ToS breaking. In some places you will put requirements, in others you will have systems to check for botters, and kabam has a couple weeks at the end of gifting to check that all is in order. You are asking them to take away one of the security measures to prevent exploiters.
You say there had to be a better solution, so what's yours? How would you prevent mass exploitation of these easily accessible units?
Let's say you're in charge of fixing this for Kabam, you've been asked to think up some requirements to stop any player to be able to get lots of units for free, very easily.
Here's the problem, it is easy to get 2 units in 6 hours - what requirements will you put in place to stop that being easily exploitable? And to make something clear, Kabam have set out that they want something to be in place to stop this exploitation, so "no requirements" isn't a good enough answer.
Not really a fair argument.
It isn’t my job to come up with solutions. I don’t know all the data points available. I don’t have detailed knowledge of methods to catch and punish cheaters. Any solution I, or anyone here, come up with will be based on incomplete information.
What players can do, is estimate how this affects their experience with the game. Including time spent and a reasonable effort vs reward.
If you want ideas. Sure. How about an account needs to spend 2000 units over the life of the account to be eligible? That negates the Act 1-3 speed run gains but still allows them to be eligible.
How about adding a receiving limit based on units spent. Cap at say 25 GGC and if account also gifts a specified number of GGC they unlock the next tier allowing them to receive up to say 50. And so on. Doesn’t affect whales and prevents an account getting 100s without doing anything.
The point is, slapping a 5x multiplier to the time required doesn’t actually fix anything. It also kicks the can to next year. Are we going to do this all over again next year when all these alts meet the requirements and are sitting on 300k units? With this solution we are.
I created two alt accounts shortly after Brian Grants video, 100% act 1 two and 3 to get about 2500 units in each, but still level 23. I decided to buy some cyber weekend deals with my units and got myself a 6 star doom on one🤣. If only it was my main. No way of getting to level 40 for me. Was too much effort lol
I think it’s odd that they added the November requirement AND level 40, which seems excessive. More than anything, I’d be interested in seeing the data that led them to determine that this is what makes sense.
Until then, I’m convinced that it actually has to do with the BG video because that’s the simplest explanation I can think of.
I actually think it’s a pro player move that one. Think about it, if Kabam wanted to shut out all alt gifting based on Brian’s video, easy, make the cut off before the video dropped on the 15th. Instead, they chose to make it 5 days after, when people who wanted to grind alts inspired by BGs vid will have already made a few accounts. But, it stops mass exploiters who were going to make 1 account a day, grind it then move onto the next.
However, since it wouldn’t stop any exploiters who made all their accounts the day of Brian’s videos, and was planning on going through each of them one by one. So that’s why the level 40 is there.
The level 40 is still enough to stop mass exploiters, while allowing your average player to grind up to it before gifting. It’s not the perfect solution, as it still does mess with people like @Liss_Bliss_ who have alts from last year. But I’ve still not seen anyone suggest an alternative that doesn’t screw someone else over, but still would stop exploiters. At the moment, all complaints have been “I’m affected, stop it affecting me” and the suggestion to stop it affected them have been change the account date creation, or more numerously, reduce the level I need to grind to. Which would just make it easier for exploiters to get to
Except the restrictions benefit the cheaters above anyone else.
For example, I have 10 alts, all completed Act 3, all around 28-32 level range. All of these accounts are 11-18 months old. I spent about 6 hours exp grinding a level 28 account. It’s at level 33 now. So I’d loosely guess 30-40 will take about 18 hours of grinding.
Consider it takes 12 hours to get to level 30 and through Act 4. We’re looking at around 30+ hours of grinding for about 10 GGC. Which will net someone about 25% of a 6-star and about 60% of a 5-star. Completely not worth it… for a real person.
However, the cheaters mass create accounts. Once you get level 5, you get a 30% beginner exp boost. Then you get 20% exp boost from the free sigil. So these shell accounts will gain exp faster. And all they have to do is bot (or even just a macro of some sort with autofight/restart). Even outside cheaters, those with new accounts created after BGs videos will be in a better spot to grind exp than older accounts that slowly played over the course of months or years.
So what has this requirement done? It completely shut down legitimate grinding and only marginally slowed down cheaters. It slowed down, but still benefits those the opportunistic players that created accounts because of the changes.
With all the data Kabam has, this requirement was lazy and ill-conceived. Once again, it ignores botting.
That would be true if this was the only method to catch bot farmers, which it isn’t. @DNA3000 knows more about it than I do, but (reasonably) doesn’t want to go into specifics, which would enable those bot farmers to skirt methods of detection.
In my view, this method largely targets mass exploiters who would do it by hand to dissuade them from doing it over and over again. Which it is successful in doing.
It doesn’t change that this restriction makes the time effort a poor investment for real people but does not affect bots.
I’m sure Kabam has programmatic code to detect bots/apps; every game does. But that code base is constantly battling the coders of bots attempting to predict and circumvent those detections.
The fact of the matter is bots still exist. And bots have no problem investing more time to meet a requirement where a human won’t.
There had to be a better solution than what we got.
What we got eliminated legitimate grinding and merely slowed down cheaters.
You don't just have one size fits all solution for botters/exploiters or any other ToS breaking. In some places you will put requirements, in others you will have systems to check for botters, and kabam has a couple weeks at the end of gifting to check that all is in order. You are asking them to take away one of the security measures to prevent exploiters.
You say there had to be a better solution, so what's yours? How would you prevent mass exploitation of these easily accessible units?
Let's say you're in charge of fixing this for Kabam, you've been asked to think up some requirements to stop any player to be able to get lots of units for free, very easily.
Here's the problem, it is easy to get 2 units in 6 hours - what requirements will you put in place to stop that being easily exploitable? And to make something clear, Kabam have set out that they want something to be in place to stop this exploitation, so "no requirements" isn't a good enough answer.
Not really a fair argument.
It isn’t my job to come up with solutions. I don’t know all the data points available. I don’t have detailed knowledge of methods to catch and punish cheaters. Any solution I, or anyone here, come up with will be based on incomplete information.
What players can do, is estimate how this affects their experience with the game. Including time spent and a reasonable effort vs reward.
If you want ideas. Sure. How about an account needs to spend 2000 units over the life of the account to be eligible? That negates the Act 1-3 speed run gains but still allows them to be eligible.
How about adding a receiving limit based on units spent. Cap at say 25 GGC and if account also gifts a specified number of GGC they unlock the next tier allowing them to receive up to say 50. And so on. Doesn’t affect whales and prevents an account getting 100s without doing anything.
The point is, slapping a 5x multiplier to the time required doesn’t actually fix anything. It also kicks the can to next year. Are we going to do this all over again next year when all these alts meet the requirements and are sitting on 300k units? With this solution we are.
No it’s not your job, but anyone complaining about this solution will likely be complaining because it affects them personally. So if we try a different solution, it’ll affect different people and then they will complain as well, and then there’s just a circle of different people being affected.
So I would expect anyone who is saying this is unfair would have a suggestion that doesn’t just shift who it affects to someone else. Which I do actually think you’ve done (first person to actually suggest something that’s not lower the level).
Now, an account needing to spend 2000 units would mean people who spend on alts throughout the year collecting daily unit offer would have to waste 2000 units worth of money. So that’s someone else screwed over.
But your idea on a cap of receiving intrigues me, I don’t want to just brush off any suggestion straight away so I’m gonna have a think about that and see if I think it would work. From my early thoughts on it:
Pros : it would affect someone who grinded copious amounts of alts, you would only be able to grind up 3 or 4 alts without grinding equally on your main.
It would allow people to have 3 or 4 alts as unit farming throughout the year that you buy unit cards for. Any more than that wouldn’t work though, which I feel is a necessary evil of this method.
Cons: it wouldn’t stop people selling these accounts for black market units. E.g grind 50 alts and sell them to 50 different people and gift to each of those accounts
It could affect content creators who subs want to gift, but as long as it’s not too low a limit it shouldn’t be too bad.
It could affect the member in your alliance that doesn’t want to spend but you all want to gift something to. Having the right limit would solve that.
Overall, I’m not sure if all of this would work better than the level 40. As at least the level 40 one does something to combat black market units by making the time investment less worth it for exploiters. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, a way to solve that issue, or maybe I’m missing something huge that blows this system apart.
But it does have potential, and if refined, I think it could be used next year. There’s almost no way a system like this could be thought up, tested and be ready for 3’weeks time.
But I agree with you on the point that this only solves anything for this year. Anyone who has an alt now would have all year to get to level 40 by next gifting event. So by then there will need to be a different system, maybe the one you suggested here.
It isn’t my job to come up with solutions. I don’t know all the data points available. I don’t have detailed knowledge of methods to catch and punish cheaters. Any solution I, or anyone here, come up with will be based on incomplete information.
What players can do, is estimate how this affects their experience with the game. Including time spent and a reasonable effort vs reward.
This is true. It is not the job of the players to find design solutions to problems. That's the job of the professionals. And to the extent that the solution Kabam is using has negative impacts on players, it is 100% fair game to point that out. So long as the feedback focuses on the impact on the player, which the player is in a position to understand and comment on, that's entirely fair.
It is when players venture into judging the design directly ("the devs must be lazy or incompetent to do that") or guestimating alternatives ("there must be an easier and better alternative") that they put themselves into a position of presuming expert knowledge or informed judgment, and then their assertions can be subject to a higher standard, which they might (and probably will) fail.
If you want ideas. Sure. How about an account needs to spend 2000 units over the life of the account to be eligible? That negates the Act 1-3 speed run gains but still allows them to be eligible.
This isn't a bad idea in principle, but as stated this also penalizes players who play normally. We assume that everyone would want to spend units immediately on the gifting event. But that's not true. A player playing an alt might want to save the units, and slowly grind up to 40 whereupon all those units would be usable next year (assuming the rules remain similar). If someone rolls a second account and actually wants to play it as a second account, they will eventually get to level 40, whether that's now or later. Forcing them to spend all their units, even if they otherwise wouldn't, would be a unit penalty on those accounts.
There is a modified version of this idea, where the player only has to spend enough units to a) reduce the *profit rate* for new accounts to be low enough to be acceptable, and b) be low enough that any "normal" player would likely spend them anyway. For example, most "normal" players are likely to spend at least some units on masteries. Dexterity, for example. If we limit the unit spend requirement to what would be required to add the Dexterity mastery, that might bring the net unit gain down to an acceptable level. I haven't thought about the numbers carefully, but you're not the first person to come up with this idea. But to be workable, the numbers have to be very carefully analyzed. It must be high enough to actually matter, but not so high that it overpenalizes alts with a unit tax. I don't at the moment know what that number is, and without a target, it is difficult to judge such a proposal.
How about adding a receiving limit based on units spent. Cap at say 25 GGC and if account also gifts a specified number of GGC they unlock the next tier allowing them to receive up to say 50. And so on. Doesn’t affect whales and prevents an account getting 100s without doing anything.
This does affect the whales. A whale might decide to spend a ton of money gifting to themself. You do that by buying tons of units on an alt and then gifting back to your main. Your limit would prevent that. As one of the purposes of the gifting event is a whale spending opportunity, this would negatively impact one of its core reasons for existing (increasing player engagement and expanding player interaction being two others).
The point is, slapping a 5x multiplier to the time required doesn’t actually fix anything. It also kicks the can to next year. Are we going to do this all over again next year when all these alts meet the requirements and are sitting on 300k units? With this solution we are.
Nobody's suggestions "fix" anything. You can't judge the developers choices on the basis of whether they fix the situation completely, then compare them unfavorably to alternatives that equally fail to fix anything. The changes being made attempt to mitigate the problematic situation, and they do that. I would prefer alternatives which in my opinion are better, but that's not the same thing as saying the changes do nothing. They clearly do something. They make it harder to create and use farming alts. If they didn't, no one would be here complaining.
And yes, we probably are kicking the can down the road. But it gives us a year to come up with a more refined solution. It gives me a year to advocate for alt-unit currency, which might be impractical to implement on short notice but might be more practical on longer time scales. Also, the early game is likely to be completely different in a year, because the low Act compression is likely not the end of early game acceleration. The whole idea of early game rewards and early game progress could be completely rethought by then.
I'm not a fan of deferring problems into the future, but sometimes it is the only way to deal with the problem in front of us.
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
Time to remind everyone how F2P microtransaction supported online games work.
In-game spenders get more stuff than non-spenders. They get to bypass gameplay and grind gates to get ahead of F2P players. In that sense they have a distinct advantage.
Outside the game economy spenders pay to play this game. F2P players get to play the exact same game for free. In that sense F2P players have a distinct advantage.
The principle behind F2P gaming is the spenders support the game financially so everyone else can play for free. In exchange they get advantages non-spenders get to encourage them to spend.
This is 100% fair, because the spenders are free to spend or not spend, and the free to play players are free to play or not play. If the spenders think the advantage they get is unfair, they can choose to not spend. If the free to play players think the advantage spenders get is unfair, they can go find a game that is supported by magical unicorns on rainbow treadmills.
To answer your question directly, what's the better deal: $100 for 3100 units or 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units? The answer is, whichever one you decide to do, that's the better deal for you. If you think $100 is the better deal, you should would spend the $100. If you don't spend the $100 and do spend the 20 hours, then by definition you've stated by your actions that 20 hours of game play is worth less to you than $100.
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
U tell me whats fair.. going to work to make 100 bucks that u can spend as disposable income or wasting your life aways for 20 hours in a game...
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
Time to remind everyone how F2P microtransaction supported online games work.
In-game spenders get more stuff than non-spenders. They get to bypass gameplay and grind gates to get ahead of F2P players. In that sense they have a distinct advantage.
Outside the game economy spenders pay to play this game. F2P players get to play the exact same game for free. In that sense F2P players have a distinct advantage.
The principle behind F2P gaming is the spenders support the game financially so everyone else can play for free. In exchange they get advantages non-spenders get to encourage them to spend.
This is 100% fair, because the spenders are free to spend or not spend, and the free to play players are free to play or not play. If the spenders think the advantage they get is unfair, they can choose to not spend. If the free to play players think the advantage spenders get is unfair, they can go find a game that is supported by magical unicorns on rainbow treadmills.
To answer your question directly, what's the better deal: $100 for 3100 units or 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units? The answer is, whichever one you decide to do, that's the better deal for you. If you think $100 is the better deal, you should would spend the $100. If you don't spend the $100 and do spend the 20 hours, then by definition you've stated by your actions that 20 hours of game play is worth less to you than $100.
The issue that you miss, and point of this thread, is that they have made it impossible for someone to go the F2P route we just outlined with these restrictions on levels and account creation. They have made this event a spend fest. Which, great for Kabam. They probably need it.
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
Time to remind everyone how F2P microtransaction supported online games work.
In-game spenders get more stuff than non-spenders. They get to bypass gameplay and grind gates to get ahead of F2P players. In that sense they have a distinct advantage.
Outside the game economy spenders pay to play this game. F2P players get to play the exact same game for free. In that sense F2P players have a distinct advantage.
The principle behind F2P gaming is the spenders support the game financially so everyone else can play for free. In exchange they get advantages non-spenders get to encourage them to spend.
This is 100% fair, because the spenders are free to spend or not spend, and the free to play players are free to play or not play. If the spenders think the advantage they get is unfair, they can choose to not spend. If the free to play players think the advantage spenders get is unfair, they can go find a game that is supported by magical unicorns on rainbow treadmills.
To answer your question directly, what's the better deal: $100 for 3100 units or 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units? The answer is, whichever one you decide to do, that's the better deal for you. If you think $100 is the better deal, you should would spend the $100. If you don't spend the $100 and do spend the 20 hours, then by definition you've stated by your actions that 20 hours of game play is worth less to you than $100.
The issue that you miss, and point of this thread, is that they have made it impossible for someone to go the F2P route we just outlined with these restrictions on levels and account creation. They have made this event a spend fest. Which, great for Kabam. They probably need it.
I don’t think you’ve used the word impossible correctly here.
People talking about what’s fair and what’s not fair… is it fair that whales can buy thousands and thousands of units? F2P players get the shaft.
Umm yeah.
You tell me what’s more fair. Opening the wallet to get the units immediately or creating a new account and putting in the mind numbing time to get the units? $100 for 3100 units or putting in 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units?
Time to remind everyone how F2P microtransaction supported online games work.
In-game spenders get more stuff than non-spenders. They get to bypass gameplay and grind gates to get ahead of F2P players. In that sense they have a distinct advantage.
Outside the game economy spenders pay to play this game. F2P players get to play the exact same game for free. In that sense F2P players have a distinct advantage.
The principle behind F2P gaming is the spenders support the game financially so everyone else can play for free. In exchange they get advantages non-spenders get to encourage them to spend.
This is 100% fair, because the spenders are free to spend or not spend, and the free to play players are free to play or not play. If the spenders think the advantage they get is unfair, they can choose to not spend. If the free to play players think the advantage spenders get is unfair, they can go find a game that is supported by magical unicorns on rainbow treadmills.
To answer your question directly, what's the better deal: $100 for 3100 units or 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units? The answer is, whichever one you decide to do, that's the better deal for you. If you think $100 is the better deal, you should would spend the $100. If you don't spend the $100 and do spend the 20 hours, then by definition you've stated by your actions that 20 hours of game play is worth less to you than $100.
The issue that you miss, and point of this thread, is that they have made it impossible for someone to go the F2P route we just outlined with these restrictions on levels and account creation. They have made this event a spend fest. Which, great for Kabam. They probably need it.
I don’t think you’ve used the word impossible correctly here.
Uhm… yeah it is impossible for anyone to create an account after the 20th to do this
Or a 3rd option: Who receives gifts, would need to have spent 5k of units in the event
There is a problem with this solution. How can you gift to someone when they can only receive after spending 5k of units in this event? Conversely how can you spend 5k units if there is no one to receive anything since they are searching for people to gift as well. That’s like the question of what came first-the chicken or the egg?
But if it makes some summoners feel good that legit alt accounts may not be able to gift their mains, I guess it’s all good.
But in my view, and clearly in kabam's otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, it's just being caught in the net thrown in to catch real, game damaging exploitation.
That brings us to the initial comment I wrote. I am curious to see how many people who were involved in real game damaging exploration were actually caught. And how does this compare to the previous years?
Comments
I’m sure Kabam has programmatic code to detect bots/apps; every game does. But that code base is constantly battling the coders of bots attempting to predict and circumvent those detections.
The fact of the matter is bots still exist. And bots have no problem investing more time to meet a requirement where a human won’t.
There had to be a better solution than what we got.
What we got eliminated legitimate grinding and merely slowed down cheaters.
I did the thing with alts gifting to main for years, constantly aware of the following
1) Gifting may not return
2) Kabam at any point could decide gifting to main accounts was disallowed and doing so would risk your account
3) The requirements to gift could change at any time
Anyone with alts planning to gift to main should actually be happy they're not worse, requirements are very doable.
You say there had to be a better solution, so what's yours? How would you prevent mass exploitation of these easily accessible units?
Let's say you're in charge of fixing this for Kabam, you've been asked to think up some requirements to stop any player to be able to get lots of units for free, very easily.
Here's the problem, it is easy to get 2 units in 6 hours - what requirements will you put in place to stop that being easily exploitable? And to make something clear, Kabam have set out that they want something to be in place to stop this exploitation, so "no requirements" isn't a good enough answer.
Personally, I think it is definitely a huge shame those sorts of players won't be able to gift. But in my view, and clearly in kabam's otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, it's just being caught in the net thrown in to catch real, game damaging exploitation.
It isn’t my job to come up with solutions. I don’t know all the data points available. I don’t have detailed knowledge of methods to catch and punish cheaters. Any solution I, or anyone here, come up with will be based on incomplete information.
What players can do, is estimate how this affects their experience with the game. Including time spent and a reasonable effort vs reward.
If you want ideas. Sure. How about an account needs to spend 2000 units over the life of the account to be eligible? That negates the Act 1-3 speed run gains but still allows them to be eligible.
How about adding a receiving limit based on units spent. Cap at say 25 GGC and if account also gifts a specified number of GGC they unlock the next tier allowing them to receive up to say 50. And so on. Doesn’t affect whales and prevents an account getting 100s without doing anything.
The point is, slapping a 5x multiplier to the time required doesn’t actually fix anything. It also kicks the can to next year. Are we going to do this all over again next year when all these alts meet the requirements and are sitting on 300k units? With this solution we are.
So I would expect anyone who is saying this is unfair would have a suggestion that doesn’t just shift who it affects to someone else. Which I do actually think you’ve done (first person to actually suggest something that’s not lower the level).
Now, an account needing to spend 2000 units would mean people who spend on alts throughout the year collecting daily unit offer would have to waste 2000 units worth of money. So that’s someone else screwed over.
But your idea on a cap of receiving intrigues me, I don’t want to just brush off any suggestion straight away so I’m gonna have a think about that and see if I think it would work. From my early thoughts on it:
Pros : it would affect someone who grinded copious amounts of alts, you would only be able to grind up 3 or 4 alts without grinding equally on your main.
It would allow people to have 3 or 4 alts as unit farming throughout the year that you buy unit cards for. Any more than that wouldn’t work though, which I feel is a necessary evil of this method.
Cons: it wouldn’t stop people selling these accounts for black market units. E.g grind 50 alts and sell them to 50 different people and gift to each of those accounts
It could affect content creators who subs want to gift, but as long as it’s not too low a limit it shouldn’t be too bad.
It could affect the member in your alliance that doesn’t want to spend but you all want to gift something to. Having the right limit would solve that.
Overall, I’m not sure if all of this would work better than the level 40. As at least the level 40 one does something to combat black market units by making the time investment less worth it for exploiters. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, a way to solve that issue, or maybe I’m missing something huge that blows this system apart.
But it does have potential, and if refined, I think it could be used next year. There’s almost no way a system like this could be thought up, tested and be ready for 3’weeks time.
But I agree with you on the point that this only solves anything for this year. Anyone who has an alt now would have all year to get to level 40 by next gifting event. So by then there will need to be a different system, maybe the one you suggested here.
It is when players venture into judging the design directly ("the devs must be lazy or incompetent to do that") or guestimating alternatives ("there must be an easier and better alternative") that they put themselves into a position of presuming expert knowledge or informed judgment, and then their assertions can be subject to a higher standard, which they might (and probably will) fail.
As to your suggestions: This isn't a bad idea in principle, but as stated this also penalizes players who play normally. We assume that everyone would want to spend units immediately on the gifting event. But that's not true. A player playing an alt might want to save the units, and slowly grind up to 40 whereupon all those units would be usable next year (assuming the rules remain similar). If someone rolls a second account and actually wants to play it as a second account, they will eventually get to level 40, whether that's now or later. Forcing them to spend all their units, even if they otherwise wouldn't, would be a unit penalty on those accounts.
There is a modified version of this idea, where the player only has to spend enough units to a) reduce the *profit rate* for new accounts to be low enough to be acceptable, and b) be low enough that any "normal" player would likely spend them anyway. For example, most "normal" players are likely to spend at least some units on masteries. Dexterity, for example. If we limit the unit spend requirement to what would be required to add the Dexterity mastery, that might bring the net unit gain down to an acceptable level. I haven't thought about the numbers carefully, but you're not the first person to come up with this idea. But to be workable, the numbers have to be very carefully analyzed. It must be high enough to actually matter, but not so high that it overpenalizes alts with a unit tax. I don't at the moment know what that number is, and without a target, it is difficult to judge such a proposal.
2000 is way too high though.
This does affect the whales. A whale might decide to spend a ton of money gifting to themself. You do that by buying tons of units on an alt and then gifting back to your main. Your limit would prevent that. As one of the purposes of the gifting event is a whale spending opportunity, this would negatively impact one of its core reasons for existing (increasing player engagement and expanding player interaction being two others).
Nobody's suggestions "fix" anything. You can't judge the developers choices on the basis of whether they fix the situation completely, then compare them unfavorably to alternatives that equally fail to fix anything. The changes being made attempt to mitigate the problematic situation, and they do that. I would prefer alternatives which in my opinion are better, but that's not the same thing as saying the changes do nothing. They clearly do something. They make it harder to create and use farming alts. If they didn't, no one would be here complaining.
And yes, we probably are kicking the can down the road. But it gives us a year to come up with a more refined solution. It gives me a year to advocate for alt-unit currency, which might be impractical to implement on short notice but might be more practical on longer time scales. Also, the early game is likely to be completely different in a year, because the low Act compression is likely not the end of early game acceleration. The whole idea of early game rewards and early game progress could be completely rethought by then.
I'm not a fan of deferring problems into the future, but sometimes it is the only way to deal with the problem in front of us.
In-game spenders get more stuff than non-spenders. They get to bypass gameplay and grind gates to get ahead of F2P players. In that sense they have a distinct advantage.
Outside the game economy spenders pay to play this game. F2P players get to play the exact same game for free. In that sense F2P players have a distinct advantage.
The principle behind F2P gaming is the spenders support the game financially so everyone else can play for free. In exchange they get advantages non-spenders get to encourage them to spend.
This is 100% fair, because the spenders are free to spend or not spend, and the free to play players are free to play or not play. If the spenders think the advantage they get is unfair, they can choose to not spend. If the free to play players think the advantage spenders get is unfair, they can go find a game that is supported by magical unicorns on rainbow treadmills.
To answer your question directly, what's the better deal: $100 for 3100 units or 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units? The answer is, whichever one you decide to do, that's the better deal for you. If you think $100 is the better deal, you
shouldwould spend the $100. If you don't spend the $100 and do spend the 20 hours, then by definition you've stated by your actions that 20 hours of game play is worth less to you than $100.1-) Gifts could only be exchanged between alliance members, with a minimum time of 2 months.
2-) Could exchange gifts with friends, as long as they have at least 1 year of friendship
Or a 3rd option: Who receives gifts, would need to have spent 5k of units in the event