**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.
Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.
Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.
Comments
YALL WHALES CAN CRY ME A RIVER LOOL
Suppose you acquire stolen credit card information. If you use this information to buy a bunch of stuff from Amazon and ship it to your house, you will eventually go to prison, because all the cops have to do is follow the packages to your house. So that's a no-no. Instead, you have to buy something untraceable. There are many ways to do that. Monetized video games are one such way.
If I take stolen credit card information and buy a ton of crystals for my own account, that's traceable, so that's still a no-no. Eventually the dude who owns that card will report the transactions as fraudulent. The credit card company will cancel those transactions, the app stores will see that as a charge back and notify the app vendor, in this case Kabam, and Kabam will at the very least hit me with a ton of contest credits, if not worse. But gifting creates an opportunity to buy stuff without buying them for my own account. Instead, I make a burner account and buy units in that account. Then I ask someone to trade me GCCs. They send to my account, and I send to them from the burner account. When the credit card fraud is detected, it is the burner account that is connected to it. I don't care if it is hit with contest credits, or even is banned.
If Kabam traces the gifts that the burner account sent, they are going to some third party who may have no idea this particular scam is being run. They might be innocent. And then again, they might not be: they may be a fully aware party to the whole thing. It would be extremely difficult to prove either way. So Kabam would have to decide whether to take action against this person or not, just for receiving gifts from a questionable account - and maybe for being an idiot. Meanwhile, the gifts *I* got were legitimately purchased by said idiot who could be just a mark in this scheme. Mine are perfectly fine, so I'm in the clear.
You can also do this with stolen or cloned SIM cards, because in many cases phones can make purchases under a phone contract account holder directly. In other words, having someone's SIM can in effect allow you to charge them for stuff just like having their credit card information. So if anyone has heard of SIM cards in connection with "fraudulent units" that's what was being referenced.
Pet peeve: there's no such thing as "fraudulent units" which is why I cannot use enough quotation marks surrounding that term. You can purchase units through fraud, but the units themselves are not fraudulent and there's no way to distinguish so-called "fraudulent units" from any other units. Kabam cannot "detect" "fraudulent units." Kabam, and all other app store developers, are completely insulated from the details of all transactions. Neither Apple nor Google ever tell app developers how an in-app purchase is made, or even by whom it is made. Kabam doesn't know if the units my account just bought were bought by credit card or gift card, whether they were bought by me or some shady dude in Australia, none of that. As far as Kabam is concerned, the units were bought by Apple or Google, for someone else, and the only thing they know is which game account should get the stuff. This is what makes things like the gifting event which encourage fraud so problematic. Kabam can encourage fraud (unintentionally) by creating an environment where fraud can thrive, but they cannot police it because the app stores will never give them the information necessary to do so.
As to "unit loading." You can't take stolen credit card info and load units into your own account. Well, you can, but that's dumb, because that's traceable. No one does this (for long). Instead, they take things like stolen gift cards or use weird regional arbitrage transactions and then offer to buy units for other people, using these resources. They ask for your login credentials, log into your account, and buy units for you, while charging you for those units. This is a (another) form of money laundering. Again, if anyone gets caught, it is the idiots buying the units from the questionable third party. But as this requires account sharing, it is much more difficult for the people buying these units to disavow knowing the transaction is wrong. Players buying units in this way aren't banned for buying "fraudulent units," they are simply banned for account sharing so Kabam doesn't have to prove knowledge of questionable transactions. Gifting is safer, because it adds an additional layer of presumptive anonymity to the transaction, and makes it harder for participants to be punished.
99% of the playerbase doesn't whale out on GGCs. 99% of the playerbase doesn't grind alt farms for gifting. This change is not going to hurt 99% of the players. In fact, this is unlikely to hurt the whales, who will almost certainly have a new way to spend money on the game post-gifting. This is unlikely to hurt the conventional arena grinders who will still be able to use their large unit stashes to buy themselves some goodies at the end of the year.
This hurts the very very tiny percentage of players who did substantial alt-farming, the small number of players who were using the gifting event for things like contest prizes, and a sizeable bunch of people exploiting the event for profit.
This whole idea of the end of the gifting event hurting 99% of the player population is ludicrous. 99% of the players weren't doing anything that the shift from gifting to whatever else comes along is going to negatively impact. I would be surprised if even 0.5% of the players was negatively affected (that we didn't want negatively affected).
You would think said whale would place highly in the rank rewards due to opening so many GGCs, but when the rankings came out, his name was nowhere to be found. Not top 30, not even top 100. It was not hard to deduce how this “whale” was able to splurge on GGCs without placing in ranked rewards, unless this well-known whale had an even bigger whale gifting him hundreds of thousands of GGCs for free. Which I highly doubt.
These will be the whales who may be crying a river as they can’t exploit the Gifting Event, in the manner described above, anymore.
Someone who gets a gigaton of GGCs but doesn't show up on the leaderboards is probably not really a whale (thus the quotation marks), they are almost certainly doing something very questionable in some way. If they get a ton of GGCs, they presumably bought a ton to trade with other players. They should show up on the leaderboards. A player that receives that many GGCs but doesn't buy any is either the most beloved player in the game or someone doing something very shady.
Some thoughts:
So, the 'spirit' of a gifting event during the holiday season is to give gifts. I get that. It makes sense. And giving gifts to oneself may sound strange, but is very common practise. Now that the event is changing and no longer involves gifting during a time of giving, it seems to me that the event should also not involve expenditure. My thinking on this is that the holiday season is not a time when I want or am able to spend money on this game. It's possibly the worst time for a 'non-gifting' event to occur. My thoughts and feelings are that the gifting event will transform into a spending event, and that this is poor practise. I know this is an assumption I have made, but based on what I have seen in the past I feel it's valid/possible/likely.
I really look forward to the various shards the event offered, and the possibly of another trophy champ. 4 star Thanos was really just a tease.
I'm hoping that the event isn't becoming a cash grab at a time when many people do not have cash to be grabbed.
I await further communication.
-TrapKill
Also as other people have said.. ITS A GIFTING EVENT, NOT A TRADING ONE. A whale can use an alt to gift himself and it wouldnt show on the scoreboard. Legitimate transactions or not, if they have the money they could do it...
Example:
Main Account Name: Whale
2nd Account: NotWhale
Whale is not gonna go around his alliance asking.. hey someone wanna trade 500 dollars worth of ggc...so what does he do... Load the NotWhale and send to Whale...
Now are all those transactions legitimate?.. We dont know...it could be GGC black market.. could be legit transactions...
Now with the new crystals.. he will just buy them for himself...
There is a huge difference between regulating activities within an environment, and obliterating that environment. The difference is the core principle of limited confining response. If the problem is that one particular event in the game is a) encouraging fraudulent activity, b) facilitating TOS-violating material exchanges, c) generating pervasive negative sentiment, d) being used by players to take advantage of other players, and e) is no longer being used for its originally intended purposes, then the obvious logical response is to first see if those problems are reparable, and if they are not to discontinue and replace this event with something that has a higher ratio of positive impact. Which is exactly what has been done.
Shutting down the entire game, then the entire games industry, then the world wide financial industry, then Earth, to resolve these problems would be taking somewhat larger actions than necessary, so I don't advocate that. And similarly, ending all governments because fraud exists in governments, ending all sports leagues because there is an element of cheating in those sports, or closing all private businesses because there exists fraud in some business activities would be equally ludicrous.
I don't know why some people equate logic with "if you want to go see the beach, might as well drive into the ocean." That's like saying if two plus two equals four, it probably equals all the other numbers as well, so two plus two also equals twelve.
The first one is going away, and probably being replaced with something where players will be allowed to buy things for themselves rather than gift them to others. The second part is almost certainly not going away either, because that wasn't explicitly tied to the notion of gifting. Gifting just happened to be the mechanism used for the competition. In the absence of gifting, I find it highly unlikely that Kabam will not replace gifting with some other mechanism to keep this element around, because like it or not in an F2P monetized game where 95% of the players are playing for free, this game survives or dies on its ability to get the people who do have money to be willing to part with large amounts of it to subsidize the rest of the players, pay the IP rights holder, and make a sufficient profit for the operating business that they don't decide those efforts would be best spent elsewhere.
People need to understand when they call things "cash grabs" those cash grabs are necessary because almost everyone playing the game is a freeloader. This is what everyone wants. The spenders want to spend and they want to get something for their money. The free to play players want to play for free. For all the talk about how monetization is hurting the games industry, 99% of all gamers in the world have voted with their wallets and their play time, and gravitated towards games they get to play for free and must therefore be supported by other people's spending, or towards game they get to spend on to get ahead.
If everyone refused to play for free and always paid their fair share, and conversely refused to play games where people who paid a lot more than that gained unfair advantages, the F2P model would die out tomorrow. But that won't happen, because talk is cheap. Every whale supports this model, and every gamer willing to play a game for free supports this model as well. We all are getting what we asked for.
On average, it took 850 GGCs for one T6B.
This player would have to have opened over 2.5 million units worth of crystals or $80,000+.
Not completely outside the realm of possibility but a huge raised eyebrow. People have repeatedly overvalued GGC drops when arguing against gifting.