Lol at the alt farmers and ggc addicts hitting the forums in outrage. It is a good thing this toxic event has been removed/changed. The worst time of the year. Just remove it totally and it wont be missed.
100% agree , every year bring more shenanigans ... 😎
And btw how does this stop the real scammers, The unit loaders?
If by that you mean how does this stop people from committing fraud outside of the game and then use fraudulently acquired cash or gift cards to buy units in the game, it does not do that because that's impossible. MCOC cannot stop crime: it isn't Batman, and has no rights to DC characters. Ending gifting only prevents such people from attempting to use MCOC as a money laundering resource, taking dirty money and using in-game gifting to launder that money into clean cash acquired from idiots.
Whether you steal some grandma's SIM card or stick up a 7-11, we can't stop you. But we can stop you from using your stolen resources to cash out by selling those things to MCOC players. That's the limit of what Kabam can police and prevent, and preventing gifting does that.
But my point is it doesn’t do that at all. The biggest fraud I’ve seen is unit loading. Which would be no different with or without gifting.
Then you just haven't been looking in the right places. Since this will now be impossible, I will lay out the scheme in detail, as this can no longer be used as a recipe for others. Note that I don't claim special knowledge of how this works: this is actually common knowledge among those that are generally aware of such things, and MCOC is not the only place this happens.
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.
You know its the piss poor players who don't spend shiz or grind out units all year for this event who think "this is a great idea'.
And not sure how Kasham combating that 3% (which is massively inflated I would say the cheaters are more like 1% of player base) supercedes the other 99% of us?
Poor show Kablam. Poor show
I spend, I grind, and I've been saying for a while I'm surprised gifting has lasted this long.
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).
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
Once again.. WHALES WILL STILL BUY THE NEW CRYSTALS THAT CAN'T BE TRADED.. It won't change anything for them
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
Once again.. WHALES WILL STILL BUY THE NEW CRYSTALS THAT CAN'T BE TRADED.. It won't change anything for them
What Addyos is saying is there are people who acquired a ton of GGCs not by being whales, actual people spending tons of their actual money on GGCs. *Those* people are going to be fine, as they will just shift from trading tons of crystals to just straight up buying them. True whales will if anything come out ahead, because they no longer have to deal with the extra hassle of finding partners. He's referring to "whales" that were getting whale-tier stuff but apparently not spending any money or units.
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.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
Once again.. WHALES WILL STILL BUY THE NEW CRYSTALS THAT CAN'T BE TRADED.. It won't change anything for them
What Addyos is saying is there are people who acquired a ton of GGCs not by being whales, actual people spending tons of their actual money on GGCs. *Those* people are going to be fine, as they will just shift from trading tons of crystals to just straight up buying them. True whales will if anything come out ahead, because they no longer have to deal with the extra hassle of finding partners. He's referring to "whales" that were getting whale-tier stuff but apparently not spending any money or units.
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.
And Kabam knew what they did and did nothing. Doesn't make any sense.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
A whale can create an alt account to gift himself like any other player, he won’t be reciprocating the gifts so will not be showing up on the leaderboard himself, his alt will; he could have multiple alts to boost those accounts for numerous reasons as well. Or yes he could buy third party ggcs but the leaderboard will not tell you one way or the other.
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.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
Once again.. WHALES WILL STILL BUY THE NEW CRYSTALS THAT CAN'T BE TRADED.. It won't change anything for them
What Addyos is saying is there are people who acquired a ton of GGCs not by being whales, actual people spending tons of their actual money on GGCs. *Those* people are going to be fine, as they will just shift from trading tons of crystals to just straight up buying them. True whales will if anything come out ahead, because they no longer have to deal with the extra hassle of finding partners. He's referring to "whales" that were getting whale-tier stuff but apparently not spending any money or units.
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.
Yes i got that part.. but lets say they spent 1000 dollars thru illegimate ggc... They will still spend 1000 dollars in this crystals.. it might not be the same ammount of crystals, but it will still be a lot... 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...
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
It was always a spending event for massive spenders anyways. They would literally spend 10k on the event every year. 10k dollars. Not units.
Or does that 3% fraud that needs to be stomped out supersede all of the rest of us?
In this case, yes they do.
What we are allowed to do in a common shared environment is limited by what the worst of us attempts to do. They are the ones that make continuing to allow us that latitude to be too costly to continue, and they set the example for the slightly less unscrupulous to follow. The 3% that does the horrible and gets away with it encourages the next 3% that were not willing to follow suit to believe it is okay to go along with it, and now you have 6% doing horribly things setting the example for the next 10% of slightly less savory players to figure why not.
You then have the majority of players wondering why bother when every year more and more people aren't playing by the same rules, and an increasing number of players believing what they are doing is fully endorsed by the game operators and they are untouchable. Which, as they say,
Honest question.. using your logic.. should we end all governments... close all sports leagues... close all private business?
I cannot think of any possible way to use my logic to reach that conclusion. If I said hey, people are conducting fraudulent activities in the game let's shut down the entire game then yes, using that logic, the natural conclusion would be that I was advocating shutting down anything that *contained* the possibility for fraud.
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.
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
Keep in mind there were two components to the gifting event. The first was gifting itself, the mechanism of allowing people to gift things to other people. This was typically done through trading, but not always. The second component was the actual competitive element: the leaderboards. That was about spending, with players encouraged to try to outspend each other.
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.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
The validity of this claim is highly questionable.
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.
Why not tell us sooner? We've seen the criticisms stating that this should have been mentioned immediately after the last gifting event concluded. Ultimately, until very recently, we weren't sure what this year's holiday event would look like. With the amount of fraudulent activity, we weren't able to analyze the full impact until months into 2022. I know there were internal conversations about ways to provide an adjusted gifting event, but every avenue the game team explored lead to more problems. As was stated in the original post, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to make decisions about how they'd spend their time; we did this as soon as we had an idea that the gifting event wouldn't happen this year, even with limited information about what the new event looks like. This communication came three months prior to a normal communication cadence for in-game events.
How are we supposed to get trophy champs, now? We haven't seen anything to suggest the replacement crystals would remove opportunity to acquire trophy champs. We will continue to keep an eye on the development of this event and will communicate as we have more information, likely closer to the holiday season.
What consumables can we gift? As the details about the new holiday event are still falling into place and there is still a lot to consider, we don't have a definitive list of what will be available. Expect more information closer to the launch of the new event.
Do you know what the level and progression requirements will be to gift consumables?
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
The validity of this claim is highly questionable.
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.
I've seen bot farms with over a thousand accounts in them.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
The validity of this claim is highly questionable.
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.
I've seen bot farms with over a thousand accounts in them.
The conversation was about whales purchasing GGCs. The original commenter said they highly doubt this player received farmed GGCs.
This thread is going nowhere, just a bunch people agree and disagree, sad/salty and cheers, what more is people who think their opinion is by arguing is always right and knows better. I cannot tell which is it. Close this thread kabam.
Rofl . Tell me u didnt understand the issue without telling me u didnt understand the issue...
I can recall one “whale” last year who racked up enough r4 material from GGCs to have at least FIVE r4 6*s in no time. When the materials to have that many r4’s weren’t in game as yet and before rank rewards came out, which gave top-ranked players a r3-r4 gem after the Event ended.
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.
A whale can create an alt account to gift himself like any other player, he won’t be reciprocating the gifts so will not be showing up on the leaderboard himself, his alt will; he could have multiple alts to boost those accounts for numerous reasons as well. Or yes he could buy third party ggcs but the leaderboard will not tell you one way or the other.
And if said whale has a line chatroom promoting selling shady ggcs then is that okay. It's laughable they know who really cheated and they did nothing to those accounts and even let one of them pick a legendary crystal for summoners to choose from. If they claim there was 850k illegitimate ggcs then prove it. Drop the ban hammer.
This thread is going nowhere, just a bunch people agree and disagree, sad/salty and cheers, what more is people who think their opinion is by arguing is always right and knows better. I cannot tell which is it. Close this thread kabam.
Yeah close the thread cause @Sw33ty doesnt like it
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.