We need to address the Banquet Crystal token point reduction
Normax_X
Member Posts: 584 ★★★★
This post isn't about the rewards or ranked or any of that. I am only dicussing the token points that got changed last minute from 400 to 100. Over the past months, many players, myself included, have invested time and resources into getting tokens with the understanding that they would be exchanged for Banquet crystals and contribute to event points.
However, the sudden addition of a clause AFTER the fact that people farmed using real money in daily deals stating that tickets will now only count for 100 points rather than 400 of the expected points is unacceptable. This decision significantly undermines the transparency we expect from Kabam.
Many players made strategic decisions over months based on the original rules. Retroactively changing these rules feels exploitative and unfair. At minimum, the tickets’ original value be honored for this banquet event, as this was the implicit agreement when players acquired them.
They also said that they decided to allow us to get the superior banquet crystal rather than the intended lower banquet crystal, so we wouldv'e had two issues to deal with here had they not addressed this part early. Which again, did not state in the description that it would give us a lower than expected crystal prior to people spending.
Kabam needs to address this as it quite literally falls within unethical business practice by definition or to put it bluntly, its a scam.
However, the sudden addition of a clause AFTER the fact that people farmed using real money in daily deals stating that tickets will now only count for 100 points rather than 400 of the expected points is unacceptable. This decision significantly undermines the transparency we expect from Kabam.
Many players made strategic decisions over months based on the original rules. Retroactively changing these rules feels exploitative and unfair. At minimum, the tickets’ original value be honored for this banquet event, as this was the implicit agreement when players acquired them.
They also said that they decided to allow us to get the superior banquet crystal rather than the intended lower banquet crystal, so we wouldv'e had two issues to deal with here had they not addressed this part early. Which again, did not state in the description that it would give us a lower than expected crystal prior to people spending.
Kabam needs to address this as it quite literally falls within unethical business practice by definition or to put it bluntly, its a scam.
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Comments
Don't we usually only get the points for buying SBC with units?
Also, has it been confirmed that token SBCs will not give 400 points?
The tokens will get you crystals, the crystals will get you points. But the language has been clear since the first banquet - you get points for purchasing crystals, not for trading for them.
You only just found out the points earned yesterday so how on earth could they have "changed it at the last moment"?
Also, for someone not being affected whatsoever, "unethical business practices" and "scam" are strong terms.
Technically, you aren't purchasing SBCs with tokens since the tokens are just placeholders. They can't give us the crystals early since they aren't available until tomorrow. Those will be like the ones we get from milestones.
I can see a case for the tokens earned from purchases like daily offers. But since you are buying tokens and trading for a crystal, there's no way to transfer that "value" of which token was traded.
Essentially they would need 2 versions of the gifting crystals.
Granted, you got a lot of other stuff for that spend as well, but a significant motivator for folks who purchased Daily specials (for real world currency) was most certainly the Banquet tickets.
Is it arguable the Banquet tickets were simply *bonuses* dropped into the Dailies? Sure, but they could also be viewed as an inducement to buy more Dailies or as a concrete and integral part of the purchase.
My conclusion: It would be fair to have the crystals acquired via tokens count as purchased SBCs, but there’s no requirement to do so. It would also have been nice to know all of this explicitly a few months ago.
Dr. Zola
Not trying to be contrary—but I don’t believe this is as clear-cut a case as others do, and I’d like to think the game team isn’t in the business of punishing Summoners, whether they spend real world money on the game or not.
Dr. Zola
Because of that, the illusion of increasing points for tokens is just an illusion, it wouldn't actually help anyone
To accrue, for example, 50 Banquet tokens, a Summoner would likely spend between ~$2000-2500 (assuming some tokens were acquired via free tickets). That alone could buy a lot more than the mythical 12K unit target.
No matter what the devs *game economy* calculations might be, that’s a fair bit of cost itself to most people.
Dr. Zola
If they wanted to have a minimum spend vs the free ones, they should have had superior tokens in the money deals like the dailies vs normal tokens for the banquet & greater banquet crystals, the same way they have two types of sigil credits in the sigil store.
Give people all the information from the first day of the glorious games packages back in July was it and then let ppl decide if they were spending then or now for the same amount.
Just curious, I have nothing to do with this thread. I'm 66-33 on your side normie.
If not count as purchase, at least change the opening points gains to 150. Could achieve some milestones at least with 10 of the ticket SBCs.
It has always been true that buying the banquet crystals gives points separate from opening them. And in the past, crystals you earned from things like milestones only granted the points for opening, not buying. This much is absolutely unambiguously true. However, some players would like to think that when Kabam created the ticket system, that should count as "buying." Except the vast majority of tickets were basically given away for free within in-game content. You *could* get them as bonus items in purchases like daily offers, but even there those tickets were added to already existing offers without the offers changing price. There's no question you were not buying tickets, you were buying the offers and getting the tickets as a free bonus. So tickets aren't purchased, and thus there's no reasonable way to assert that they themselves "buy" the crystals. Anyone who thinks this must believe we "buy" Titan crystals with Titan shards, we "buy" T4B catalysts with fragments, etc. And that's just not true.
The sideways argument goes like this: I would never have bought the daily offers if they didn't have the tickets, so yes I did in fact buy the tickets. Sorry, that doesn't work. Whatever your motivation for buying the offers has nothing to do with what you actually bought. You can *say* "I only bought this because I knew I would get that, so I bought that" but that doesn't mean they sold it to you and you actually bought it. This line of argument wouldn't work anywhere else.
I get that some people misunderstood and are disappointed, but that's really on them. Thinking this is unethical or even illegal is a bridge way too far. If you had asked me before the banquet began if you'd get the purchase points for exchanging tickets for crystals, I would have said "almost certainly not. Kabam would have had to have lost their collective minds to do that. In fact, if they say they do, I would assume it is a typo." Because it is essentially nonsensical for them to count as purchases for the purpose of points.
The banquet event is a spenders event. But like everything in this game, Kabam bends over backwards to try to accommodate free to play players. The whole entire purpose of the event, which traces back to the original gifting events, is to get spenders to spend, buying things with cash and units, in a more interesting setting than just buying offers. That's what it is, that's what it always has been. Everything else is window dressing, and accommodations for the 95% of players who don't spend. The tickets were themselves a way to extend that to allow free to play players to get even more participation in what is a spending event targeting spenders. And of course, if the tickets exist in an event targeting spenders, there would also be a way to buy some. Because of course. But tickets are not buying, because tickets are not cash and are not a direct intermediary for cash.
I am a long time pessimist when it comes to these kinds of things. I am often predicting in what way the vocal community will explode over everything. And even I missed this one. I am clearly still insufficiently pessimistic.