The ABCs of Kabam Communication - Anything But Clarity
Furrymoosen
Member Posts: 4,553 ★★★★★
TLDR; The Banquet is disappointing, Kabam set themselves up for failure, and they need to improve communication all around.
Kabam,
I hope this letter finds you well.
I want to start off by saying that I do feel bad for you all, to some degree. It must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to put so much work into building an event like this only to see it result as poorly as is possible. Perhaps you feel like the creators of Kraven the Hunter right now. You hyped the event like no tomorrow, and maybe that's because you truly believed this would be the best event ever, but it is clear (and then some) that it has far from lived up to the expectations you set. Your time, energy, and excitement proved fruitless.
I know you've seen me around the forums enough. I try whenever I am able to be a voice of reason, even at times defending you and your decisions to unrealistic players, or players that simply aren't willing to do their homework. But this event is an incredible failure through and through. And it isn't just a failure because the event is underwhelming, it's a failure because you sold us snake oil. I can't defend you on this banquet.
You title this "The Great Banquet" and doubled down on this word, "great", many, many times. You said it would far exceed last years banquet event, and at the very least it does exceed it, though not as we were led to believe. You bragged about Thronebreaker accounts walking around wth 7R3s after this event was over, and it turns out that was true. But it turns out that the language used was incredibly literal and Valiants were foolishly led astray into believing that this would mean something great for us. Your most loyal and dedicated player base has been slighted. This was misleading communication, and you could have given more clarity on it. You could have said something out there was great for Valiants too, but maybe you didn't because you knew there wasn't. Thronebreakers may be having a great time, and perhaps some Paragons as well, but Valiants are left sharing reduced rewards because we still don't yet get a consistent individual experience in this game.
You said that the realm event would be a "bonus" on top of the rewards. This was a good correction to make after the feedback from the BG season. Crashed came on here last night to defend the total rewards for the unit cost, and he is correct, it is worth it. But again, your communication wasn't clear. If we remove the realm event and look at the total rewards then, it certainly isn't worth it. So one of two things happened here - the banquet was going to be significantly worse than it actually is so you added the realm event because you knew it was underwhelming, or when building out the realm event you took into account the allocation of the other rewards and the realm is in fact not a bonus, but is merely part of the total package. So which is it? Was the event going to be worse, or did you falsely state that the realm event would not be replacing rewards anywhere else?
You told us you were reducing the filler in crystals - many experiences would speak to the contrary. In the 66 crystals I had that I was excited to open, I received 2k titan shards, almost enough 7* shards for two crystals, half a T4A and filler, filler, filler, filler. If I were a Thronebreaker player, I would've been ecstatic. But as a Valiant, I don't need this filler. On the plus side, I now have enough materials to take four champions to R3 (less than I got Cyber Week), but many of those materials cost me more in these crystals than it would anywhere else in the game. You put such a little amount in these crystals that you successfully devalued units along the way. And yes, we can go back and forth about the main rewards being in the milestones, and I will say that the milestones are great. But you could've had clearer communication before hand. You could've said that the main objective of the crystals was to provide rank-up materials to rank the new champs we would get through keys and milestones - but you didn't. And now look at the milestones. That realm event has crashed hard. The way we're trending now, 3 billion points is in doubt unless you interfere. It would be the shock of the century if we hit Isophyne in this event. While the milestones may be good and exciting, the road to get there is depressing, and you made it that way. What would be so terrible about my 3% T7B being 15%? What would be so terrible about getting 6 of each T6CC instead of 4 of each? What would be so terrible about opening four 7* crystals instead of two? What would be so terrible about actually being able to get a single Titan crystal out of this for the 20k units worth of crystals I opened? Could I sure as heck opened multiple Titan crystals Cyber Week. 60% of the crystal pool is worth less than the units spent, and the next 39.5% may be worth a bit more, but unless you are one of the lucky .5% you will almost certainly not recoup anything that feels like it is worth the value.
But now the main point of feedback for this lengthy (sorry) post: communication. You are no strangers to our feedback over the past 6 months. Let's not mince words - communication has been at most times abysmal. Yes, new team in place, but also bigger team in place. Over the last few weeks, the most present Kabam employee I see here on the forums is Crashed and it isn't even his job! He takes time out of his day to make up the slack. Nobody here is expecting a Kabam response to every single post or every single problem, but my goodness just try being a part of the community. The community manager hasn't posted on the forums in 16 days! What in the world! So many problems would be solved by the community team being present with the community, or at the very least would be eased. And I know we've covered this feedback before, and for a brief period of time it did improve, but I can honestly say that these last several weeks feels like it is the worst it has been to date. Do you know how many problems you would solve just by being present and acknowledging that you hear and see concerns? And no, I don't mean making a post to collect those concerns - you tried that with the one month check-in and very little has been done with that feedback. At this stage, I don't think any of us expect anything from the post you made trying to collect banquet feedback; it feels more like you're just trying to limit the new posts. But if you were present, if you communicated more clearly (please stop being so vague) ahead of time, and if you were in on the feedback as it was happening, it would make a world of difference. I'm not gonna start preaching about a flood of people leaving this game, because we know that's not true, but we know that the lack of communication, transparency and clarity are serious contributing factors to longtime players leaving the game, and this event certainly broke some.
I love this game. I want to keep playing and enjoying this game. I enjoy the content, the challenge, the champions, and achieving things with my alliance. But communication needs to be improved, expectations need to be met, and you need to stop biting off more than you can chew. We all want to see The Contest live on, we wouldn't be here if we didn't, but the ball is in your court to make it happen.
Kabam,
I hope this letter finds you well.
I want to start off by saying that I do feel bad for you all, to some degree. It must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to put so much work into building an event like this only to see it result as poorly as is possible. Perhaps you feel like the creators of Kraven the Hunter right now. You hyped the event like no tomorrow, and maybe that's because you truly believed this would be the best event ever, but it is clear (and then some) that it has far from lived up to the expectations you set. Your time, energy, and excitement proved fruitless.
I know you've seen me around the forums enough. I try whenever I am able to be a voice of reason, even at times defending you and your decisions to unrealistic players, or players that simply aren't willing to do their homework. But this event is an incredible failure through and through. And it isn't just a failure because the event is underwhelming, it's a failure because you sold us snake oil. I can't defend you on this banquet.
You title this "The Great Banquet" and doubled down on this word, "great", many, many times. You said it would far exceed last years banquet event, and at the very least it does exceed it, though not as we were led to believe. You bragged about Thronebreaker accounts walking around wth 7R3s after this event was over, and it turns out that was true. But it turns out that the language used was incredibly literal and Valiants were foolishly led astray into believing that this would mean something great for us. Your most loyal and dedicated player base has been slighted. This was misleading communication, and you could have given more clarity on it. You could have said something out there was great for Valiants too, but maybe you didn't because you knew there wasn't. Thronebreakers may be having a great time, and perhaps some Paragons as well, but Valiants are left sharing reduced rewards because we still don't yet get a consistent individual experience in this game.
You said that the realm event would be a "bonus" on top of the rewards. This was a good correction to make after the feedback from the BG season. Crashed came on here last night to defend the total rewards for the unit cost, and he is correct, it is worth it. But again, your communication wasn't clear. If we remove the realm event and look at the total rewards then, it certainly isn't worth it. So one of two things happened here - the banquet was going to be significantly worse than it actually is so you added the realm event because you knew it was underwhelming, or when building out the realm event you took into account the allocation of the other rewards and the realm is in fact not a bonus, but is merely part of the total package. So which is it? Was the event going to be worse, or did you falsely state that the realm event would not be replacing rewards anywhere else?
You told us you were reducing the filler in crystals - many experiences would speak to the contrary. In the 66 crystals I had that I was excited to open, I received 2k titan shards, almost enough 7* shards for two crystals, half a T4A and filler, filler, filler, filler. If I were a Thronebreaker player, I would've been ecstatic. But as a Valiant, I don't need this filler. On the plus side, I now have enough materials to take four champions to R3 (less than I got Cyber Week), but many of those materials cost me more in these crystals than it would anywhere else in the game. You put such a little amount in these crystals that you successfully devalued units along the way. And yes, we can go back and forth about the main rewards being in the milestones, and I will say that the milestones are great. But you could've had clearer communication before hand. You could've said that the main objective of the crystals was to provide rank-up materials to rank the new champs we would get through keys and milestones - but you didn't. And now look at the milestones. That realm event has crashed hard. The way we're trending now, 3 billion points is in doubt unless you interfere. It would be the shock of the century if we hit Isophyne in this event. While the milestones may be good and exciting, the road to get there is depressing, and you made it that way. What would be so terrible about my 3% T7B being 15%? What would be so terrible about getting 6 of each T6CC instead of 4 of each? What would be so terrible about opening four 7* crystals instead of two? What would be so terrible about actually being able to get a single Titan crystal out of this for the 20k units worth of crystals I opened? Could I sure as heck opened multiple Titan crystals Cyber Week. 60% of the crystal pool is worth less than the units spent, and the next 39.5% may be worth a bit more, but unless you are one of the lucky .5% you will almost certainly not recoup anything that feels like it is worth the value.
But now the main point of feedback for this lengthy (sorry) post: communication. You are no strangers to our feedback over the past 6 months. Let's not mince words - communication has been at most times abysmal. Yes, new team in place, but also bigger team in place. Over the last few weeks, the most present Kabam employee I see here on the forums is Crashed and it isn't even his job! He takes time out of his day to make up the slack. Nobody here is expecting a Kabam response to every single post or every single problem, but my goodness just try being a part of the community. The community manager hasn't posted on the forums in 16 days! What in the world! So many problems would be solved by the community team being present with the community, or at the very least would be eased. And I know we've covered this feedback before, and for a brief period of time it did improve, but I can honestly say that these last several weeks feels like it is the worst it has been to date. Do you know how many problems you would solve just by being present and acknowledging that you hear and see concerns? And no, I don't mean making a post to collect those concerns - you tried that with the one month check-in and very little has been done with that feedback. At this stage, I don't think any of us expect anything from the post you made trying to collect banquet feedback; it feels more like you're just trying to limit the new posts. But if you were present, if you communicated more clearly (please stop being so vague) ahead of time, and if you were in on the feedback as it was happening, it would make a world of difference. I'm not gonna start preaching about a flood of people leaving this game, because we know that's not true, but we know that the lack of communication, transparency and clarity are serious contributing factors to longtime players leaving the game, and this event certainly broke some.
I love this game. I want to keep playing and enjoying this game. I enjoy the content, the challenge, the champions, and achieving things with my alliance. But communication needs to be improved, expectations need to be met, and you need to stop biting off more than you can chew. We all want to see The Contest live on, we wouldn't be here if we didn't, but the ball is in your court to make it happen.
15
Comments
Sorry for the unexpected situation. Please understand that our new community managers are brand new and don’t have experience in this position before, we have some laid off wave in the last couple years due to economic crisis. Please support us by keep spending to the game. We will send some compensation package as our apologize. Thank you for your patience lol