Last year there was a realm event for us to open crystals, that also gave us rewards, why is this route not being taken this year. These crystals we obtain/earn/buy are ours. Why Kabam, would you presume you can tell us what you are going to do with our accounts almost like we are on your payroll. If we are not cheating, breaking the rules, or requesting assistance, there should be no infiltrating our accounts without our okay. I mean whats to stop you from just deleting our champs from our rosters when they feel like.
Mostly the fact that this would be counter productive.
It is time for the friendly reminder that you do not own your accounts nor anything in them. This is spelled out in the TOS you agreed to when you decided to play the game. And in case you missed it or failed to read it, consider this ample notification.
You may refuse to accept the TOS, this is entirely your legal right. But if you choose not to accept it, you must immediately stop playing the game. The game is the property of Kabam and by extension Netmarble, and playing it without agreeing to their terms and conditions is they of service. You aren’t allowed to just do whatever you want or use whatever you want.
This is not some special rule for online games. As a systems administrator I’ve deleted things off of computers and systems whenever I have felt this was necessary, without asking for “permission” because none was needed. The corporate owner of the systems provided the only authorization necessary. It’s nice to give people a heads up, but I don’t need the permission of users to do things on systems they don’t own.
As to the reason why there’s no Realm Event, that’s obvious. If it became known Kabam was going to be holding Realm Events for crystal cleaning every year, people would save crystals just for that event, which is 100% counter productive to wanting players to open crystals. Kabam specifically picked crystal cleaning as the very first Realm Event precisely because it was a way to test the Realm Event systems with a low risk event that would likely never be repeated. The effectiveness of the event would have been blunted if players believed there would be another one, and then tried to jockey for the right iteration. I would have.
But Kabam does not require your permission to straight up ban you, obviously. They are not accountable to you, and have no obligation to prove to your satisfaction their actions are justified. But even if you had some sort of weird right to protect your account from alteration, that would not stop Kabam from deleting the crystals from the game. You would just be holding onto valueless tokens redeemable for nothing. This happens all the time when people “buy” casino chips for a casino that closes, or just plain expires a set of chips. You can redeem them, or you can hold a bag of nothing. They don’t owe you anything. Except with MCOC, Kabam has no legal responsibility to even keep those crystal resources in their game client, which is another thing they own. Your game account would have an invisible number that references nothing visible in the game client and is redeemable for nothing.
You don’t own the account. If you disagree you must stop playing the game or this is technically theft of service. Even if you did own it, you don’t own the servers, the game clients, or any of the game resources. “Your” game account is just a bunch of numbers in a database that references pictures you don’t own in a game client you don’t own which is linked to a bunch of redeemable resources you don’t own. They aren’t asking for your permission to open “your” crystals. They are informing you the crystals are being deleted from the game, and are informing you that rather than losing those resources they will give you what you would have gotten if you had opened them.
This is what they are allowed to do with the game accounts they let you use on the game they own and operate.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
Its as unethical as a reward points program making your points expire. Its as unethical as a credit card miles program telling you if you don't use them by a certain date you lose them.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
Its as unethical as a reward points program making your points expire. Its as unethical as a credit card miles program telling you if you don't use them by a certain date you lose them.
In the programs you mentioned, they give you an expiration date as to when it will expire. Does Kabam give us an expiration date on the crystals?
Some people are making too big a deal of this. I’ve been playing for about 6 years and this is the third one of these forced crystals openings I can recall.
The class based boost cost between 5,000 and 10,000 loyalty. They are purchaseable with a limit of 1 per period.
I find these valuable and the storage limit very small. Maybe my account, baby valiant, is not developed to the point of not needing or caring about these or the associated cost in loyalty currency to aquire them. If I am allowed to have larger storage for these or the ability to trade them in for the associated loyalty cost i would be kept whole.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
That entirely depends on what you call ethical. I'm going to bypass the fact that their server is what needs to purge, and not just accessing our Accounts, and I'm going to speak to the ethics of it. Ethically, a developer is responsible for the creation, development, maintenance, and repair of a game. That's what their job entails in the simplest of forms. There are different aspects of that, such as design or code. However, their main priority is to keep the game running, and running as efficiently and smoothly as possible. Of course the security of the Accounts of its users is a huge priority, but that's not in question. No one is breaking into our Accounts. They're purging older Crystal types to maintain the quality of the servers. Now, ethically they have a responsibility first and foremost to keep the game running for everyone to the best of their abilities above the choice to hoard these outdated Crystals for the few. I'm not sure how that's hard to understand. Game declines and dies, there's nothing to hoard for anyone.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
Its as unethical as a reward points program making your points expire. Its as unethical as a credit card miles program telling you if you don't use them by a certain date you lose them.
In the programs you mentioned, they give you an expiration date as to when it will expire. Does Kabam give us an expiration date on the crystals?
They just did... Not a date date but a ballpark time frame.
Thank God I don't have to pop about 1k crystals in batches of 10, I don't know how anyone could even be complaining about this 90% of those crystals are completely useless.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
You can type less to say less, but calling this unethical is not just wrong, it isn’t even a particularly popular kind of wrong. Things expire, change, or just plain disappear in games as a service all the time. It’s been happening since I was playing online games over twenty years ago, and this is not a thing that I have heard a lot of complaints about over the years. Mostly because almost no one would ever consider a game company saying hey, some stuff is going to disappear on our game, but we’re going to hand you what it is actually worth to be a bad thing.
Even saying they are “going into our accounts” is a meaningless statement. The game does that every second of every day. Your game account is not a thing the game or the devs need to “enter.” Your account is a fiction, an imaginary set of numbers that is nowhere stored all in one place. Saying Kabam is going into your account is like accusing a bank of going into your bank accounts to pay you interest, or going into your accounts to deduct a fee.
It’s your prerogative to decide what Kabam is doing, which by the way they’ve done several times before, is “unethical.” It’s not my job to convince you otherwise. I’m simply stating as a fact that this is common practice both in this game and in other games, and not only is it not seen as unethical by the developers of those games, it isn’t given a second thought by the vast overwhelming majority of the players of those games, in my opinion for the simple reason that thinking this is anything but ordinary is nonsensical. This unethical thing you are protesting is something I’ve done many times before, would do again in a heartbeat, and will even after this discussion will not give a second thought towards. Nor do I think will almost anyone else.
@DNA3000 Its counter productive to your player base to tell them we are going into your account and deleting crystals you earned and saved. yes we know they can do what they want to the accounts WE built, I acknowledged this in above comments. Is it ethical? No its not. So you can sit there and type your brains out defending or justifying what this is, but in my opinion its wrong to tell your player base we are going into your accounts and popping your saved assets.
It's no unethical. You're not meant to hoard crystals for years that won't ever be released again. They literally own your account. When they own it, they can do what they need to do to keep the game running. Maybe stop holding on to crystals for years at a time.
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Not one of these crystals that are going to be forced open is relevant to the player holding it. This is the silliest thing I’ve seen complained about yet.
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Why would anybody ever save a feat 6* crystal? Pay more shards to just look at it?
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Why would anybody ever save a feat 6* crystal? Pay more shards to just look at it?
I think it’s just the ISO obsessive crowd. What they don’t seem to realize is that those four or five featured crystals from four years ago, could have put sigs on champions, which would get them closer to max sigs, which results in getting more shards that are actually valuable when you dupe the max sig champs, which gets you more relevant champs to do relevant content, which helps your progression, which makes you a better player, on and on and on.
Sitting on old featured crystals is like saying, “nah, I don’t want to earn any interest on my money by putting it in the bank. I get too much enjoyment out of looking at the nickels in my shoebox.”
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Cause there are different featured 6* crystals with different pools. But they all have the same name
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily
This could have a significant chance of straight up murdering a lot of crystal hoarders’ games.
As someone who has done some spectacularly weird things on the test server at times, and also the fourth place finisher in the Crystal Cleanse Realm event, I can tell you that you do not want more things than necessary on timers in your game client. The game client was not designed to have lots and lots of things on timers simultaneously. All the players who did serious work in the Crystal Cleanse will tell you that when there was more than a certain amount of stuff in the stash expiring, the game became virtually unplayable. Poor Vern probably couldn’t play the game at all for a week.
It is possible having dozens or hundreds of crystals in the vault on timers wouldn’t have a serious impact on the game, given the large number of stash items that can end up on timers, but then again that’s not a risk I would want to take across the entire game. It wasn’t just a question of how many things were on timers, but in precisely what way, which makes this somewhat unpredictable.
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Why would anybody ever save a feat 6* crystal? Pay more shards to just look at it?
Using the sigil discount and opening them when the pool updates?
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Why would anybody ever save a feat 6* crystal? Pay more shards to just look at it?
Using the sigil discount and opening them when the pool updates?
Read back a few post, specifically someone who is "Saving the wrong data". The feature pool updates, the content of the crystal doesn't. When the pool updates, its a different crystal with the same name. Matter of fact they don't stack, which you would have noticed if you had a significant ammount that would impact your account.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily
This could have a significant chance of straight up murdering a lot of crystal hoarders’ games.
As someone who has done some spectacularly weird things on the test server at times, and also the fourth place finisher in the Crystal Cleanse Realm event, I can tell you that you do not want more things than necessary on timers in your game client. The game client was not designed to have lots and lots of things on timers simultaneously. All the players who did serious work in the Crystal Cleanse will tell you that when there was more than a certain amount of stuff in the stash expiring, the game became virtually unplayable. Poor Vern probably couldn’t play the game at all for a week.
It is possible having dozens or hundreds of crystals in the vault on timers wouldn’t have a serious impact on the game, given the large number of stash items that can end up on timers, but then again that’s not a risk I would want to take across the entire game. It wasn’t just a question of how many things were on timers, but in precisely what way, which makes this somewhat unpredictable.
Well, I guess that means players have to print a list and guess which featured crystal is going to be deleted? Surely there must be a better way than just pasting 256 lines of generic text and expecting players to know what crystals will be deleted from their stash. A red border? A star? A marker?
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily
This could have a significant chance of straight up murdering a lot of crystal hoarders’ games.
As someone who has done some spectacularly weird things on the test server at times, and also the fourth place finisher in the Crystal Cleanse Realm event, I can tell you that you do not want more things than necessary on timers in your game client. The game client was not designed to have lots and lots of things on timers simultaneously. All the players who did serious work in the Crystal Cleanse will tell you that when there was more than a certain amount of stuff in the stash expiring, the game became virtually unplayable. Poor Vern probably couldn’t play the game at all for a week.
It is possible having dozens or hundreds of crystals in the vault on timers wouldn’t have a serious impact on the game, given the large number of stash items that can end up on timers, but then again that’s not a risk I would want to take across the entire game. It wasn’t just a question of how many things were on timers, but in precisely what way, which makes this somewhat unpredictable.
Well, I guess that means players have to print a list and guess which featured crystal is going to be deleted? Surely there must be a better way than just pasting 256 lines of generic text and expecting players to know what crystals will be deleted from their stash. A red border? A star? A marker?
The issue is they all have the same name, look back a couple of pages and you will see that I shared I have 3 different kinds of alliance war victory crystals in my vault. Same with the login crystals, they all have the same name, but are different crystals.
I'd say it is safe to assume that every single 6* featured crystal that came before the current one is going to be opened automatically
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Why would anybody ever save a feat 6* crystal? Pay more shards to just look at it?
I cannot imagine a reasonable reason to keep most of those crystals as a stash enhancer. I do feel for the people who collected some of them as trophies, even I have crystals I hang on to because they are cool, and I would cry over them if they got eliminated in a clean up. But I don’t think that particular reason is worth exploding the game data to the point of actually hurting the game or the development thereof. That’s too high a price for mere collection.
It is worth noting that for people holding crystals to actually hold the resources, whatever they are, there are certain crystals that are completely safe from crystal cleanups: crystals they keep giving out permanently. Any crystal that you can still earn is safe from clean up. Because the point to clean up is to permanently delete the crystal, only crystals that no one can ever earn ever again by any means are targets for clean up. 6* featured crystals are unique for each pool of that crystal, so in effect although featured crystals are constantly sold, each version is only available for a limited time and thus cannot be earned past some point. So they are targets. But things like basic crystals, dual class crystals, T4 catalyst crystals, Valiant Daily Crystals, stuff like that, you can theoretically keep indefinitely because Kabam cannot safely delete them from the databases. They would just have to put them back when the next player earned one.
Temporary crystals eventually get cleaned up. Crystals that are more or less permanent fixtures of the game never get cleaned up. I have a collection of Abyss Nexus Crystals. As long as the Abyss exists, that collection is 100% safe, as a player could earn one any time in the future by running the Abyss.
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Why would anybody ever save a feat 6* crystal? Pay more shards to just look at it?
I cannot imagine a reasonable reason to keep most of those crystals as a stash enhancer. I do feel for the people who collected some of them as trophies, even I have crystals I hang on to because they are cool, and I would cry over them if they got eliminated in a clean up. But I don’t think that particular reason is worth exploding the game data to the point of actually hurting the game or the development thereof. That’s too high a price for mere collection.
It is worth noting that for people holding crystals to actually hold the resources, whatever they are, there are certain crystals that are completely safe from crystal cleanups: crystals they keep giving out permanently. Any crystal that you can still earn is safe from clean up. Because the point to clean up is to permanently delete the crystal, only crystals that no one can ever earn ever again by any means are targets for clean up. 6* featured crystals are unique for each pool of that crystal, so in effect although featured crystals are constantly sold, each version is only available for a limited time and thus cannot be earned past some point. So they are targets. But things like basic crystals, dual class crystals, T4 catalyst crystals, Valiant Daily Crystals, stuff like that, you can theoretically keep indefinitely because Kabam cannot safely delete them from the databases. They would just have to put them back when the next player earned one.
Temporary crystals eventually get cleaned up. Crystals that are more or less permanent fixtures of the game never get cleaned up. I have a collection of Abyss Nexus Crystals. As long as the Abyss exists, that collection is 100% safe, as a player could earn one any time in the future by running the Abyss.
People holding crystals as resource management are smarter on their choices. They hold common crystals and open the odd ones when needed first Sentimental value crystals, its arguablr for very rare and maybe cool named crystals. I don't even know what a JARNBJORN crystal is, the lore of it, or when it was given and have 0 need or wish to have one for example 🤣
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
It has nothing to do with being transparent. It has everything to do with people saving each of these types of crystals for years. You can't tell me you're saving featured 6* crystals for resources. You have to buy them to store them and they're always available. The pools do not update as it's already been stated. So why are you buying a crystal to hoard that won't have a different pool ever?
Well, the fact they are force opening the Mega Egg whilst Brian is away is telling. Also, for those talking about useless crystals, featured 6* and 5* crystals are on the list... Don't be surprised if a crystal you saved for resources because of the small stash size suddenly disappears.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
It has nothing to do with being transparent. It has everything to do with people saving each of these types of crystals for years. You can't tell me you're saving featured 6* crystals for resources. You have to buy them to store them and they're always available. The pools do not update as it's already been stated. So why are you buying a crystal to hoard that won't have a different pool ever?
I should point out that even if no player hoarded crystals, we’d still have this problem because players quit all the time. If even a single player quits while holding a GMC or Cav for a special event, the fact they never log in again still forces the devs to keep that crystal active in the databases, which means all of us have to keep storing zeros for that crystal in our accounts. Hoarders and collectors are special cases of the general problem, which is that crystals must be kept in the game so long as a) it is possible to earn it or b) someone still has it. Once it can’t be earned anymore and no one holds it, it can be safely removed from the game. But there will always be at least one account that holds a crystal, if for no other reason than they never came back to open it. Periodic crystal purges prevent those crystals from slowing down the game even when few if any players really care about them.
Crystal hoarders don’t *cause* the problem. They are just the players that happen to be the most impacted by the solution to the problem.
Comments
It is time for the friendly reminder that you do not own your accounts nor anything in them. This is spelled out in the TOS you agreed to when you decided to play the game. And in case you missed it or failed to read it, consider this ample notification.
You may refuse to accept the TOS, this is entirely your legal right. But if you choose not to accept it, you must immediately stop playing the game. The game is the property of Kabam and by extension Netmarble, and playing it without agreeing to their terms and conditions is they of service. You aren’t allowed to just do whatever you want or use whatever you want.
This is not some special rule for online games. As a systems administrator I’ve deleted things off of computers and systems whenever I have felt this was necessary, without asking for “permission” because none was needed. The corporate owner of the systems provided the only authorization necessary. It’s nice to give people a heads up, but I don’t need the permission of users to do things on systems they don’t own.
As to the reason why there’s no Realm Event, that’s obvious. If it became known Kabam was going to be holding Realm Events for crystal cleaning every year, people would save crystals just for that event, which is 100% counter productive to wanting players to open crystals. Kabam specifically picked crystal cleaning as the very first Realm Event precisely because it was a way to test the Realm Event systems with a low risk event that would likely never be repeated. The effectiveness of the event would have been blunted if players believed there would be another one, and then tried to jockey for the right iteration. I would have.
But Kabam does not require your permission to straight up ban you, obviously. They are not accountable to you, and have no obligation to prove to your satisfaction their actions are justified. But even if you had some sort of weird right to protect your account from alteration, that would not stop Kabam from deleting the crystals from the game. You would just be holding onto valueless tokens redeemable for nothing. This happens all the time when people “buy” casino chips for a casino that closes, or just plain expires a set of chips. You can redeem them, or you can hold a bag of nothing. They don’t owe you anything. Except with MCOC, Kabam has no legal responsibility to even keep those crystal resources in their game client, which is another thing they own. Your game account would have an invisible number that references nothing visible in the game client and is redeemable for nothing.
You don’t own the account. If you disagree you must stop playing the game or this is technically theft of service. Even if you did own it, you don’t own the servers, the game clients, or any of the game resources. “Your” game account is just a bunch of numbers in a database that references pictures you don’t own in a game client you don’t own which is linked to a bunch of redeemable resources you don’t own. They aren’t asking for your permission to open “your” crystals. They are informing you the crystals are being deleted from the game, and are informing you that rather than losing those resources they will give you what you would have gotten if you had opened them.
This is what they are allowed to do with the game accounts they let you use on the game they own and operate.
I find these valuable and the storage limit very small. Maybe my account, baby valiant, is not developed to the point of not needing or caring about these or the associated cost in loyalty currency to aquire them.
If I am allowed to have larger storage for these or the ability to trade them in for the associated loyalty cost i would be kept whole.
Ethically, a developer is responsible for the creation, development, maintenance, and repair of a game. That's what their job entails in the simplest of forms. There are different aspects of that, such as design or code. However, their main priority is to keep the game running, and running as efficiently and smoothly as possible.
Of course the security of the Accounts of its users is a huge priority, but that's not in question. No one is breaking into our Accounts. They're purging older Crystal types to maintain the quality of the servers.
Now, ethically they have a responsibility first and foremost to keep the game running for everyone to the best of their abilities above the choice to hoard these outdated Crystals for the few. I'm not sure how that's hard to understand. Game declines and dies, there's nothing to hoard for anyone.
Even saying they are “going into our accounts” is a meaningless statement. The game does that every second of every day. Your game account is not a thing the game or the devs need to “enter.” Your account is a fiction, an imaginary set of numbers that is nowhere stored all in one place. Saying Kabam is going into your account is like accusing a bank of going into your bank accounts to pay you interest, or going into your accounts to deduct a fee.
It’s your prerogative to decide what Kabam is doing, which by the way they’ve done several times before, is “unethical.” It’s not my job to convince you otherwise. I’m simply stating as a fact that this is common practice both in this game and in other games, and not only is it not seen as unethical by the developers of those games, it isn’t given a second thought by the vast overwhelming majority of the players of those games, in my opinion for the simple reason that thinking this is anything but ordinary is nonsensical. This unethical thing you are protesting is something I’ve done many times before, would do again in a heartbeat, and will even after this discussion will not give a second thought towards. Nor do I think will almost anyone else.
Would have been much more transparent if Kabam just placed timers on the crystals they will delete, instead of a huge list with generic names that no human can correlate with their stash easily. I mean, there are literally two entries for the 6* featured hero crystal.
Clean the data, make the game better
As someone who has done some spectacularly weird things on the test server at times, and also the fourth place finisher in the Crystal Cleanse Realm event, I can tell you that you do not want more things than necessary on timers in your game client. The game client was not designed to have lots and lots of things on timers simultaneously. All the players who did serious work in the Crystal Cleanse will tell you that when there was more than a certain amount of stuff in the stash expiring, the game became virtually unplayable. Poor Vern probably couldn’t play the game at all for a week.
It is possible having dozens or hundreds of crystals in the vault on timers wouldn’t have a serious impact on the game, given the large number of stash items that can end up on timers, but then again that’s not a risk I would want to take across the entire game. It wasn’t just a question of how many things were on timers, but in precisely what way, which makes this somewhat unpredictable.
I'd say it is safe to assume that every single 6* featured crystal that came before the current one is going to be opened automatically
It is worth noting that for people holding crystals to actually hold the resources, whatever they are, there are certain crystals that are completely safe from crystal cleanups: crystals they keep giving out permanently. Any crystal that you can still earn is safe from clean up. Because the point to clean up is to permanently delete the crystal, only crystals that no one can ever earn ever again by any means are targets for clean up. 6* featured crystals are unique for each pool of that crystal, so in effect although featured crystals are constantly sold, each version is only available for a limited time and thus cannot be earned past some point. So they are targets. But things like basic crystals, dual class crystals, T4 catalyst crystals, Valiant Daily Crystals, stuff like that, you can theoretically keep indefinitely because Kabam cannot safely delete them from the databases. They would just have to put them back when the next player earned one.
Temporary crystals eventually get cleaned up. Crystals that are more or less permanent fixtures of the game never get cleaned up. I have a collection of Abyss Nexus Crystals. As long as the Abyss exists, that collection is 100% safe, as a player could earn one any time in the future by running the Abyss.
Sentimental value crystals, its arguablr for very rare and maybe cool named crystals.
I don't even know what a JARNBJORN crystal is, the lore of it, or when it was given and have 0 need or wish to have one for example 🤣
Crystal hoarders don’t *cause* the problem. They are just the players that happen to be the most impacted by the solution to the problem.