**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.

Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.

Apple Now Requires Game Developers to disclose odds on "Loot Boxes" [MERGED THREADS]

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Comments

  • HigherPoweredHigherPowered Posts: 118
    These rates are known to Kabam, and based on results from large samples of crystals we sort of know what they are already, so I don’t really understand why Kabam haven’t published them on forums to kill the discussion until they can include them in game to avoid all this hand wringing...
  • ThatweirdguyThatweirdguy Posts: 675 ★★★
    These rates are known to Kabam, and based on results from large samples of crystals we sort of know what they are already, so I don’t really understand why Kabam haven’t published them on forums to kill the discussion until they can include them in game to avoid all this hand wringing...

    This is a good question. The only the answer I can come up with is that they absolutely loath the idea of having to reveal these so they won't until they have to.
  • ThatweirdguyThatweirdguy Posts: 675 ★★★
    ArmandStar wrote: »
    Vydious, you have to admit, the conspiracies and etc are because of the lack of answers.

    Miike said there's a lot of work involved, visual designs, production and etc.

    and that is fine, we understand.

    however, what is NOT fine is the fact that you guys took over a month (or who knows how long) to give this very simple and acceptable response.

    someone said maybe you guys (forum mods) were forbidden from speaking, but couldn't you say so? "hey guys, our bosses don't want us to give any statement yet".


    whether the solution is ready or not, the customers have requested to know about the progress and for a whole month the only response was silence. you can't blame players for going paranoic in this case.

    The forum mods do not get to speak their minds. They are told what they are and are not allowed to say. They probably weren't even allowed to tell us that there was no statement. They are just voicing what their superiors permit them to probably via some script or bullet points they are given to put on here.
  • Jason7680Jason7680 Posts: 15
    I can guarantee that the 5* basic is rigged. Out of all the heros in that crystal. I've pulled 3 storms, and 3 cyclops and old Champs. What is the odds on that? Too fishy to me. I've spent a lot of money on this game and get **** champs, I'm done spending.
  • FPC3FPC3 Posts: 144 ★★
    Miike - The team could make a forum post with the drop rates to satiate the player-base. Surely all the other things you're talking about are in-game as you mentioned graphics and such, and those certainly DO require a bit of time. But a forum post would be quick and easy, no?
  • Vdh2008Vdh2008 Posts: 966 ★★★★
    FPC3 wrote: »
    Miike - The team could make a forum post with the drop rates to satiate the player-base. Surely all the other things you're talking about are in-game as you mentioned graphics and such, and those certainly DO require a bit of time. But a forum post would be quick and easy, no?

    I think the issue is that every crystal has different rates...

    PHC rates
    Daily Special crystal rates
    GMC rates
    FGMC rates
    Arena Crystal rates
    etc
    etc
    etc
  • GapToothWitchGapToothWitch Posts: 22
    edited February 2018
    Vdh2008 wrote: »
    FPC3 wrote: »
    Miike - The team could make a forum post with the drop rates to satiate the player-base. Surely all the other things you're talking about are in-game as you mentioned graphics and such, and those certainly DO require a bit of time. But a forum post would be quick and easy, no?

    I think the issue is that every crystal has different rates...

    PHC rates
    Daily Special crystal rates
    GMC rates
    FGMC rates
    Arena Crystal rates
    etc
    etc
    etc

    at least these:
    PHC rates
    Daily Special crystal rates
    GMC rates
    FGMC rates
    Arena Crystal rates

    at this point, anything really. Since in reality they could just be telling apple "we are working on it" just like they are telling us.

    For all we know there is a monkey working one hour per day trying to code this..

    I understand the "There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen" but there is no excuse why they can't publish the drop rates in a forum post - they already know the rates! No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved.
  • We are not going to update this thread until there is something to update you with. Repeatedly posting "we don't have anything new to share yet" is not a good use of anybody's time, and giving progress updates is not always possible, because there are lots of moving parts.

    I agree: repeatedly posting "nothing new yet" is generally a waste of time and I understand the limitations of detailed progress reports. But as I said above, it seems clear from a post in a different thread that the decision has been made to release drop rates and the dev team is working on implementing a way to do that in-game. Wouldn't it be a good use of community coordination time to simply state that officially, to preempt discussions that presume this isn't happening?

    You might think this was implied from your "working with Apple" statements, but the forum discussions in this and many other threads clearly demonstrate it was not. A clear statement we can point to which addresses this clearly and directly would certainly be both possible (because you already did it in a harder to reference thread) and helpful.
  • CorsoCorso Posts: 8
    As someone who has gotten kabamed multiple times by dropping a $100 On an "increased chance" for a specific character and did not received it... I would love to know the drop rates!!! Probably would not have spent that $100. Lol. So they will either raise the drop rates, or make less money... kabam is just crooked. This will definitely benefit us!!
  • I understand the "There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen" but there is no excuse why they can't publish the drop rates in a forum post - they already know the rates! No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved.

    People keep saying there's no excuse for this, but if I was the producer in charge I would in many circumstances recommend not doing this, and I've been in favor of releasing drop rates from the very beginning. And I say this as someone that knows precisely what would be involved in doing that, because I've seen it first hand.
  • 420sam420sam Posts: 526 ★★★
    Yeah, this thread is getting closed.
  • Corso wrote: »
    As someone who has gotten kabamed multiple times by dropping a $100 On an "increased chance" for a specific character and did not received it... I would love to know the drop rates!!! Probably would not have spent that $100. Lol. So they will either raise the drop rates, or make less money... kabam is just crooked. This will definitely benefit us!!

    What crystal did you spend a hundred dollars on, that we players don't already have a pretty good idea what the drop rates are?
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    I understand the "There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen" but there is no excuse why they can't publish the drop rates in a forum post - they already know the rates! No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved.

    People keep saying there's no excuse for this, but if I was the producer in charge I would in many circumstances recommend not doing this, and I've been in favor of releasing drop rates from the very beginning. And I say this as someone that knows precisely what would be involved in doing that, because I've seen it first hand.

    why would you recommend not doing this?

    and what exactly is involved based on your experience?
  • RehctansBewRehctansBew Posts: 442 ★★★
    yall make me laugh, it takes time to remove targeting drop rates. You can't simply recode it over night. Amazingly since the apple guidelines release, we have seen very little unit offers that gave bonus units for those newer players or the ones that haven't spent much in the past few months. This may just be a coincidence. Why would the game need to rework anything, they could simply post drop rates in the legal or terms of service tabs. That wouldn't require any extra coding.
  • Zuko_ILCZuko_ILC Posts: 1,503 ★★★★★
    ArmandStar wrote: »
    Vydious, you have to admit, the conspiracies and etc are because of the lack of answers.

    Miike said there's a lot of work involved, visual designs, production and etc.

    and that is fine, we understand.

    however, what is NOT fine is the fact that you guys took over a month (or who knows how long) to give this very simple and acceptable response.

    someone said maybe you guys (forum mods) were forbidden from speaking, but couldn't you say so? "hey guys, our bosses don't want us to give any statement yet".


    whether the solution is ready or not, the customers have requested to know about the progress and for a whole month the only response was silence. you can't blame players for going paranoic in this case.

    I can see where you're coming from, but I think you're reaching a bit here. There was no need to say more than we did. There is no reason to believe that we were looking for ways around this, or working on changing Drop Rates. That's just needless paranoia, and we don't reply to conspiracy theories.

    We are not going to update this thread until there is something to update you with. Repeatedly posting "we don't have anything new to share yet" is not a good use of anybody's time, and giving progress updates is not always possible, because there are lots of moving parts.

    Now, let's get this thread back on track, or we're gonna close it down.

    Miike I think for the most part people get worried that things are forgotten. Even though Kabam states they will provide information when they have it I think most people hear just want someone to check in. I have no idea what the requirements are or what you guys have to do and there's no reason for me or anyone else to know. I do appreciate it though when someone checks in and says sorry guys still no update after a few days. I think Kabam has been doing a better job of keeping people updated but there are still a lot of topics that are months old with no official update (skill mastery for example) that tends to build up.

    It can be quite a difficult job being a moderator, and I think the players also have to understand that you can only provide what your company allows you to. So taking it out on you or other mods isn't acceptable.

    Anyways thanks for the update!
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    I understand the "There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen" but there is no excuse why they can't publish the drop rates in a forum post - they already know the rates! No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved.

    People keep saying there's no excuse for this, but if I was the producer in charge I would in many circumstances recommend not doing this, and I've been in favor of releasing drop rates from the very beginning. And I say this as someone that knows precisely what would be involved in doing that, because I've seen it first hand.

    why would you recommend not doing this?

    and what exactly is involved based on your experience?

    There are lots of reasons for potentially recommending not doing this. One of them is the fact that while people seem to think that all it takes is just copying a bunch of numbers and pasting them into a forum post, that doesn't work in the real world. First of all, the drop tables themselves are not likely to be easily human readable, and there's the separate problem of "human readable" is ill-defined. Without text explanation, the raw numbers could easily be more confusing than informative. I see it all the time where most people don't seem to even have the correct conceptions for what any numbers actually mean.

    Once you decide you actually have to take the raw numbers and write text descriptions and explanations surrounding them, the amount of work increases a lot. And you can't just tell someone to do this randomly either. Look at all the text explanations in the game now. Most of them are horrible and those were written by the people who's job it is to write things. Those people have limited time. If you just tell a random content creator to write up an explanation for the statistical odds of the drop tables, that can easily go from horrible to incomprehensible. And I'm ignoring localization (translation) work.

    It is a lot of work and there's many places for it to go wrong. You might think that work is necessary regardless, but that's not 100% true. Depending on how you choose to display the odds, displaying odds in-game with the UI and in-context can be easier than writing an entire odds-sheet. You don't have to explain all of the situational background information for a particular drop, you can simply display only the odds information relevant to that specific lootbox in that specific circumstance. You don't, for example, have to clearly explain what crystal means what, what it looks like, and how to connect the text information in the forum post to a specific lootbox. And separate from the amount of work, the specific *kinds* of work are different.

    The game has all of the numbers in databases: those numbers are "authoritative" meaning they cannot be wrong. They are what the game actually obeys. A developer could write a set of templates that pulled the numbers from the game itself and displayed them with boilerplate text. In fact, that's how many of the champion character sheet descriptions work. When you read something that says a particular ability has a certain chance to happen and the chance is in green, those numbers aren't in the text: they are pulled from the game itself and filled in by the game interface. If you do it right, the numbers you display to the players will always be right. But a forum post can be wrong: it can contain typos, it can contain errors.

    All of those things are challenges I would have to evaluate, and weigh the resources required to address them, before committing internal resources to doing this.

    As to what is required to do this. If someone ordered me to make a forum post with all of the odds, I could do it. I would need the drop table spreadsheets first. Those would contain the numbers. I might need some of the details explained to me, if the tables were constructed in a non-standard way. I would need someone to make the decision on which specific rewards were being disclosed. I would then do a compilation of a traversal of all the appropriate reward tables. And then I would translate the weighted odds into percentage odds and write them up in English, then hand that to the translators for localization into all supported languages.

    What does "compilation of a traversal of all the appropriate reward tables" mean? Well, suppose that "PHC" was one of the lootboxes on the list of lootboxes whose odds were authorized for release. I would need to find the PHC in the reward spreadsheets. It might not be actually called that: sometimes what developers call things internally is different from what the content designers call them in the game. So I would have to find it. Then it is very likely the reward table contains tiers segmented by rarity. In other words, the PHC reward table itself contains reward tables. "Basic 2*" for example. I would need to find these tables also and ensure they themselves did not contain further indirection to make sure their odds were flat. I would then flatten the odds into a single table I could then write up.

    Rinse and repeat for every lootbox authorized for disclosure. Someone would, of course, have to double check my work. It would then pass through the hands of some English major editor that would mess it up, because editors don't understand math. I would have to then fix it, whereupon I would get edited into errors again.

    Also, internal procedures would have to be put in place to ensure this information doesn't become dated. If the content developers ever change the odds, I would have to edit this document. There would have to be documented procedures for what I did, so someone else could maintain the work if I decided to go work for Disney tomorrow. Or alternatively if the intent was always to do this only once, there would have to be a way to expire and invalidate the forum post as soon as odds changed, so it wasn't referenced incorrectly. Of course, no matter what you do, it will be referenced incorrectly, and used as proof that Kabam tried to mislead the players because the numbers changed and they didn't just edit the document to fix the numbers, because it is inconceivable that anyone couldn't just do that on their lunch break.

    This doesn't include the many, many, many meetings I would have to endure where all the grey areas were hammered out by managers, producers, lawyers, and the monetization vampires designers. For example, the PHC has about a 90%ish chance to drop a 2* champion. But not just any 2*, because many 2* champions aren't in the normal crystals. Do you have to say that? If some 2* champions are indeed rarer than others, then doesn't that have to be specified? That sounds like a two hour meeting right there.

    It would actually be faster if I just hacked into the game servers and leaked the odds on Reddit.
  • yall make me laugh, it takes time to remove targeting drop rates. You can't simply recode it over night.

    Ironic statement of the day, because the notion that drop rates involve code is pretty funny.

    Even if Kabam was doing odds manipulation in the code, which they are not, and even if they wanted to eliminate that feature, which they don't need to, you wouldn't reprogram the game to stop doing that. You would instead zero out everyone's profile, making them look identical to the game engine and reverting everyone to the same odds profile.

    You never rewrite the game to *remove* a feature. Every time you touch the code you take a chance of introducing bugs. If you don't want a feature any more, you don't remove it from the code, you simply stop using it. You save editing out the feature from the code for that big refactor that everyone talks about but everyone hopes doesn't happen until after they leave the company.
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I understand the "There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen" but there is no excuse why they can't publish the drop rates in a forum post - they already know the rates! No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved.

    People keep saying there's no excuse for this, but if I was the producer in charge I would in many circumstances recommend not doing this, and I've been in favor of releasing drop rates from the very beginning. And I say this as someone that knows precisely what would be involved in doing that, because I've seen it first hand.

    why would you recommend not doing this?

    and what exactly is involved based on your experience?

    It would actually be faster if I just hacked into the game servers and leaked the odds on Reddit.

    Please do.

    Valid points, but Miike did not say any of this was (except time).

    Again - he stated "No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved" ... it feels like they already have those exact drop rates just taking their sweet time posting it.

    From the get go, they have always been secretive about the drop rates, not being transparent even once. So now it's been close to 3 months and we are in the same position.

    It doesn't take a genius Kabam loathes the idea of being transparent on this topic.
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    yall make me laugh, it takes time to remove targeting drop rates. You can't simply recode it over night.

    Even if Kabam was doing odds manipulation in the code, which they are not,

    Source?
  • BosleyBosley Posts: 240 ★★★
    KABAM cannot simply put down the drop rates as they are flexible and change based on spending habits of the player.

    "The distribution probabilities of the individual potential awards associated with probability item bundles vary depending on the purchase history of the user activating a probability item bundle."


    https://www.google.com/patents/US9744446

  • Valid points, but Miike did not say any of this was (except time).

    Again - he stated "No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved" ... it feels like they already have those exact drop rates just taking their sweet time posting it.

    That's the opposite of what he said: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/306230/#Comment_306230

    This is correct. We're not looking for a workaround, nor did we ever try to look for a "way around this". We've been working on how we are going to make them visible in game. There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen, including visual design, production time, engineering time, among other requirements.

    Note, he was talking about making the information available in-game, not what the requirements would be to construct a forum post with the odds. His comments are therefore not strictly relevant to your questions or my answers.
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    yall make me laugh, it takes time to remove targeting drop rates. You can't simply recode it over night.

    Even if Kabam was doing odds manipulation in the code, which they are not,

    Source?

    Such manipulation would be visible in the crystal opening data we have publicly available, and statistically proper analysis of that data shows no such signs of manipulation.
  • GapToothWitchGapToothWitch Posts: 22
    edited February 2018
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    Valid points, but Miike did not say any of this was (except time).

    Again - he stated "No visual design, production time, or engineering time involved" ... it feels like they already have those exact drop rates just taking their sweet time posting it.

    That's the opposite of what he said: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/306230/#Comment_306230

    This is correct. We're not looking for a workaround, nor did we ever try to look for a "way around this". We've been working on how we are going to make them visible in game. There is a lot of time and work involved in making this happen, including visual design, production time, engineering time, among other requirements.

    Note, he was talking about making the information available in-game, not what the requirements would be to construct a forum post with the odds. His comments are therefore not strictly relevant to your questions or my answers.

    Right so let's have them respond to why a simple forum post won't do, instead of these back and forth essays.

    They engaged in the conversation about this so they can respond to our reasonable questions.
  • GapToothWitchGapToothWitch Posts: 22
    edited February 2018
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    yall make me laugh, it takes time to remove targeting drop rates. You can't simply recode it over night.

    Even if Kabam was doing odds manipulation in the code, which they are not,

    Source?

    Such manipulation would be visible in the crystal opening data we have publicly available, and statistically proper analysis of that data shows no such signs of manipulation.

    Here's a sign of manipulation: https://www.reddit.com/r/ContestOfChampions/comments/7nv9gh/mcoc_pity_timer_on_crystals_w_proof/
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