Downtime Compensation [Merged Threads]

Will there be compensation for the recent “emergency maintenance”

Comments

NikoBravo wrote: »

What a turd of a compensation package. I have to say, this is getting worse. You can’t keep your fan base happy by doing this. The fact that it took over a week to come up with that is shameful.

The truth is, this was your plan all along, but didn’t want to piss us off prior to your 4th of July deals because people would boycott you once again and we know you felt that last one.

You are all walking a diminishing fine line, and probably will feel it again.

Give me my free shards so I can blow them on a reduced chance at a decent champ.

Also, a true compensation package would make up for lost rewards, and also a “We’re sorry for f’in up” apology gift for continuous screwups. Your old Collector understood this, did he get fired for being too nice?

Gwendoline

DNA3000 wrote: »

Lowecomotive wrote: »

This proposed compensation is unsatisfactory.
We dropped nearly 1000 places in AQ as we couldn't finish the maps on day 1.
This didn't just mean we missed out on our map 5 crystals. We also took a massive prestige hit over the remaining days.
We missed at least 2 map 6 crystals plus glory. Plus whatever rank rewards we miss.

My suspicion is that alliance were hit significantly by the downtime events during that week. Although we also experienced downtime, our alliance was able to compensate for that by playing more aggressively and taking advantage of reduced timers, so we ended the week actually slightly higher in points. However, we ended up over four hundred rating places higher, which seemed disproportionately high for our point total to me. My very rough guess is that we placed around three hundred places higher than we would have on a non-downtime week, which suggests many alliances in the 1-1500 expert tier range placed significantly lower than they normally do.

It is only one data point and it involves mostly judgment on my part, but I don't think it is an insignificant data point.

This might be a little of topic but I remember this issue in aq a while back. Prestige didn't jump up after day 1. People that paid attention didn't start day 2 right away but came here. Kabam (quickly, I think) decided that since everyone had the same issue it would be fair and prestige stayed the same all week. We all benefited from that in different ways. For high prestige alliance it didn't change much, since their prestige was sort of capt out already anyway, it just made the gap a bit bigger. For lower prestige alliances like myself the difficulty was nice. We had trouble on day 4 and 5 at that point, so a whole week of "day 1" was a welcome change.

My point to this story, it would have been a fair solution this week. When someone changed the timers they should have disabled prestige from going up and down.

SparkAlot

It took that many days to come up with this compensation package?
The amount of hours the game was done, and it boils down to that as compensation?

It sure seems to me that many factors were not included in the decision making process. All those solo and alliance events that people couldn't finish? What about all the units / gold / PHCs and so on lost in arena for not being able to log in?
All those ranked rewards missed out on, since people couldn't make the final push to get the score up?

@Kabam Miike while the initial compensation is a (very) small step forward, gonna need a few more things to make up for all that lost time and lost rewards.

DrZola

DNA3000 wrote: »

Kabam Miike wrote: »

It's important to remember a few things here. First, the first and foremost goal of these kinds of compensation are to make up for what you missed during the downtime. We want to make sure that all events affected had a resolution, and that any affected Summoner has the situation rectified for them. Compensation packages are not about "Free stuff". The only events that we can't measure how players were affected specifically were things like Event Quest, and Alliance Wars, which is why there are Energy Refills and 5-Star Shards in the package as well.

I understand and I agree up to a point. The point to compensation is to compensate: to try to counteract the ill effects of the downtime. I can agree that in theory the correct thing to do is to try to figure out what the potential damage was, and rectify that.

However, there's two things I think Kabam should consider. First, I think the approach to compensation is doing a subtly but significantly wrong thing. Take the arena events. Kabam's solution to those is to rerun them, which makes sense on the surface. However, that addresses the opportunity cost of losing the opportunity for the highest rewards in those arenas, but doesn't address the question of player effort. Consider this thought experiment. I'm grinding in an arena and I'm four hours of grinding into it when it malfunctions. So Kabam offers to rerun it. So I run it again, and I get four hours of grinding into it when it malfunctions again. So Kabam offers to run it again, and again, and again. In each case Kabam's position seems to be that this adequately addresses the issue of me not being able to grind that arena to completion, but those restarts are not compensating me for the fact that I'm putting in a ton of effort into the arena and getting little back for it (in many arenas past the last milestone you are primarily grinding for either the top reward or a high percentage ranked reward, and there's no more rewards for continued grinding besides that). Basically, Kabam is giving players the opportunity to expend more effort for a particular reward, but not accounting for the effort already put into the events. Players aren't actually being fully compensated for the damage due to the downtime, even in theory.

The second thing to consider is even if there existed a way to magically make everyone whole in absolutely perfect fashion, it brings up the question of whether even that is enough. Again, consider a thought experiment. The game goes down for eight hours. Somehow, you wave a magic wand and reset everything so that everyone gets both their effort compensated for and the lost opportunities recreated in a perfect fashion for everyone. To say that this alone is the target of compensation is in effect saying that so long as this magic wand exists, downtime is harmless. The downtime happens, everyone is compensated, and since compensation precisely accounts for lost player time and lost player opportunities, there was no actual harm.

I think this is wrong. I think even in a perfect world where compensation perfectly achieves your stated goal of "making up for what you missed" during the downtime, the downtime still causes subjective harm. Kabam should be trying not just to compensate players for material losses, but also for the intangible losses due to inconvenience and gameplay disruption.

TL;DR: Kabam is trying to give players the opportunity to make up for downtime losses. But Kabam isn't in every case trying to directly compensate players for lost effort, disrupted gameplay, or general inconvenience. That means their target errs on the low side of compensation, and Kabam should consider making a reasonable effort gesture towards addressing those intangibles. And I don't count the energy refills and 5* shards, because Kabam explicitly stated those were meant to address other game modes with immeasurable impact. So they cannot also address the issues with the explicitly mentioned game modes in the announcement I reference above.

Spot on. When there isn’t a clear and obvious compensation quantum (e.g., player qualifies for a certain level of arena rewards but never receives them), there’s rarely going to be perfect symmetry when making up for lost time, lost effort, etc. The decision then is really a policy decision—should the company award restitution magnanimously, legalistically/minimally or in some combination thereof?

In my experience, it’s best to make the calculus based on things like the duration of the error, the extent of the injury caused by the error and the level of fault that lies with the company—and then lean a little further towards the magnanimous end of the spectrum. That tends to soothe whatever soreness there is over the error.

This certainly looks like they didn’t take that approach.

Dr. Zola

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mum_m2

Someone please post what they expect from Kabam. Everyone is griping about how minimal the compensation package is, and I'm very happy with the return on it. They've given everyone a chance to redo the gold arena. (also Kabam, please don't rerun Ant-Man...rather than expending the energy to rerun him, just find a way to make him relevant). No one is mentioning what it should have been.

As for @dcw_ you're not nailing anything down. you and anyone mentioning lost time here instantaneously loses any argument. You're playing a video game on your own time....your own FREE TIME. free. your investment into a game is valueless. You've taken a game to the point of addiction if you feel that you're investing in yourself through a video game unless it's your way to make a means. Unless your name is Callum, or Dave, or Bryan, then I mention the digs to snap you and anyone back into reality/wake up. And that's my perspective when I see a bunch of people crowd around a forum complaining about a server outage that's at the fault of a third party. And if you and anyone feels so strongly against this compensation then don't claim it and let it sit there until it expires.

Also lastly going to mention that to anyone who spent and lost their items is getting 1500 5* and some refills which is about the same as beating master mode 100%. So...there's that too.

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dcw_

mum_m2 wrote: »

Someone please post what they expect from Kabam. Everyone is griping about how minimal the compensation package is, and I'm very happy with the return on it. They've given everyone a chance to redo the gold arena. (also Kabam, please don't rerun Ant-Man...rather than expending the energy to rerun him, just find a way to make him relevant). No one is mentioning what it should have been.

As for @dcw_ you're not nailing anything down. you and anyone mentioning lost time here instantaneously loses any argument. You're playing a video game on your own time....your own FREE TIME. free. your investment into a game is valueless. You've taken a game to the point of addiction if you feel that you're investing in yourself through a video game unless it's your way to make a means. Unless your name is Callum, or Dave, or Bryan, then I mention the digs to snap you and anyone back into reality/wake up. And that's my perspective when I see a bunch of people crowd around a forum complaining about a server outage that's at the fault of a third party. And if you and anyone feels so strongly against this compensation then don't claim it and let it sit there until it expires.

Also lastly going to mention that to anyone who spent and lost their items is getting 1500 5* and some refills which is about the same as beating master mode 100%. So...there's that too.

Your entitled to your opinion as I am in mine. The difference is the thought and delivery of those opinions.

There is something called opportunity cost. You fail to consider the time, effort and resources behind simply rerunning the arenas (especially the gold pool arena).

Your subjective comments to the nature of individuals and your mission to set people straight are neither here nor there. Again I see little to no added value in your contributions to this topic (my subjective opinion

Cuteshelf

I don’t mind that this compensation sucks, as long as you take the money earned on the July 4th “deals” to buy more/better/satisfactory severs.

RogerRabs

@Kabam Miike Why is there no Glory included in the compensation? Many alliances couldn't finish the day 1 Map due to the excessive downtime. This had ripple effects the whole week. Lower prestige leads to missed milestones (glory and map 5/6 crystals in our case) and led to a rank 600 spots lower then we place every week. That's more glory and t4cc fragments.

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LegionDestroier

While most things are covered by the compensation. Our drop in AQ ranking for that week has been completely ignored.

With not completing day 1 we missed out on millions of points points and dropped 650-750 ranks. So @Kabam Lyra where is our missed rank awards? I see no reflection of this in your compensation.

My suggestion is you award us the rank awards we got the week before as they are a reflection of what rank we would of got if the emergency maintenance never happened.

DrZola

Stugots2704 wrote: »

The funny thing about all this is all the people that are complaining on here are the ones that thought the July 4th deals were wonderful and bought several of them. Now you are mad that the compensation package isn’t enough. Your words don’t phase Kabam. They are a company looking to make as much as possible while throwing small bones from time to time. Your threats to quit are a joke. If you wanted to hurt them, truly hurt them, you would’ve passed on any deal, no matter how good it was. Instead, Kabam is laughing all the way to the bank. Way to go community.

Be cautious using absolutes. No deals for me, no log in for me since yesterday evening and no log in until tomorrow at the earliest. And I’m not complaining: just chronicling how every time Kabam has a shot at making something right, their instincts seem to steer them in the other direction.

Dr. Zola

DNA3000

mum_m2 wrote: »

Someone please post what they expect from Kabam.

I did that already. I didn't specifically mention some specific thing I expect from them, because I don't specifically expect some specific reward. In general, I rarely advocate for compensation at all in most cases. But I believe the recent outage is an exceptional case, I believe it is part of a continuum of increasingly common problems and outages since the beginning of the year, and Kabam's overall response to them in general has, with only a few exceptions, been below my own very conservative expectations. What I want is what I always want: I want Kabam to think carefully about how they are choosing to approach this problem as I want them to do so for all problems, and formulate a strategy that will work in the long term to address all aspects of the problem in the most beneficial way for the game as a whole. I don't think the compensation announcement does that in this case.

You're not going to make everyone perfectly whole, and you can't keep giving out escalatingly higher compensation rewards either. That's why you're supposed to avoid unexpected downtime and operational issues to the best degree possible: it is because you can't just make everyone whole and move on. There's a lesson there: the universe doesn't hand you an unlimited number of mulligans, so you can't operate as if it does. Making things right when you screw up is supposed to be painful, so you try harder to avoid screwing up in the future.

And I do understand, probably more than most, that there is an external component to the outage that wasn't entirely under Kabam's control. But when a failure like that happens, you can only blame externalities once. After that, you're supposed to be implementing failsafes that will tolerate similar failures in the future. At some point, the problem isn't the vendor, it is your continued use of a vendor in a way that allows them to bring you down. That's hard to address, but it is never impossible.

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Raganator

In protest, I am going to log off tonight for the same amount of time that the game was down last Friday. That'll show them! (And I get to enjoy my Friday night).

LegionDestroier

Stugots2704 wrote: »

The funny thing about all this is all the people that are complaining on here are the ones that thought the July 4th deals were wonderful and bought several of them. Now you are mad that the compensation package isn’t enough. Your words don’t phase Kabam. They are a company looking to make as much as possible while throwing small bones from time to time. Your threats to quit are a joke. If you wanted to hurt them, truly hurt them, you would’ve passed on any deal, no matter how good it was. Instead, Kabam is laughing all the way to the bank. Way to go community.

This is irrelevant, the deals, idea of boycott and logout day have nothing to do with the outage and outage compensation. They were regards the game meta changes happening with 19.0. Please take it to another discussion.

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dcw_

Stugots2704 wrote: »

The funny thing about all this is all the people that are complaining on here are the ones that thought the July 4th deals were wonderful and bought several of them. Now you are mad that the compensation package isn’t enough. Your words don’t phase Kabam. They are a company looking to make as much as possible while throwing small bones from time to time. Your threats to quit are a joke. If you wanted to hurt them, truly hurt them, you would’ve passed on any deal, no matter how good it was. Instead, Kabam is laughing all the way to the bank. Way to go community.

Hindsight is 20/20. I bought 2 small deals on the 4th and I don’t have any regrets about spending the money, then or now. The 2 things are completely separate, I do think it’s suspect on the timing of the information release coupled with the need they felt to explain how compensation works. However, similar to your statement; it’s completely a subjective view point not based in fact.

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DrZola

Stugots2704 wrote: »

Be cautious using absolutes. No deals for me, no log in for me since yesterday evening and no log in until tomorrow at the earliest. And I’m not complaining: just chronicling how every time Kabam has a shot at making something right, their instincts seem to steer them in the other direction.

Dr. Zola

Then why chronicle anything sir? This is a free to play game and if you aren’t spending or even logging in, why do you care enough to be on the forum? And, it’s not using absolutes; it’s talking about the vast majority.

“[a]ll the people that are complaining on here...”

That’s an absolute.

I’m pretty sure you misunderstood my comment above. The thread is about downtime compensation from a week or so ago—it isn’t restricted only to people logged on today or who bought the July 4 deals. I’ve played the game since 2014 (including during the downtime), just as I will tomorrow. I’ve actually been on the forums since 2015, and I perused this thread when I was checking to see whether the V19.0 phone overheating issue was resolved.

So that’s why I’m on the forums.

Dr. Zola

ILovePonies

So much activity from kabam mods.. hmm shows they care about our issues..

Just gonna leave my initial message here looking like a scrap piece of paper because it won’t get answered anyway.

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Hi @Kabam Miike so you have merged my post here.. understandable.. but no message to why?

so what’s gonna happen to people like me who were at the end of a legend run in lily quest? Just lose out on the items and no legend? No compensation for us? We just the lost cause for trying to be competitive ?

What will it physically cost you as a company to award the players who were in a legit run for legend and was put to a guaranteed fail for legend due to the downtime? NOTHING. Costs you absolutely nothing to award somebody something like a legend badge.

Did the other players use 30 percent non farmable boost for various in game stuff? Did they use units to add on suicides? Did they buy units for the legend run?

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

dcw_

Stugots2704 wrote: »

dcw_ wrote: »

Stugots2704 wrote: »

The funny thing about all this is all the people that are complaining on here are the ones that thought the July 4th deals were wonderful and bought several of them. Now you are mad that the compensation package isn’t enough. Your words don’t phase Kabam. They are a company looking to make as much as possible while throwing small bones from time to time. Your threats to quit are a joke. If you wanted to hurt them, truly hurt them, you would’ve passed on any deal, no matter how good it was. Instead, Kabam is laughing all the way to the bank. Way to go community.

Hindsight is 20/20. I bought 2 small deals on the 4th and I don’t have any regrets about spending the money, then or now. The 2 things are completely separate, I do think it’s suspect on the timing of the information release coupled with the need they felt to explain how compensation works. However, similar to your statement; it’s completely a subjective view point not based in fact.

Your dealing with the same company that hasn’t been able to get server issues straightened out in three years, gives certain deals to certain people and not everyone, shady business practices, all while the people that keep them in business are complaining. You can’t complain about outages and compensation while you are still pumping money into them. It’s ignorant and 100% related. They don’t fix the issues and don’t compensate properly because they don’t have to. The money is still flowing. The only time they EVER bent to the community is when the top alliances threatened to stop spending.

You and I have vastly different definitions of the word ignorant.

For example I think it’s ignorant to think people should have made decisions yesterday using information gained today. (It’s also impossible)

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Namelez

So I see... Back in October, we got 7500 5* shards just bc of server crashes... What's different this time ?

Alfninja

Since the old ones closed migbt aswell make a new one.
The compensation for the downtime aka 1500 shards 3 refills and 50k gold is trash.
What about the boosters and refills i used in arena?we need better compensation.

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DNA3000

Namelez wrote: »

So I see... Back in October, we got 7500 5* shards just bc of server crashes... What's different this time ?

I believe I can explain it, although I don't agree with it. Kabam's position seems to be that when the servers crash, there's two sources of problems for the players. First, there's the actual disruption associated with the moment of the crash. Fights get interrupted and/or lost, etc. Second, there's the losses due to the duration of the downtime, when players cannot participate in events. A single crash of any duration has one of the first kind of problem, and one of the second kind of the problem. The first kind of problem is difficult to compensate for: basically all you can do is hand out a bunch of crystals or potions that have some value, but of course it will never be anything but a general attempt to address that loss. The second kind of problem is, as Kabam sees is, contextually easier to address if not always technically. The loss due to being unable to participate in something, like an event, can be addressed by allowing players to try again. Remember: this is my interpretation of Kabam's statements, not my opinion.

Back around the end of last year we had a large number of short disruptions. That created a lot of losses of the first kind, but not as much losses of the second kind. The compensation thus was weighted towards the compensation they give for that kind of loss: some bag of stuff. But the recent outage had far less of that kind of loss (because it was only one big disruption - I'm setting that statement aside for now even though I know it is not fully accurate) and more of the second kind, which they feel they can address with event reruns however long the outage was.

That's the source of the difference in approach to compensation, as I'm interpreting Kabam's statements. I'm not defending them, so don't ask me to.

ShadowReptile

Someone asked what should be fair compensation here is my opinion:
-5000 5* shards (1500 we missed plus more for messing up big time)
-500 4* shards
-1000 3* shards
-1 premium hero crystal
- 3 AQ map quest crystals (like they proposed)
- All people who reached first milestone in any arena recieve the champ including goldpool
- Mirco relms return pym particles
- 1 tier 4 basic or 1 aplha catalyst (to be nice to us)
- For wars if you won you recieve what the losers got and if you lost you get rewards for what the winners got plus reset everyones ranking back to before the mess up
-75,000 gold
-1500 glory
-5000 battle chips
-5000 loyalty

I know this isn’t perfect and I probably missed a few things but i feel like this is more around what we as a community would hope to recieve for all of this.

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