**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
AQ Bracket Issue [Resolved: Compensation Given]
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Comments
What exactly did Kabam day that made you think running map 3 made sense? We didn’t interpret it your way and ran map 5 since it provides the best rewards while not being a complete drain like map 6.
When this got messed up previously, the messed up week was disregarded and the previous week was used to determine rewards. I don't think it was unreasonable for alliances to assume that this would be the case this time as well, especially since no one jumped in from Kabam to clarify right away.
There were precedence kabam restarted AQ because of wrong brackets. Based on historical info if they told us to do whatever we choose it is possible someone think that AQ might be restart again like before
In other words has there been a behind the scenes communication with the big spenders and decided on the type of this compensation?
Maybe this goes too far but wouldn’t come out of the blue considering Kabam’s recent game changing decisions which take into account only big spenders.
Never believe what kabam says.
But regardless, it wasn’t clear—at least it wasn’t to me. Without a firm explanation, the safer thing to do was play map 6.
But ultimately, I’m not sure it matters, unless I’m missing something. The way I read the compensation was that we are getting all milestones (not just the milestones we would receive based on score). Then we are getting rank rewards based on score. So unless you are always hiring top aq milestone, you’re likely getting more glory than you otherwise would have gotten and aomw glory crystals instead of a t4cc crystal.
I hope I’m reading the milestone payout correctly. I never know anymore...
At the time we had no detailed information from Kabam and no answer on if doing map 5 WOULD actually count or not. As you probably know it's pricey to run it all week anyway, and everyone who got dropped down a tier already hit their low reward/milestone threshold within the first map (doing map 2 for a lot of us on accident when it defaulted). When you say "it provides the best rewards" that is true usually, but no one was in the right bracket so therefore no one was actually getting those best rewards at all. Many groups chose to stay on the side of caution that this week wouldn't count and didn't want to waste resources on maps they weren't earning glory and map 5&6 crystals on. Does that make sense? I mean everyone was flying dark and had these conversations with their groups, and going by the only line we had from Kabam about being "free to play the week" took that as we could continue to do map 2 or 3 and then everything would be fixed next week. When in fact they waited until 3 map launches into the week before coming up with their answer, which will lead to a lot of groups possibly losing their normal rewards they would have earned had they been running map 5 all week. My group has run map 5x5 all season long now, and always stay in expert tier and finish with over 100 million. NOW, because of Kabam's default to map 2 the first day and bad communication, we ran map 2, then map 5, then map 2 before the announcement and since this is somehow being translated on their end to act as a normal week, that would mean two days without map 5. I am fully expecting to drop out and get punished for something we haven't done ALL SEASON, because they couldn't do their job and couldn't come up with a decision that would benefit everyone fairly. My group isn't alone there either, there's going on 700 comments on this, and messages all over reddit, youtube, twitter and facebook where similar groups did the same thing are could be hurt from it. This was a terrible decision on Kabam's part and shows they are either incredibly out of touch with their player base, or they just don't care. And both of those options shouldn't be acceptable to anyone, including the top players. It might be happening to a lot of mid level groups now but it sets a precedence that anyone could be done dirty like this again. And that's already been happening for most of this year anyway so it wouldn't be a surprise.
Honestly, and i dont mean this in a bad way but a mod backing which? or a third story?
also here is screenshot
Anyone who thinks the posted statement could not reasonably have been interpreted in that way should not, under any circumstances, be involved with customer communication. And out of all the people absolutely certain about what that statement meant, exactly zero of them apparently decided to post that certainty on the forums to respond to people's confusion. I was one of the very few to post to suggest that the announcement meant people should run AQ normally, and even I wasn't certain about that.
A lot of people are certain about what Kabam means when they post things AFTER it is too late to interpret those statements. No one seems willing to stick their necks out and prove that their Kabam-o-meter is anything but a lava lamp BEFORE those statements are made moot.
Kabam is killing the morale for most of the top end players struggling to be in top 100. They are quitting in droves and killing the game.
I"m switching anyway, but I don't expect Kabam will make it right. I'll probably get nothing at all.
You're likely to get nothing if you switch. If the rewards mean anything to you, I would recommend staying until the end of the week even if the alliance isn't even running AQ anymore. My understanding of the compensation as currently announced is that at the very least, you'll be getting all of the milestone rewards for the expert tier, which is not insubstantial. But I don't know how they are going to handle alliance switches in the middle of this week. But at the moment, I would presume the absolute worst possible thing is the most likely thing, given Kabam has explicitly stated more than once that their current approach to compensation is, to put it generously, surgical, and to put it the way the players are more likely to, minimally mandatory.
But you gotta do what you gotta do.
Would it be additional compensation? Yes. But it's Kabam's error. I don't blame the mod. They work off the best information they have at the time and consistently get hung out to dry over and over again. It's not fair to them, it's not fair to the players who believed a mod was a representative/mouthpiece for the company and their words can be taken as fact. Kabam is indirectly saying the mods aren't a part of the game team, but if that's the case then they should never be given any information at all related to the game to communicate with us. They can just hang out on the forums in participate in polls, I guess.
Really hope this is still being monitored and they reconsider the terrible solution the "game team" came up with. Doesn't have to be my idea, but the solution they threw out yesterday is trash.
I don't actually blame the moderators either. In fact, I seem to be the one giving them the most benefit of the doubt. I believe they had no idea what the compensation would look like, and thus they were not in a position to give the players any solid recommendations. Therefore, they made an ambiguous statement owing to the fact that they had no information to make a precise one. This caused different players to make different decisions moving forward, which is entirely understandable when you don't have sufficient information. Kabam should have factored that into their compensation, which they did not. This is ultimately the fault of the operational decision makers, who dropped the ball.
The players who are attempting to make the claim that the moderators were perfectly clear, and deliberately and intentionally made a specific recommendation moving forward are the ones that are, whether they understand it or not, setting the moderators on fire. Because if they were making an explicit deliberate recommendation to the players, there's only two possibilities. They knew what the compensation would look like, and they deliberately allowed the players to remain confused for days when they knew their statement was being considered ambiguous by a significant percentage of the player population, or they didn't know what the compensation would look like and gave us an explicit recommendation without knowing if it was a valid one. Both of those possibilities represent gross professional errors.
It is not in the best interests of the community representatives to confuse or breed mistrust in the player community, because that just makes their own personal job harder, and they don't make any more money doing that either. Even if anyone thinks there's some greed component to this, and I don't believe there is, there's absolutely no reason for the moderators to sacrifice themselves in service of it.
You said this perfectly. Especially the part about others speaking on their behalf or trying to clarify their official positions and statements. It does the opposite effect and you can literally see it on this post alone. The comments just take off after they jumped in and that's when I got on here myself and needed to speak up finally and start posting. I couldn't take it anymore. And honestly I don't think anyone blames the mods for not knowing, but we are allowed to be frustrated and think their comments can be rude in some cases and could definitely be worded better, more respectfully, clearer and it would help both sides here. I also completely agree with the part about not speaking at all if they don't have information from the game team. They have plenty to do with deleting comments it seems lately.
I have seen you make numerous comments on threads about what kabam supposedly said or when things will be fixed, only for it to be completely wrong. I think you should, of all people, stop trying to “clarify” kabam comments and let the actual mods speak for themselves.
This is the quote that has caused some confusion. "... everyone is free to run through the current AQ series If they so choose" . There are alliances that didnt run map 4, 5, or 6 because it didnt sound like the compensation was going to be impacted by what map they run.
The logical reason to drop down in maps is that by the end of the first day, any 5x5 alliance would have maxed out the milestones and ceased getting milestone rewards. Given the chaos of the week, and given that many alliances could have started the wrong map, it would not be unreasonable to assume that Kabam would have taken that into account and not relied on this weeks' points for ranking purposes. At that point, the maps you're doing are just for the map crystals, and some alliances may have chosen to switch maps to the lower maps because they actually wanted those lower map crystals, and this week was a perfect opportunity to downshift to those maps without penalty. It was also an opportunity to take a break and ease off of map 5, which is not a trivial map for all alliances doing it to complete.
If the week was going to be tossed out and restarted anyway for ranking purposes, then it is an entirely free choice which map to run or even whether to continue to run anything, a position reinforced by the moderator message that explicitly used the words "free to run" and "if they so choose."
When people say "precedent" I'm assuming they are referring to the previous case where an AQ week was restarted, and not elaborating on the complete thought process I'm presuming many players made.
Confession: I have flagged GW’s terrible posts before. However, in this instance and as much as it pains me (sorry, GW, you often spew nonsense), he’s absolutely right.
Actually, I've been pretty consistent with clarifying statements. As for the actions they would take, I'm not responsible for that. The only thing I said was in the past, they have given the previous week's earnings, so it was a possibility. I never said it was certain because that's not my choice. I'm not responsible for people not running it, and in fact I never commented on it until after the news came out about how they will handle it. You also have to consider the fact that there was an outage last week, so they can't really go by that. At what point do we stop pointing the finger and take responsibility for our choices?