**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.
Summoner Appreciation Week Discussion
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
You were just trying to make yourself seem superior by correcting him. Seems a tad hypocritical to me.
Dr. Zola
I’m sure it will be only 25 pages when they delete some posts
Kabam please talk to us!
Kabam is teaching us life lessons, in the same way that we teach toddlers to prepare them for the harsh reality of life.
I see Miike as something of a father figure.
Daddy...
Yeah he's the Shou Tucker of father's lol
This recent silence on kabam’s part regarding all these issues has really emphasized within the playerbase how little the customer actually means to the company! I always thought a successful business was built on the belief that the customer is always right. I understand that some people would take this too far but most are reasonable. Ignoring these messages will only prove to community around us how little the company values us as customers. Now to get straight to the point, as iterated in the title, we want to hear from you @Kabam Miike , @Kabam Lyra , @Kabam Vydious , etc! Yes, we do understand that you guys/gals are the messengers but we need to know what’s going on with our game! We deserve to know as a community what’s going to be done about all the bugs, and all the disdain about summoner appreciation week/compensation!
My one question to you kabam is; what are you going to do about all this uproar of 1000+ comments, all stating that this compensation/appreciation is truly unforgivable? Are you going to be the change, are you going to inspire hope within the community or are you going to ignore us and create a rift between the player base and mods/admins/kabam?
I don't see a general pattern of the game tightening up rewards. If anything the overall trend is increasing rewards within the game content. And I don't see dungeons as giving out less rewards in terms of rewards per time spent. They constrained how much time we can spend grinding them per day, which ultimately places a lower cap on maximum possible rewards, but that's not consistent with the notion that Kabam is trying to reduce rewards across the board in the game. They were also much more transparent about their design thoughts when it came to dungeons, whether you agree with their design logic or not.
If anything, dungeons makes the SA announcement seem even more schizophrenic to me. I find the dungeon changes reasonably well thought out and reasonably well explained, even though I personally am not a fan of dungeons. I can see what they were thinking, and I generally agree with the motivations for the changes made, and the changes seem to be a reasonable attempt to implement those changes. Reasonable people can disagree, but at least there's some context for us to discuss that disagreement. Here, we're arguing over whether a "gift" can be "compensation" which is pretty ludicrous.
All we have is a statement that the stuff in the SA announcement represent both summoner appreciation content as well as "compensation" for, well, stuff. If you believe the compensation is inadequate, the question is: inadequate for what? Is Kabam delivering poor compensation for a wide range of problems, or is Kabam greatly underestimating the problems we've been experiencing, relative to what the average player perceives to have been the problems? And how do we know compensation is inadequate, when Kabam hasn't even announced what the contents of the choose your own gift package are? Why announce something as being compensation for problems and make it a mystery as to what is actually in the thing?
I am not a conspiracy theory proponent. I don't make unfounded accusations about the motivations of the developer team. But this all smells to me like the SA content was designed *first*, and then someone retroactively decided to make the choose your own gift the 19.x "compensation" after the fact and at the last minute. And that suggests that someone decided not to make an actual compensation package for those problems and tried to punt the problem away. That just feels wrong to me.
I wanted to listen to the podcast before commenting. After listening to the entire sequence, I think this is a slightly unfair distillation of their position, albeit one encouraged by the fact that *they* distilled their position in a similar way when they summarized that section of the podcast.
They initially stated the notion that the problem was *caused* by Kabam's poor messaging, which is not the same thing as saying that players were complaining *about* the messaging. That's two different things. And I think proper messaging would have significantly altered the community response. Three things would have been completely different had Kabam thought carefully about their messaging here.
First, Summoner Appreciation Week should have been separated completely from compensation to make the two things completely separate. This would have separated *discussion* about the two things, and that's important because at this point almost no one is discussing the SA content in general, positive or negative. That's been swallowed by discussion about the poor way compensation was both announced and what its value is. There are positive things in SA, even separate from the fact that its duration is only a week. Most of that has been lost due to incredibly bad messaging. Personally, I wouldn't have even announced them on the same day, much less in the same post. That's just brain dead.
Second, compensation should have been explicitly announced with both a list of problems being addressed and *precisely* what was being done to compensate for those things, in the same vein as the dungeons dev diary. I'm not saying that doing so would make everyone who thinks the compensation is inadequate change their minds, but doing so would have focused the discussion in specific directions - did Kabam account for all the same problems the players experienced, did the compensation adequately compensate for each individual item, or if not what specifically would bridge the gap. As it stands, none of that discussion can happen, because none of those details exist and there's no avenue to discuss them if they did. This dramatically changes the context these complaints would be discussed within, and that discussion could have changed people's minds, or at least softened their dissent. But even if it didn't, it would have almost certainly prompted a more productive discussion.
And finally, there are in fact players who believe that the poor messaging translates into poor customer service. Many players made specific complaints about how the confused and faulty messaging demonstrates that Kabam didn't care enough about these problems to put enough effort into addressing them. These aren't complaints about the messaging itself, but complaints about what the poor messaging implies, in their opinion. None of these complaints would exist with careful and proper messaging, and those certainly fueled the animosity many players felt towards the announcement and its contents.
I have no doubt that had this been better thought out, even if the content hadn't changed the discussion surrounding it would have been far more productive and far less antagonistic. At the end of the day, the same people might have felt it was inadequate, but I'm pretty sure more people would have felt there was at least a reasonable avenue to work towards improving things, and that changes everything about how the announcement landed.
This is pretty much where I am. It’s curious all the way through, vague statements, thrown-together events, odd pronouncements, doublespeak, radio silence.
Someone pointed out to me today that the 19.x patch never mentioned overheating or battery issues at all when it was made available in the App Store, which makes it seem even more like the team has tried to sweep this under the rug from the outset. I don’t know if that’s customary or not, but it seems at odds with the way it was to announced on the forums as a fix derived from the beta (and I’m assuming no other issues were targeted in it). You as a developer would know more about that than I would.
Dr. Zola
People are very unpredictable in the general case, and there are a million possible reasons why anyone does anything, but I can hypothesize. It is possible that the data Kabam had suggested that the problems experienced were so randomly dispersed and so wildly different in impact for different players that there was no possible way to address them with a targeted compensation solution, which is their preferred choice. With that off the table, the question became what, if anything, should be done. "Nothing" is a possibility: when no remedy actually works as compensation, sometimes nothing is the correct thing to do. But another possibility was to offer some moderate value compensation package to everyone, and simply call it a day. That would almost certainly be seen as inadequate by many players, especially those impacted by a higher amount or in avenues of the game other than the ones the compensation package might assist with. And then SA comes along and within it something new that a content developer created. A choose your own gift package that would allow a player to pick which area of the game they would want the most benefit from during the summoner appreciation week. And then someone gets the bright idea to say, hey, that's a good idea for 19.x compensation: make a package that players can choose the contents of, so they will autotune compensation to the parts of the game they were most affected by. And since the thing has already been created, let's just use that. And while that decision is made, absolutely no thought or time is spent changing the content announcement to account for that.
I'm not saying this happened, and I have no inside knowledge about that. I am also not saying I would do this. Definitely not: I would have warned against this. All I'm saying is that it is possible for human beings to make decisions like this: they do so every day. Globally, these are dumb decisions taken together. But individually, they are exactly what many people do just before they step off a cliff while trying to get a good selfie. Sometimes people are motivated by bad intentions. But sometimes people are just people, doing catastrophically bad things because they simply don't realize the full consequences of their actions. It is what gives NTSB investigators job security.
So here is the issue I have with what Dragon said. Here is the quote: “That’s [referring to the moderator response being how we found out it was compensation] what caused all the outrage, that is literally the single driving factor in all of the outrage is that, ‘this was the compensation, we weren’t actually told it was compensation until we asked’ and now that we found out after the fact in the way we did, people have become even angrier.
I agree that this is ONE OF the things people are annoyed about, but it’s not the only.
People are annoyed by a range of things.
-how kabam told us: it should have been clear that this was compensation at the very start. We shouldn’t have had to ask, wait for Lyra to vaguely tell us and then a day (I think, or at least hours) later, Vydious to confirm.
-appreciation: it’s being all wrapped up as a kabam saying how much they appreciate us, when it should be compensation. Kabam are trying to spin this as though they are being nice and making sure we all feel thought about. When, in reality, this is to make up for all the issues of the past month
-forced to choose how we were affected: I get that the cast like this part, but a lot of us here don’t. I was affected in arena, Aq, Aw and event quests, but I need to choose where I was affected most? Where can I get the shards I lost from arena, the glory from aq, the shards from Aw, the energy from event quests? You even said yourself that you were android and weren’t affected, but surely you understand how others were?
-the compensation doesn’t make up for the issues, it let’s US make up for it: look at arena one. We get boosts and stamina refills, so we need to put more effort in to make up for what we lost. This isn’t a major one, but still part of it.
-kabam are distancing themselves, from us and the problem: there hasn’t been a mention of the overheating at all. Just “the issues of 19.0”. Kabam seem like a kid not wanting to say sorry to a sibling. They are also ignoring us, this thread has over 43k views and 780 comments, but 2 from kabam officials. Only clarifying it’s compensation, then leaving us to talk, rant and be angry. Kabam are giving an air of utter uncaring to us. And it sucks.
Dragon says in the podcast, that “the package is wonderful. The presentation of it was just a nightmare”. And this does not represent the communities thoughts. Like I said, I get that you like it. And that’s fine, I’m not telling people to dislike it, but we do not think the package is wonderful. No matter what way kabam had wrapped it up.
And look, I’m not throwing shade at anyone at the podcast, I love what you guys do. I just wanted to kinda correct what was being said that this was the only thing we were annoyed about. It felt like all our outrage was being devalued to “oh they were just annoyed that kabam didn’t say it was compensation”. It’s a lot deeper than that.
I hope you could address this on the podcast next week, and not as in a “You should correct yourselves” way, because that’s not what I’m trying to get across here. I just don’t want this anger that the community feels to be painted in a mob, pitchfork, anger, flames light. Because that’s what it seems like. I want our views to be represented, as clearly as you, Deacon, Dragon and JJ etc can all represent your views.
Look forward to the next episode.
The data I've seen suggests that more than half of the players are from North America (Canada, US, Mexico) and Europe, and the majority of the revenue comes specifically from the US.