**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.
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Comments
I should have seen a predictable response from you coming.
Just because you don’t you don’t understand opportunity cost and the time value of money doesn’t mean they aren’t valid points. It’s safe to assume that if I say I’m generating interest from the money it’s in an interest bearing account. You might want to put your money there since it seems like you keep it in your mattress.
The burden shouldn’t be on us to have to prove what damage the boosts not working caused. Technically I don’t have any proof I used them at all outside my memory. All that proof sits on Kabams servers. They have logs and if they really wanted I’m sure they could better assess how it effected each individual player. But I understand that’s unreasonable.
Why are you so against them giving extra compensation? Businesses that let down their customers do it all the time. Ever gotten credit from an airline when a flight is delayed? Or gotten something comped at a restaurant because of poor service?
But hey, keep up your contrarian takes.
Sure, let them asses a 10's of millions of players fights. Think compensation is taking a long time now. That would take months plus.
Getting your food comped isnt "extra". Its the compensation for poor service. Extra would be getting good comped and next 3 meals free. Getting credit for a delay isn't extra either. Extra would be getting credit for the flight and vouchers for the next 2 flights.
It comes down to you just want more. Most of this player base does. They don't owe you interest. They could've fixed the boosts and never said anything but they are trying to be transparent about it.
I'm not specifically endorsing this one way or the other, but when you sue someone in civil court there's two kinds of damage relief you can ask for. You can ask for compensatory damage relief and punitive damage relief. Compensatory damage relief attempts to compensate you for actual damages (i.e. losses). Punitive damages attempt to punish the other party for damaging you in the first place. Let's set that aside for now.
Most compensatory damage awards require some proof that the damage was actually done, how much damage was done, and that the damage was caused by the other party. You can't ask for compensation for hypotheticals. You can't say "if I had that money I would have bought stock in Google and made a fortune, so they owe me for that opportunity cost." Opportunity costs are not recoverable. However, there are cases where everyone knows the damage was done, but it is impossible to specify with precision exactly what the value of the damage was. Take so-called "pain and suffering" relief. There's no objective way to measure in dollars and cents what "pain" is worth. But you can still ask juries to guestimate and award damages.
When something like this happens, I think Kabam must make a reasonable attempt to return the resources spent on things that were clearly defective. I doubt there's a lot of disagreement about that. But when there's a lot of vague collateral damage, like how much damage was done because the boosts were not working, that is an extremely difficult thing to really judge accurately. In the real world in civil law, there's an understanding that when we cannot reasonably quantify such losses, we make a reasonable guess and compensate on that basis, knowing it is imperfect and won't consistently relieve everyone commensurate to their damage.
I don't know what that translates to in hard numbers, because I don't have the data Kabam does. But if I was Kabam, I would consider compensating for both the expense of the boosts, and some kind of "pain and suffering" compensation that we all know will be highly inaccurate and highly disproportional but would be the best that is possible with the time and resources available. Just like happens everywhere else in an imperfect world.
And I would also clearly state in the compensation announcement that this part is to return the costs for boosts bought that were not working. And this part of the compensation is to address the issue that there were side effects to the boosts not working, but as they could not determine with precision all possible side effects they were making a best effort to award partial compensation for those side effects, with the understanding that some players had no bad side effects and some had bad side effects that can't easily be made whole, and this was what the developers determined to be the best option available.
Theres also even more situations where the restaruant didnt give anything or the airline only gives an apology because it was mechanical and out of their control.
None of this really matters to be honest. They are going to do what they think is right and you'll have to live with it. Maybe they give extra maybe they don't. But you shouldn't expect more. It would be a extreme undertaking to sort that data if they even could. I doubt they would ever be able to make it any compensation acceptable even if they did.
It's not "every excuse under the sun". Since your reading comprehension seems to be lacking, I have clearly stated I don't expect 12.0 level compensation.
You seem like someone who accepts what people tells them without ever questioning their logic. To not understand that boosts not working DID effect people in a multitude of ways is just silly. You're either being intentionally obtuse or you don't play AW at a high level. An extra compensation package of some boosts, potions or revives would not be out of line.
You two always complain "people want free stuff". No, I want a working game. Since that doesn't always happen, yes I'd like to be compensated for the things that didn't work as they were supposed to. Refunding the costs of the boosts is the bare minimum compensation they should give. Most companies with strong customer service go above and beyond the bare minimum because it's good business practice.
Most companies deal with tangible products not e-items. It costs kabam nothing to go above and beyond correcting their own mistakes.
That's wrong, on many levels.
Enlighten me...it takes a planning meeting to be brought up. And a change in code to release the package to those it impacted (they are doing this already) it will take a nano second to tweak said package.
All the while these devs are salaried so it’s of no impact to the bottom line.
1. Those Items are NOT free. They represent hours of work, coding, and monetary and propriety value, protected by Law. It is not just imaginary, out of thin air. It has a value, both within the game and in the real world.
2. Those Employees earn a livelihood designing, upkeeping, balancing, revisiting, and maintaining those Resources. The fact that you think it's just a conversation and doesn't matter is cavalier.
3. Everything in the game has a balancing factor. You can't just sprinkle Resources into it whenever you like without considering the effect it has overall.
4. The fact that you think it doesn't matter disturbs me. It reminds me of people who believe it's acceptable to steal from corporations.
5. The expectations are not realistic.
It's very telling how you all keep creating straw men arguments and attempt to dismiss people's claims by intentionally overstating what our position is. It's often a tell tale sign of a weak argument.
I'd like you to refute any of these points:
1) The boosts not working made specials do less damage.
2) Specials doing less damage made some fights longer than they would have been.
3) Longer fights have a higher opportunity to make a mistake leading to damage or timing out
4) Increased chances to take damage will lead to increased damage over a large sample size
5) Increase damage taken leads to more potions and revives having to be used
Since it would take too much time to individually assess each person's fight log, I think they should take an educated guess. A few AW potions/revives/or extra boosts would not break the resource economy.
So again, no one (other than the made up arguments you keep referenced) has claimed they lost out on huge rewards or that we need RDTs and T2A. We only ask Kabam take in all of the factors that broken boosts had when assessing the true damage this bug caused.
I doubt this will matter to many if any, but just for the benefit of anyone that cares, or any budding game designers out there, game companies aren't reluctant to hand out lots of stuff because those things have cost, or even necessarily because handing them out means they lose the revenue associated with that stuff. The former is not true at all, and the latter is only true to a very limited extent in most cases.
What most people don't appreciate is that all value is relative in games like this, and explicitly made such by how the games are managed over time. I'm going to oversimplify greatly here, but what is "master difficulty?" How does anyone really know how hard the content should be for master difficulty maps? There's no objective way to judge that numerically. We only know, and game operators only know, by actually seeing how many people can complete that difficulty. Ultimately, master difficulty is judged based on how strong the average player is. And the average player doesn't get stronger very quickly. *Individual* players might get stronger fairly quickly, but across the entire playerbase older players are always leaving and newer players are constantly joining, and the "average player" doesn't move upward as fast as individual players do.
But the average does tend to move upward, at least for players that have played for longer than a certain amount of time (long enough that there is a good likelihood they will stick around for a while). And if the average player gets stronger, the average difficulty of "master level" will rise so that in rough terms the relative difficulty of that content compared to the relative strength of the average player is still roughly the same.
All of this is to say: resources only have relative worth. If you give every player something, in one sense all players got stronger. But in another sense, in the long run all players actually didn't get stronger. In fact, most players got weaker because rewards across the board dilute performance gaps. If one player has 100 of something and another player has 500, the second player has five times as many. Give both players 100 more, and now the second player has only three times as many (200 vs 600). Give both players a million, and now the second player is basically identical to the first player.
In the long run, game operators managing MMO-like and progression-style games like MCOC have to be very careful how they hand out rewards, not specifically because the rewards cost money to make (incrementally the cost is zero) and not because of the opportunity costs (in the long run actually they don't matter directly because you'll just sell something else instead) but actually because even if it is impossible to measure directly every time you pump rewards into your game, you are diluting the value of all rewards and accelerating the need to add more rungs on the progress ladder. On time scales of a week or a month or even sometimes a year this is difficult to see, but in time scales of years it becomes the dominant influence on how you advance the design the game.
I understand that. It affects the balance within the system. I was pointing out that it indeed does have a value. The argument was that it costs nothing because it's Digital Property, and they can just have a meeting and throw some more in. I don't think that's true at all. It has a value within the game, and while you may not be able to gauge dollars to Bytes on the outside world, it still represent valuable Intellectual Property, representative of the people who are employed to create it and maintain it, as well as those who will have to spend time and effort to rebalance it in the event it's just thrown in. It's not just insignificant programming. Everything has a value.
Actually, Kabam itself specifically states that legally speaking, the items in the game have no monetary value, explicit or implicit. This is spelled out in the TOS that all players must agree to. You might want to try to defend them on this regard, but this is an area upon which I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want your help, and would actively argue against you. If the items have value, there are a lot of laws that would apply to them that Kabam would rather not.
The *design* of the game is intellectual property with value. Human beings make the design and implementation of the game. But a computer makes the items. I should say, a computer manipulates the bits of data that represent those items. The individual items are little bits of data that have no value. Kabam can give them out, or they can take them away, and players have no legal remedy because they are representations of things in a game with no value.
I had the opportunity to design content that generated rewards for players of an MMO. I'm proud of the design and the implementation and the fact that players generally appreciated the system. But at no time did it ever occur to me to think about the rewards being handed out as coming from me directly, or that I created them. And when that system was tweaked to hand out more rewards for balance purposes, I did not feel my work devalued in any way. It was just a cog in a larger system designed to manage the handing out of rewards to players who earned them. It wasn't a bag of things I made that I cared about at all. I doubt if the developers of MCOC view their work any differently.
You may be right, but I still don't agree with the OP's statement. To say that it's worth nothing and you can just add them at will is irreverent. That kind of statement displays a level of entitlement that is irrespective to the process.
Edited to add: I've cleaned up some back and forth arguments here as well, please remember to stay on topic and remain constructive with each other. We understand the frustration you experienced when you encounter something in the game that's not working. You should not take your frustration out on each other and name calling when you have differing views or opinions. Thank you for your attention to these rules