Compensation for 8% 12% Class Boosts? [Merged Threads] [Admin: Comp Coming]

I have spent hundreds of thousands of loyalty for those boosts. There are lots of people like me.

If we knew those boosts did not work properly we would never wasted our loyalty.

**MOD EDIT** Please refer to the latest update here.

Comments

CoatHang3r

Prolly not any loyalty for the 5% since they are a rare drop from crystals you are awarded when you lose a war.

RogerRabs

Demonzfyre wrote: »

RogerRabs wrote: »

Ad0ra_ wrote: »

Hey everyone! Thanks for your patience surrounding this issue, we wanted to provide another update. We’ve finished pulling all of the information surrounding those impacted by this boost issue, and will be sending out compensation soon. During this process, we took some time to test out all of the other boosts. We’ve found one other boost that was not working as intended, the Special 3 Defense Boosts. As a result, we have now fixed this boost and will be compensating for this one at the same time as the others. This is a new list of players for us to pull, so it will delay things a bit - we’re going to compensate for all impacted boosts at the same time. We will not only be providing any loyalty spent on these impacted boosts, we will also be providing crystals to any players that pulled these boosts from a crystal.

With this extra compensation needed we don’t yet have a specific date to provide, but we will continue to update you!

Take the following argument as an argument of principle. I know that this will never happen.

Refunding just the loyalty or units spent on these boosts is not enough. There are many down stream issues that surely arose from the boosts not working. For example, if I popped a 12% damage boost, it would certainly affect how mindset when I entered the fight. I may have changed strategy or used sub-optimal champion, relying on the extra damage to win the fight. (Maybe I used Corvus hoping for a quick KO instead of a safer champ).

Secondly, how many times did I either die or take damage (thus needing to heal with expensive potions) because the correct damage wasn't applied. Let's say my special did 10,000 damage. Instead of getting the extra 8 or 12%, my opponent may survive and land a hit on me later in the fight.

An analogy I find fitting is this. If someone stole $10,000 from you and then six months later they returned the amount in full, would you be satisfied? I certainly would not be. I could have been making interest off of that money or using it myself.

I believe Kabam owes us "interest" on top of the cost of the boosts. It doesn't have to be crazy, just something to let us know they are sorry for selling a defective product. Since it's impossible to calculate the true and total effect this bug had, a standard package could be sent to everyone who used one or more of these boosts. Tiered packages depending on how many you used would be much better, but I understand that would also be a lot more work.

Kalam should stop being stingy with compensation, to me it shows they sometimes either lack an understanding of the intricacies of the game's strategy or are lazy. Either one is not good.

Please don't repeat the same mistakes of 19.0 (aka Phone Fires) compensation.

How do you prove which fight you lost because of the boost or because of your own error?

I'm sorry but your example with $10,000 is really bad. What if they stole that money from a safe? Can't make interest off that in a safe. You even end the statement in "I could of" which means technically you weren't. Should of, could of, would of can't be quantified for compensation. If the guess to low, you'll be mad. If they guess to high, you'll say others didn't deserve it.

Also you couldn't ever have bought these boosts with units. Loyalty is the only way or from War crystals. Loyalty is probably all you'll get back.

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.

Demonzfyre

RogerRabs wrote: »

Demonzfyre wrote: »

RogerRabs wrote: »

Ad0ra_ wrote: »

Hey everyone! Thanks for your patience surrounding this issue, we wanted to provide another update. We’ve finished pulling all of the information surrounding those impacted by this boost issue, and will be sending out compensation soon. During this process, we took some time to test out all of the other boosts. We’ve found one other boost that was not working as intended, the Special 3 Defense Boosts. As a result, we have now fixed this boost and will be compensating for this one at the same time as the others. This is a new list of players for us to pull, so it will delay things a bit - we’re going to compensate for all impacted boosts at the same time. We will not only be providing any loyalty spent on these impacted boosts, we will also be providing crystals to any players that pulled these boosts from a crystal.

With this extra compensation needed we don’t yet have a specific date to provide, but we will continue to update you!

Take the following argument as an argument of principle. I know that this will never happen.

Refunding just the loyalty or units spent on these boosts is not enough. There are many down stream issues that surely arose from the boosts not working. For example, if I popped a 12% damage boost, it would certainly affect how mindset when I entered the fight. I may have changed strategy or used sub-optimal champion, relying on the extra damage to win the fight. (Maybe I used Corvus hoping for a quick KO instead of a safer champ).

Secondly, how many times did I either die or take damage (thus needing to heal with expensive potions) because the correct damage wasn't applied. Let's say my special did 10,000 damage. Instead of getting the extra 8 or 12%, my opponent may survive and land a hit on me later in the fight.

An analogy I find fitting is this. If someone stole $10,000 from you and then six months later they returned the amount in full, would you be satisfied? I certainly would not be. I could have been making interest off of that money or using it myself.

I believe Kabam owes us "interest" on top of the cost of the boosts. It doesn't have to be crazy, just something to let us know they are sorry for selling a defective product. Since it's impossible to calculate the true and total effect this bug had, a standard package could be sent to everyone who used one or more of these boosts. Tiered packages depending on how many you used would be much better, but I understand that would also be a lot more work.

Kalam should stop being stingy with compensation, to me it shows they sometimes either lack an understanding of the intricacies of the game's strategy or are lazy. Either one is not good.

Please don't repeat the same mistakes of 19.0 (aka Phone Fires) compensation.

How do you prove which fight you lost because of the boost or because of your own error?

I'm sorry but your example with $10,000 is really bad. What if they stole that money from a safe? Can't make interest off that in a safe. You even end the statement in "I could of" which means technically you weren't. Should of, could of, would of can't be quantified for compensation. If the guess to low, you'll be mad. If they guess to high, you'll say others didn't deserve it.

Also you couldn't ever have bought these boosts with units. Loyalty is the only way or from War crystals. Loyalty is probably all you'll get back.

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.

DNA3000

RogerRabs wrote: »

An analogy I find fitting is this. If someone stole $10,000 from you and then six months later they returned the amount in full, would you be satisfied? I certainly would not be. I could have been making interest off of that money or using it myself.

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.

Demonzfyre

RogerRabs wrote: »

Demonzfyre wrote: »

RogerRabs wrote: »

Demonzfyre wrote: »

RogerRabs wrote: »

Ad0ra_ wrote: »

Hey everyone! Thanks for your patience surrounding this issue, we wanted to provide another update. We’ve finished pulling all of the information surrounding those impacted by this boost issue, and will be sending out compensation soon. During this process, we took some time to test out all of the other boosts. We’ve found one other boost that was not working as intended, the Special 3 Defense Boosts. As a result, we have now fixed this boost and will be compensating for this one at the same time as the others. This is a new list of players for us to pull, so it will delay things a bit - we’re going to compensate for all impacted boosts at the same time. We will not only be providing any loyalty spent on these impacted boosts, we will also be providing crystals to any players that pulled these boosts from a crystal.

With this extra compensation needed we don’t yet have a specific date to provide, but we will continue to update you!

Take the following argument as an argument of principle. I know that this will never happen.

Refunding just the loyalty or units spent on these boosts is not enough. There are many down stream issues that surely arose from the boosts not working. For example, if I popped a 12% damage boost, it would certainly affect how mindset when I entered the fight. I may have changed strategy or used sub-optimal champion, relying on the extra damage to win the fight. (Maybe I used Corvus hoping for a quick KO instead of a safer champ).

Secondly, how many times did I either die or take damage (thus needing to heal with expensive potions) because the correct damage wasn't applied. Let's say my special did 10,000 damage. Instead of getting the extra 8 or 12%, my opponent may survive and land a hit on me later in the fight.

An analogy I find fitting is this. If someone stole $10,000 from you and then six months later they returned the amount in full, would you be satisfied? I certainly would not be. I could have been making interest off of that money or using it myself.

I believe Kabam owes us "interest" on top of the cost of the boosts. It doesn't have to be crazy, just something to let us know they are sorry for selling a defective product. Since it's impossible to calculate the true and total effect this bug had, a standard package could be sent to everyone who used one or more of these boosts. Tiered packages depending on how many you used would be much better, but I understand that would also be a lot more work.

Kalam should stop being stingy with compensation, to me it shows they sometimes either lack an understanding of the intricacies of the game's strategy or are lazy. Either one is not good.

Please don't repeat the same mistakes of 19.0 (aka Phone Fires) compensation.

How do you prove which fight you lost because of the boost or because of your own error?

I'm sorry but your example with $10,000 is really bad. What if they stole that money from a safe? Can't make interest off that in a safe. You even end the statement in "I could of" which means technically you weren't. Should of, could of, would of can't be quantified for compensation. If the guess to low, you'll be mad. If they guess to high, you'll say others didn't deserve it.

Also you couldn't ever have bought these boosts with units. Loyalty is the only way or from War crystals. Loyalty is probably all you'll get back.

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.

Again your failing to properly understand analogies.

In this scenario the restaurant would only have to return the cost of the meal to you. Meal=Boost. There are plenty of situations where they have given the price of the meal plus an additional item say dessert for free.

Same with the flights. If Kabam ran the airline all they would be giving back is the price of the flight you missed or was delayed. Airlines often do that plus give you some additional value.

Yes I’m asking for more, and no it’s not a ridiculous thing to ask for. I didn’t ask for a T2A or rank down tickets. I don’t expect the moon.

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.

unknown

This content has been removed.

Ankalagonn

Any news?

RogerRabs

Wakanda4Ever278 wrote: »

"Why are you so against them giving extra compensation?"

Well, when people like you ( @RogerRabs ) decide to make every excuse to get extra stuff, people like Demonzfyre and I roll our eyes and tell you to accept what you're already getting. Not every issue deserves 12.0 level compensation, you know...

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.

GroundedWisdom

I'm not sure what companies you're familiar with, but most don't go above and beyond. They will replace the item, or refund the price. They're not likely to buy you a bike and a new pair of shoes because your toy car was defective.

GroundedWisdom

So-to-speak.

Omni

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

I'm not sure what companies you're familiar with, but most don't go above and beyond. They will replace the item, or refund the price. They're not likely to buy you a bike and a new pair of shoes because your toy car was defective.

Most companies deal with tangible products not e-items. It costs kabam nothing to go above and beyond correcting their own mistakes.

GroundedWisdom

Omni wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

I'm not sure what companies you're familiar with, but most don't go above and beyond. They will replace the item, or refund the price. They're not likely to buy you a bike and a new pair of shoes because your toy car was defective.

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.

Omni

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Omni wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

I'm not sure what companies you're familiar with, but most don't go above and beyond. They will replace the item, or refund the price. They're not likely to buy you a bike and a new pair of shoes because your toy car was defective.

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.

GroundedWisdom

Omni wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Omni wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

I'm not sure what companies you're familiar with, but most don't go above and beyond. They will replace the item, or refund the price. They're not likely to buy you a bike and a new pair of shoes because your toy car was defective.

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.

GroundedWisdom

Those would be the levels.

RogerRabs

Drooped1 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Omni wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Omni wrote: »

Gw putting words in my mouth...this may be the worst overreaction from you I have seen.

Where did I say it doesn’t matter? The employees are being paid regardless of what they are working on and or how you or I regard what they are working on.

The initial cost of creating an item has already been realized and has a minuscule impact of maintaining...

It also isn’t just sprinkling resources, it’s tepaying those who were impacted and saying hey we messed up and acknowledge we did. Here’s something small as a token of our appreciation and understanding.

Kabam used to do that all the time when they messed up but have since stopped for whatever the reason.

I’m not asking for the moon or even asking for anything I’m just correcting where you’re wrong.

Actually I'm not wrong, and your response is still minimizing and cavalier. You're grossly devaluing the process of what goes into these things, and the actual value of the materials.
I'm not wrong. Name a company that sends you on a shopping spree when you return something. Go ahead. I'll wait.

You’re deacribing two different scenarios. Kabam sold a product that doesn’t work. They arnt giving away free things

According to you, they are. Doesn't cost anything. They get paid anyway. All they have to do is get together and make it happen.

They said they would refund the Loyalty spent on them. That's addressing it. Somehow that translates into more for some. Happens everytime the "C Word" is used. The lists come out.

But I bought 1 of these boosts and it cost my entire allaince master rank 1 we ended up in gold 1.. clearly you dont think I should just accept that right?

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.

unknown

This content has been removed.

DNA3000

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

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.

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.

GroundedWisdom

DNA3000 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

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.

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.

DNA3000

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

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.

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.

Snail_McGavin

Hey thanks Kabam for doing good on your part!! Appreciate the compensation just as promised.

unknown

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Tsunani

I'm seeing a lot of people receiving the compensation for the non working boosts. I used a lot of those but received no compensation.

Brainimpacter

I got nothing yet either, probably sending out to people in batches, we might get ours later.

GroundedWisdom

DNA3000 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

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.

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.

ManChild

Are they really sending out compensation today? Or is this just me not understanding what people said.....

[Deleted User]

Hey folks! Just a quick update - the compensation has started going out, a few of you have already received it. It will take us a few days to process the full list, so if you haven't received yours yet don't worry - we will be getting to all impacted parties. Thank you for your patience with us on this one! We really appreciate it

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

Quatre_1988

Me neither

Thanos_Car

Same here.