**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.
Gifting Badge Discussion [Merged Threads]
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There is no way to continue in the game if there is more help from comrades, be they alliance, or not.
Items sent as gifts help a lot in evolution.
Buying is part and also helps, but the gifts were something fundamental in the game.
When you pass this week, there will be many players here complaining about this and / or giving up the game.
Do you have any idea how much the gifts helped most of the players?
Thanks for your attention.
In the first way, it is used to launder money defrauded from other people via mechanisms like credit card fraud, cell phone SIM cloning, or other methods. You get this stolen money, use it to buy units, then use the units to gift people stuff and charge them *out of game* for that stuff. This in effect is money laundering. The money you steal might eventually be detected and someone might come to get it back. But the money you get from other players buying your "cheap units" isn't fraudulent, and you're more likely to be able to keep it. Inventing a "gifting currency" could reduce the amount of this kind of abuse if gifting currency can't be purchased, but you'd have to be very careful not to have any loopholes in the system.
In the second way, you create accounts that farm units with bots. You can then "sell" people those units earned through automation for cash. If the account is eventually detected by Kabam, you just make another one (remember, this account doesn't have to have any direct connection to you: it could be using different invented email addresses, different devices, it could even be using emulators on PCs because you don't need the account to evade detection forever; it could cost virtually nothing to make another one). Really, you probably have dozens or even hundreds just parked about, botting in the background earning currency slowly, until you need them. Inventing a special gifting currency wouldn't address this kind of abuse. People would just rewrite the bots to specifically farm the gifting currency.
When I used to play MMOs a lot more, I knew all these tricks, because I used to use all these tricks. I never sold anything for cash: I drew the line there, but I used to give away an incalculable amount of stuff, just to see if I could do it. In fact, there's lots of tactics well-known in the MMO world that I haven't seen attempted yet in MCOC. For the record, I haven't attempted any of these things in MCOC: I'm retired.
In games that have to deal with this, there's usually a combination of overlapping ways to address the problem. You put account prerequisites on trading and gifting, like the account has to be at least X days old, to prevent quick drive-by gifting abuses and to give you time to find those that are modding or botting. You limit the value of gifts until even higher prerequisites are achieved. You limit the target of trades and gifts so it is easy for long-time friends to do it but much harder for two anonymous random strangers to do it.
There's also mechanics like binding that are used to limit this kind of thing (where some items are and some are not tradeable not based on what they are, but rather how they are acquired). So if you earn the Sword of Overpowered Evisceration, you can use it but you can't give it to an alt account or your friend or even sell it to another player and then go get another one. This allows you to allow players to farm without being able to use farming to sell or transfer too much resources (in MMOs, this is often referred to as "twinking").
There's enough here to teach a month-long course in game design, and it is best to build on the effort of others rather than try to reinvent the wheel. If you try to do this all by yourself from scratch, you'll be decimated by the abusers who have a twenty year head start on you.
But the problem is also manageable, and I hope Kabam reaches that point and can return gifting capability to players. The ability to trade and gift is part of what makes massively multiplayer games interesting, and is a valuable component of social interaction. It just has to be protected from the abusers of the privilege.
There are thousands of other ways to cheat and carry out money laundering.
This greatly harms players from third-world countries and favors extreme first-world players.
There will be a very large imbalance in the game if the gift mechanism does not return.
Many players will abandon the game upon seeing this imbalance. It will be restricted for some players with a purchasing power for a moment, but these will also gradually disappear, precisely because of lack of competitiveness;
That will be a fact.
Some may leave the game because Gifting is disabled. No doubt. If not that, the next thing. Some of them may even leave the game because their way of making money illegally was ended. That would be a good thing. However, it is not going to destroy the game. That's apparently been done consistently for years, so we seem to be discussing a ghost.
No idea what you quailfy as a Third-World Country, but the ones I understand aren't worried about MCOC. They're concerned with much larger problems.
6x5
map 7
7x5
variant
war where a single mistake in one fight could cost 1000 units to fix
I have 200k arena fights and I spend all day grinding and it's not easy. "Just grind" isn't a solution. The game is and endless barrage AQ, AW, boosting, arena for units, t1a/t4b, and monthly and side quests.
I know super skilled guys in master who spend 8k units a month on advanced war boosts and potions for war and they're hanging it up for gold alliances. And that's just AW let alone everything else and what it takes to maintain their position. Something has to give now.
I really hope that Kabam will review the gift mechanism.
I work for more than 20 years with marketing and market intelligence and, after analysis, faithfully believe what I said in my post above.
It's wait and see what happens.
@DNA3000 , are you moderator here in the forum? It's just that this job is for a Kabam. But maybe it was just the wrong impression of me, since I had the same impression on other opportunities to read the forum.
The less people spend on the competitive aspects of the end game, the less expensive the end game will be. That's a choice that is directly in the players' hands. People are always complaining about how Kabam is constantly "forcing" players to spend on "cash grabs." If people just decide to stop spending, the competitive end game will become cheaper. That's true no matter what Kabam does to it.
People are still going to spend. The game makes millions of dollars a week. The game's future is not in jeopardy if a small percentage of players decide to stop spending because the gifting feature is disabled. It just isn't. But if the true cost of these things is something that some players used to be able to ignore, and now they can't, and that causes them to spend less on those things, that might be a healthy thing to happen. Because the game doesn't get cheaper when Kabam lowers prices. It becomes cheaper when players decide to spend less. The players who are deciding to spend less aren't just spending less: they are creating an opportunity for their competition to also spend less. And as long as the game can still generate enough revenue to be profitable and function, I have no problem with that. And I'm quite certain it can.
Also I wonder if the players leaving and dropping tiers will cut off vs the people spending more. I think kabam is going to see a cut in revenues and then when gifting comes back it will be a little too late
But, it will gain strength.
Let's wait.
-.-
Because thats essentially the same position Kabam seems to be holding when interpreting the "compensation" units dispersed recently as it seems to directly relate to being market value equal to the money we had paid for it.
As far as being an add-on, in another post I mentioned how my first attempt at buying the stark w/badges or whichever happened to be the least expensive unit deal, was "on sale"(technically not though) for a few bucks less($29.99 or $19.99 I believe), but I didnt realize until after I bought it that the badges werent included. There wasnt anything implicitly stating the the badges were not included for that price. So I could safely assume that there was a monetary value given and not an add-on back then. I was refunded and then purchased the "regular priced" breifcase to get the badges.
As I have said in previous posts, IMO it's pretty difficult to justify that it cost nothing when it was ommitted with the price dropped and to obtain it we had to pay the "regular" price.(which I did after the refund)
I also understand the valid reasons for the removal of it and applaud the active stance of Kabam.
But I believe the events must be viewed seperately to a degree and something good being done shouldnt justify accepting and overlooking something that is being done poorly.
Maybe its just me, but I grew up in a generation where consumers held companies accountable for missteps big or small. Its that simple principle that encourages improvement and advancements and overall quality.
The companies that are not under scrutiny and coddled beyond reproach end up taking steps backwards rather than forward. Take the current state of Apple as an example
Since the current debate is about the badge and its value and monetary cost, refunds, compensation, blah blah blah.
I have actually made a request to Kabam support as I stated earlier, as I'm thinking others have also to some degree or another.........
@Kabam Miike @Kabam Zibiit @Kabam Vydious @Kabam Lyra @Kabam Porthos
What would you think of, and also what could you do to get the wheels in motion for the following idea for a "collaboration" of sorts.
I know there has been nothing even eluding to cash refunds on this, BUT.....How bout the playerbase and Kabam agree to do something together with a smile and come up with a plan to donate funds relevant to a gifting badge refund of sorts that Kabam would consider to be acceptable and fair? We could use the forum polls to get a bunch of player supported charitys or groups and divide evenly?