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Here's an unpopular opinion.....
Mr. Kite
✭✭
in The Bridge
...Give DB a break. Its a company that makes phone games. Game's crash. No game is perfect. Everyone assumes that risk when they spend money on a phone game for pure entertainment. A game crashes affecting everyone and some people act like DB stole their first-born child. Then DB gives a gift and people get more angry because they already bought that cartoon, which they knew full well had no tangible value to begin with. If you're pissed, just remind yourself its a phone game that has you spun up and ask if its worth it? Go ahead and attack me now.
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That isn't an excuse to be lazy. In fact, it's a very good reason to do a better job cultivating good community vibes by over apologizing. Your player base is willing to pay a bunch, just don't drive them off. Doing things that only benefit the free players as a way to compensate everyone for a failure in a competitive event is the best way to alienate those paying players. They pay for a competitive advantage in just this situation.
-Lord Wizzlestix I
I would not be surprised if some enterprising young lawyer somewhere jumped on this looking to make a name for themselves.
It is a phone game, you are right, but the Mirror Picard giveaway was a very very bad decision and it makes me worry about what level of thinking went on in DBHQ to arrive at it. I don't spend a lot on this game, maybe £20 per month, but I am not spending any more cash at all until they wise up in that office. If i carries on like this they will simply cease to exist as a viable company, and that would be a shame.
I'm clearly the silliest of all, since I'm amused at someone who is angry about people who are angry about a phone game. And I'm saying so!
I hope that you will now understand why the outcry is so huge. I am a very forgiving person, and I don't whine at freebies, but this one showed a serious lack of thought on the matter, not to mention lack of managerial skills to anticipate the outcome.
(Or back to the store you bought it from)
Why is this any different ?
If you go to any restaurant, from McD's to the nicest place in town; and have a problem with product, the manager will go above and beyond to make it right. Most of us don't have jobs where we can get away with saying "Well, that wen't horribly, but we made 60% of customers happy so that's a job well done."
Now consider that we're spending money earned doing such jobs on this product and try to extrapolate why we might be dissatisfied with the way this has been handled.
-Lord Wizzlestix I
Don't flag Mr. Kite's post because you don't agree with it. Flagging is for spam, not a dislike button.
Whether it's a phone game, console game or browser game it doesn't matter. It's a thing that people have invested time and/or money into and that means it's important to them. If a company is ruining something you enjoy, or treating your money/time with disrespect, why not be upset?
I don't think anyone here truly believes that this is worse than their house burning down or something, that's just silly. If you don't understand why people are so upset, I have to assume you simply never sunk that much time, effort or money into a game before.
Cardassian wishlist:
Tora Ziyal - Thanks!
Natima Lang
Empok Nor Garak
Tekeny Ghemor
Mira
Makbar
Dejar
Ulani Belor
I hooe you meant 50K honor.
No I specifically meant 5K. Explain why this mistake is worth 50k. I imagine a few people got screwed out of a Troi but that number is very small and some of those people shouldn't be relying on the last 3 minutes to make placement.
Of course, DB managed to turn a small mistake into a bigger one but that's a separate argument.
But I also agree that the choice of compensation was wrong. They should have just given all players some currency and extended the prizes back a 1000 places or something.
That's what people are right to complain about. The 50k honor or $25 demands are patently insane. You are literally better off than you were before no matter how you slice it, unless you can show that you were affected by the outage.
I don't care about the 6th Picard either, but I don't begrudge it to everyone else.
DB: 'Here's four versions of a mega-event character. If you want a 5th, you'll have to pay either $25/50,000 honor!'
Player A: gives $25/50,000 honor
(a week passes)
DB: 'Just kidding! Here's a free 5th version of that character!'
Player A: 'Uh, didn't you just say I could only have that if I paid your exorbitant prices?'
Thurtorad: 'Well, whatever you do, don't ask for a refund. That would be patently insane.'
Not exactly. They said through the course of the event, you could earn 4 copies.
I get both sides of this debate, the trust and money is a big concern that is growing ever more on my mind, but burning down the forum every single week is simply going to result in the eventual “we made a mistake, it’s fixed, your compensation is getting to play again” and no hand outs. The community needs to settle itself and present arguments in a less vitriolic manner without threats of legal action, bolstering, and doomsday exaggerations every week. As many have pointed out, closed wallets for a few weeks may help. But if you close your wallets, expect another sexy desirable 5* to pop up. Tsunkatze Seven is probably waiting for the next boycott, because companies know how to make money. DB has been trying, and failing and succeeding, but lately it has been hard to get excited about the game. This event wore me out, and was not fun, and not easy, and deeply time consuming to get 750th place. I assume this stress was not unique to me. Congrats to the folks that spent, by my estimate based on my own score and time investment, upwards of 40 nonstop hours building things. What we need to be angry about isn’t a free gift for a 10 minute outage, but a rewards structure that isn’t prohibitive to all but the most dedicated so that one minute and forty five seconds of an event doesn’t drop you 100 places and out of a tier you spent 10 hours to get too. Less game stress, less forum anger, that’s my theory.
Agree completely. I was a little surprised we got anything more than 100 chrons, to be honest. They would have avoided this whole mess if they gave something small. Although was the outage during the event? Then maybe something more than 100 chrons is probably in order.
Mirror Picard however ... wasn't smart, because he was the main featured crew of the current event (meaning he won't be in the regular portal for half a year) and those who cited or DYS'd the last star on him had an advantage over those who didn't, and that's fair. Getting everyone the last star out for free turned fair into unfair.
I'm pretty sure none of the Mega Event crew have ever been added to the portal, which makes it even more tempting for people to want to FF with Honor or Money
-Lord Wizzlestix I
A Galaxy event screw up implies that Sorrytons is appropriate compensation. Given the amount of work Galaxy events have turned into however should yield a better apology. 1000-1500 Chrons for example or perhaps a Supply Kit and Chrons.
This is a lesser screw-up than the prior Beverly event. That event's fix was only really only good for life-less losers like me who didn't have anything better to do on Christmas morning. Pounding through an extra 6 tickets still wasn't the best way to spend my morning. I gave up some valuable staring at the ceiling time for that.
I think they could have rigged a behold in the portal to be un-purchasable and given us the choice of Picard, Troi, and one of the other event 5*s (they could have picked one based on certain metrics). However, you still would have ended up with upset players, because there are those who would have had FF Picard, Troi, and whichever other 5* DB gave. And we would still be in the same boat, but with a smaller angry group. And 50k honor/citation would not have been better for those trying to get their 1 Troi by getting rank 1k and who got hosed by the outage. They still wouldn't have the character they wanted.
However, the group that really benefits from this are the brand new players not on the forums. They don't see what everyone is angry about, but they get a free 5* that they may not have been able to get.
I think I have actually seen Borg Queen in a Be-Gold and wasn't aware how valuable she was ... or was that in a pack with Locutus?
But, don’t presume that others should value their experience the same as you. Because of this game, I’ve connected to amazing people in my fleet and developed relationships that I would have otherwise not. It’s a shared experience. It’s not so important that we’re advocating to burn servers down, but I understand why those might be frustrated with persistent communication and gameplay issues.
Join the eXo|plosion today!
Is that fair?
Those who lost most from the server crash are those that were playing competitively, those who were most likely to have spent $25 on a DYC for Picard to help in the event.
Instead of giving decent compensation to all players, DB chose to reward the ones who had spent the least, and put the least effort in.
Yes, servers crash. There are bugs in the game and things go wrong, but it is DBs handling that turned a server crash into a money losing calamity.
Crashes happen. They **tsk tsk**, especially when the timing is unfortunate, but they are unavoidable. STT has had its fair share and until now I have always felt like DB went above and beyond with making recompense for outages and errors...many of which never even affected me personally but ended up with a pile of chrons or some other apology gift in my inbox anyway.
The issue now is that people put either a lot of money or a lot of time into a single purchase that was obviated by the latest apology gift. I can understand someone at DB HQ saying “wouldn’t it be nice if we saved everyone who was able to get the first four stars on Mirror Picard some time and money for a fifth star” but what I can’t understand is that someone didn’t think to find out how many of their paying customers already got that fifth star before the award messages were sent. It’s a tone-deaf response magnified by the apparent lack of a cohesive response to support tickets...
What’s the right answer? How does DB pull back from the precipice so many players are willing to jump over? There have been a lot of different options discussed but this topic is the only one that seems to tell us to **tsk tsk** it up and pretend like nothing happened. That’s a reasonable response to most outages and errors, and maybe a reasonable one to the original outage that started this outrage, but it isn’t a reasonable response to those of us who feel cheated out of our time or money by the same company that purports to entertain us. Unless, of course, Mr. Kite works for Comcast’s customer service department IRL...