Okay, first and foremost, I want to say - I'm not quitting, I'm not going anywhere, I love the game and community and I'm definitely staying - so no such sort of drama will come out of this post. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I will touch upon the three big mistakes the team made when approaching the CA conflicts, which maybe surprisingly (or not?) are not just math but actual human error in my mind. The three main points are:
- BFs have been assigned a disproportionately larger amount of CP than they should have been assigned. (someone made the decision, it was not math)
- The way the replacement of wagons work is definitely not thought of enough and is just made so it can be a land resource drain.
- The two things above lead to the situation where if you do not feel insulted enough as a small to average (or even a bit above average) player who has put money into the game, then this should definitely add insult to injury, namely the fact that the most well off players in terms of game resources will actually get "free of tax" airdrops because they stake cards on a lot less wagons than the cards staked provide airdrops for them.
Now let's go over each point.
So, I'm sure there some people asking themselves - so where's the issue. The issue is that people who spent $5-6-7K had the expectation that they would get at least 7-8-9 airdrops per conflict (as was the case with RB) not because they are entitled for that but because when you spend that kind of money on an RF set, you're likely more or less spent for some time, and obviously the more airdrops you get, the less frequent your trips to the marketplace are. Skewing the CP like that towards the premium BF cards devalues the investment these people made in the game, and leaves a bad taste in their mouths. Now, I know someone will come with the spreadsheet and show me that everyone gets exactly what they paid for, and that may, indeed, be the case, but it's not about that. It's about perception and unfulfilled expectations. People bought in with a particular expectation, namely that their level of investment will help them get through the airdrops with little additional investment into cards, and that definitely made them feel even better about it and then the reality of "math" hit them like a truck. Yes, math is cold and calculated, but it was not math the entity which assigned the CP values to the BFs to begin with. This is a mistake made by the company, and now the company is hiding behind "math". RF players who put the "average" amount of $5K to $10K into the game should be the largest group of players the game has, and they should not feel they were tricked into buying cause that will just drive them away. All respect to the whales but the game just won't survive on the BF collectors alone. In the end of the day who is going to buy their RFs drops if all RF people have walked away?
Another bone I have to pick is the way the wagon system works. Okay, I'm all for more land utility - it's great. I myself have 10 plots I am currently not working due to the ridiculous (in my opinion) staking requirement of 50,000 DEC for a Common plot. As we've already established earlier - I'm not in the position to pull randomly hundreds of thousands of DEC out of pillows but that's a completely separate topic. Back on track - land utility is great, people crafting wagon kits is great, however, the implementation of the actual mechanic is totally unthought of. Okay you buy the wagon kit for $4-5-6, then it breaks and you "repair" it with a new wagon for the exactly same amount of money. How does that even make sense and why is it called a "repair". I thought about it for like 1 min and came up with - each wagon has 3-4-5-N number of charges. It produces a card - you pay 1000 or 2000 or N amount of DEC to repair it. After all charges expire - your wagon is kaput and you go to the market and get a new one. Yeah, that might reduce the buying pressure on wagons but why does it have to feel like a constant tax feeding a particular group of people. Again - I have nothing against the group of people, they are playing according to the rules, I have against the one who has set the rules. After all we already have Midnight potions, lottery tokens or whatever their name is and I'm sure they will come up with other stuff soon as well, all of these items share the same resources, so I don't see the need to push them so ardently. Anyhow, back to wagons. It feels really bad for people who were expecting some amount of airdrops and end up getting a lot less than they expected to also feel joyous about being "taxed" for each card they happen to miraculously get. How's that gonna make you feel great about airdrops. Isn't the point of airdrops to excite people and not make them think - oh boy, it's the middle of the month, the airdrop is about to finish and I'll have to figure out a way to get enough money to buy new wagons and the RF cards I need to max my the RF drop.
*screenshot above obtained from Azircon in tavern in Discord.
Again wagon-adjacent. The fact that some people (again not the fault of the people - let me be clear) will have say... 60-70 wagons packed with the cream of the crop in terms of CP BFs, and respectively get over 100 airdrops - maybe 120 or even more - does not really matter how many more, but the amount of wagons that gets destroyed is the amount they have. So they get 100 cards, but they essentially get 40 cards for "free" if they have 60 wagons. How is that remotely fair? I, for instance, have 40 wagons and that will yield 8.5 (8) airdrops for the first conflict. Where are my non-taxed airdrops? I won't ever be in the situation where I get more cards than I have wagons. I just find this really unfair and adding just more insult to injury. By the way, it so happens that the largest producers of wagons will probably spent a lot less on wagons in relation to the amount of airdrops they've obtained than any regular RF holder, who is already not really thrilled about this whole situation.
Okay, I can write more but I think I'll start going in circles. I think I've expressed my main sources of irritation related to the CA airdrops. /rant over
Over and Out,
Referral