This is supposed to be a "Happy" anniversary event?
All it has done so far is made a lot of people upset and angry and frustrated.
BB you fail miserably in making this a happy event.
This is supposed to be a "Happy" anniversary event?
All it has done so far is made a lot of people upset and angry and frustrated.
BB you fail miserably in making this a happy event.
I find the blatant favouritism shown by BB towards the German servers very strange and quite shocking, some people have said it's natural human behaviour to look after your own, which is true, but it doesn't make sense from a business point of view. It's not as if German customers are going to walk out if the game was made fair, but international customers aren't going to be keen to part with their cash in the face of such obvious discrimination. At this point in time the score board is out of action, so we can live in hope that BB may actually be sorting the issue out as we speak and making things fair. I think it's in their best interests to do so, I hope they realise this too.
I beg to differ.
From the small amount of information that's trickled its way into my attention from the German forums and chat channels, it sounds very much to me like this event has made BlueByte a significant amount of money.
[/CYNICISM]
As for the OP, I certainly hope, during this period of downtime for the leaderboard, that BlueByte take the opportunity to rebalance things in some way. Whether that takes the form of tweaking target totals, redistribution of teams or some other measure, they really need to do something to try and restore confidence in a significant portion of their customer base.
If you're going to do something which brings in more revenue then it makes sense to do it on all servers so as to maximise profits. Look at the US, traditionally US players have more disposable income than any other country. Thanks to BB's pricing structure for different sever regions if they was going to pander for economic reasons it would be the US servers who would benefit, to the best of my knowledge at this time that is the last thing BB can be accused of.
The server vs server competitions are a good idea in so many ways (from a business- as well as a gamers pov...), but I agree that they probably never will be fair. The reasons are complex, and I don´t believe bb are intentionally favoring the german servers. Rather, it seems to me that all of bbs attempts to balance or rectify things tend to make matters worse...
At the bottom of all this lies, as I understand, the fact that bb will not give out information regarding number of players, activity etc, as these are business secrets. That means that any idea of a simple, predictable "reach this number of balloons" contest, or any open solution where we know the conditions of the competition, are a lost cause. Unfortunately. That leaves us with the "we can´t tell you the rules of this contest (but trust us, it´s balanced!), so just do as you´re told and you´ll do fine!" kind of competition, which I frankly find a bit insulting.
I hope I am wrong in this chain of thought, but if bb cannot make these contests more predictable, transparent AND fair (which seems like a contradiction right now), then I, too, kindly ask they stop doing them. There lies a strong social obligation for participation in these events, and with the levels of negative stress people are displaying, it seems to me bb are all but forcing people to quit playing...
Finally, I disagree with the OP that bb should use any opportunity to rig the contest even further, although that may be just what they did! I have had my share of compensations and consolation prizes in this game, sorry.
my 2 cents... :P