MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Summary - 29th August, 2018
Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior and Masta Don
Duration: 40 minutes.
Next event is Crystal Siege (CS). This will be a short event. Some people may like this, other people may
not.
Leader boards were shown for Serpenta.
Regarding the "incident". A vast majority of the players understood
that it was a glitch, BC is thankful for that. They're thankful for the 4am
phone calls on that Saturday. These were startling. The bug happened for the
ios users and not the android users. Both devices use the same sales setup on
the server side of BC. What appears to
have happened, which is still under investigation with Apple, and it was
nothing on BC's end, at some point Apple's end of the program interacted
differently to the list of prices on BC's end and reversed the list so the top
things pointed at the bottom prices. Since nothing happened on Android, then BC
knows that it definitely wasn't an error on BC's end. The $99 pack was on sale for $0.99 for ios
users, and it was triggered as an unlimited sale. BC shut down the sale and called up the people
to get that done. Once that was done they had to get the resources back. BC
knows that a lot of players feel this was unfair. Historically, when accidents
happen, BC tends to let them hang "out there" and some players may
have been expecting that. However, this was the kind of accident that if this
was left out there this time... (Masta Don cut out here) ... without giving everyone
the same amount of gold and energy immediately and seeing what happened - a maximum
inflation strategy would have been the only solution and everyone would have
been happy.
BC chose to do a "claw back". Anyone who purchased
1-99 packages, were credited with 1 package. If someone bought 100-200
packages, they were credited with 2 packages.
If someone bought 10 of the packages, or spent $10, then they were
allowed to keep the gold and energy from 1 package. Everyone will end up with
either the same or a better deal than if they had purchased 1 pack for $99. You
still get more.
Unfortunately for android users this will be frustrating and
seem to be unfair, but BC isn't sure what they'll do on this. They have finished doing the claw back for
energy and gold, after pulling their Server team onto it during the event.
For the trophy claw back, they looked at the player's
trophies to energy ratio and then looked at how much energy they had to claw
back. They then removed the amount of trophies corresponding to the energy they
would have needed to claw back, should that have dipped below how much energy they
had going in to the event.
(MiriamRowan's translation: If you had used energy from the sales on the
event and they couldn't remove all of that energy directly from your account
without touching energy you had prior to the event, your trophies were then
reduced by your average amount of trophies per energy for the energy they
needed to remove and couldn't).
For the players who had lots of stuff removed but still seem
to have a lot of gold or energy, One of the reasons for this is because these players
went into the event with that amount of gold and energy. For example, if you went into the event with
2000 energy, and then purchased 1000 energy and spent 1000 energy straight
away, then essentially there was nothing for BC to remove in terms of trophies .. (Masta Don cut out again)... because with that energy. (MiriamRowan's comment, this example doesn't
make sense to me personally. It's at the 9 minute mark of the video if anyone
can catch the last part Masta Don says?)
Repeating, BC clawed back everything from the purchases
except for one pack. Everyone got one. Honestly,
if everyone had decided to just buy 1, then BC wouldn't have had to have done
claw backs. But since there was a bunch of idiots jumped on and decided to buy
100 packs as fast as they can before they shut off, that's forced BC to do
theses fixes, despite knowing that it was a mistake. In another game Masta Don
played a couple of years ago, they banned all accounts who exploited the bug in
the system. BC won't ban players for
things out of their control.
BC asks android players to take solace in the fact that you have
a much better gem matching system compared with the ios users in terms of speed
and damage done. You get the faster and
better turns all the time.
Masta Don is aware that a lot of players are angry and some
feel that since it was there they should be able to keep it, but that isn't how
it works. It's not the way any industry works. It happens on Amazon, on Best
Buy and in other games... (Masta Don cut out again) ...Some players made scripts to purchase as many packs as they
could, as fast as they could during that time, and that's forced BC to do
something about it because it was abusing the system with its intentionality.
No one is happy and we all have to move passed it.
Masta Don received the call at 4am on Saturday and there was
a lot of profanity and a lot of frustration. BC had to figure out how to handle
it and then realized that as the mistake wasn't on their end that they had to
call other people to handle it, which was even more frustrating. The solution
has pulled the Server guy three days to work on this, which has put everything
else behind.
Additionally BC is still deciding what they will do with
players who spun and whether or not they need to address these and how to go
forward with that. Spins are tricky. As soon as everyone purchased these sales,
they knew they were bugs. So the immediate reaction was to spend their
resources as fast as they can because BC can't get back what you spend right
away. It's like getting a million dollars in your back account and so you
decide that you better do a withdrawal.
The next thing that they did was they started spinning the grab sales. Many
of these players have an alternate account linked for trading and they started
trading these monsters around. Here's
the problem. Anyone familiar with the bugs that BC had a while back regarding
monster inventories causing massive problems when players couldn't get into
their accounts. That happened when BC tried to do various claw backs on
monsters that weren't meant to be there. Players had been tricked into trades with
the monsters were only there because of bugs, and now these players have a
monster that shouldn't exist but they did nothing wrong themselves. BC needs to decide whether the impact of the
monsters is worth going through the effort to go through and find them. Once again, this is very frustrating for
android players, as they don't want to see players being able to keep ill-gotten
goods as a result of a bug they couldn't take advantage of themselves. Unfortunately
they may get to keep those monsters. BC
needs to look to see how, and if, they can do anything about them without
jeopardizing tons and tons of players.
Unfortunately the first thing that happens when people see something is
to trade the monsters and try to cover it up and bounce through multiple
accounts, making it challenging to create scripts to track and follow. And every day that BC needs to spend on their
server team writing scripts (because a sginle person cannot manually track all
this) is a day that they can't develop anything. It's one of those difficult
choices. Masta Don understands that people have spun a ton and have a lot of
event epics and event ultras and that these are in the economy now and it's
unfair. BC is still looking at it. This
week they will specifically be looking into whether these event monsters can be
addressed as opposed to every monster that was spun. But it is a matter of it
still being in discussion. BC has so far taken care of the gold and energy and
trophies. The monsters are trickier as
removing them causes a lot of innocent people's accounts to bug. They need
server guys to look into that more and unfortunately it's going to be on the
clock, where if they can't figure it out this week then they're not going to be
able to keep working on it. He can't
pull the server team for two weeks. Instead Masta Don may look at all the
accounts which didn't make any purchases and see if BC can make a gift to
offset this. (More on the incident in
various paragraphs intermixed below as they came up).
Next update coming soon. It will have new second evolutions
and new vanity items in it. There won't be any new events in it. They may look
at this in the future, but he wants to concentrate on releasing more events
that people want. Before new events are made, he wants CT (Celestial Towers) and
TW (Troop Wars) added to the rotations on a regular basis first.
Returning to the Serpenta incident event monsters. It's mostly the epics that BC are concerned with. There are generally so many event supers in the game that people don't have issues trading for them. Even ultras, it's arguable that there are a lot ultras in the game that trading back and forth isn't too much of an issue. The epics are definitely the main issue with people being able to keep them for essentially $1.
Reward monsters. In a perfect world, Masta Don would
eliminate event monsters and then reward
monsters would be the top monsters. They can't do this as many people have put
a lot of time and money into developing event teams. BC wants to bring reward monsters back into
the mix on a regular basis. One of the ways they can do this is to put troop
wars (TW) back into the rotation though. Another way is to have events that
don't use damage monsters. Last TW, the top 500 players played TW a ton. There
is definitely a demand for TW among the top 500 players. Everybody else, below the top 500 players, participated
significantly less. Since these top 500
players have epics, mythics, legendaries, that are second evolved and r boosted
to the max, the regular players without these monsters can't compete or catch
up without event monsters. However, these
players are choosing to spin during world boss events , or Battle Royale, or
Dominion, or Crystal Siege (etc) as they know these monsters have greater value
and are more repeatable. BC is trying to find out how to increase the value of
r monsters without "nerfing" the heck out of event monsters that
players have taken forever to get.
Coliseum. Masta Don will think about Coliseum after he can
get CT back into the rotation. CT is a better event than Colisuem. It's well
thought out and it has beautiful zones and it has the floor mechanic of the
towers which is completely different from the raid mechanics. They like CT
because it offers more variety than Coliseum does. Coliseum is something that BC is looking at. Coliseum is a match based event and BC already has a lot of matched based events,
and Coliseum is at a disadvantage compared to these. Coliseum is essentially a
raid event where you hit a raid boss as much as you can. The interesting part
of Coliseum is the rotating event monsters and this is why many players like
Coliseum. Another way to do this is to would be to make those monsters work on
more events.
"Cheng made a lot of promises that I told him not to
make" - Masta Don
Reward monsters that haven't come out with equipment yet? BC
will look into these. BC made a jump to put equipment on the newer monsters as
players didn't like the older monsters returning.
Regarding the Serpenta/ios incident. BC will treat ios users
who didn't buy a gold package during the incident in the same way that they
will treat android users. BC is looking
at this now, but they need to decide whether the event monster issue is
solvable first. They need to do a full accounting of the incident before they
can do anything for all of the players who did not take advantage of the sale.
Reading Ricky Hanson's comment out loud on BC Live: What a
good guy not exploiting the bug and waking people up. Yes, a shout out to Ricky
for getting ahold of a lot of people, and making a lot of enemies. "You
just threw yourself under the bus, man. Blame Rick. Don't blame us".
Masta Don understands the frustrations of players. He's been
a gamer all of his life and he knows firsthand that it's very frustrating when
it happens to him or his account. In general, he always abused it, so he
understands. He would always purchase once but in a way that he could always
say that it was an accident or that he didn't know better. The people who
messed this up (during the Serpenta incident) and made it harder than it needed
to be, aren't the people who purchased once and Masta Don doesn't feel
negatively towards these players who purchased once or a couple of times. He is still seeing stuff that he can't
believes, such as a person who purchased over 70 over only 5 minutes. He's
going to get a balance on it. He understands the frustration and the way it
feels unfair to the players who didn't take advantage of it. BC will let us know what will happen to
balance this once they have taken a full accounting of it all.
CS has one the largest participation of the mid level
players out of any event. CS is the most beautiful bell curve for
participation.
BC has heard that players would like shield with
warrior/crusader in spins.
New equipment for old active/passive reward monsters? People
don't like old passive reward monsters in the leader boards (tier prizes), as
they're perceived as having less value. Now that merging is back they'll
possibly starting to introduce these back into the tiers. They'll look at it maybe
after their current rotation.
The next update (with second evolutions) has pushed back a
week as Server has busy fixing the "incident".
BC knows that cavalry monsters are more valuable than rogue,
but may bring more rogues into the leader board prizes by request of players.
Arena? Arena would be done and would be back in the mix, but
last year when they pulled it to do a bit of a revamp on it, the person who was
working on it unfortunately left the company during restructuring. It's now
sitting out there like an old car with its engine pulled out. They can't run it
without spending time to fix it. One day they'll work on this.
Pvp is slated to be worked on at some point, but it's a back
list thing. Masta Don would like to see
it as a peer-Elo system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system). That way you're paired with people equal to
you. The biggest mistake they made with PvP was taking into account the power
rating when matching, because this is irrelevant, all that matters is that players
are the same Elo. This is why you currently get matched with players of higher
or lower power rankings.
League was good. The issue wasn't with participation. But
they happened around the same time that BC had tons and tons of players doing
massive amounts of vaults (?? Seems to refer to chests or sales?) and was a perfect storm and was looked down upon internally within
the company as a the problem, instead of a side effect of the sales at the time. And it happened around the time the Server
gave out about 5000 energy to a bunch of people.
If BC did PvP as a straight full event instead of only one
day, it would need a leader board revamp and will likely remain as an
individual event still. Players either
really love or hate PvP and they don't want troops forced to need to encourage
their players to do something they don't like within the game.
Crafting bound equipment? BC is looking at this. It will
unfortunately take time for server to do. A new item would need to be created
to do this, ideally it would be available from Lost Temple, so it feels like
you're farming for that. If BC makes
bound equipment craftable, then it would bind to the first monster that wielded
it and couldn't be changed afterwards.
They're not sure if they would allow event monsters to wear this
equipment, although this bonus would be additive, so it may not be significant.
Wrkshp Warrior is almost done with his PvP training and may
be ready next show to take on the world.
Old passives and actives will be in the grabs again for
crystal siege. There will be one reward epic for each element, as usual.
Could events be separated into different power ratings (PR) so
that the lower level players have a good chance to advance? The leagues that BC
ran had been a test of the mechanic to
group players together by PR. Back when
the league events had good rewards, players would get angry about the league
they were in as they couldn't compete on the same level or push as hard the really,
really good players in the leagues. The feedback was negative, otherwise BC
would have considered doing this for events.
There will be new second evolutions in the upcoming update.
He doesn't know when this will come out as they have to relook at Server's time
since so much of it was spent on the incident this week. BC will try to give us
sneak peeks at the sevos through Facebook.
Elemental Clash will not be returning to BC.
BC doesn't allow a lot of stacking on Cool Luke as there are
a lot of players who run a lot of accounts. With trading, BC can't allow
stacking, as these players stack energy on lots of accounts and then transfer
their monsters between each one. If BC
didn't have trading, then there wouldn't be a problem and stacking would be
possible. BC isn't as generous as they used to be with energy as a result.
Energy for Elite/Legendary Spins? BC can consider this as feedback was good in
the past.
Assuming nothing weird happens (like the update coming out
earlier than currently expected), the event following CS will be Slick Tricks
raid. This is an old raid with a giant serpent boss. (MiriamRowan's comment: Slick Tricks was a
raid event from May, 2016. Event monsters used back then (no guarantee they'll
be used again) were: https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Gnawchuck,Lushwolf,Canterbranch,Toxeel
)
BC won't increase the r boost or passive levelling up
chances. BC gives out a ton of monsters, and if they were to increase the chances
then they would need to reduce the number of monsters they give out to balance
this. That's how the economy works. Masta Don has considered different ways to
balance it though including releasing monsters that give 100% chances. These
would be extremely rare and given as event rewards.
Masta Don and Wrkshp Warrior read through all comments and
Yulun provides the BC team with a summary of questions asked and these get
passed onto the team. Even if your question or comment isn't read out during a
stream, it is read by BC.
