BC Live - 29th August 2018

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.