Kristi927 Thu Aug 16, 2012 11:20 am
I just wanted to share a letter someone sent to the author of the venturebeat.com article. Since they are from this forum I thought it relevant to this thread.
"Here's a long message I got from a player, trying to explain what happened and what the sequence of events was. The message follows:
I'd
say that most people complaining are level 100 and higher, meaning
that even if they had added zero friends in exchange for diamonds,
they've had at least 500 diamonds at their disposal since you get 5
for each level advanced. Not to mention that GI has given away
probably hundreds of diamonds for simple things like entering weekend
codes that they give out on the Facebook page, rating the app at the
App Store, and downloading their other games. Out of those ~700+
diamonds I've had, I probably have used fewer than 200 to skip past
parts of the game that got frustrating. (Usually it involves waiting
for a certain item to appear under particular circumstances. It *will*
eventually appear, but some people don't want to wait at all and will
just buy the item with their diamonds right away.) Others have been
spent on things that definitely aren't needed to advance in the game,
like permanently boosting my maximum energy, or changing the
appearance of your username.
I can't speak for the other communities, but the main thing that fired
up the mmuff.com group is that in the last month, GI started banning
people who abused glitches in order to advance in the game -- at least
a handful of posters at mmuff.com got banned. The way the game was
supposed to work is that you can give other players collection items
out of your own inventory. Like most objects in the world, when you
give Item X to a player, the amount of X that the receiver has goes up
by 1, and the amount you have goes down by 1. Well, a glitch was
discovered so that if you gave away an item, but hit the "Cancel"
button within a split second, the other player would still get the
item, and you wouldn't lose yours. It was really easy to do. So not
only could you for all intents and purposes "create" items out of thin
air to give away without losing your own, this also got around the
limit of 10 items you could give each day. People went nuts with it to
the point where the most avid were literally -- yes, literally --
giving away hundreds of items to their friends every day. Of course,
GI was going to notice this and respond.
So they did, and some people got banned. This naturally gave most of
the mmuff.com community the vapors. And then the unthinkable happened:
GI fixed the gifting glitch entirely. Note that the game doesn't force
you to upgrade right away, you're just limited to trading gifts with
people who are using the same version of the game as you. So of course
when word got out, a lot of the most avid gifters declined to upgrade,
so that they could continue to use the glitch. Now you can tell who
has upgraded and who hasn't, because you're only allowed to visit the
rooms of people using the same version of you. And wouldn't you know
it, but about a week after the upgrade had been released, a good
percentage of the leaderboard was taken by people who hadn't upgraded
their games. So GI eventually forced everyone to upgrade by basically
not letting non-upgraders do anything meaningful in the game, and now
everybody is on the current version of the game, multi-gifting is
dead, and that's when it really hit the fan.
Note that there are some legit complaints out there. I've suffered
probably 3 crashes at most the past few months, but I believe the
people who say it's a problem for them. I'm guessing it's because I'm
using an iPad 3, and they might be on less powerful iPads which might
be causing the problems. The coins in the game (as opposed to the
diamonds) are basically useless. Being a social game, not being able
to add particular friends (whether you got diamonds for doing so or
not) is a large problem. There are certain "creatures" in the game
(Ninjas) that drop items needed to explore a certain room in the game,
but they have all but disappeared for some reason. (I doubt it was
done on purpose, they just need to rebalance the game.) The current
version often hangs for seconds on end when sending a gift that
someone requested on your wall. But there have occasionally been
problems like the hanging issue and GI has gotten them ironed out in
subsequent updates. Speaking of GI's support, while I wish I had been
made known of the problem beforehand, when I emailed them to find out
why the game no longer worked once I moved from the original iPad to
the iPad 3, they helped me get my game transferred and even sent a
followup email later to make sure that it was all working.
The bottom line is that it's my opinion that the outcry is mainly due
to GI fixing the glitches that certain people used to endlessly
exploit. I used to exploit multi-gifting moderately myself, but hey,
they caught on, fair game, and now it's gone. If people had just used
it reasonably, GI probably would never have had to step in to fix it.
The rationalizations at mmuff.com for why people did it, or why they
should petition GI to bring it back, rather than address the real
problems mentioned above, are comical and ridiculous.
Feel free to get back if you have any questions, or to use any of the
above (just not my name, username, email, etc.) if you want to add
some more balance to the article."
Here is my response that is awaiting approval.
I want to say that the person who wrote you the letter you posted in your comment was off base about several things. First, banning of players. I only know of 1 player that was banned and this has nothing to do with our strike. The other thing that has nothing to do with the strike is number of diamonds accumulated. We are not complaining we don't have enough diamonds, no one said this. The price for paying for diamonds is unreasonable, BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO BUY THEM. We also never asked for multigifting back, we would simply like to be able to give more than 10 collection gifts a day since the achievement in the game is to add 500 friends. That is about 1 gift every 6 weeks to each of my friends. The game is setup as a social game for us to help each other and now it is very hard to do this. Even dropping the counter with coins would be fine. We are NOT asking this company to stop charging, we just want fair gameplay back. If they were able to make millions with the way the game was, why change core aspects (like adding friends with codes) of the game. We are fully aware this is a business and pledge that once they JUST SPEAK TO US AND LISTEN, we will restore their ratings. We aren't asking for much, but are tired of being completely ignored by their customer service. I am glad the person that emailed you was able to get a response because many of us wait for weeks without a reply.
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