Three World Events later: lessons learnt, and lack thereof.
Council of Chiefs, Festival of the Sun, and From the Depths have come and gone, providing the playerbase with an opportunity to once again observe the development trends, and how much ‘player feedback’ matters in shaping said trends.
The first iteration (CoC, 16/MAR) was universally disliked, with the main complaints from the playerbase being:
- Random Scoring is unfair and makes no sense
- Rewards are too hard/expensive to obtain (>Tier IV from 30 Guild Members for full rewards)
- Event constraints applying to Hero are overly limiting, especially for newer players who rely on smaller weapon inventories
- The ‘choice’ when selecting battles is borderline inconsequential
- Players shouldn’t have to read the forum in order to find out what is the scoring method for an event
Then FotS came in on 13/APR, with scores being apparently homogeneous for all players for the same number of battles (thus removing the unfairness factor), and a lowered cost to obtain all rewards: despite ignoring feedback nº 3 to 5, this event was significantly well-received by the playerbase, thus suggesting it was a move in the right direction when it came to customer satisfaction.
On 11/MAY (and despite the positive feedback resulting from FotS) FtD inexplicably reverted back to the CoC model, reincorporating random scoring for the same number of battles, and requiring an extremely high buy-in from guilds wishing to obtain all rewards: however, due to a self-admitted ‘typo’, the cost of rewards was lowered back to FotS range, thus narrowly dodging a full CoC2 situation.
However, if there had been no typo:
it would appear that the higher (CoC-like) cost to get all rewards was the intended requirement (the ‘clarified’ explanation is anything but, as evidenced by subsequent comments by players in the same thread).
It would therefore seem that “2 steps forward, 2 steps backwards”, and still miles away from the destination…
…assuming ‘customer satisfaction’ is a top priority.
Sources: