One could argue that, based on available information at the time via posts to the forum and beta feedback, the self-looping feature of GAP was anticipated, predicted, and hence intended.
I think your interpretation is also valid, but by no means is it the sole valid interpretation.
I encourage you to reframe your thinking: GAP did not punish anyone. It gave players who spent significant time playing on Thursday comparative advantage, but even post-nerf, GAP is extremely rewarding and much more generous than I would have expected.
So this is my interpretation of the event regarding to people knowing it was a bug and taking advantage knowing it was an exploit.
The dev team mentioned that we would be able to encounter verse gnomes during the GaP.
The GaP allows you to encounter 4 random gnomes during the event.
Verse gnomes are gnomes.
They dev team was warned by testers that this would trigger looping. They chose to ignore or not listen to the warning.
All of this combined throws confusion out there whether or not this was what they wanted.
As a player, knowing all this information, it’s not unreasonable to think that this is how the event was intended to be.
According to Kafka and the devs they have a very meticulous testing regimen. Surely they would listen to their testers and take what they say into consideration right?
Don’t get me wrong I’m upset by this whole thing as well. The dev team literally hasn’t done anything right in months. Everything they’ve released is either broken on release, or just bad design concept entirely (lycanthropy).
I’m not sure what the best solution on their end would be honestly. I doubt anything further is going to happen regarding this issue from their end though.
So you don’t think its punishing to have to grind all waking hours of the rest of the event, just to get a fraction of the resources others got over the course of several hours? Any effort is futile. Pets are up in my guild every hour, and those that played Thursday are just buying their way to kingdom upgrades with gems earned from Thursday. Meanwhile the people would couldn’t take advantage of this due to irl obligations just sit on the sidelines discouraged by all this. I’m happy for those that got to take part in it. I wish I could have, too. Nothing should be stripped away from anyone as I don’t see it as a bug. There should however be some compensation for those that are at a disadvantage because they couldn’t play over those several hours on Thursday.
Punishment would involve losing resources for no gain, so I stand by my claim. I understand that feeling like you missed out on easy resources can be upsetting. I was trying to convey the notion that, even if you were not able to get as many resources as players who played on Thursday, you would still be getting many more resources than during a regular vault weekend because of GAP.
@Salty. Did someone goof the end time now too? Ending at 3AM ET Sunday at reset instead of a normal gnome weekend lasting until Monday 3AM reset? Gnome-a-palooza ending soon? Get your GAPs in!
This is such an unfortunate situation. Gnome-a-palooza is awesome, even after the changes. And if it was just released this way, everyone would have been thrilled.
I feel bad for the devs, they rarely have a new feature for us that will be universally welcomed by all players. It was their chance to get a big YAY, THANKS! from the community. Instead… And it was all so avoidable. So painful to watch and I can imagine how frustrated some people behind the scenes must be about this.
That stuff happens occasionally and you have to be quick to catch it. Like every new troop that is Never supposed to be in the soul forge, will be there once for ~ 20 minutes. Only Zuul did they take away when it was craft able at normal mythic cost.
Things like a bugged chest that you can open for more loot infinite times, you get about five opens before they will go through logs and remove extra loot. If you exploited it 100’s of times and then spent the loot, Sirrian gets mad and may delete your account.
Yeah, why am I being punished? The only thing left in the game I can use is writs and deeds and I got none of those. For all the time I played on Thursday and all the resources I got, I can’t even level a single kingdom.
I laughed out loud at the 7+ vip level, you choose to use the money at the time for your enjoyment, it does not give you the freedom to hold a company ransom because you gave them money. If you enjoy the have continue to play, if not I’m sure there are other free to play games that give you free premium currency every hour to play.
When someone finds a pet your need while you’re at work, do they owe you? Just saying. Also, it’s not fair when someone wind the lottery and I don’t.
I hope you find something you enjoy doing
My guess is that initially the drop rate for the verse carrying gnomes during GAP was set at something like 5% or 10% and then they changed it something like 0.05% or 0.10%, so you may very well be right.
At least they’re consistent with this. I learned that last time there was a bug with the guardian troops. There’s no (or rarely) punishment or rollbacks for exploiting a bug, so take advantage if you can. So even if you’re not sure if something is intended or not, do it first, then ask questions later.
On Thurdsay I collected 5/2/4/2 from exploring;
Then (with slowish Phoenicia due long loading screens, including some server error messages), first Palooza gave 3 verses out of 4; second gave some more for full set. In all, 4 Paloozas were done and and net result from all four was - 8/4/10/6.
10 Paloozas after the nerf (with Rowanne on E1, normal loading times, 3 games per minute) - 1/0/2/1.
As @mitamata said, it was so easy to get big thumbs up with this feature, but they still managed to muck it up (and then there is satisfactory solution anymore).
In my opinion, verse gnomes should’ve never been allowed to show up during a Palooza in the first place; if they, for some reason, though it was okay, they had to make absolutely sure appearance rate was set low enough to prevent cycle of “free” Paloozas.
Why did they fail to assure this, especially after being warned of this very scenario by both beta-testers and people just watching preview stream and with drop-rate numbers easy to change of the fly? I don’t know, may-hap, predictions were based on low-speed teams they use in preview streams and not the ones people actually play.
The drop rate should have been what it was after the fix, rare! I have always loved gnome hunting, Some Sundays I’ve been dissapointed of the rewards. Still, Thursday took part of the joy away and I enjoyed spending Saturday and Sunday hunting for those missing verses. The joy of getting the missing gnome is such a mind boost.
But it wasn’t really a bug, was it? If you watch the preview stream, Salty even got several verse gnomes while GaP was up and encouraged players to take advantage of it as much as possible. I guess they eventually changed their mind, can’t really fault players for following official recommendations though.