Information about bans

I can confirm now that the next Vault event will be on the weekend of March 3rd

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great news thank you.

So currently we’re scheduled to having 1 per month (1 in Feb, 1 in March & 1 in April) where normally there would have only been 1 per every 6 weeks, so one of those months wouldn’t have had one.

Then from there we’re going back to our regular 6 week schedule (pending the possibility of slight variations due to clashing events).

If you’re still not happy with this, please explain why in more detail so I can properly represent your concerns, otherwise, while I know people still aren’t happy about the whole situation, I think we’ve done what we can to address this at this stage and we do need to close this out at some point and just taking feedback under advisement for any future incidents like this.

^ Text is hard to convey tone, so just a disclaimer, I do genuinely care about conveying your criticism and concerns, but I do need more to continue this discussion at this point, I’m not trying to say this in a mean way, I’m just trying to communicate where we’re at on the status of this.

We have people saying we’re lying about an extra vault weekend - but that’s really not helpful or very descriptive or communicative, if you think we’re having a miscommunication I need more information, because I do want to help address this properly.

I do understand you were expecting a Vault event in January, if that’s what this is about, understood already, but if there’s more to it yeah, more information please!

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The reason is that you are forgetting January and December in your calculations. It looks nice when you put it like “1 in Feb, 1 in March & 1 in April”, because then yes, it looks nice, 3 instead of 2 over 12 weeks/3 months. But you’re forgetting the 10 weeks break between the one in December (2 Dec) and another one - 10 Feb, which would be 17 Feb, i.e. 11 weeks, if the community didn’t complain their butts off for weeks now. So, in the eyes of many, February, March and April Vaults being so close together means that we are now getting even for the 10 weeks of interval between December Vault and February Vault, bringing the average interval back to 5-6-7 weeks between Vault events, that is to the typical schedule. Don’t feel surprised that people don’t see this Feb event as “extra”, but as a replacement for the cancelled January vault. When you look at past schedule, not just for the months that are to come, this Vault doesn’t feel or look extra. That’s why we’re still asking “where is the extra”. Is this clearer now?

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The last vault event that followed the 6 week schedule was Dec 2


There is no extra event here

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Vault events are part of the weekend event cycle, which spans 6 weeks, you confirmed that yourself. Events sometimes get shifted around by a week, both forward and backward, that doesn’t change that there’s one vault event every 6 weeks on average.

Let’s look at the math. The last “regular” vault event was beginning of December. We now get one in February, March and April. That’s 3 vault events within 16 - 20 weeks, depending on when the third one in April is going to be held. This averages out to the regular one vault event every 6 weeks, there just isn’t anything extra there.

Which gets us the core issue that has slowly been destroying this game for years now, communication. And I’m also not trying to be mean here.

If there had been some announcement well ahead, like at the beginning of December, that the by far most popular weekend event, vault, would be skipped in the next event cycle, the community would have been unhappy. That’s a range from grumbling to shouting, depending on the reason given for skipping the vault event. It probably wouldn’t have lasted long, people tend to lose focus and move on.

What actually happened was radio silence. The community eventually noticed the distinct lack of the next vault event and asked several times what is going on, which resulted in more radio silence. This overlapped with the ban fiasco, which handed out a “compensation” that didn’t even remotely cover the cost the banned players had paid for all the event sigils that expired unused, due to the incorrect bans. And which also didn’t even remotely cover the cost of guild members having to bail in with extra shop tiers, due to their most active players being unable to play.

To sweeten that turd an extra vault event was promised. And at this point, after all the extended radio silence, presenting “extra” as “hey, we silently removed one vault event from the schedule, never told you about it, never responded to your questions, but this regular vault event is really an extra one you wouldn’t have received otherwise, trust us” really begs for this interpretation:

There’s also the Krinkle nerf. This troop was sold as map generator, the feature was “temporarily” removed to analyze the ban issue, then quickly found to not be the cause. Now, almost two months after the ban issue has been declared resolved, Krinkle is still not generating maps, and there don’t seem to be any real plans to ever return them. Please communicate, because this definitely shouts “we noticed we are selling maps for real money, the ban issue was a convenient excuse to make sure it stays that way”.

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Feels like it has been explained by many others multiple times already but maybe @Kafka @Jeto @OminousGMan @Bramble @Nimhain can try and understand it now since @Fourdottwoone explained it - again. With an open mind I’m confident you guys can understand it too, so it may be finally passed on and acted upon…

Especially the “extra” Vault part.

Otherwise the lack of communications part is just tragic, because there’s so many things that could be done to improve on that matter, without taking up too much time and effort on the “dev-sided” part. But it is a question of “do the devs even take interest in that”? For now, we seemingly have our answer and can only hope for things to improve.
Example: @Kafka - you today posting a simple quick and easy confirmation in this thread was perfect. No big textwall of chit chat with buried backdoors, just plain and simple INFORMATION (that hopefully will take place).

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Do any developers at least read the forums, the important to them parts I mean (not us showing cool screenshots or recruiting)?

I think relying on a messenger to give you the information, however well-meaning that may be, might end up in a game of telephone.

It’s not that I don’t trust our CX folks, it’s just what tends to happen.

The only thing I’d add is that with

  1. The original Feb Vault Event having previously been scheduled for this weekend 17 - 19 Feb

  2. The next / extra event going ahead 3 - 5 March, two weeks later (3 weeks between actual)

  3. Following Vault Events to be ~6 weeks after this (8 weeks between planned)

Even if it is extra (going with the line that “there was never going to be a Jan event” – which probs should have been mentioned), it’s really only extra, since it’s reduced the time between planned events by 4 weeks

Maybe that’s getting a bit nitpicky, though :stuck_out_tongue:

To be fully extra, there’d have to be only 4 weeks between the 3 - 5 March event and the next, reducing time between events by an additional 2 weeks (bringing it to 6 total) – i.e. Apr 7 - 9, per the regular schedule.

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Ok, totally understood now, thanks for taking the time to explain to me AGAIN (I know you’re fed up with repeating yourselves).

I know Icy just commented my posts are too long sometimes but I guess I want to summarise, so feel free to skip the next bit, you’re not missing much:

Me being verbose

For me, at the time, I felt like spacing out the Vault Events more to avoid one in early January was a good idea as we had Kingdom Pass, Legends Reborn, a game update and a Vault weekend scheduled AND half the team was on holidays that week, the team were on the same page about that so we just moved it. It just felt like the perfect concoction of - if something is going to go wrong it will blow up this particular week because that’s Murphy’s Law - so let’s just not create the perfect storm and move something. The Vault event was the easiest thing we could move.

The gap between Vault Events seemed like the lesser evil but in retrospect we should’ve known how not having a Vault Event in January would be more problematic for the community (we knew it would be problematic, I think I had my holiday rose tinted glasses on though about how strongly everyone would feel about it). I think we should have tried harder to postpone the Vault or run it sooner so we could avoid that perfect storm week as well as still have the event.

I think also, because we never announced the Vault Event would be every 6 weeks until recently we just felt we could be much more flexible with the timing.

Meanwhile, everyone has grown used to the unannounced 6 week schedule, so reasonably there is now an expectation the 6 week schedule will be followed.

So that warrants more communication when we plan to deviate from the schedule - and in future we’ll try to do better at that.

TLDR; I see it from both sides now, I feel like I am clear about what the core issues are and misteps that were made and I feel equipped to handle this better in future - I am sorry that I didn’t do a good job of communicating at the start and during these issues, I will do my best to improve on that.

We’re also still very sorry about the ban issue that happened and the Vault Event scheduling.

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Coming back to the ban issue once again (and hopefully for the last time). There has been a pet (Prancer) which the banned players have missed.

Would it be possible to include it in the regular pet runs or at least sent out 1 free copy to those that missed it because of the ban?

Sidenote:
There’s also a few old campaign pets that never appeared again. Neither in-game nor as an offer (money or gems). There should be an option to get them somehow as well, even if it was through the Soulforge like Angry Anvil. :thinking:

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Kris Krinkle needs to be reverted (this is an important matter for those who care). I recommend rescheduling Arena Events anytime there seems to be a congested schedule. Simply take it out and put it back at a later time, a much, much later time. The Vault Events shouldn’t be messed with. Want more money? Create more offers around this, “The Vault” (those who are interested in purchasing will purchase, of course) as I feel it will be more of a win-win situation.

:sunglasses:

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Better planning would be to not put out gameupdates while many employees are on vacajay. Also don’t put them out before weekends, because you guys tend to ignore the (bug report) forum during those times.
Also please plan stuff better with the events so that not multiple unliked time intensive events due to a horrific game structure with “daily rng battlecrashers” or “you are only allowed to play on in around 3 days” are ongoing at the same time.

You can. Just inform about it clearly. Players knew about certain rotations of events due to the history of it, players keep track on stuff. You must’ve read that since around December ~20th, when the gamefiles scheduled vault event just vanished from the gamefiles without explanation. Since then there would’ve been time to comment on that matter. The same question since then was asked many times, and ignored the same amount of times. Ignored because other stuff got commented on. Meanwhile a “extra” Vault event gets announced that also doesn’t happen. At some point it feels foolish. It also is one thing if a rotation takes a week more or less, as long as it gets back on track - also happened before. No much fuzz about it, just comment/announce it. But in this situation, with just canceling January-Vault and no information about future plans for the next months (and closer gaps between Vault that may or may not have happened over the next months) was poor communication. And again, many players asked about it multiple times and got ignored on that matter.

One more question, again:
What is the situation about the extra Vault event?

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Too lazy to hunt for it, but I believe Kafka has stated that this is not something the company is considering.

the week long vault event was because guild wars was canceled because of the russian invasion on ukraine.

However a week long vault event every April would be nice and some thing to plan for evey year if given a set date for example 2nd week in april.

this wold give those with real commitments an oppertunity to get some vault in with out commiting a full weekend.

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week long vault event has only happened once. Likely to not happen again. These things need to get approved. A much easier thing to get approved might be an extra day so you get Thursday- Sunday. This would help folks that are busy or working the weekend and would help with folks talking about an extra vault weekend I think. Just an idea…

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Just a reminder on that.
Hopefully not March 3rd (2028) :rofl:

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now we have had two of the promised vault events when should we expect the 3rd and the then the regular one we would have had?

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just a reminder for @Kafka @Jeto @Bramble to re-read two postings in this thread:

and

I’m sure the active players would appreciate and like to know about the plans for the early april vault event (so we are finally back on schedule?) and also about the promised “extra” vault event that never happened. Please don’t deny, postpone or “forget” about it further. :slight_smile:

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Hear that sonic boom? That’s an entire Customer Experience team making sure they won’t be seen anywhere near this topic.

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