To bend back into legal parlance, and what court procedure might dictate if prosecuted in that forum? (In the United States, where I am.)
A big problem with this idea is the concept of “provable damages”. If you want to suggest that a player banned for three days should receive 72 tributes, how are you going to prove that’s what was lost? How are you planning to prove that somebody would have logged in once per hour to collect that; I’m sure there are some people who do, or who have an arrangement where somebody near them logs in while they’re asleep, at work, and so on. But that’s probably a very small group of people.
Second? What about mitigation? A lot of the complaints I’m reading in these spaces are people “who stopped playing because they were afraid of a ban”. I understand the fear, but why should the developers be on the hook for a player changing his behavior, especially when that player very easily could have logged in to collect tribute and then signed off without playing? If a player stayed away from the game altogether out of this fear, that’s a “them” thing and not a “developer” thing. That’s a player making a conscious decision to behave in a certain way and compounding his/her losses.
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And on the broader talk of compensation? I sincerely wish that people asking for ginormous amounts of compensation – not the post I’m directly responding to by the way – would stop and think for a moment. If your position is that the developers ought to award that much compensation, and maybe to bend over and invite you to spank them to boot, isn’t there a very real risk that the developers could decide it’s cheaper (and maybe easier) to give nothing and risk those players walking away? As opposed to having to give them so much free stuff that they’d lose as much (or more) that way?
To use a real world example: If you have a problem at a restaurant, they comp your meal. Maybe they give you some consideration beyond that, whether it’s a free extra or three that you didn’t order or a limited discount on future patronage. But they don’t go too much further than that. Because they’re still a business, and there’s still a line beyond which they won’t tread on account that the benefits to them are out-weighed by the cost of “doing nothing”.
We don’t have to like it, and there are many complaints in these spaces about the increasing monetization of the game and the seeming “greed” of the developers for ever increasing amounts of contribution. But we also ought to remember that this is their business, that they provide an of service without requiring any up front payment (or even any payment at all). But they have very real expenses when it comes to creating and maintaining the game and the economic model they’re using doesn’t guarantee that they’ll ever meet that. They undoubtedly do, given the longevity of the game as opposed to the mobile clones that appear and disappear like twinkling Christmas Tree lights.
But if you make it impossible for that side to stay in a tenable position, they could just pull up stakes and walk off into the sunset. Which leaves the complaining player no better off than he is now and perhaps worse, depending on how much of an attachment s/he has to this game and the value s/he receives from it.
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Any suggestions, other than not playing the game at the frequency I am playing to account for this?