My pledge to support GoW

We now know that Fraud is “working as intended” based on the “final response to the issue”. This is the last straw for me, and beyond the last straw for many. I do not support games that release broken update after broken update. I do not support games that lie to their players, or blame the players for their broken game mechanics. I do not support bait and switch where published droprates for chests are not based in reality (we have seen this many times, from chaos shards up to AW last week).

So, until real change is made and proven, I pledge that I will not spend another penny on this game, including mobile ads. I will not buy gated weapons. I will not buy campaign passes. I will not buy flash offers. I will not buy passes for limited time events such as the upcoming Soul Harvest. I will not watch mobile ads for other predatory games, and I will encourage others to do likewise.

I want honest communication. I want well-documented updates. I want new content that does not require immediate nerfs, fixes, patches, or rollbacks. When fixes are necessary, I want those fixes to address the issue, and not cause further gamebreaking bugs. These are all very reasonable expectations for something I’m spending money on. Unless and until this is in evidence, I will not support this game, and I encourage you to do the same.

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Good on you for putting your money where your mouth is. It’s sad to see so many big players stop all spending, but it’s good that they are standing up for what they believe in.

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I do not support

  • game-breaking bugs being allowed to persist for months, as evidenced by the lycanthropy and mana potion campaigns, nor
  • inadequate and inappropriate compensation as a result of bugs or other issues resulting from miscommunication from official sources, as evidenced by the recent Archproxy Yvendra fiasco,

and hence also pledge that I will not spend another penny on this game.

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I’ll be honest, when I saw the title I expected you to be defending them.

Unfortunately these games create junkies. The instant gratification and the impulse deals are addicting, just like any street corner drug pushed by the scum who rely on the same thing.

I haven’t bought anything since 4.7, And it will stay that way.

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Agreed! I am VIP 10. I averaged $50/month on this game. I spend on every F2P game I play.

I stopped spending a few months back. It feels weird playing a game I am not paying for, because I never do that.

But I can’t with the issues, and now the devs have stolen money with the AW issue.

I am not asking for perfection. Wee bugs now and again, who cares. Bouncing icons on world event? Meh, I imagine rave music in the background.

What I am asking is to stop releasing content when its bugged and costing people money (mana potion bug and buying event tiers comes to mind).

The biggest thing I am asking is to stop stealing money. Telling people AW is available when it isnt, then telling people to craft it half off is theft. If any store or casino did this it would be illegal.

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It’s kind of weird how they did full refund for the tier 7’s not working issue in the recent delve event but are unwilling to swap a mythic for players who spent 1000’s of event keys unaware they were wasting their resources/money.

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Sucks even more for those that wasted event keys chasing nothing, when there is a new kingdom coming soon.

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Also I wonder how many players spent tonnes of event keys and just think they were unlucky because they aren’t forum goers. We need to spread the word in public chat for weeks to make sure everyone knows they were robbed.

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Agreed. It is unfortunate how game info is hidden on the forums. We need to flood discord, game chat, facebook, etc.

Could also flood the game store reviews to let future gamers know. :smiling_imp:

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I’m VIP 10, and stopped spending money on this game more than 8 months ago. In fact, I quit playing altogether for most of that time. A big part of what drove me away was seeing the devs push lots of aggressive monetization (especially campaigns) while offering few quality of life improvements in return. Came back last week to see if things had gotten any better, and immediately encountered this Weaver debacle. Guess I’ll keep not spending money in solidarity.

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It’s interesting, because while outrage is incredibly common on these forums, and has been for a couple years now, this might be one of the biggest explosions I’ve seen.

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Ridiculous bugs are one thing, but devs literally stealing our resources and money, that’s another.

Curious to see if devs eventually do the right thing.

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VIP11 here, and like many before me I stopped spending a while back, because of the Company (not because of the Product).

We all have different levels of Tolerance and Breaking Points: mine was the documented Patronizing behaviour of the Mods, coupled with a wave of Censoring here in Forums, that said all I needed to know about this Company. It cost them easily 500USD in Mythic packs (which I had been buying consistently until the risk of dupes became too high, and would have continue to acquire after they implemented dupe protection), plus campaign passes and potential flash offers.

Countless excuses, misleadings, radio silences, and outright lies later (see Forums), I went from being a non-paying customer, to proactively warning my guildies against spending, while providing them with the corresponding supporting facts.

This situation we are experiencing may be the breaking point for some, or it may cause them to start advising others against spending: either way, the reality has been quite consistent since @Sirrian (no longer taggable) and @Nimhain stepped back.

That reality is that IP2 (not 505, as it’s often brought forward when trying to excuse certain behaviours) has allowed the playerbase to be treated in a particular way (dodges, silences, misleads…) and, unsurprisingly, it has only gotten worse over time.

It’s been said countless times: the problem is Communication (and/or lack thereof). A skilled Mod who actually understood the game and had the necessary dedication would diffuse most of these situations before they escalated.

In this particular instance, if a Mod had tackled this question when it was indirectly asked a week before it happened (they were tagged and didn’t bother replying), this may not even have happened to begin with.

Even things like the nonexistent QA would be significantly more tolerable if we had a Mod who was present, understood the problems, and communicated bidirectionally without dodges.

So this is just another iteration on a periodically increasing cycle, that will have no end until the evidenced root cause is solved.
:blush: :vulcan_salute:
#GoWPhilosophy

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I stopped spending back when 3.0 came out (I think?) when the nerfing was just too much to tolerate. It was whenever Gems were removed from LTs and might have coincided with the Statue nerf as well (blue statue nerfed from 590 to 390…which was actually a buff because the original nerf was worse) but I can’t be arsed to look up the patch notes.

I support paying for F2P you enjoy. I only play one other F2P and I make small purchases there from time to time to show support. I’m not one of “those” people who says “it’s free!!” - I do believe in supporting quality products because it’s the only way we will ever see more of the same quality of product.

IP2 has really put their foot in it on this, but it’s well-documented that only a tiny percentage of players even use the forums/discord/game social media. It’s up to us to make sure our fellow players understand exactly what happened in this case. The only way we’ll get the company to notice is to hit the bottom line and those of us who already quit spending for other assorted reasons aren’t going to have an effect.

This dev response has been awful. I’m sure it’s the suits pulling the strings, but for the love of Pete…if I were a dev I’d feel about an inch tall right now at what I’m doing to the players.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now - drop rates are sacrosanct. This would include keeping your players properly informed of what they can and can’t pull before they attempt to pull it. This is in contrast to the numerous other issues this game has, many which are frustratingly lax at getting fixed, are not on the same level as drops. Yes, I get irritated at all that stuff too, and yes, I really wish it would get fixed, and yes, some of them I really find an affront to the concept of game design, but drop rates are your bread and butter. These are the worst type of issues to have and even worse when you don’t give a proper resolution to them.

My personal interpretation of this when this started was this was something that was intended to help players out by extending the exclusives into event chests. Unfortunately, this meant to them removing a drop from event chests due to the mythic being exclusive in other chests - something that has never happened before in Gems of War history. There was no documentation to even hint that Weaver would not be present in event chests during the first half of the week before people opened chests and reported it, not in game, not on support sites, and only afterward in a response post buried in an unrelated thread.

Fundamentally what is not getting communicated here is that changing the drop table on purpose and failing to directly and appropriately communicate this when there is no way for players to do their due diligence and determine something is or is not in the drop pool is for all intents and purposes the same thing as something not being in the drop table due to a bug. The have the same outcome - due to your negligence, people are gambling on getting (sometimes with real money) a prize that is not in the prize pool.

Now, allow me to present a less-than-charitable interpretation of this:

  1. There were at one point tools that allowed players to do their due-dilligence through third party API access because the severs were sending logs of chest contents. After calling out drop issues multiple times, these tools were eventually removed. There was no evidence before this point of them ever being incorrect, and in fact they were used to double check many of the drop issues and both save people some grief ahead of time. ​This was before the (vastly inferior) “drop rate” preview was added to chest screens, where it is impossible to tell if something is or is not in chests, and was, famously, blatantly incorrect (which did have a favorable resolution at least… eventually). Before this post (and during the fix) they were claimed to be “correct” multiple times.
  2. When confronted over not properly communicating AW being removed from chests during the first part of the week it was stated that it was both an old change and it was in response to player feedback. Others were quick to point out that four years ago, there were no more than one mythic in any given kingdom. and such a change would have been irrelevant at that time since no kingdom had more than one kingdom in the event key pool at any given time until years after that, and this is the only overlap of such since.

It isn’t hard to see here how this could be interpreted as gaslighting in an attempt to cover up mistakes and avoid responsibility. The worse interpretation given the facts would be intentional fraud with malice of forethought, and while I don’t personally believe this, I have to admit that a lot of these issues (and the way they are dealt with after the fact) stretch the concept of Hanlon’s Razor to the breaking point.

Unfortunately, I can’t pledge to stop spending on GoW until this is addressed I already have (I have not ever bought anything since campaigns were introduced because of this) because campaigns introduced “timed exclusives” you could only get by paying money that are becoming less and less possible to even collect at all after the fact (think about how hard an individual tarot will be to pull when there are 13 of them sharing the same tiny corner of the drop pool, even with GAP, and that these are going to likely gate mythic collections from here on out). While I know this is seen as “normal” to alot of people playing free to play games, the moving across this particular line was a huge red flag in a sea of monetization progressions checkered with them. But thats a subject for another thread.

I’m almost convinced at this point that they do a coin flip to determine which issues that they will properly compensate.

Devs, if you bother reading this, let me reiterate, this is not a “player entitlement” issue. You have a resource you can charge money for to get random loot, you removed a drop from said random loot without properly communicating. There has to be at least some instances where you have actively defrauded paying customers and not just consumed “digital goods”. Maybe not to a standard that can be upheld in court, but you really don’t want the reputation that this is how you operate.

It is not impossible to get something closer to a favorable result here. Rollbacks being “too hard” is not on us. Not having the support staff to individually address these issues for a full resolution is not on us. If you are looking for suggestions about an “easy” way to give “appropriate” compensation, the following was already floated - have a soulforge recipe that consumes Archproxy and gives Weaver. Anybody using keys to pull Weaver would have at least had to roll “a mythic” before having the 50/50 shot at Weaver if both were in the pool as all prior evidence would have suggested they would be, so allowing someone to just swap them would be slightly player favorable. Anyone who could have pulled Weaver during this period and at least hit the mythic roll would just be afforded to have the opportunity of them choosing the one they were after, it wouldn’t affect anyone that wasn’t happy with what they got (since there was already a documented chance to get Archproxy here too, the issue is that there was no documentation that AW would be removed). Anyone that didn’t receive at least Archproxy… you wouldn’t have ever rolled Weaver due to how the drop rates work internally so you aren’t entitled to a copy here because you weren’t directly affected (and I say directly because any droprate miscommunication or error affects EVERYBODY). This reaches the most people affected by the miscommunication while “giving away” the least amount extra.

In closing, so long as the discourse remains on this forum, they can just ignore it until it dies out. I recommend discussing this on other platforms. Again, I remind people do not harass whatever point of contact you may get (if you get any), but more people need to be aware of what happened, the extent of how bad it is because of what it represents, and why the “compensation” put forth right now is completely unacceptable. Reach out

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If enough players feel this way, nothing is going to change. This was likely their hope behind the timed exclusives anyway.

Taking over a year to craft Zuul broke my “I need all the things” urge. I’ve never bought a pa$$. Hopefully these kinds of behaviors can break other peoples’. The company can F off with their FOMO pressure.

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Clarified my post to say that “I can’t stop spending money because I already have because campaigns”, the text made it seem like the other thing. This is a particular psychological trap I refuse to even engage with because I already know I am extremely susceptible to loss aversion and it would be way too easy to convince myself to keep paying into it, or any future similar packs. Its such an effective trap that I can know exactly how it works but were I to engage in it even recognizing how it works probably would have a hard time stopping to spend money. All purchases before this point were only on things I felt I was accelerating to something I would have other felt was a reasonable bar for playtime, or completely frivolous things (for example, buying a vault key pack for every vault key I got during that period when I don’t really use vault keys, or weekly gems when even back then I was pushing 20k+, now 150k+).

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You have 10 weeks to make a purchase. If enough people wait then Infinity Plus 2 will feel the crunch way more than you will.

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I’m trying to clarify that I already haven’t bought any of the campaign packs because of the psychological trap associated, not that I “have to” here. So I can’t pledge to “stop spending” because that already happened, and correcting this issue can’t make me “start spending” again. Sorry for the derail.

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Thank you for that. And yes, I saw this coming when campaign pa$$es were first announced. It’s cheap and a “no-brainer” after being trained for years that mythics had a “value” of $50 (path to glory, for example) I’m not surprised people tripped over themselves to not miss out. It was completely by design and given that this is the 5th campaign they likely have a whole army of loyal “subscribers” at this point…because let’s face it, this is essentially a subscription.

Anyways, thank you again. Sorry for my minor soapbox moment…stepping back off of that now!

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