Please provide proof of life that Steve Faulkner is still in charge of Infinity Plus 2 games. I find it hard to believe this Arachnaean Weaver crazyness is happening under his watch.
I know y’all take long Holliday’s in your part of the world so if that’s the case for him. Then please inform us of that and I’ll patiently await his return.
That doesn’t even count since Salty could use his account.
I’d really love to hear Steve’s opinion on this, I deeply respect the way he interacted with the community. Unfortunately, his Twitter page hasn’t received updates for years and his Wiki page links to a profile at IP2 that doesn’t seem to exist. Maybe they parted ways.
Fawkner will continue to lead the studio, transitioning onto the management team within 505 Games.
"After working closely together on Gems of War for the past 7 years, we are excited to officially become part of the 505 Games family,” said Steve Fawkner, CEO and Creative Lead at Infinity Plus Two. “We not only share the same personal and professional values, but also work really well together. We’re looking forward to building on that foundation with both ongoing projects and all new unannounced projects already in the works.”
If he did leave, then not on his own accord.
This is an automated response from the bot programmed to act as Sirrian:
I have been told to tell you that I am still here and running the show.
Really.
Nothing to see here, please move along!
Seriously though
It’s all good… I’m still here!
I’m split as the project lead across PQ3 and GoW these days, which sadly means the 50% of my job where I used to come to the forums and hang out with all you awesome folks is now taken up with my work on PQ3.
Also… if I wasn’t here, who would ever put all the terrible dad jokes in the troops’ flavor text!
Let’s put this to a test. I believe the real Sirrian would find some words on how to move forward with the incorrectly configured event chests and the still evolving refund fiasco (summay, long version). A fake or automated Sirrian would just disappear again.
He must be handcuffed by 505 Games and basically told to let this “customer experience” agents handle it no matter what.
Arachnaean Weaver-gate is a testament to “no matter what”.
Since my OP basically put the metaphorical golf ball on a tee for Sirrian to sweep in with his warm and fuzzies and drive it home.
But ultimately Superman can’t save us ladies and gentlemen. We can only save ourselves this time.
I see what you did there 
We’ll put Arachnaean Weaver in the Soulforge for everyone to craft by way of a compromise. Probably next week.
We’re just figuring out how low we can get the cost and still keep it sane.
We actually would have loved to put a Yvendra → Weaver exchange in the Soulforge… that was a good idea, BUT as we know, we modified the forge based on player feedback so it didn’t consume troops used in recipes, so we weren’t able to do that.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
This kind of response is great, not just because it does what the community wants, but because it:
We need more of this! I’m NOT saying devs should blindly do anything asked of them, and that’s not what is happening in this case. But this kind of back-and-forth positive communication is what this community has been starving for for years.
Is the “probably next week” recipe different than what we have now? What we have now isn’t fair for anyone who already spent event keys. Is there a new plan?
Can the Soulforge be updated to allow some recipes to consume troops? Would this be an option?
Agreed that this comment is cheerful, and nice to see the devs liked the idea of exchanging one mythic for the other.
But, I am wondering if Sirrian knows Arachnean Weaver already is in the soulforge.
This also confuses me.
Is it an all-or-nothing affair? (If so, why?)
When making Xathenos, weapons aren’t consumed.
When making Enraged Kurandara Heart of Rage was consumed — so, for at least a brief time, both ways of crafting were available (albeit troops and weapons are likely tagged differently).
And if weapons are different than troops, well, the question remains: why can’t some recipes consume troops (for times like these) and some (most) recipes avoid doing so?
because they’re very bad at making code that works? … this should be pretty obvious by now!
A permanent recipe is the best solution. I imagine it’ll cost as much or slightly higher than the current AW cost.
But if it’s somehow less expensive. Then cool. 
Rather help players for years to come than “be fair” to those who already crafted AW.
It would be just as fair to those who crafted AW for 4k diamonds the rotation before this week. 
I had a sneaking suspicion this might be the case that individual recipes couldn’t be tweaked to consume/not consume for whatever reason. Thank you for being direct in your communication. I feel like if this had happened from the start, it would have been much easier to reach a favorable outcome for both sides.
While I still don’t agree that a discounted standard diamonds recipe in soulforge is the “fair” thing to do here, even if it is discounted more, I do find it a bit concerning how the replacement offer isn’t feasible because you lack the tools to do it on your end (if not a soulforge swap, which would be mostly hands off, then data log parsing everyone who pulled Archproxy during the affected period and sending an in-game mail for them to send a ticket if they want to swap - and thats if this can’t be handled by an in-game form, which I’m not sure if is possible for you guys). If the support volume would be so high here as to make this a not viable solution, it really draws to light questions about just how many people were affected and/or how backed up and understaffed support is. People are reporting that support directly denied this request when asked, leading me to believe this about more than “it won’t work to do the swap via soulforge”.
Regardless, I do think it is critically important that you devote at least some of your attention to having (completely hands off, automated but frequently checked) in-game notifications of when chest contents last changed, when they will next change, and what exactly is in them. People shouldn’t have to guess if something is or isn’t in chests or argue after the fact whether something should or shouldn’t have been and who’s fault it was that they didn’t know, it should be based on a set of rigid rules with ample notification if and when those rules change and always up to date in-game information direct from the process responsible for rolling the loot (or at very least from the same source) to verify it against.
Not convinced yet. The Sirrian I remember once suprised me with a very detailed response to a Blighted Lands tribute bug report, explaining the technical aspects of what had gone wrong.
However, troop consumption is handled on server side, and Archproxy Yvendra would be easy to identify and consume, either by troop id or by being the only mythic troop used as crafting source. Recent Gnome-a-Palooza changes have also shown that server side updates can be done surprisingly fast, well within a single day. Since you would love to add the exchange option, would you mind sharing the technical aspect I’m missing that prevents you from doing this?
It doesn’t help, this is just a windfall for players who had planned to craft Arachnean Weaver anyway. Crafting mythic troops requires several months of preparation, due to the highly time gated diamonds involved. Players opened event chests for Arachnean Weaver because they didn’t have diamonds for crafting, and won’t now suddenly have them. At least not unless they receive some diamonds for the event chests they opened, which has also been proposed as viable compromise.
Well… Nim just let me know that she was able to do a half-cost Arachnaean Weaver and it went in the store earlier this week… that’s great!
Unfortunately, one of the issues with being unable to go into the office is that I don’t always hear the day-to-day things that happen like this (another reason I’m cautious in venturing into the forums these days, because I don’t like providing incorrect information). Apologies for that miscommunication.
However, troop consumption is handled on server side, and Archproxy Yvendra would be easy to identify and consume
Possible, yes. Easy… well… nothing is ever as easy as you’d like with servers. You kinda get 2 choices with these types of things:
Anyway, I made the call to put it in at a discount, and I do believe it is probably the best compromise we were able to make at this time.
… I am reasonably sure that’s Sirrian. 
I can relate. Then again, maybe the Sirrian bot just got a memory upgrade.
I do believe this is very akin to “hack it in and just get it done”, which “experience tells us seldom leads to good things”. In fact, we seem to have “ended up with something worse than the issue this is supposed to fix”, and with “some extra debt down the line” on top.
So the only obstacle that prevents the proper fix is time. I’m confident those who wasted their event keys would be okay with waiting a few weeks for the exchange option, especially if this were to be announced in some way. I’m sure the community would help to distribute the announcement, to ensure it reaches those still waiting for a fair solution. Would you agree that this sounds like a reasonable compromise, much more appropriate than the best compromise you were able to make at that time?
Can Arachnaean Weaver be put in the Soul Forge permanently to ensure no one effected by the incident won’t have a fair chance to craft it at a discount please?
