Hey everyone,
Firstly welcome back after the New Year.
I wanted to jump in here personally and explain exactly why, some time mid-2018, we had to stop compensating players for missed rewards, when their mailboxes filled up, and what steps we took (and will take) to try and stop that happening. As part of our New Year’s resolution, I wanted to be totally transparent on the process here.
Basically, it comes down to a few things:
- We need to be very consistent in the way we deal with any request. When we make an exception, everybody expects that exception to apply to them too.
- Checking that all compensation has been correctly received & not missed, takes our customer support team a long time (30-40 minutes per request)
- Once word got out that we were potentially providing compensation for overflowing mailboxes, dozens of requests (30-40) would roll in every day, with people telling us they missed rewards. Most days, I believe 90+% of these were mistaken, fraudulent, or “just checking”. Note - I’m not implying that this request was fraudulent, just that most of the other ones we received were.
So… We briefly provided this compensation service in mid-2018, but soon after the first time we did it, we had to stop. We realised, over the course of a few weeks, that it was not viable for us to keep doing this - our support team (Cyrup, Kafka, and Vex) can provide about 24 hours of time per day, and up to 20 hours became filled with this task. As you can imagine, it was harming the level of support we could provide our players in other areas of the game.
Furthermore, there was also, an added pressure, where once top guilds knew we were providing this service, they would complete tasks faster at the beginning of the week, knowing that any members who missed would be compensated. We noticed the number of recovery requests start to trend upwards as that happened.
We had to discontinue this policy at that point.
We resolved to provide the following:
- A display of the mailbox limits, so players would know how full their boxes could get
- I believe we had also, at some point, increased the mailbox limits as far as was practically possible to 100.
So, while we’re very sorry to hear of Guild of Thieves’ full-mailbox issue here, sadly we’re unable to revisit this policy.
Honestly, I’m not happy about it either - I HATE it when our players’ expectations are not met - and looking to future, I’d like to try and solve the problem, potentially by consolidating Legendary Rewards in the mailbox, like we do with regular Guild Tasks, so it’s not a problem.
There are a couple of code/data-architecture complications with that right now, so it’s not a quick fix, but in much the same way we’ve untangled the server code/data to allow free Hero Class Changes (which will be in 4.2.5, due out soon-ish), this is also something I’d like us to devote some time to early this year.