Calculating the Compensation Package
Note: Because it’s 2:30am, the rest of this article will be less polished.
Baseline Assumptions
So we’re all on the same page about what happened and what should be done.
- The date and weekday refers to the “game day.”
- The game was unavailable from approx. 16.5 hours after end-of-Thursday Reset until about 4.5 hours after end-of-Friday Reset = 12 hours.
- The game rolled back to approx. 2 hours before end-of-Thursday Reset.
- Therefore, no lasting gameplay was possible for at least 30.5 hours – call it 31 hours.
- There was no indication that the game was down on the “Game Status” page, nor any indication when it came back up.
- The developers posted an explanation of what was happening at the time indicated above, but did not post any ETAs for the game returning.
- The developers did not provide any notice on the forums when the game being accessible, nor presumably anywhere else.
- The developers will probably not want to calculate individual compensation for each account. Were they able to automate this type of process, they would not have needed to roll back the servers.
- Any true compensation must cover the worst-case, reasonable scenario for everyone, with very few individual exceptions. Hence, assume a reasonable amount of end-game play.
- An early-game player receiving end-game compensation is NOT a problem; it’s a nice, little progress bump – and an investment in them continuing to play.
- A 30-day Message will expire for inactive players that were unaffected before they can claim it.
Gameplay Assumptions
- Australasian and European players would have been somewhat more affected by the rollback than American players (it’s a time-zone thing), but not differently enough to matter.
- Assume everyone did their daily quests at the start of the day. This would include: Adventure Board (incl. 15m XP bonus), Dungeon (possibly a perfect run), buying 10 Underspire Torches for 150 Gems, buying 3 Daily Delve Sigils for 50 Gems and opening 3 Deep Delves.
- Assume everyone had all their Kingdoms maxed and would have claimed their hourly tribute every hour (total of 32 tributes, because you have to count the end-points).
- Assume that everyone bought the Dragonite in the Daily Dungeon.
- Ignore Daily Mail, because it will be insignificant compared to what you’ll be sending.
Initial Calculation: What is a Gem Worth?
It’s worth noting that Gems are not as valuable as you want people to believe. In particular, the 5,000 Gems proposed in Restitution are worth just one of the following:
- Hatching 2 random Dragon Eggs.
- Buying enough Deeds from Daily Offers for just 1 Book of Deeds.
- 550 Gem Keys (about a 55% chance of 1 Mythic)
Explanation: If a player spends all the Gems (plus 100 more) on the daily Dungeon Dragonite offer, it will take 5,100 / 300 = 17 days and they will get 17 * 60 = 1,020 Dragonite. That’s enough to hatch 2 random Gem Dragon Eggs, with no guarantee they won’t be duplicates. It’s useful, but not game-changing.
However, most end-game players are already buying that offer every day. So they are likely to instead spend 5,000 Gems on something they are NOT already buying, such as any Daily Offers they see for Deeds. I’m going to assume these offers cost 300 Gems for 3 Deeds (this may be wrong, but it’s twice the cost of the equivalent Merchant Offers that we’re already buying). Again, 5,100 / 300 = 17 offers purchased, each containing an assumed 3 Deeds, for a total of 3 * 17 = 51 Deeds. Assuming they’re all of the same colour, that’s just 1 Book of Deeds you can craft. Not much at all. And you’ll need a lot of patience!
For players who aren’t yet thinking about Books of Deeds and Dragon Eggs, they’re most likely to spend bonus Gems on Gem Keys (VIP Keys would roughly triple the odds). We can buy 50 Gem Chests for 450 Gems, so 5,000 Gems gets us 4,950 / 450 = 11 lots of 50 Gem Chests, which is 11 * 50 = 550 Gem Chests (the same as 550 Gem Keys). The chance of a Mythic troop dropping is 1 in 1,000, so there’s roughly a 55% chance of getting a single Mythic from those 5,000 Gems (and about 11 Legendaries). One Mythic and 11 Legendary troops isn’t exactly game-breaking.
Activities Which Require Compensation
Given that about 18 hours of play-time were rolled back, pretty much all players would have had a chance to do most of their daily tasks. Rounding that up to our end-gamer baseline, here’s what needs to be compensated for:
- 32 hourly tributes.
- Friday’s Adventure Board.
- Friday’s (purple) Dungeon.
- Friday’s PvP Citadel and the cost of losing VPs.
- Friday’s Underspire Sigils.
- Friday’s Daily Delve Sigils.
- 240 battle win rewards.
- Two super-lucky drops from Underspire Chests, yielding one Sentinel and one Book of Deeds.
- A series of lucky drops from Explore Chests, yielding the equivalent of one Medal of Nysha.
1. Hourly Tributes
The combination of server roll-back, game down-time and the failure to announce the game’s return suggests up to 32 hourly tributes were unobtainable. (It’s very easy to figure out a way to claim tributes 24 hours a day, if you’re really keen, so don’t talk to me about sleep.)
The end-game player assumption requires us to assume that all 38 kingdoms are at 30 stars. Even though this isn’t actually possible, it simplifies the calculation to no great impact. We can just assume every kingdom has 5x the Tribute Chance and 5x the Tribute Amount. I’m not entirely certain what the base Tribute Chance is, but it seems to be between 11% and 13%. I can’t get the numbers to settle on a single figure, so let’s use 12%. We’re already making a bunch of estimates.
Each Kingdom’s tribute consists of a certain amount of Gold, Glory and Souls. These amounts are shown in the (hopefully-inserted) image. If you add them all up and multiple by 5 (the Tribute Amount multiplier), we get 16,137.5 Gold, 642.5 Glory, 2,742.5 Souls.
Each kingdom that successfully grants tribute (after the first) gives 1 Gem and 2 Gold Keys. The maximum total is 37 Gems and 74 Gold Keys per hourly tribute. These are not affected by the Tribute Amount multipliers.
Each kingdom offering tribute gives 35 additional Gold for unlocking the kingdom and completing its quest line, but this is not multiplied, and hence best ignored.
The chance for each kingdom to offer tribute is 5x 12% = 60%. For simplicity, we can just multiply the number of tributes by this number to estimate the portion of the full 32 tributes our hypothetical player was likely to get: 32 * 60% = 19.2 Tributes offered by each kingdom.
Finally, we multiply the total resources it’s possible to get per tribute by the adjusted number of Tributes, for a total of: 309,840 Gold, 12,336 Glory, 52,656 Souls, 1,421 Gold Keys and 710 Gems.
In the Compensation List, above, I’ve rounded these to:
- 300,000 Gold
- 12,000 Glory
- 55,000 Souls
- 1,400 Gold Keys
- 710 Gems
2. Adventure Board
The Star Stones Daily Adventure is easily compensated for by extending it to an extra day. I recommend that everyone should end up with a number divisible by 100.
The other two Daily Adventures were Common and may be ignored.
I know that some people received the “Kill 150 [Color] enemies.” task for 150 Gems. It’s fair to give everyone credit for that. (Note that this is the precise text that appears when completing such a task: it’s an unaddressed bug that makes you look silly.)
Completing the Adventure Board tasks at the top grants a 15 minute bonus to XP, which can be claimed at any chosen time within 7 days. Therefore, it needs to be sent in a separate message! (Yes, I know most people will click “Claim All,” so maybe send it using the Gifts section of the mail system.)
The total compensation for Friday’s Adventure Board is therefore:
- One extra day of the Star Stones Daily Adventure (not included in the list above)
- 150 Gems
- One 15-minute XP bonus in a separate Gift message
3. Arcane Dungeon
Friday’s was the Arcane (purple) Dungeon. At level 20, completing the Dungeon grants 120 Amethysts, 480 Jewel Shards, 24 Diamonds.
Some people would have achieved a Perfect Run, worth 120 Dragonite at Level 20. It seems fair to give everyone a Perfect Run.
Most end-gamers would have spent 300 Gems to buy 60 extra Dragonite. They’ve now been deprived of that opportunity. Might as well give them the paltry 60 Dragonite for free.
So, the total compensation for Friday’s Arcane Dungeon is:
- 120 Amethysts
- 480 Jewel Shards
- 24 Diamonds
- 180 Dragonite
You could simplify the first three items into the equivalent amount of Diamonds, but if people don’t see any Amethysts, they’re likely to assume you didn’t compensate them for the lost Dungeon.
4. Friday’s PvP Citadel and the cost of losing VPs.
You did double the Gold Mark rewards for Bay of Stars and Broken Lands (Friday’s Citadels) on Saturday – and presumably offered them to every Alliance. So that’s good.
But you forgot about the 15 Gold Marks for completing one of those Citadels.
Players also usually receive a number of Silver and Gold Marks each day based on their Alliance Rank. The game doesn’t tell us the amount for each rank, so we’ll have to guess.
Some people also might not have had the opportunity to reinstate their rank or finish their PvP Season goals – although the one-week extension does help.
If we assume that some people dropped from third place to fourth and missed out on the 90 Gold Marks for the week, then fair compensation would be roughly 90+15+2 = 107 Gold Marks and some Silver Marks.
However, in this one case, I recommend rounding down to a simple 100 Gold Marks to buy one random Book of Deeds.
5. Friday’s Underspire Sigils.
Completing the Underspire requires buying two lots of 5 Torches for 150 Gems total, almost every day. The actual amount depends on your individual layout and luck. We missed out on the opportunity to buy Torches on Friday, up to a maximum of 15.
Consequently, some players may have had to buy all three tiers of Torches on Saturday and Sunday in order to finish the Underspire to their usual satisfaction. That’s 150 Gems per day extra to buy the third tier. And they still might not have finished. It would be fair to include those 300 Gems (for 10 extra Torches across 2 days) in the compensation.
A lucky player might have found a Book of Deeds in their Treasure Chests on Friday, and then lost it during the rollback, as the chest contents were all rerolled. (One person in our Guild family said they’d found and lost two Books of Deeds.) This is a sufficiently rare reward that it would make sense to give everyone a single Book of Deeds.
A REALLY lucky player might have found a Sentinel troop from a Sentinel Room Chest on Friday, and then lost it during the rollback. This is an extremely rare occurrence (much too rare, in my opinion), so it’s an enormous loss. Granting everyone the choice of any single Sentinel troop (ideally, one they don’t already have), would be quite reasonable.
Total compensation for Friday’s Underspire is then:
- 300 Gems
- 1 Book of Deeds
- 1 unowned Underspire Sentinel troop (player’s choice)
Choosing a Sentinel Troop:
The extreme rarity of Sentinel troops justifies putting a bit of effort into this item of compensation. Luckily, I think some minor tweaks to the Gift Code system can easily provide players with a choice of which Sentinel troop they want. If you’re careful, you test it thoroughly, and you provide clear instructions, you should be able to avoid most Support questions.
Here’s my idea:
- Create 100 sets of 6 distinct Gift Codes. Each set of 6 Gift Codes sends each of the six Underspire Sentinel troops to the claimant.
- Send one randomly-chosen set of 6 Gift Codes to each player. Tell them which Sentinel each of the six codes will give them, and clear instructions how to claim it. Also include a warning that abuse of this system will be punished severely.
- When an account claims any of the 600 Gift Codes, first check if it was one of the 6 codes sent to that account; if not, reject the code and ignore it. If the code is valid for that account, lock it out of claiming any of the 600 Gift Codes again.
- Wait an hour before sending the Sentinel troop Message. If more than one of the 600 Gift Codes has been claimed on the account, only count the first instance (or randomly choose one, if the time-stamps are the same).
The reason for creating multiple sets of Gift Codes is to reduce the chance of a mischief-maker claiming on someone else’s account and denying them their choice. Twenty sets of codes might achieve this almost as effectively.
The reason for point 4 is to ensure that each account can only receive a single Sentinel troop. Someone is bound to try to hack the system, for such a rare troop.
Of course, there are other ways of achieving the same thing, but I reckon this would be a lot easier than most.
6. Friday’s Daily Delve Sigils.
Just as we lost the opportunity to buy extra Underspire Torches on Friday, we also lost the opportunity to buy extra Daily Delve Sigils.
While not many people bother spending 50 Gems to open three Deep Delves a day, some people do. I know I do, and I know one other person in my sister Guild who does.
Note: each Deep Delve costs 2 Sigils, so you can only open one with 3 free Daily Sigils. But you can open three Deep Delves with 6 Sigils. That may be worth it, to bank more chances of Band Gnomes from the Deep Delve gnome room during a Vault Weekend.
I strongly doubt anyone spends 300 Gems to get all three tiers for an extra 9 Sigils (and hence 6 Deep Delves) on a daily basis. They might do it occasionally, but surely not every day. It’s just not good value. For these people, missing out for one day is no big deal.
But it is reasonable to assume that some people did feel the loss of 3 Deep Delves on Friday. And, of course, everyone lost the option to use 3 Daily Delve Sigils.
Because Daily Delve Sigils reset every day, it would not be smart to include them in the general Compensation and Restitution Messages. I suggest sending two Messages of 3 Daily Delve Sigils each into the Gifts section of the mail system. That way, they’re unlikely to be claimed accidentally before the player is ready to use them.
Compensation is then: 6 Daily Delve Sigils, send in one or two separate Gift messages
The Gems Alternative
For those who buy 3 extra Daily Delve Sigils each day for 50 Gems, the only other way to compensate them would be by providing them with enough Gems to open 6 Deep Delves on one day, at a cost of 250 extra Gems.
Even though it’s much simpler, I don’t recommend this. You’ll get complaints to Support.
7. Battle Win Rewards
This is an impossible calculation, so let’s make some reasonable-sounding assumptions.
We know that left-side PvP and D12 Explore can both be played by end-gamers at a rate of two to three battles per minute. But that sort of compensation would not really satisfy an angry player.
Instead, let’s calculate a reasonable amount of resources for battle wins, then supplement that with something special. That way, no-one is likely to complain.
So, assume one battle per minute for 4 hours: 240 battles. An end-game player is very likely to have bought Death Knight Armor (for a 100% boost) plus boosts from VIP level, Guild Statues, etc (assume another 100% boost). A 200% boost is roughly the same as tripling the number of battles without a resource boost. Hence, the compensation should be equivalent to play 3 * 240 = 720 battles.
At this point, I get stuck. I don’t know how much Gold or Souls I get from a battle win, on average. I just did a D10 Explore battle with and received 2,089 Gold and 12 Souls. Reducing that by my current bonuses, that’s about 1,350 Gold and 6 Souls. Multiplying by 720 battles, we get 972,000 Gold and 4,320 Souls. Wow!
Might as well round that to 1 million Gold and 5,000 Souls. It’s still a blip for an end-gamer – and a once-off bonus to a beginner.
However, battles also drop Traitstones. It costs 2 Celestial Traitstones (plus some other stuff) to craft one Arcane Traitstone. Getting 3 Arcane Traitstones per hour of Explore would be pretty disappointing. But getting more than one Celestial Traitstone in an hour might be okay. So perhaps give everyone 24 Celestial Traitstones, on the assumption they played game modes other than Explore in their 4 hours of play.
I don’t see any easy way to compensate for lost Hero XP or Class XP, so we need a big item to satisfactorily compensate people for whatever it is they actually lost just by playing unspecified battles in the game.
Consider, then, an end-game player farming D12 Explore at a rate of 2 battles per minute. That’s roughly 3 minutes per Boss Chest, if he follows the bonus Mythstone Lantern (93-98 Mythstones per Mini Boss). If each Boss Chest awards an average of 2 Tokens, in four hours, he can get roughly 240 / 3 * 2 = 160 Tokens. Crafting a Medal require 9 Tokens of the same kind, so that’s 160 / 9 = 17.8 Medals of various kinds. One of them might have been a Nysha Medal, if he were lucky.
Rather than compensating all those Medals, how about you just give everyone 1 Medal of Nysha? I think we’ve found our big item.
Total compensation for both battle win rewards and farming Explore is then:
- 1,000,000 Gold
- 5,000 Souls
- 1 Medal of Nysha
Individualised Compensation
Obviously, every Support case complaining about what a player lost over the weekend costs you money in wages. Avoiding that is kind of the point of what I’m proposing here. If you show people you’ve put some thought into things (or I have, and you’ve agreed with my logic and calculations) and you’re generous with your Compensation and Restitution, then it will be much harder for anyone to argue they missed out on something.
That said, there are a handful of things that you should consider individual compensation for, through the Support system. Here’s some examples:
-
Achieving a Pure Faction Team Level 500 run in a Faction (I know of one person who actually did this, and lost it).
-
Obtaining a copy of a pet not previously owned from a pet rescue. Compensate with 16 copies of the pet (therefore requiring one Orb of Minions to max it).
-
Refund the Library Pass, in full, for anyone who bought it on Friday, with the false expectation it would triple all the Gems they’d just received in compensation. False pretences are still false pretences, even if someone is trying to take advantage.
-
Mythic troops dropping from key chests. Give them the Mythics – especially if they don’t own a single copy.
-
Previously-unowned dragons hatched from Dragon Eggs and rolled back. The RNG on this is so frustrating that rolling back the spent Dragonite is not enough (unless you give them 2,000 Dragonite and advise patience).
-
Unlocking a previously-unowned Immortal from Burning Chests. Give them enough Souls to get to Level 4.
-
Obtaining a copy of a previously-unowned troop drop from a Vault Key. Give them two copies, as a bonus – unless they ask for more than one troop, in which case, give them one of each and double-check.
Make it clear that you have the final-state backup from mid-Friday and you can check whether the request is valid or not. And that you will severely punish any requests found to be lies. Give them a chance to recant if you’re suspicious or find an anomaly, then ban them for a month, or whatever.
Personally, I opened three Deep Delves late Thursday (game day), so I actually had SIX Deep Delves reset on me, 3 each opened (but not played) on Thursday and Friday. Does that mean I should get 600 Gems instead of 300? Maybe so. I can’t prove it beyond any doubt, but I do have substantive evidence that this happened.
Determining a Restitution Package
Why to You Owe the Players Restitution?
Accepting my suggested to compensate all players as if they were end-game players and a little bit lucky should satisfy most players.
However, that does not amount to an apology.
Nor does it compensate people for the time they spent playing the game on Friday, and the battles they likely had to repeat over the weekend.
A proper apology and restitution are doubly needed because the no-one at Infinity+2 saw fit to provide any kind of ETA on game restoration.
And worse than that, they did not bother to tell anyone when game access was restored. This, in particular, is completely unacceptable by any measure.
Finally, the entire episode was 100% preventable. As I already mentioned, many players have been repeatedly hounding you to fix your processes – especially QA. But this isn’t just about improving QA; it’s about changing your entire mentality about game releases and the choices of what to work on. It’s about respecting the players and the feedback of long-term players who really do know more about what it’s like to play the game than you do.
Today, the consequence of ignoring the issues we’ve raised, is that you need to take full responsibility for a completely avoidable mess.
That means compensating everyone fairly, apologising, and offering fair restitution.
What would be fair restitution for the damage caused?
- It cannot be a token amount. It must respect the players.
- It should include things that are hard to obtain.
- It should also include something that is extremely difficult to obtain.
- It should cover elements of the game that cannot be easily compensated.
- Some part of it should give players some choice and flexibility.
Things that are hard to get in-game: Dragonite, Books of Deeds, Gold Marks, Diamonds, Star Stones.
Things that are extremely difficult to get: That one thing you don’t have yet: Mythic troop, hatchable Dragon, Underspire Sentinel, Immortal, Pet, Shiny Tokens.
Things that can only be obtained with real money: Kingdom launch weapons for any kingdom launched before you started playing, Deathknight Armor, Avatars.
(I’m going to rule out Deathknight Armor and Avatars right now, because it wouldn’t be fair to those who spent money on them.)
A Suggested Restitution Package
This should be sent out to everyone, accompanied by a sincere apology (and in addition to the compensation package):
a) 5,000 Gems
This is the easy bit. As discussed above, it’s equivalent to hatching 2 Dragon Eggs, 1 Book of Deeds, or 11 Legendary troops and 55% of a Mythic troop.
It looks like a lot, but it actually isn’t. That’s good, because it will be over-appreciated but won’t break the game’s economy.
b) 200 Gold Marks and 20,000 free VPs
Gold Marks are a highly-valued currency, but 200 of them is not actually all that much. You can buy 2 random Books of Deeds, which is nice, but not game-changing.
Including 20,000 free VPs in the next PvP Season allows everyone to spend those Gold Marks on Books of Deeds – including players who are too weak or unbalanced to play PvP efficiently (or at all – eg: my alt account).
c) 8,000 Diamonds
Given some patience, this is enough to craft any 2 Mythic troops. It gives the player a sense of choice in the Restitution Package while only getting them 1.3% closer to owning every Mythic troop in the standard Soulforge rotation (2 out of 158).
d) Unlock one Immortal, plus 100 Immortal Souls to level it
Again, Immortals can be hard to get and even harder to level. As you create more of them, levelling any particular Immortal will become even harder.
The idea is to give every player something they actually need, without the RNG getting in the way.
Here’s one possible algorithm:
- Randomly pick any Immortal that the player does not own.
- Unlock that Immortal and give them 100 of its Immortal Souls (enough to reach Level 4).
- IF the player already has every Immortal, select the lowest-level Immortal (break ties randomly) and give them 100 Souls of that Immortal (enough for at least 1 level).
You’ll have to figure out how to achieve this, yourselves.
e) One unowned, kingdom-launch weapon for free
This is the piece de resistance. No-one can really complain if you give them something they can’t possibly get without spending real money. Yet it’s only US$5, and it’s for an item that isn’t likely to ever be used. It’s a placebo.
With minimal tweaking, you should be able to use the Monday weapon offer mechanism for this. Set the price to Free, and randomly choose any unowned weapon from the 38 kingdom-launch weapons.
If someone already owns all the kingdom-launch weapons, give them credit for having paid for them all – or having played since the beginning – and offer them 500 Burning Souls instead (for Free).
Other Ideas for Restitution
If you don’t like my suggested package (probably because one or two items might be difficult to reliably implement – but NOT because you might think it’s too generous!), then here’s some other ideas.
Ideally, you would substitute like for like, one item for one different item.
f) Make next PvP Season’s mythic troop free for the first copy (overall, NOT each day – obviously).
g) Create a special, apology Mythic troop we can craft for peanuts, that is actually good.
h) 35 Shiny Tokens for Chrysantherax.
i) Unlock both new Immortals for everyone at the start of the next PvP Season.
j) 1,000 Star Stones
k) One special Token to unlock any unowned weapon of our choice (instead of option (e)) – or a $5 refund/credit for those who bought all the kingdom-launch weapons.
l) One copy of every Underspire Sentinel.
m) Two full sets of Verses for Gnome-a-Palooza.
Closing Word
Thank you for bearing with me.
If you’re a player, show your support by liking this thread.
If I’ve missed something, please let me (and the devs) know.
If you are Sirrian or Nimhain or Jeto – or anyone else at Infinity+2 – please understand that anything I’ve written that could be interpreted as abusive is simply a reflection of every Gems of War player’s frustration with your team. I might have worded things differently, but ultimately you dug this hole yourselves, and you deserve the repercussions.
Understand that I don’t want those repercussions to include the death of Gems of War. Nor do I want to burden you with lots of Support cases. And I want you to work towards actually rebuilding players’ trust after a series of wholly-avoidable stuff-ups, culminating in this weekend’s disaster.
Be generous and humble, and you will be rewarded.
Sincerely,
Starlite as always
