I just went through manually and removed Zuul from all defense teams on the PS4
Only 18 people on PS4 managed to craft him, and I found him on 8 different teams (all gone now on the server - though that might take a little longer to update on the client’s teams, I’m not sure)
I was one of the 18. I feel privileged.
I need to contact support about the orbs if I can be bothered. Thanks for your clear explanation Sirrian. I don’t play much anymore but was lucky enough to play around with zuul for a bit. FTR, he’s pretty underwhelming. Not sure why most of the mythic troops are pretty crap these days.
Did you swap him out for a Peasant?
When I found Zuul on a team, he got replaced by a Treasure Gnome instead. even dropped me 2500 gold.
** Reaches through the computer screen and beats some sense into Cyrup **
Why would we ever NOT want to see posts like this more often? That’s like asking somebody dying of thirst in the desert if he’d care for a drink.
There’s a German saying, “do good and talk about it”. Remember when you changed the crafting rotation from entirely random to pool based? That’s great news for players, you absolutely want to post about that. Not as some reply burried deep in one of the many forum threads, it easily qualifies for its own Official News. It shows that you listen to feedback. You could be wrestling Goblin teams 25 hours a day, if you don’t mention that at least once a week players will assume you are just watching giant toadstools grow in your back yard.
Even if something is bad news for players, write about it as early as possible, explain. The whole “no more gems for legendary tasks” nerf would have gone down much better if it had been announced ahead of the change. Or at all. Instead of going silent for a week, leaving players to wonder whether its a bug or intended.
It’s not entirely unlikely patch 3.4 will contain something you already know players won’t like, something unpopular enough to not even make it into the patch notes. Don’t be afraid to talk about it, it will give players time to adapt to the idea. They’ll eventually find out anyway, at which point they’ll feel much more unhappy about it.
La la la, I still got zuul and Sirrian is sleeping. Best part, I can’t remove zuul from the two teams he is in. And since my pvp def team is three fortress walls and zuul, it’s a good bit of fun for all.
Also adding on to this, not sure if @Cyrup gets a transitive mention:
Some time 2 months ago Soulforge was changed to behave in a way people first started asking for 6 months ago during the Great Pharos-Ra Drought of 2017. This is something that would make players all \0/. But it was ninja-patched. No one knew it happened.
So instead, for 2 months, players were all 
and made threads about how stupid the current Soulforge rotation was, and that it was dumb it’d taken so long to fix, but we’d just have to wait because it didn’t have a due date, etc. That was not just wasted effort, now those players probably feel stupid. Like the guy who had to tell a dev, “Uh, no offense but unless you patched it without notice that’s not how it works Mr. Dev.”
If you change something, write a post about it! If you can make it funny, do so! We like to know as much as we can about how the game works. We like to get funny jokes or drawings or musical numbers.
It perplexes me how many players - veteran, experienced players who know how this stuff will play out! - choose to create more work for the devs at times like this. They’ve got a new bug to fix already, didn’t need to go hunting down all the random Zuuls.
Seriously. We’ve got “the devs know, he’ll be rolled back if you craft him” within a few minutes and people are going “ha I’m gonna make one anyway lol”.
… hell I don’t know, maybe its worth it.
They did the work for it this time because they want people spending cash for sigils for orbs to craft him… whereas with pharos ra they said it would be too much work to track down all those who used keys in the first 4 hours… Which really means we don’t care because we didn’t lose money and actually probably made some from people buying keys that could never get ra…
Why yes, he is worth it. Most fun I’ve had with a new troop in ages. And what makes him worth it are the little things, like how 20 minor orbs of growth make one major. Or what making eight orbs of power really takes. But most of all, I spent money to get xanethos early, while others got lucky and the achievement via legendary task even earlier!
So I’m going to enjoy zuul while I can.
I did both. But since I did it on mobile. No Steam achievement. 
I argued this early on. I’ve played games where crafting ZG would’ve been considered “an exploit” and resulted in disciplinary action. Generally if there were rewards, it was for the people who reported it.
But I was quickly dogpiled and told the devs deserve this for making mistakes, and that due to some invisible terms of service they owe every player everything spent on Zuul’goth down to the gold they might have harvested from PvP during the time they spent crafting it, leveling it, traiting it, and replacement rewards for any match they might have played with Zuul’goth that they could have been using a farming team for instead.
The thing is, it’s hard to argue with some of them because the dev response has been so scattered and confusing. My “proper” fix with a bit of teeth would’ve been:
Instead, we got this:
I’m never going to say “the devs deserve all of this extra work”, but it seems like it should be pretty easy to get the “poor saps” list and nuke ZG from the game. To the players, this was a #1 priority. It feels like the devs treated it as “What I’ll do when I finish my other tasks for the day.”
On Monday, since GW wasn’t active yet, there were no consequences and it was the best time to do something.
Now it’s Thursday, and on top of “incorrect compensation for exploit” tickets, they also have to deal with “please compensate me for facing an exploit team in GW”. The hole got deeper because it wasn’t filled in completely.
The hole they dug it with was their lackluster but somehow explosive dev team… let’s implement X and hope to only break A thru D… but what we get is A thru Z then on to A1…A2. Etc. And good luck on proper fixes. They are entirely ignoring the RA fiasco. As stated above it’s only because they are potentially losing money on zuul that they are hunting every last copy down. As opposed to with RA it was " too much work "
Well, context is important. I’m painting another picture.
3.4 is “Soon”. Most seasoned players are expecting it by Monday, with Friday (tonight) as a very reasonable guess.
Some of the bonkers behavior is really likely to, “The servers are running 3.4 code, and the 3.3 client doesn’t speak exactly the same language.” If you subscribe to this theory it’s clear from frequency of bugs that GW gets some kind of changes in 3.4. I’m suspicious something new is in Soulforge too.
The devs were weirdly quiet for a couple of weeks. I noticed a ton of really obvious, easy bug reports garnered zero response. My guess is that was “crunch time” and they were finalizing a lot of 3.4 stuff in that period.
That makes this week a flurry of work too. Lots of meetings. Lots of emails to uncaring app store people. Potential rejections followed by very hasty fixes.
And in the midst, a major error that causes an exploit that requires very fiddly manual labor to compensate players who demand a less-than-24h turnaround. They didn’t balance their time well.
Maybe it’s what happened, maybe it isn’t. I still stand by “I’d have a good laugh if we’d start punishing exploits instead of rewarding them.”
Yeah, see I know the Australian definition of “Soon”. Real world example: Console will be caught up with PC/Mobile soon. A bit over 14 months later… We arrived at “soon” and caught up.
PS: they are NOT going to deploy an update on Friday (tonight). and IF they do it will be the last Friday deployment they ever have.
My guess is we will get it next week unless sirrian want to do overtime this weekend to watch the bugs
