@abgofast @nacho18 @wazemank @platium @alcusto @janmej @phoenix6 @oldschool
@stevep ~
On my last post I tried to summarize the difficult situation we are put into in terms of team gameplay and the reasons we have to continue struggling for the resolution of the issues we face. Also, I proposed to not limiting our claims to the ineffective Rovio CS and to try to reach above and beyond. Putting apart our Queen (of mp) you don’t seem much insterested on the matter. I understand that what we search here is to have fun playing, and getting along, and apart that all seems a waste of time. Also, what I propose seem difficult or even impossible. Me, I’m one of those persons that always fight for his rights even if it seems a waste of time. But before you accuse me of proselitism, or worse, please let me say that if I don’t get clear positive feedback by a significant number of you I’ll never touch the subject again. Also, I’m sorry if I look paternalistic but not knowing you very well I don’t know how to otherwise explain my ideas in a clear way.
I would like to start telling you what happened on a 6 months period of time on that other racing game I played before this one (GT Racing 2 from Gameloft).
GT Racing 2 is a realistic racing game meaning that the racer drives real cars on real tracks. It has two main completion features. Challenges are temporary features that puts racers in groups trying to achieve a certain goal. In the end the top players are awarded a prize (f. ex.: a specific car). The other competition mode is the real mp and it’s the main feature. It is similar to AB Go! mp but there’s no team races – all races are individual. And with a periodicity of 2 weeks all results are reset. At the end of each 2 weeks (a season…) the top players and teams are awarded and a new competition starts anew. Also, the ranking is done in a way that all results are disputed till the final minutes. It used to be necessary to play the last 12 hours non-stop. That was an incredible rush of adrenaline but also very/too demanding because it messed with people duties. Some great players refused competing this way and it was an initial point of attriction between players and Gameloft,specially because the later refused the request of the end of the seasons being on a Saturday or Sunday.
GTR 2 also suffer(ed) from many bugs and rampant cheating, specially on challenges (mp was safe from cheating till when I left, in October). Besides, Gameloft, a big company with over 500 games, had the aggravating behavior characteristic of not fixing bugs. It’s unbelievable but they launch updates after updates but bugs, specially those that doesn’t impact gameplay seriously are never fixed. This was another point of friction between players and company.
GTR 2 community is of, at least a few hundreds persons from all over the world (including Chinese, Japanese, Russian.. speaking only people) and they organize freely in Facebook groups. There are over a dozen of such groups right now on fb.
But let’s get to the point. At the end of last Spring one of the most active members of the community took the initiative of compiling a list of demands that summarized those of the community and sent them to Gameloft. Some of these demands were very ambitious and proposed big chances in the game. He also started a fb group named “please fix the game Gameloft!” and started inviting and proposing others to invite, people with opinion, to join (the group is closed). I don’t know if he was treated with so much suspicion as Jane with Rovio but an answer came. Some of the demands were refused, others were said to having been put under study but basically nothing changed.
At the beginning of the Summer came an update that didn’t solve any of the pressing issues but introduced really big prizes for weekend team challenges. This challenges were a big success. Suddenly it was achievable to buy all the cars in a reasonable amount of time. But shortly thereafter something catastrophic happened. The prizes stopped being given! Fortunately, quite different from Rovio’s, Gameloft CS is great and they always did their best to adequately compensate players for those prizes. But it was a drag to have to contact CS for each prize not received. Besides cheating on these challenges became awful. The community tried to fight this treating harshly the top players that dared to resort to the dirtiest forms of cheating but if it more or less resulted between top players these were just a small part of the 100k plus users of app. All others were by themselves.
And the situation prolonged itself till the end of Summer. CS service started to degrade too, even if they never took more than a few days to answer a ticket and never left one without an answer. Quite different from Rovio’s, if you don’t mind the repetition.
There was an atmosphere of doom in the air and some speculated that Gameloft had given up on the game. But racing on itself still worked very well and someone had the idea of building their own game inside the app and started doing hotlap leagues. This meant racing for the best lap time on a certain track with a certain car and posting the result in a fb event. It was an old demand that the fastest racers should be rewarded, not the ones that raced the most, and these leagues showed it was a viable way for the game.
Meanwhile, in October, mp was taken by the cheaters and me having all the cars and plenty of individual and team trophies plus a sense of boredom caused by racing every track thousands of times stopped playing.
Shortly thereafter the unthinkable happened. Gameloft not only fixed the prizes bug and modified the game to avoid the worst form of cheating as acceded to the demand of changing the game. Some of the challenges are now for the best lap time. They even, something that I never thought possible, tstarted patronizing the hotlap leagues giving the organizers a certain number of the main currency of the game to be distributed by the winners. Can you imagine?
This rant of mine is very long already and I don’t even know if you are still reading this so I’ll finish shortly after the conclusions.
From the GTR 2 story I tell above, I think at least 2 conclusions should be attained:
1- Companies don’t abandon games easily, specially when they involved a big investment to start with. What can happen is a certain game to be put aside for awhile and the company resources being allocated to other projects. I’m sure Rovio isn’t abandoning AB Go! . Team mp is a failure but everything else works well to very well. Lauching a new game every month they probably have their resources allocated elsewehere but there will come a moment where they’ll return to AB Go! .They’ll try then to perceive the best to do and I’m sure they’ll give a look at the community feedback. And that brigs us to the next conclusion.
2- If Gameloft, a much bigger company than Rovio, changed GTR 2 according with the desires of the strongest voices in the community why shouldn’t that happen with Rovio? What we need is to be heard. But we’ll not be successful if we count with CS only. We must reach higher.
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P.S.: I’m now ready to receive the prize for post with the most text in number or words. Ah! Ah! Ah!
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