C Minor Competition – Lessons Learned – Good and Bad

[eugene]

1. A chance to acquire another exclusive – Rumble

2. A chance to acquire some cassettes and other items without having to earn or spend a lot of gems – 3 other cassettes, sunglasses and Soundwave’s cannon

3. Real players or app generated phonies – In the minds of players the question remains, “are we playing real players or is the game giving us app generated characters to encourage us to play more and spend gems to play more?” This question will remain as long as nobody is able to prove we are playing against our friends or other people we know.

4. If you start the competition late you will not get all of the tokens for getting the high score. During the Christmas competition people were able to take advantage of joining late and getting a lot of tokens while those who joined later had to fight for them. This was changed. While it made those who played all day happy, it upset those who tried to join late unhappy since it wasn’t advertised that this was changed.

5. If you are in the middle of a competition node when that competition ends you will not get credit for it, and the battery will not recharge for that node. I started a node about 2 or 3 minutes before the competition ended. I was less than 20 points behind first place. The node ended about 2 minutes after the end of the competition. I racked up nearly 30 points that I would have beaten the first place. I got second place.

6. The servers were not keeping competition information up to date. On the first day I was in the lead and ahead by more than 30 points. Average we were getting was 10 points per node. I watched the counter as it counted down and when it ended I ended up with second place, not first place. It didn’t show me the other scores, so I still don’t know how I got beat or by how much.

7. The competition should have run longer. With all of the rewards that were offered you were unable to get all of them, and you were hard pressed to get just the 4 cassettes. You had to have a perfect score every day just to get the tapes, and then you couldn’t get anything else. If you got even 1 second place you were done, you would not be able to get all 4 cassettes.

8. Since it wasn’t announced right away when the competition would end, it meant when it was announced many more people jumped onboard towards the end and made the last 2 days of play even harder for those who had been playing. I ended up on the receiving end of players going nuts at the end.

9. Freezy, freezy, crash, crash – The return of nodes freezing up and not being able to do anything. In nearly every case it would occur during the node so I lost everything I just played and I lost the one battery life because I had to force close the game.

10. You can’t wear all of the accessories anymore – If you purchased multiple accessories, and they “do the same thing”, then you can only wear 1, not both. Example Beastbox and Soundwave’s cannon both increase his firepower. I saw several complaints over this change from people who had paid for multiple accessories, but now can’t wear both due to this change.

11. Battery recharge – If you played during the end of competition you would have to wait the 40 minutes or more just to get 1 cell on the battery to start the new competition. It would take a couple of hours for a complete recharge, or you have to pay for it. This should change for future competitions. Every time a new competition starts the battery should recharge.

12. This was the biggest headache for many players – The return of Updating Your Progress. This time the game kept looping if you had any characters in an upgrade status and you were connected to the internet. What made this even worse the only way to fix it was we had to do an instant upgrade, costing many people up to 200 gems, depending on what level the character was upgrading to. The response for the developers was if you paid for the gems they might be able to reimburse you. That doesn’t help anyone who EARNED the gems in the game. I average earning about 50 gems a day. That means it can take me 4 days to replenish the 200 gems. In my case it cost me over 100 gems (that I earned, not purchased) to finish the upgrade I was running at the time of this bug. This appears to have been fixed.

With the gems I would ask Rovio to please remember that this is an in game currancy. The players can earn them (Missions or Prof Pig) or purchase them. The rules have changed in the number of gems we can earn from both Prof Pig and on Missions. During a previous update the numbers were downgraded. So when a problem like #12 occurs it is upsetting that we have to spend gems that we earned on something we would not do, and it is costly to the players. Just because we didn’t pay for them, doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same value and shouldn’t be treated the same.

I did get 3 of the cassettes – Rumble, Beastbox, and Ravage.

A suggestion for future competitions – people of all ages play this game – I work full time and do have to sleep so that kills more than half my day. How about threshold levels to earn the tokens instead of a competition? Example reach 1000 points today, earn 1000 tokens. Reach 750, earn 500 tokens. That would take out the questions about real players or app generated characters and it would eliminate the problem with the servers not refreshing.

This is not meant to be an attack, rather a very even handed approach to what I saw while playing the competition.

Topic

[PBJ]

Wow! Great write up! I agree with all of that and can’t think of anything to add except maybe, don’t release a challenge at the same time that you’ve reconfigured the level of play, i.e. messed with the strength levels of the TFs.

There are already enough issues with the UYP purgatory and the other Challenge flaws, that introducing such a profound change to the over all game added to frustration levels of this Challenge and in general.

[eugene]

@aliaspbj Thank you.

[eugene]

One other issue I ran into at the end. I cashed out my final tokens for one pair of sunglasses. I choose the pair for Soundblaster because they were black on the token exchange page. When I ended up on the Custom page they were blue and it showed that I owned the blue pair not the black pair. Something was wrong on this.

[SnTrooper]

And Energon Soundwave’s are black not blue.

[sheepybach]

Nice write up and we’ll see if they take any notice of it when the next Comp takes place which could be any time as we’ve had the Pigs and next it should be 3 Birds.

[eugene]

I was wrong on #12 – this is NOT fixed, I am stuck on an Updating Your Progress loop because I thought things were fixed and tried to upgrade Grimlock to level 14. And it worked for a little while. Now It keeps looping and if run mission it is canceled and all coins and gems are returned to the game map.

[datguygamer]

One more thing I’d like to add. Sometimes since 1.10.5.5 (yes when the competition started it was 1.10.5.4), sometimes players would change after completing a challenge run. I remember one scenario where I started a run seeing myself at #3 with the #2 spot held by someone named “TheArticulator”. When I finished the run and checked the leaderboards, the guy at #2 changed to “MegaAuxilas”. So, yeah, (maybe) app generated players indeed.

[Pampeans]

@datguygamer

“So, yeah, (maybe) app generated players indeed.”

Well, THAT certainly explains why @geary encountered the devil…

[Optimus_Pig]

Good list.

This kind of reiterates my main complaint about the competitions/challenges thus far – the total lack of instructions. We basically have to spend the first two or three days trying to figure out the rules, and Rovio never bothers telling us about the changes until enough people notice and start getting vocal about it.

What really killed me is that no one actually knew how long Challenge in C Minor was going for. It wasn’t until Day four or five that we found out it would be only be going on for seven days. In contrast, the Holiday Challenge went on for twelve days.

[werehamsta]

@optimuspig, well, for fairness sake, it was *called* “Soundwave’s week”, so it would be unreasonable to expect something longer. But then, I wonder why people insist on saying that it lasted seven days. The Sunday was not included.

[Optimus_Pig]

@werehamsta

What’s this “Soundwave’s Week” of which you speak? I don’t recall seeing it in any promo material, and I asked the question of end date multiple times and no one ever bothered answering me until I asked Gradientturtle7 directly.

For fairness’ sake, if Rovio doesn’t actually come out and say so, are we expected to guess when it ends?

“But then, I wonder why people insist on saying that it lasted seven days. The Sunday was not included.”

It started on Saturday January 23, 7pm EST and ended Saturday January 30, 7pm EST. That’s seven days.

[eugene]

@optimuspig – you are correct. I didn’t see anything about the end date until the contest was half over, which is why it made the list. And thank you for the compliment.

#12 does seem to be fixed if you upgrade to the newest version, Chinese themed. I am upgrading #27 to level 15. And so far no looping. Only 5 left to upgrade!

[werehamsta]

@optimuspig, well in my ingame announcement screen it *was* written “Soundwave’s week”, but my game isn’t in English, so I can’t be sure how it was called for you (plus, even if I posted a screenshot, you’d have to take my word for it that there’s written what I say there is).

[PigBuster]

Hi Guys,

Any idea how the leader board is created? I played my first stage right after midnight GMT. I got 12 tokens but first place was already 300+?