C Minor Competition – Lessons Learned – Good and Bad
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.