I don't quite remember last year but if you could join the winning team at the end, then yes this is a step up. I kinda appreciated not having individual things because it meant I could be lazy, but I don't think having individual tasks necessarily makes it not community oriented. if the achievements are maybe a bit tough but achievable, people on your team may help you out if you need it. that creates some bonds in the teams. I do think we can't handle teams very well. if you want it to be a community event, something other than a competitive drive needs to happen. I'm not sure what that would be though (I think of battling right away but not everyone enjoys that)

I had no complaints about the quest a thon! (well other than I didn't care about the pet slot prize, and maybe having different tiers of prizes would be good to try next time) but I did think it was the best one yet. I don't remember any drama. I am always happy when the forums are more active (gives me something to do) I thought that was one of the best things to come from this. I think the other usual forums were a bit slower than usual, but the general chat team threads were very active. (you can tell I never use the forums from my post count!) throwing a battling option into events is something I will never disagree with.

The context of this situation was that a glitch was discovered by users, and staff did not tell them to stop using it. It isn't really relevant if the end result was that everyone cheated equally -- I care that staff decided this glitch was perfectly fine to continue to use even after it was recognized as a glitch by someone in a position of authority.

Because that means that some glitches are acceptable for users to use in their favour in some situations, which is very different from zero situations. People took advantage of a glitch and they at least believed it was in their favour -- that is exploiting it by definition. Had staff said, "Oh man, yeah, this sucks, but it hasn't impacted the numbers, we swear! Everybody needs stop doing it now, though," then this situation would be totally different. You guys let folks get off scot-free even after they knew what they were doing was not kosher, and that's even less kosher.

And I'm upset because I had hoped Subeta was moving past its communication issue stage, and this feels like such a huge step backwards.

So yeah, forgive me if I indulge in some for-effect hyperbole. I won't disagree for fundamentally disagreeing with staff's decision here, though. Please don't gaslight users -- coming from people who have more knowledge and more power, it just feels like a silencing tactic.

It's more the fact that it sounds like you only needed to donate one thing to qualify for participation prizes, but that you could continue donating? If that was the case, anyone that donated extra was just wasting their time and money.

I don't know if there was anyone that went above and beyond like that, but I know if I was in that position and it continued to accept donations, I'd feel like donating more might have a purpose?

My suggestion is that you give them a goal of like 100 points, and once they hit that you stop accepting donations from them. Then you don't risk leading anyone on.

Nature had the largest team by far, but it doesn't look like their team was very active. My guess is that a lot of people joined the team just to get the prize, and didn't actually participate. That's what I mean when I say that team suffered from the prize reveal, and I don't think it would have been as bad if prizes weren't revealed until later.

I don't know.. honestly, i have to say that as someone who did only the event without using the forums i thought it went pretty good. I can see where the MB thing looks messy but really, I also see it from staff point of view. they found out about it really late but when they did they changed it asap since people worried it caused an unfair advantage. They looked into it and in the end they say no one actually had an advantage since every team used it. guess i just hope this doesn't deter them from having more events like this. I thought it was really neat and was fun overall.

I know people do :P I'm just speaking for myself, pet slots don't do a whole lot for me, but I'm going to get one as long as I don't need to try too hard for it! I would enjoy multiple tiers. and your reasoning behind it is why :P yes we hit the goal really early, kinda took the wind out of the final days of the event.

yeah I figured that's what you meant :)

it made it so team nature had the burden of carrying the most dead weight, which was a detriment to them.

I was on no team and donated over 2k items. Mostly because while the staff's done a great job in being more upfront about prizes/scoring rules, the situation has in the past changed without warning. I donated that many things just to ensure that if there were surprise tiers, I wouldn't be caught with my metaphorical pants down.

I don't mind going above and beyond, and I'm glad there were no surprise tiers. But you never know because Subeta.

Edit: For what it's worth, I'm extremely glad the prize was shown beforehand. I like more transparency, not less. The deadweight thing is an issue, though.

I get that, but what I'm trying to explain is that we players had no way of knowing that because we're on the other side of the fence from you. In retrospect, the right course of action would have been for our team to jump on the MB train and exploit the glitch with everyone else, instead of doing the "right" thing and leaving it alone while you guys sorted it out.

This whole situation proved that the rules are flexible (based on context that we as players do not have), which makes it difficult for us to know how to handle this sort of thing in the future. That's why we're making such a big deal out of it.

I'm not sure there's any better way for me to explain this, so I hope I'm getting my point across this time.

you got your point across the first time. i feel like you missed the last sentence of my post, though. that i felt you guys would trust us enough to do the right thing with the information you didn't have. that you'd know we wouldn't just sit by and do nothing while one team gained a significant advantage by using a glitch.

and members of your team did exploit it along with the others. which is why no one benefitted from it. if your team hadn't used it, there would have been benefit to the other teams.

One thing I had talked about earlier with some fellow Team Mischief members was that if we knew the team scores were about averages, that would have helped our strategy. We had some very active members and some less active members. Based on 's item equation, we donated the most items, with Team Nature in second. Team Sticky's team apparently had a higher average, but it was pretty close. Less active people were clearly detrimental to the bigger teams. But then we had people like who helped us out immensely in this competition, and it was great to see the conversation and cheering each other on, and the ping group that's stemmed from the event with a number of us wanting to keep talking to each other. (sidenote: I can't thank enough for her contributions to our team even though she wasn't able to sign up for it!)

I completely agree with your point about the prize reveal. I think it would be better to say that there will be a relevant prize for each team at the end of the competition, but all of the prizes will be available in the MC once the competition is over. People will still gravitate towards certain NPCs, but at least if we take the prize out of the equation, it may have been a more even distribution of players. I think people were worried that the participation prizes would be really expensive in the MC after the competition, so maybe the price for the participation prizes could be revealed ahead of time, but not the prizes? I kind of like being surprised at the end, but I think I may be in the minority.

I really like the idea of having several goals for sitewide events. It encourages people to keep participating to get even more items. It would be nice to have individual goals too, e.g. doing 90% of the quests a non-GA account could get over the course of the quest-a-thon. A GA would obviously have an advantage, but that could drive people to buy GAs which could mean more CSC purchased which in turn benefits the site even more. In terms of team scores, would it be possible to do a bar graph with arbitrary numbers that show each team's progress relative to each other but without the actual numbers? Maybe something like what had suggested here? I think that would motivate people to make their bars move as much as possible. Or maybe report it as a percentage (so whatever your average team score is/total average scores across all teams X 100%) so then both axes are labeled? Just spitballing here :)

I think some of Team Mischief's frustrations stemmed from the feeling that other teams may have benefitted more than our team, but clearly at the end of the day that didn't make that much of a difference because the scores were calculated by averages, and Team Sticky really pulled out all the stops trying to get their team to all donate as much as possible. Our team was trying to donate as much as possible especially after Team Sticky pulled ahead, but having a larger team is detrimental to the average score if the average user does not participate as much (if that makes sense. The math makes sense in my head anyway). I really appreciate you taking the time to try and explain this to us. I know we're being particularly frustrating and difficult!

So... you guys felt you didn't need to clarify or explain anything because users should have just trusted it would all work out in the end and staff was doing the right thing?

I'm baffled.

Just keep in mind, some of us grown adults can handle and actually really enjoy and perhaps maybe even crave some actual real competition, with rewards actually corresponding to individual effort put in, much in the way of old restock wars and battle events where each win gave you certain about of points etc etc. Not everything has to be everyone works together and gets along and then at the end still fights and whines about it anyways...

The only thing I really didn't like was the scores posted throughout the whole week. When you knew there was only a better prize for the 1st place, and you seen two teams go way ahead; incentive was lost. Maybe there would have been more incentive even if people knew a trophy was involved for all; their trophy would have said 3rd instead of 5th? I like the idea of what someone posted of not showing the scores but the place value and the 'You are almost caught up' or 'You are falling behind'.

I do like that you guys posted the prizes ahead of time so everyone knew what they were getting, so if they spent tons of money or not you had an idea of what you were getting.

The snowball shop to me was good as a sp sink if you didn't want to spend time restocking to get things cheaper.

I do agree with the good thing no Top % prize as that would have been yet another issue with the glitch that happened. So at least that wasn't a problem. :P

I'm just sitting here watching this all unfold and I gotta say I have to agree that it boils down to communication and clarity between staff and the userbase.

I can confidently say that the userbase didn't exactly trust the staff to do the "right thing" as soon as the knowledge of the glitch unfolded is because elephant in the room Subeta often does the WRONG THING. Time and again we've had seen, and we'll continue to see threads complaining how events, seemingly unnoticed site issues, etc were handled. Even though this was kind of a different problem from what we've seen in the past, the reaction of Team Mischief shouldn't be reprimanded imo. And to be frank I don't find it overall to be that well-handled either, from the perspective of being an outside party (i was a team nature member, but was busy with college so this all happened without my knowledge).

It should be CLEARLY brought up in the future that anything that any user find to be extremely exploitable should be reported to staff immediately no matter what, and that there WILL be consequences. (But in this instance, it's all the past, so this event will serve as the only exception.) Because what you guys are getting at right now seems as if the line "Everyone does it, it's totally cool" is a thing, and it shouldn't be, because 1) it can possibly have a deleterious effect on how the site runs (i got some 502 errors, but then again they happen even without a mass influx of users lmaoooo), 2) not everyone actually does the said thing (maybe an announcement saying HEY GUYS, YOU CAN GO CLICK THE FUCK OUT OF THE MB FOR YOUR TEAM WOO would have made things seem more equal to all parties) and 3) this is basically a precedent and is a possible slippery slope to allowing even more crap to fly by the radar (which is bad. like really bad. like what's the point of having that rule in the site kind of bad).

But besides all this, I agree with 's list of possible improvements. I admit I was one of the people who joined for the pretty wearable but barely contributed LOL oops :x So I am in no way complaining about prize distribution lmao A+

ETA: points, grammar edits, spacing

omggg people like my post ;_;

Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but I don't trust Subeta staff to handle things fairly. Frankly, the track record is terrible with broken promises and missed deadlines and one staff member saying one thing and then another one saying something different, and then Keith zooming in and contradicting both of them . . .

Encouraging auto refreshers is ridiculous - we still have tens of thousands of Free Beer floating around, anyone remember that clusterfuck? - and there must be a way to find and halt people who use them.

Also, I'm laughing at the "It was a learning experience for us!" You've had how many years to learn now?

I'm sorry, I must seem terribly negative, but I get overly optimistic - surely this time will be better! - and then am crushed when Subeta does the same thing all over again.

One issue is that Team Mischief got kinda reprimanded for the way they reported the glitch, whereas the people that used the glitch didn't get reprimanded at all.

It's a complete red herring to even bring up how it was reported. It comes off as not wanting to address the complaint so instead picking fault with how the complaint was made. The original staff response in the Team Mischief Thread really does spend longer talking about reporting and what the people upset did wrong, than it does in sweeping aside talking about the glitch. It seems like classic deflection - especially as there wasn't a huge delay in making a ticket and it didn't change the outcome.

I also think "you shouldn't want details, you should just trust us" is a weird response.

I still don't understand why you can't add a partecipation medal for all the teams now, even if you didn't say you would at first, it's not like you would take away anything from anyone, the winners would still have their winning trophy, we just want a "hey, I was there too" wooden spoon shrugs

I also totally agree that there's no reason a participation notice can't be added just because it wasn't initially stated in the prizes. Staff has very regularly changed the things they even explicitly stated wouldn't happen based on user response and staff whims.