THIS. This so much. I tried explaining this but you did a better job than I ever could have. From experience it pretty much went something like this:

fellow mischief: Guys what should we do? should someone make a ticket? make a thread in problems and bugs? mischiefs: frantically chattering trying to find out what to do ticket? ticket? report? would posting in the P&B forum expose it so more people would use it? what's happening? me: did anyone make a ticket yet? gets washed away in the sea of posts fellow mischief: I MADE A TICKET another mischief: I made one too! staff: barges in how dare you talk about this glitch you should know what to do shame on you shame shame shame this is not a glitch how dare you complain instead of reporting it this is not a glitch but we're fixing it now entire team mischief: ?????????

And it continues to baffle me the way staff seemingly continues to blame us for discussing it instead of reporting it or whatever? I don't get it. "it was being discussed". Yeah. as a team, we were discussing what the best course of action would be, looking for second opinions and confirmation. Like excuse us for not knowing exactly what to do; for example, I make a thread in P&B only to be told to make a ticket, and then when I make a ticket for something else I'm told to make a thread for it in P&B. We don't want to be running in circles about this.

They seriously need to stop ignoring the fact that tickets were actually made, and stop implying that we were talking about it just to be talking about it and not bothering to report it.

Mischief should have been discussing it through sMail for most of the day, and only in terms of abusing it, rather than in terms of the best way to report it. That would have been the best way, obviously.

Just wanted to say I appreciate that this was a great item sink. I'm not sure how much space the items take in Subeta's database or whatever, but it was nice seeing some retired stuff not going for 2000sp.

I do encourage some more "item sinks" like this that include items from the Sole Train, Accessory Bin and Clothing rack.. there are soo many of those items.

I assume the MB glitch also acted as a great sP sink...

I know this is a little late, and i may get dogpiled for my opinions which is ok. But:

: I'm 99% sure Lush wasn't calling you rude. Maybe i'm a little biased because your user name is the same as my real life name and yr avatar kinda looks like me. (:)) but i think you are AWESOME! you're always very informative, helpful, and friendly. OTOH, everybody who's been on the internet in the last...oh, 20 years? Knows that all caps is the same as yelling. (And yes, i did yell that you are awesome but that was in a friendly way.) Grelca was the one who literally yelled at users which is highly unprofessional and extremely disappointing. The post that was just a gif to a serious question was flippant, and the post that she ended with "CONTEXT. MATTERS." is yelling.

And no, i don't just automatically trust this website. Why should i? Constant 404s and downtime, and every event ends in drama. I won't trust the posited "fact" that every team cheated the same and that it doesn't matter until we get exact data on that, which i don't reasonably expect to happen.

And this sort of stuff is costing you guys money. I was given my first loyalty box a few months ago and received the 3 month gold account option. I'd bought 1 week gold accounts before with SP and was confused at first. Like, why would they give a whole 1/4 of a year when i'da been more than happy with 1 month? But i realized why, because after that expired i was like "arghhh i'm so used to it now, i'm addicted and need to buy it, lol! These guys are brilliant!" Which would be only the second time in 15 years of internetting that i've spent real life money on an internet game.

But that was right when the whole christmas debacle happened. And i decided to wait cuz the site didnt seem stable enough for me to invest in it. Then i was thinking of actually spending money on this site again, and this happened.

Don't get me wrong, this site is very fun. But i won't be spending money on it unless i can go....say maybe a coupla months without a giant mistake being made? You guys have to realize how yr alienating potential customers.

Thank you for this post!

Thinking about what people have said about lack of engagement and not feeling as though their team could catch up, wanting achievement tiers, and wanting to be one team against NPC's instead of userbase pitted against userbase, I had an idea.

What if, in a future donation based event, the userbase is competing against NPC teams? Make the NPC's into actual dynamic teams as well. The NPC teams could "gain" points at a steady rate that wouldn't be impossible to match, which in the end would give each NPC team a total score equalling one of the achievement tiers, but add a sense of competition during the event (especially if we didn't know the tier amounts right off the bat).

So say the Rift Monsters team is the lowest achievement tier. Their numbers would go up by, say, 100 items a day, so by the end of the week the user team who had donated 101 items a day on average would "beat" that team and get those prizes. The Underground Zombies team numbers would go up by 1500 items per day, and teams that achieved more than that on average would also gain THOSE prizes. And so on and so forth.

That way, the teams could "race" against NPC's, achieve tiers that are humanly possible and not bellcurved toward who has the most donatables, and not have to face off against each other.

Did any of the other teams even report the glitch? It looks like mischief is the only team getting crap about how they reported it, but at least it got reported? I don't see any blame being put on the teams who promoted abusing the glitch through sMail. But this isn't a problem because it isn't even being considered an exploit. The other teams are fine for using a "cool trick" to get an advantage. Team mischief is at fault because they didn't efficiently report something that isn't a big deal because a few members of mischief used it too. Can we stop saying this is okay because every team used it? If I could control everyone on my team, my team wouldn't have used the glitch. It feels like I am being blamed for people on my team using the exploit which isn't an exploit because I didn't do a good job of controlling my own team members.

Sounds like a good idea :p

Written on my phone. P's usually mean O's, if it doesn't make sense, I will correct later.

ok, that made me laugh... but seriously, I don't think it's fair or helpful to imply that staff were rude/accusing in the Team Mischief thread. The tone of the posts seemed perfectly professional to me, it's just the content (i.e.: dismissing your problem and instead unfairly picking fault with the way you'd raised it as if that was the real issue) that wasn't great.

So....let's not muddy the water by suggesting staff roared into the team thread in a tank and screamed how dare yooooou at anyone, deliciously dramatic though that mental image is.

I like that idea!

Yeah I exaggerated the staff response, sorry for that, but I was going off of how it felt when it happened. It did feel like staff was attacking our team personally for not reporting it properly and quickly, and it made a lot of us wonder why we were being singled out in that way when we were just trying to report it in the first place. They didn't say anything to any other team about it. If they would have made a separate thread or announcement about it I know I wouldn't have felt that way.

But still, most of the discussion was

1. If it was actually something to report, including rationalizing how it could be considered abuse. Which we decided yes, and then became:
2. What would be the best way to report it? (As users we don't really have an all-powerful knowledge of which method would be more appropriate for any situation, as I pointed out in my previous post where often times threads are told to make a ticket and tickets are told to make a thread.)

Those two topics were the bulk of the conversation, and both directly relate to reporting the glitch. A lot of us were online and everyone wanted to put their two cents in so it may have seemed like excessive discussion and in retrospect it did probably go on for longer than necessary.

The staff response felt like a personal attack (not individual but team-based), but after your clarification I see it wasn't meant to be. :)

Also, I want to say that as a user, I would have thought that every person on our team making a ticket about the same thing would have been... excessive? Overwhelming? It was pretty chaotic that night and we wanted to get organized and have someone make a ticket. If multiple tickets about the same thing is actually the proper protocol then... noted for in the future!

I hope you see it from our point of view! :)

here are a few quotes from you and Grace on this thread that still sound kinda blamey and ignore the fact that, even if it wasn't prompt, a ticket was made.

[edit] so it was discussed on this page where people started finding out what it was, like 10 minutes until midnight. once it hit midnight, the bug no longer was useful to anyone.

it looks like the next page is people who used the glitch to try to catch up, the next couple of pages people are starting to question if it's a glitch or not again and what should be done. again these pages are after midnight, nothing can be exploited at this point.

12:38 is the first mention of someone making a ticket I see, again at 12:42 12:47 is when Grace first posts.

there were 10 minutes where it was being discussed and the glitch was live, but after those 10 minutes, the mystery box changed. Two tickets at least were filed. it's sorta coincidental that Grace just happened to post 9 minutes after the first one was filed. Was a UA even on and assigning tickets at that time anyway?

I filed my ticket at 12:38am and at 1:27am I received a response saying:

xD

so discussing it on the thread actually brought a quicker reply than a ticket. best course of action would have been to directly sMail Amber, but not everyone is comfortable doing that and I wasn't paying attention to the chat when this was going on.

I actually really like that this is the direction we're going in now. There's obviously an incentive to win in general, but unless it's clear that the prizes are supposed to be a mystery (e.g. EPICon), then having the prizes clearly stated up front along with the conditions for winning and sticking with that decision is, imo, the best way to handle it. Even if some people are disappointed for getting exactly what they knew they were going to get, at least that's not the site actively screwing you over for adding secret other conditions that you now can't go back and try to do something differently, because hey! event's over, hope you guessed correctly.

Perhaps that is what happened, but I honestly don't think it makes a difference. If people joined a team solely to have the rest of the team carry the load those people would have done it whether the prizes were revealed or not. Instead they would have chosen by the more popular name, or the more popular npc, etc. I just think that if it were only the popular item at fault, there would have also been a significant addition to the amount of people who did participate (as in people who wanted the team item and had the motivation/money for the big prize). Maybe the prize reveal did alter the distribution of non-participating people, but with the prizes being released in MC for anyone to claim I don't think that was the problem either. Because a lot of people decided to choose the team they wanted rather than the one with the item they wanted. Idk, maybe instead of having it as just a donate 1 item to get it prize, perhaps a different method of awarding it could have happened. Like tiered achievements (in this case specific to teams) were people donate X amount to get it. I don't think the staff shouldn't have announced them though. Being vague about prizes is hardly a good way to get people motivated. To quote Amber:

With all of the drama around this event and the questioning of who really should have won it seems like a really poor choice to start some new sort of strict policy with this event as an example of sorts.

I'm not questioning who really should have won, I just like trophies. :(

And I think we had this discussion after a previous event where staff was like "we're trying to move away from trophies" and we were all like "but we love trophies!" and they were like "oh, then I guess we'll start doing trophies again" and now I'm like "...trophy? :("

and then you taunt us with this thing

I agree. Donald Trump isnt awesome. I keep wanting to set his hair on fire.