Some of you may be aware that Fallen Earth has recently gone free-to-play, and others may also be aware they're doing a contest giveaway, where the grand prize winner would receive something in the neighborhood of $2,000-$2,500 worth of prizes, with other prizes below it. However, the contest may as well be rigged, let me explain why. Before I do, I would like to point out, that at the start of the contest, I even asked in the help channel, "this contest is open to everybody right? I'm not going to find out at the end it was only for premium players?", to which a GM replied to me with, "everybody has an equal chance at winning, even freebie players". Which actually is proving to not be true.
Fallen Earth offers a few premium services you can pay for, which speeds up certain things such as AP gain, experience gain, unlimited money (freebie players are limited to 10 red chips unless they get premium or buy an item from cash shop), etc. Turns out they also have a harvesting speed bonus for when they scavenge nodes, etc. Well, after you register for this contest, the way it works, is there's several MainTech computer part nodes scattered randomly all throughout the gaming world of Fallen Earth. Figuring it out yet? Let me go deeper into detail here in saying, a top premium player harvests a node in 2.8 seconds (checked, confirmed, and verified), while a f2p player harvests a node in 5.9 seconds (verified on my character as a freebie player). Which if you look at one node to the next, doesn't seem like much. However, if you look at the entire contest, over it's longevity of 30 days, it snowballs quite a bit. Now, to add to that, which I'm willing to write off as an accidental oversight, it's been confirmed that individual premium players have been zooming around in interceptors (fastest vehicle in the game) around the clock to collect up as many nodes as they can. Now for the record, it is possible for a freebie player to make an interceptor, but it's pretty much impossible any would have one yet unless somebody gave it to them, and even then they probably wouldn't even be able to use it. Due to the crafting system that Fallen Earth has, along with level requirements to make an interceptor, in the short time Fallen Earth has been f2p, it's virtually impossible that any freebie player could have made an interceptor already. To add to that, a freebie player has a money limit of 10 red caps, which because of this, people purposely put interceptors on auction for more than 10 red caps for a reason.
Allow me to share the forum post I made about this on the Fallen Earth forums:
(Also to note, due to certain forum responses I received, as well as one guy in help channel trying to pretend he was Mr. Wizard, I'd like to point out, that this is just a hypothetical scenario... for those that want to argue "random chance" of finding nodes, since that "random chance" works equally against freebie players and premium players, we're going to look at that as a constant variable, which I know is a paradox, but still, is actually a non-factor in the overall outcome, as it applies equally to both kinds of players.)
To this post, FYI, one premium player actually responded with, and I quote: "If I'm paying for this game, I should have a better chance at winning this contest than you do. Holla!". Which
would confirm exactly what I've been saying!
Way to go MoneyFirst, you've successfully taken play to win to a whole other level. It's one thing for a GAME to be pay to win, it's a complete other to have contests that are supposed to "fair and square" become pay to win as well. For all froobs that registered for this contest, seems at the very least, it was all just a sham to get more email addresses on their mailing list, and perhaps even a way to rub freebie players noses in the fact they're not paying and in a round about reverse-psychology way, bend their arm into paying for a premium. As I said in the post, I *was* a huge fan of GamerFirst, but this just does it for me.
Oh, also, I should also point out, if you're a freebie player, they may as well not even care that you're there. Here's why. After having slept on this last night, today I decided to contact somebody at Fallen Earth and/or GamersFirst, figuring that GMs didn't really have much control over how the contest is run or operated, and that perhaps somebody higher up on the food chain wasn't aware of the shenanigans. However, upon going to the Fallen Earth support website, and clicking, "contact us", this is what I see, LOL:
Wow, really!? First of all, let this be a public announcement to any freebie players in a GamesFirst game; should you have an issue that goes beyond a GM, seems there's absolutely no open-door policy whatsoever, so for what it's worth, don't go pissing off those GMs. Secondly, how absurd is it, that after being "so sorry" that this service is restricted to paying players, they'd follow it up at the end by attempting to usher you to the MARKETPLACE. For anybody that read my F2P vs P2P article, this would probably constitute into the category of "mortgaging your gaming experience"!
I mean, just WOW. Instead of GamersFirst, perhaps they should name themselves "money talks and bull!@#! walks", really!? I must say, it's quite devastating to find out a gaming company I used to have worlds of respect for turned out to be a run of the mill slum-lord.
Hi there! I'm Linus from the FE blog and forums.
ReplyDeleteWe've never meant for Premium subscriptions to be a leg up in contests. What we've tried to do is walk a very fine line between selling something that does *not* give paying players a direct competitive advantage over others, but still is a worthwhile enough purchase that we can keep the lights on and rolling out new free stuff (like the Chopper, Faction Territory Control, World Events, etc). The (much more boring) facts of this situation are that Premium vs. free player harvesting time did not factor into the decision, and that actual time to harvest nodes ends up being affected by enough other variables as to make harvesting time a fairly moot point. I think really, we've all been taught to never let down our guard when we play MMOs because publishers are always trying new angles to make us spend money, so any situation that could be even *remotely* impacted by paying seems like some kind of ploy. I can't fault you for feeling this way because I tend to feel it myself when I play other companies' games. I hope we at G1 at least can earn back your trust as you continue to play FE and APB :)
Oh, and it was awesome getting to type this out to the theme of Final Fantasy IV, so thanks, haven't heard that in forever!
ReplyDelete*nods* Thanks for replying. I do have to ask, why is the "contact us" ability only reserved for paying players? I mean, over the past two years or so, I've done about 5 trials in Fallen Earth, and always got the notion, that it sort of shrugged off those not willing to dish out the green... but to limit the ability to contact the company? That seems a tad odd to me for some reason.
ReplyDeleteThat's something we've struggled with for a while. We might continue to refine it, but really it just comes down to the math of Free2Play. Customer Service--along with utilities, bandwidth, game development, and everything else that goes into running an MMO--is paid entirely by paying customers (since we don't have ads or anything else that might generate revenue from free player traffic). When you open yourself up to taking support requests from everyone, the support you give to paying customers invariably suffers. A GM might be giving awesome service on 100 (completely made up number) support requests a day, but when that same GM is suddenly forced to handle 700 support requests a day, performance suffers (just like anyone's would if their workload increased by such a massive factor). And you can't hire six more GMs to account for difference, because that massive volume of support requests accounts for no increase in revenue. So now that you've got 700 people a day getting poor service, the perception gets out there that you give crappy customer service, and a few less people are willing to pay, resulting in less revenue for GMs or continued game development.
ReplyDeleteWhat we've tried to do instead is make sure GMs are available in-game to all players 24/7, built out a massive knowledgebase for self-help purposes, made sure the forums are not subscriber-limited, and allowed incoming ticket submissions from free players for account change and payment support requests. This allows us to maintain our excellent SLA (service level agreement -- essentially, the contract we make with customers who submit support requests), give awesome support, and still provide a number of outlets for free players who want to contact us.
Still, though, I don't know if we'll ever say "You know what? We're done. This is the perfect system," so if you have any feedback it's absolutely welcome.
Thanks, and if you're in the states, have a happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. The numbers make sense true, but I will say from experience/witnessing there's not always GMs on 24/7; I used to help out all the time in the help channel (to the point users would ask if I was around specifically cause they recognized me in there helping them so much), where people would come in and ask, "is a GM on?", in which me and others would tell them to press O, and click "GM" tab, and I'd do it myself at times, to see no GM on to help. Also, as far as knowledge-base, perhaps for the general run of the mill FAQ sort of questions that helps, but one thing many people have agreed with me on, both in-game and outside of game, is the lack of a decent resource for Fallen Earth and perhaps APB, like a wiki or something. As far as Fallen Earth goes, it's really hard to find actual concrete information that's not out-dated or in error, even to the point many in-game don't know the correct answer either; anything from where to find certain materials, to where to find a certain quest, how to do some quests, etc. Really thinking if they had some sort of concrete referencing source like that, that might also help to cut down on the workload of GMs, as many questions I saw in the help channel were usually of that nature; as in where to find certain items, how to do a quest, where to find a quest giver, how to get certain reputation with a certain faction, etc.
ReplyDelete