Don't make Secret Releases

[Ruby Eyes]

14 minutes ago, WatersMoon110 said:

Releases didn't even used to be in English.

The saurian translator was and still is online. Information that can be decoded is better than no information at all.

[Paintra]

1 minute ago, Kirjava-Kitsune said:

There is one thing I don't get about this thread, overall.

If people have the time to check the forum for news, then what is stopping them from popping over on discord (official or unofficial) and asking a quick question? It would actually be faster. There are no more barriers to joining discord than there are to joining the forum.

 

Honestly this feels like the same argument we've been having over and over and over since the beginning of time DC. First it was CB metals being rare, then CB prizes being awarded to contest winners, then more CB prizes being awarded to raffle winners. The definition of "rarity" is that not everyone can have an item right away - and it follows that once those "rare" items started becoming available to a larger number of users, then people started complaining that they were losing value. It's the circle of life. Everyone would love rares to be only rare to others.

 

So Staterae will be in extreme demand for a while, and we will have complaints about rarity. Then they'll become less rare, and people will complain that they aren't valuable anymore.

 

Can't we just let go? Everyone will get their Stat sooner or later.

 

I'm confused at what you're getting at here. There are people who are upset about Staterae being rare, but the issue being laid out here is not with their rarity. The majority of this thread has been focused on the lack of communication about the release and how it was handled. No confirmation, no "hint" that not everything was as it seemed at first, nothing.

 

Many rare (though not as rare as Staterae) releases have gone well in the past. I can't speak for before my time, but more recent rare releases have been seen as exciting (Aeons especially!). Stats were tarnished not by their rarity, but by the way their release was handled. Personally, I think that Secret releases can be done, but no communication about it whatsoever (like we saw here) is not the way to make your community excited and happy about a secret release- and isn't that the point? Making a game intentionally frustrating does nothing but drive users away...

 

Of course, I won't say that the rarity of the Stateraes doesn't factor into the issue here. There would not be nearly as many grievances with the release if Stats were a cave-blocker or a common. But it's simply not true to act like the only issue with the release was the fact that the Stateraes are rare.

 

On another note- the Discord and New Release forum topic are plagued with information overflow. I've seen conversations fly by in minutes in the Discord in particular, especially when a new release is happening. I don't blame someone for not wanting to scour through every channel or every page of a forum thread to find out that an unannounced release occurred.

[schenanigans]

I'm going to agree that calling the drop exclusive was a massive stretch. Everyone has the same exact tools at their disposal, if they don't want to utilize them then that's on them. Exclusivity would be making it so that only members of a certain group had access and nobody else did, or that members not of said group had limited access. And in this case, that is simply not true. People actively went out of their way to help. If "casuals" are going to care about the game enough to be frustrated by not knowing about a secret release, then they're going to have a world of pain coming to them as that is just the way TJ works. And if they don't like it and don't stick around, then what's the issue with that? 

 

Everybody had equal opportunity to get the new xenos and the staterae, it literally would not have mattered what time the staterae flooded, someone would have been put out. Let's imagine how people would have reacted had they known the rarity - everyone who had the opportunity would have abandoned their new release xeno catches, loaded up on as many staterae as they could, and the flood would have been much shorter. They also would NOT have traded 1:1 for new xenos for over a day. Honestly, the way the Staterae were handled (as a secret) made them enough of an enigma that the staterae were probably as spread as evenly as possible throughout the user base. Arguing the flood wasn't long enough is a whole other conversation.

 

I will agree that the sheer length of time that TJ remained silent could have been better, but I am also not surprised in the slightest that he handled it this way 🤷‍♀️ But don't blame the spriter. 

 

 

[DragonLady86]

23 minutes ago, Kirjava-Kitsune said:

There is one thing I don't get about this thread, overall.

If people have the time to check the forum for news, then what is stopping them from popping over on discord (official or unofficial) and asking a quick question? It would actually be faster. There are no more barriers to joining discord than there are to joining the forum.

 

Honestly this feels like the same argument we've been having over and over and over since the beginning of time DC. First it was CB metals being rare, then CB prizes being awarded to contest winners, then more CB prizes being awarded to raffle winners. The definition of "rarity" is that not everyone can have an item right away - and it follows that once those "rare" items started becoming available to a larger number of users, then people started complaining that they were losing value. It's the circle of life. Everyone would love rares to be only rare to others.

 

So Staterae will be in extreme demand for a while, and we will have complaints about rarity. Then they'll become less rare, and people will complain that they aren't valuable anymore.

 

Can't we just let go? Everyone will get their Stat sooner or later.

rarity is not the issue at all. Yes, I personally am a little flustered that I haven't even seen one to try to catch; but that's hardly the first time. I missed the entire birthday week when the coppers were released. Took me years to find them. Frustrating yes, something I feel the need to voice displeasure about on the forums no. 

[missy_]

I don’t mind that there was a surprise dragon. In fact, I liked it. 

[TJ09]

I think this thread is going in a weird direction, and the OP doesn't really seem to even want it open (though I agree that the original thread it was a part of was not a good fit), so it may not make sense to keep this around. I'll drop a few tidbits before closing it, though:

• The release more-or-less went as originally planned. It was intentional that Stateraes were obtainable from the beginning but didn't appear in the cave immediately, because that would've given away some of the "wait what is this" moments. Obviously, based on the feedback there is room to improve here. "Secret" releases are rare, so don't expect this to be a frequent occurrence, and we'll see what happens in the future.
• Doing this sort of thing with a breed that is intentionally pretty rare obviously has its downsides and probably won't happen again. That's not to say that future releases won't contain surprises, but there are a number of confounding factors that made this one particularly bad.
• There's been a lot of underestimating the length of the "flood," sometimes by a factor of 2x (!). That's fairly unproductive (although the fact that it's perceived to be shorter than it was is very much noted), but discussion regarding that should largely be contained to the other thread.
• Discussion of "Discord vs forums" is similarly not useful, IMO. Discord is a real-time chat so news may technically break faster there, but as far as I can tell, posts in the news thread were not really "behind" Discord in any meaningful way, so people who are part of any of the official communities were not left in the dark as everyone discovered things in real time.
• Concerns about lack of direct acknowledgement (particularly given that there has been an incident in the past where an unintentional release was rolled back) are understood and will be taken into account where relevant.
• As always, I've read everything here and will keep it in mind when making future decisions.