PD
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For those of us watching on discord, nobody saw coming what ended up transpiring. A lot of people came out of the woodworks when they previously had not and even more decided that this year was the one to make a statement. Needless to say it went above and beyond everyones' expectations of what would happen.
That said, there was quite a lot of frustration around the contest, particularly around the donating experience, and the fact that the top cut for this year being extremely high, enough to lock out people who had previously played moderate amounts out of the running. On several issues, some frustrations were especially known:
Donating Gold: This is by far the most raised issue. As I've stated before (and others too), donating gold is extremely tedious and time consuming. Unlike tokens, which has virtually no timeout, gold seems to have especially long delays that don't ever seem consistent to itself. People have raised that it takes extremely long amounts of time to contribute, and thus many people don't even participate at all. This has to be addressed next year. I had raised this earlier, but it seems that it was said that there was no time to address this year. And from what we've heard, unless we're diligent about this next time around, the likelihood for any changes will likely not happen.
I have to be honest to myself, the donation experience has always been poor. And this year has made me seriously re-consider whether I should even participate the next time around in earnest. The experience of offloading gold should be fast, simple and straightforward. Which so far the contest has not seemed to have done much. Yes there were improvements made last year by not forcing you out of the menu, but all the change has done is forced us to wait around while the backend, for whatever reason decides it can only send in a certain number of requests at a time.
Announcing a Stretch Goal in the Middle: This added a lot of stress. A lot of people were already struggling to get by, and announcing the stretch goal gave a mid-contest surge that put a lot of people out of the running. For others, it forced them to put in more time into the game. People don't like when there's sudden changes because it also changes the whole calculus of the event of whether to participate or not, or what to do about the people who had already reached a certain level of activity.
Less Participation Prizes: There's been a lot said about this one about how there were no participation prizes. Yes we had stretch goals, but the lack of participation this time around was noted. This year, we only had faces for participation. The misc was decided to be given to the top 50 only, and there were no fixed-tier prizes unlike previous years. This seemed like a major regression on the part of donation contests.
Requirement of needing multiple characters to gain receipts: It's no secret that this is something a lot of people aren't happy about. Some people gain more than their fair share of receipts, while many don't get a receipt at all. And for how this contest was run, now more than ever if you didn't play at the beginning or the last 3 weeks, you had a drastically lower change of getting a receipt. No less the others whom often use multiple characters to effectively widen their net to gain receipts over others.
Now that those have been highlighted, there's a couple things I and others have thought of that could redress the situation:
A Streamlined Donation Process: This is probably the highest priority on the menu. All things withstanding, a clunky donation system was the single most important factor of how much someone was going to participate. Ideally, moving large amounts of gold should be an quick, automatic and easy thing to do. Not the current system of waiting sometime between 45-60 seconds per transaction. Changing this would make these events much more enjoyable, and drastically increase activity.
Fixed-Tier rewards for all rewards: This wouldn't even have to involve a change to the ranked system. We can still have ranks, but instead of only awarding items to the top X players, all it would require is awarding a prize to anyone who has reached or passed a certain threshold. A lot of people don't participate because they are of the belief they cannot win. There's a lot of potential people who would participate, but end up not due to this. Implementing this kind of change would also encourage participation and expand the pool to those whom never participate or usually don't. This would also redress the lack of participation prizes this time around.
A more equitable donation system: The current system is rife with abuse: If you have multiple characters, you will get more receipts than those who don't. If you play at *certain* times, you will reap an overwhelming benefit. This all means the people who in theory need it the most will never see the prizes, and the people who don't get the overwhelming amount of receipts. Changing this so everyone only gets a receipt at the end, and spreading it evenly across the board would do wonders for increasing equity on this front.
Anyways, these are my thoughts on the contest. I really hope that there will be changes (though honestly, I am pessimistic about this but won't rule out the possibility for). At least staff has noted that they're going to be looking at feedback. I certainly hope so. These things should really be the highlight of the year but for a lot of people it's just stress on top of more stress. To bring it to where it should be, we should really take note and make our feelings known.
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