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NDB -> RE: The yearly big gifting event and why it is bad (a lot of problems) (7/16/2019 12:57:00)
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It completely devalues everything, yes. I still have 20 million credits and 6500 arcade tokens, and have every single credit sink achievement maxed, every arcade maxed, have already bought every weapon I possibly could since last gifting and have way more rarity score than is required for the last achievement tier. For perspective, it takes 5.6 million credits to max one 15k rating achievement and only about 600 tokens to max one arcade depending on luck. And I have only ever been to two giftings (I was completely inactive for the first two years). I have much lowered motivation to farm for credits compared to before gifting and groan out loud when I see prize codes on Twitter. We all make fun of the people who only show up once a year for gifting, but, if they get loaded, than there really isn't much of a reason to play hard unless you care about war influence... it's sort of a vicious cycle. On the bright side(...?), there is a limit to what gifts can do for you. If they don't make enough new stuff to drain my resources, than after this year's gifting I won't be able to improve no matter how many gifts I get, and that's true for most of the people on the rating leaderboard right now considering pretty much all of them have maxed cheevos too. And for low level people buying all the gear, there's a limit to that too considering most stuff is seasonal and you can pretty much get enough credits to buy one set of whatever you want with missions by level 20 except for Endless Armor. It's still not fair and making a level limit for gifting could be an option, like level 10 or higher, but the example of a new player quitting because they get crushed by someone with better gear isn't really valid since that's going to happen all the time with or without gifting and it happens in every game ever.
For me, personally, I feel like the cash ratings system is a way more annoying issue than the credits/arcade tokens inflation. Last year they added an insane amount of new cash rating and exclusive items features to motivate people so it's just getting worse. Almost all twenty places of the rating leaderboard changed over night and most of the people on there really don't deserve it at all. The daily gifting leaderboard is especially absurd and extremely unethical in my opinion, especially since they made the daily achievement tiered. Gifting Streak is pretty unethical too since it's relying completely on impulse buys in the heat of moment and one DC, which are all too common during laggy gifting events, can completely screw you up after you've spent a ridiculous amount of real money. Epic Supporter was an okay idea, but making it tiered? That's 21,500 ratings for spending $650, folks.
But they've said themselves that gifting accounts for pretty much all of the game's yearly revenue from a relative standpoint and they've dug themselves into a whole so deep it's pointless to talk any reason into them. From my understanding, the first years of gifting were much smaller than last year. The fact of the matter was that they were desperate to get EpicDuel some attention this past gifting that they were willing to try anything, even if it felt wrong, and a lot of effort was put in to ensure that it'd draw more money than in previous years. It feels cruel to make fun of that effort because they seem to genuinely want EpicDuel to succeed on a bigger scale. NW is just one man and he's clearly over-worked and I can't help but sympathize when I think of what it must have felt to be in his shoes going into last year's gifting. There was probably a certain amount of guilt. People call him greedy (probably not true at all) and every insult under the moon when things go wrong and he doesn't deserve most of it. Guess what I'm trying to say is gifting is around for political reasons, period. It's not going to go away or be changed in any way that will decrease profits, the damage from years past has already be done, and we should learn to live with that. But I definitely agree that it shouldn't ever be allowed to get more over the top than it already is in the future.
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