GwenMay
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I'm a big fan of both the token and gold Giftmaster rewards. I love autohit, and staff have been doing a great job with Damage over Time support recently, a direction I wholeheartedly support, especially with the release of Dire Lean last summer. As an aside, I can confirm that the Elani Silencer's weapons auto-hit is currently not working.
I do share @CH4OT1C!'s concern about the Last Rose misc potentially inflicting a -200 END fragile in one turn. The info subs certainly seem to indicate that it will stack by power instead of duration, and I understand Fragile items usually stack by power, not duration. That the misc would stack by power instead of duration was certainly how I read it last night, and how a lot of players read it. Perhaps there is ambiguity in the wording if one stretches, but I think the better reading - and the one most if not all players had last night on the various AQ communities - was that it would stack by power. While mathematically balanced (to my understanding), as a design choice stacking by power may be a tad overtuned. However, I ultimately disagree that staff should change the Last Rose misc to stack in duration (or otherwise) under these specific circumstances. As I previously discussed in my thread on premium item balance, my opinion is that premium items should be subject to balance standards, but special consideration should be given when staff considering changing them to ensure the purchasers' reasonable expectations are maintained. This is to avoid inadvertent misrepresentations and justifiable playerbase anger about detrimentally relying on an item's effects when making decisions about whether and how to spend their money on AQ.
Staff chose to release the Giftmaster reward info subs seven hours before donations closed. This was the period when the players aiming (or considering aiming) for the top 50 token tier are most likely to be active and donating to secure (or choose to give up on) their spot, whether by sniping at the last minute or donating to ensure they won't be sniped. Indeed, the minimum for top 50 increased significantly in the last few hours of the contest (as always happens). Now, I can't say how many players went for top 50 based on the info subs specifically and how many would have donated anyway (I am in the latter camp), but as @ming shuen indicated some did donate, at least in part, based on the info subs. This should be expected - the players willing to spend 77,100 tokens or more (worth approximately $150 USD) on an AQ Giftmaster reward are also the players most likely to be sophisticated enough and connected to the community enough to check the info subs before the contest closes. It seems to me that the only point of posting the Giftmaster reward info subs before the contest ended was to give Giftmasters more information on which to make decisions - a laudable goal. Even if we can't know how many actually donated based on the info subs, we should assume that a significant number did, because that was the point of posting the info subs before the contest's conclusion.
Accordingly, we have a situation where some number of players justifiably relied on the staff's official representations about the effects of the Last Rose set to make last minute decisions about whether to spend significant money (or the token equivalent of money) on AQ. This situation is limited to 50 players for the misc, and since it's a donation contest it cannot be rectified by giving refunds (as with Warcaster, Cataclysm, and Wrath) or by allowing players to chose a different package reward (as with Tribal Shaman). The misc itself is not mathematically unbalanced, it just perhaps has an element that was an unwise design choice. Under these specific circumstances, I think the best thing to do would be to leave the Last Rose misc unaltered, and perhaps clarify that it is an exception and that future Fragile effects won't be designed similarly. This, in my opinion, is the best way to proceed where, as here, players justifiably and detrimentally relied on staff representations during the high pressure closing hours of a donation contest to make monetary choices that cannot now be undone.
What do we do in the future? While not providing info subs pre-release would have prevented this issue, the better course for me is to provide the info subs well in advance, at least by a few weeks (in my experience, nobody who wasn't going to donate anyway makes final donation decisions that far out). That would prevent people from having to make late night last minute decisions without any chance for official confirmation or clarification, and give time for feedback and course correction (such as, say, clarifying how an effect might stack to remove any ambiguity that may exist). I ultimately understand however staff resolves this tricky situation, and hope we can avoid a reoccurrence in the future.
< Message edited by GwenMay -- 2/1/2026 11:29:14 >
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