Update on Grand Arena and Territory Wars [MEGA]

"CG_SBCrumb;d-196719" wrote:

updated rewards to compensate for the increased number of events

Not happy about this, for a slightly different reason than others have stated.

Grand Arena is vastly more fun than normal Arena. Normal Arena is boring, it's the exact same slog for months at a time. It doesn't work for people who have families, or people who work later, or people who just want to eat and be sociable when it's a good time of day for people to eat and be sociable. Basically, normal Arena is a toxic thing, a detriment to people's lives. I put up with it because other parts of the game are actually fun, but I hate how it makes me feel.

Grand Arena has none of those problems; it's a good challenge, it's flexible for people's schedules, and there's a lot more potential for it to change from one to the next and stay fresh.

CG_Carrie mentioned a long time ago that she understood the inherent hostility of the Arena's payouts and reward structures to people's real lives and was eager to find an alternative. I was so happy to hear that. My hope these last few months has been that GA could be the solution she was looking for: with the right incentives, we'd have no less pressure to chase the meta and stay on top, but without disrupting people's daily lives. Since launch, GA rewards have not been commensurate with the effort required relative to the other arenas, but that made sense -- it takes a while for a new thing to settle in. But three months later, the rewards are shrinking rather than expanding. Such a great opportunity to deprecate the original Arena and finally change the core of this game for the better, and we're squandering it, which is as clear a signal as we could possibly get that whatever Carrie was hoping for will never happen, and that's the real point here.

I'm not complaining about the loss of a few stun guns over a week, because with the extra GA I'll make them back the next week, even though it feels bad to work just as hard as before for less payout per unit of effort. GA is still fun.

I'm complaining because we all put up with a lot of nonsense to get to the fun parts of this game, and some of that nonsense is required to develop a game in this decade I guess (like inciting people to gamble and impulse spend), but some of it isn't. And it just feels bad to know that whoever's running the show doesn't care enough to fix the seriously toxic things that aren't even required by their business model. I guess we're all still here because either we think the fun outweighs the nonsense, or we're unwilling to admit our sunk cost fallacy. I think I'm the former.