UNUSUALLY HIGH PRESENT COUNTS

Unusually high present counts come from unusually high donut spending. I have a couple of neighbors who buy all the prizes on the 1st day of events. For this Xmas event that gave them over 14,000 presents on the 1st day. At 27,000 your neighbor must be spending donuts just to spend donuts.

With all due respect to the respondents to the OP, while there may be some percentage - a small one, I would think - of people who throw that kind of cash for donuts to rush event counts and unlock all the items, mostly that explanation is almost total *.

The most direct answer is the one that the OP cites, namely people playing with a hacked account.

Here is a screenshot from my game I took less than 48 hours after the 2014 Holiday Event began. (I have the original with the metadata, but I have edited player names for privacy.) Over 14,000 presents in less than 2 days. Nice.

http://s15.postimg.org/79e1ym6tn/tstohack.jpg

So what's EA to do about the thieves? They don't want to lose whales and other premium players, and banning a hacked account will just cause the banned person to go create a new one. EA can't incentivize paying premium players with special content, because while that would be nice, the hackers would just get the code and insert it into their games. What EA could do would be to analyze player accounts, see who is actually paying, and gift these players with a certain percentage of their yearly purchases back as free donuts. Yeah, yeah, I can already hear the naysayers, but if the problem is big enough, this is a way to reward premium, non-thieving players without unduly imbalancing the game as well as doing something that the hackers can't really get any benefit from (and it's probably far easier to monitor legit, paying players than try to play whack-a-mole with the hackers).

The thing is if it's from gacking, it isn't really lost revenue. Gackers are not people who would be forking over cash if it weren't for their gack.

So since it isn't a loss, and it's such a small fraction of players, they can be ignored.

We're not supposed to discuss the H-word. So I've used a G-word instead.

The only people cheesed by it are neighbors who get jealous. If you don't like their ill gotten gains, simply unfriendly them.

I have a few friends like this too, that will have most (if not all) of the prizes in their town the first & second day of the event. When I visit I try to be quick so I don't see the prizes I don't have yet.

I thought of deleting them, just because I don't like spoilers like that lol....the one I'm thinking of doesn't really visit either & the town is scattered all over the place with no roads etc. Not really my play style, I like to take it slow and win everything over time, not spend $100+ in donuts to get everything first.

grogtheslayer wrote:
With all due respect to the respondents to the OP, while there may be some percentage - a small one, I would think - of people who throw that kind of cash for donuts to rush event counts and unlock all the items, mostly that explanation is almost total *.

The most direct answer is the one that the OP cites, namely people playing with a hacked account.

Here is a screenshot from my game I took less than 48 hours after the 2014 Holiday Event began. (I have the original with the metadata, but I have edited player names for privacy.) Over 14,000 presents in less than 2 days. Nice.

http://s15.postimg.org/79e1ym6tn/tstohack.jpg

So what's EA to do about the thieves? They don't want to lose whales and other premium players, and banning a hacked account will just cause the banned person to go create a new one. EA can't incentivize paying premium players with special content, because while that would be nice, the hackers would just get the code and insert it into their games. What EA could do would be to analyze player accounts, see who is actually paying, and gift these players with a certain percentage of their yearly purchases back as free donuts. Yeah, yeah, I can already hear the naysayers, but if the problem is big enough, this is a way to reward premium, non-thieving players without unduly imbalancing the game as well as doing something that the hackers can't really get any benefit from (and it's probably far easier to monitor legit, paying players than try to play whack-a-mole with the hackers).

Do you know how many people play this game? This forum is probably only about 25% if that. It would take forever for EA to go through everyones towns and decide who's playing and who's not. I don't think they really care that much tbh lol.