This “issue” is pretty similar to the whole token thing I wrote about a little bit back; people don’t like receiving a chance to get something as something they are given - whether it be compensation, a gift, or anything else you are given. It sucks getting a gift that may or may not actually be something.
How awesome would it be if your significant other walked up to you with three envelopes and said, “Pick one”, and only one had a gift in it? Pretty damn awful.
I’m not upset that we didn’t really “get” anything, but I do think it’s odd that they didn’t at least ship some tokens/ISO-8/Hero Points out to everyone. It’s simple, easy, and effective. If they sent out an e-mail to everyone saying that they received some bonus package for the holidays, they might even drag some people back.
I would even say I’m “okay” with the fact our gift was 20-man Lightning Rounds, even though I didn’t get to participate in them at all.
Here’s the thing though, and I’ll use a personal example. On my phone, I used to play this game called Lies of Astaroth. It was a fun game for quite a bit of time, but after awhile I got bored of the having to grind for three hours before I could get past the next “event”. Eventually I uninstalled it because all I was doing was logging in for daily rewards, which are cumulative in this game - so if I miss a day, I miss a bunch of rewards for the month - and I just stopped after awhile and a little bit after that I was uninstalling things to install new things and it went out the door. Well, low and behold, the game makers make a post on their Facebook page (as well as e-mailing me at the e-mail I registered to the game with) about sending everybody a bunch of materials. I mean a bunch. Each player who is over level 5 received a “Christmas Gift Pack” which contains 300 Crystals, 10 Magic Cards, 30 Universal 4-star Scraps, 100 Universal 3-star Scraps. Crystals are an in-game currencies you can buy card packs with. Magic Cards are kind of like Heroic Tokens, except sort of better because they guarantee a certain rarity of card (but in all fairness they balance this by having some suboptimal cards in those rarities). The scraps are used to make cards of the applicable level, but this is of course very random, and can require a lot of pieces. My point is, I downloaded it again that day and I’ve been playing it again, albeit lightly, because the same problems are still there, but they are slightly elevated by the gifts I was given.
Bottom line, it costs them literally nothing to give a small hand-me-out to the player base for the holiday, but if they want to do something unique like special Lightning Rounds - tell us beforehand so we know - I’m all for special events for holidays, even if it’s something simple like a 20-man Lightning Round, but I want to know that.
