Okay, Most of you may notice that I almost never post anything of the forums and may be wondering who I am. I will start off by answering this, I am a member of the community that is active many times a day and have forged very strong friendships on this game. In my time I have ran multi-factionwide alliances and many companies. I wanted to make this point clear so you can understand my choices and how badly this has affected me.
A long time ago I started a sports company for the reason that at the time I wanted to fully focus my training on defence. The bonuses at the time were strength training, defence training and I believe the last one was higher gym gains. It was what I knew a lot of my friends also needed at the time so I started the company, invested in it etc. You get the idea.
It irked the hell out of me when without warning the main reason I started the company was removed but I let that go, we could still train str, sure it was now real limited but it was fine, i guess. I let it go, I didn't complain I just accepted this is what ched does some times (Having done similar things in the past such as removing entire features in which people have invested in (Giving only a handful of players notice who used that info to protect themselves i might add)).
So that was probably close to 3000 days ago. The one thing I knew is that not everyone would be active at once. I am not the kind of leader to ruthlessly kick people away when life gets busy, the main principal of my choices was that I would be here for my friends. If they went inactive for long periods then I would still be here for them when they came back. Newer players I would offer this same creedo, They dont need to worry about being booted from the company for small periods of inactivity, I never cared about being profitable or efficient, witht he 50% hit I could just about manage keeping a high rank so everyone could get a decent amount of points to put into training, at a huge personal cost over a long time.
I could rationalise the investment as going towards something useful for many people. When friends would return after a period of inactivity they would find they had a lot of points built up to invest into their strength, amung many other things.
So let us fast forward this story to 2 weeks ago, I noticed the company took a 90% hit to income overnight. I'm not one for reading the recent wall of text change logs so it took a few days of this confusion to find it and realize what had happened. Instead of inactive people dropping eff to 50%, now they dropped to 0%. This is such a mind boggling change, if it were dropped to 25% it could be more understandable but a straight out 0 is insanity to me. The only way to keep a company above a low rank now would be to mercilessly boot anyone who is inactive for longer than a day or two. So this change means that running a company for the benefit of friends who only periodically play is impossible now.
For the last two weeks I have watched my company downrank twice, soon to be 3 I imagine on writing of this post. We were on the 2nd page of highest earners (Even with the inactives) and now on last check I was on page 7, probably further back now. My entire reason for owning this company is being erased, I maintained it to be useful, but it is clear the down ranking wont stop unless I kick out those who I made it for in the first place or to be whittled down to earning one point a day which is not worth holding at that point.
I was stewing on this until i saw the newspaper article earlier. I want to air my grievances at the two statements ched answered with.
In regards to the change in the first place.
"It was a highly rated suggestion. I don't think that's an unintended consequence, that was the entire point of the suggestion. I voiced my concerns within the suggestion, but yielded due to the high level of support on all fronts."
Just because an idea gains support doesn't mean it;s a good idea. Quite often the case is that people want something for personal benefit and often don't care about the longer term ramifications for it. As a developer it is your job to understand this, if you don't agree with an idea why the hell would you adopt it without trying to find a more comfortable middleground?
In regards to why no warning was given.
"Is it worth it? Making a change like this is one thing, but having to prepare it, announce it with a deadline, and release it only at a future point in time turns it into this whole 'big thing'. At most, it's just an inconvenience to the (mostly inactive) directors who already had inactive employees at 50% effectiveness, and could have replaced them if they wanted to."
Now this one irks me the most and made me write this. Your reasoning for not giving warning is you didn't want to make it a big thing? Well what about for those it would affect? Was it not a big thing already?. With two weeks I could have gotten in contact with the crew, came to a choice about how to handle things and make a reasoned chocie before becoming frustrated by a system that out of left field began to screw over something that I had worked hard to keep balanced. Your reasoning that the only people it would affect would be mostly inactive directors is in my opinion a narrow minded conjecture to diminish responsibility for the actions taken. I think the truth is you just didn't care, and if you had said that I wouldn't have had a problem, we are all subject to the whims of the higher powers.
So I accept I am going to get a LOT of hate for this post. I'm beyond caring about that. I have been on this game for way longer than I care to count and this is certainly not the first thing to have royally annoyed me. I think the reason I felt the need to vent right now is just how... is just how little ched seemed to care about the potential impact, something I could say about many choices made with this game. Need I remind everyone of the pet's fiasco?
So yeah. Feel free to ignore me, I just felt the need to vent.
A long time ago I started a sports company for the reason that at the time I wanted to fully focus my training on defence. The bonuses at the time were strength training, defence training and I believe the last one was higher gym gains. It was what I knew a lot of my friends also needed at the time so I started the company, invested in it etc. You get the idea.
It irked the hell out of me when without warning the main reason I started the company was removed but I let that go, we could still train str, sure it was now real limited but it was fine, i guess. I let it go, I didn't complain I just accepted this is what ched does some times (Having done similar things in the past such as removing entire features in which people have invested in (Giving only a handful of players notice who used that info to protect themselves i might add)).
So that was probably close to 3000 days ago. The one thing I knew is that not everyone would be active at once. I am not the kind of leader to ruthlessly kick people away when life gets busy, the main principal of my choices was that I would be here for my friends. If they went inactive for long periods then I would still be here for them when they came back. Newer players I would offer this same creedo, They dont need to worry about being booted from the company for small periods of inactivity, I never cared about being profitable or efficient, witht he 50% hit I could just about manage keeping a high rank so everyone could get a decent amount of points to put into training, at a huge personal cost over a long time.
I could rationalise the investment as going towards something useful for many people. When friends would return after a period of inactivity they would find they had a lot of points built up to invest into their strength, amung many other things.
So let us fast forward this story to 2 weeks ago, I noticed the company took a 90% hit to income overnight. I'm not one for reading the recent wall of text change logs so it took a few days of this confusion to find it and realize what had happened. Instead of inactive people dropping eff to 50%, now they dropped to 0%. This is such a mind boggling change, if it were dropped to 25% it could be more understandable but a straight out 0 is insanity to me. The only way to keep a company above a low rank now would be to mercilessly boot anyone who is inactive for longer than a day or two. So this change means that running a company for the benefit of friends who only periodically play is impossible now.
For the last two weeks I have watched my company downrank twice, soon to be 3 I imagine on writing of this post. We were on the 2nd page of highest earners (Even with the inactives) and now on last check I was on page 7, probably further back now. My entire reason for owning this company is being erased, I maintained it to be useful, but it is clear the down ranking wont stop unless I kick out those who I made it for in the first place or to be whittled down to earning one point a day which is not worth holding at that point.
I was stewing on this until i saw the newspaper article earlier. I want to air my grievances at the two statements ched answered with.
In regards to the change in the first place.
"It was a highly rated suggestion. I don't think that's an unintended consequence, that was the entire point of the suggestion. I voiced my concerns within the suggestion, but yielded due to the high level of support on all fronts."
Just because an idea gains support doesn't mean it;s a good idea. Quite often the case is that people want something for personal benefit and often don't care about the longer term ramifications for it. As a developer it is your job to understand this, if you don't agree with an idea why the hell would you adopt it without trying to find a more comfortable middleground?
In regards to why no warning was given.
"Is it worth it? Making a change like this is one thing, but having to prepare it, announce it with a deadline, and release it only at a future point in time turns it into this whole 'big thing'. At most, it's just an inconvenience to the (mostly inactive) directors who already had inactive employees at 50% effectiveness, and could have replaced them if they wanted to."
Now this one irks me the most and made me write this. Your reasoning for not giving warning is you didn't want to make it a big thing? Well what about for those it would affect? Was it not a big thing already?. With two weeks I could have gotten in contact with the crew, came to a choice about how to handle things and make a reasoned chocie before becoming frustrated by a system that out of left field began to screw over something that I had worked hard to keep balanced. Your reasoning that the only people it would affect would be mostly inactive directors is in my opinion a narrow minded conjecture to diminish responsibility for the actions taken. I think the truth is you just didn't care, and if you had said that I wouldn't have had a problem, we are all subject to the whims of the higher powers.
So I accept I am going to get a LOT of hate for this post. I'm beyond caring about that. I have been on this game for way longer than I care to count and this is certainly not the first thing to have royally annoyed me. I think the reason I felt the need to vent right now is just how... is just how little ched seemed to care about the potential impact, something I could say about many choices made with this game. Need I remind everyone of the pet's fiasco?
So yeah. Feel free to ignore me, I just felt the need to vent.