Some notes on today's cert grants

After 23 pages I'm going to assume this is still the main theme so I would ask for a link to the certs for cash page so I can stock up.

Otherwise a bare handful of players compared to the total number of active players got a rather large cert injection.

Now does this make it pay to win? No.

A terrible player with lots of cash is still going to be a terrible player even if he unlocks every single item and perk in the game.

Looking at this....

http://www.planetside-universe.com/character.php?stats=deadtech&tab=events

.... as a paying customer (100 dollars in the game), I feel cheated.
Cheated also for the the time spent honestly getting my certs, by "working" the game.
And I don't like to feel like a turkey, as another guy in this thread rightly said it.

Frankly, something must be done for the paying customers and I DO NOT WANT to get certs freebies like the bingo winners, because this would just ruin my characters progression.

In the meantime, I will still continue to play, because the game is great, but my money is gone for you, SOE, for a long, long, long time.

"What about all the people that bought with SC weapons that got nerfed..."

Like the Anhilinator which costs me 7 real dollars and which is just a buggy piece of useless crap.

Just for the fun, in fact just for me looking like a clown, it was before the training room that I bought the Anihilator, not for no-skill vehicule farming like the latest rocket launchers, but as an emergency measure against lolpoding.
The plan was, when my Vanguard was attacked by a lolpoder, to fire the IR smoke, to get out of the tank and to fire against the ESF with the Anihilator.
A totally useless tactic of course.
It was before the training room.

My dog bought the large weapon pack I was looking at when he jumped up on the keyboard. I got 1400 certs back because I had the only weapon I wanted from the pack already. Im happy SOE, and my dog as well.

the new numbers of players in question, cant be true, imo, because

a) many people of my outfit write about - got "wtf" 5000+ certs for nothing, messages appearing on daily basis btw

b) random guys at Wg, happy bragging about "wtf" certs income. happens often

it appears to me, certs flying left and right. and my observation is just low-time-window i was in game and watching chat window...

Read the EULA

Afaik there is bundle cert compensation, my theory is, that they compensate for bundle price instead of item in that bundle price :/

if they are fair, they should refund _over!_nerfed annihilators .. playing "we are nice" 2:1 card in some cases, playing "eula" card in other. i bought anni with Certs (after long month of lib farming with me as victim)... may the fair come to me, and let me cert reset this useless POS. sorry for offtopic. it is always like this with me if somebody talks about ovenerfed_annie.

"Read the EULA"

I know it.
They can make any weapon totally useless without any problems for their side.
Buch such a game, to last long, must be based on trust.
Why do you think (apart from the certs problem) that many "veteran" guys don't buy new weapons?

So, the "read the Eula, hey you paying clown" attitude is not very clever, on a commercial point of view.

By battle rank 60, you have earned about 20k certs.

I've talked to half a dozen BR 20s-40s who were just given 10k certs or more. How is this not game breaking?

Just refund their damn money. Why would you refund people with a different currency than they used to pay? This makes those getting the refund perfectly happy as Certifications are much more valued than SC, but it screws over the rest of us who have worked hard for our certs and still have many tens of thousands of certs left to earn.

It also has the effect of keeping those who got these massive refunds supplying SOE with income. Clearly people buying these massive bundles on multiple characters are the top spenders in Planetside. If they'd been given back 10k station cash instead of 10k certs, there is no way they'd be buying any SC cards in the future. SOE is banking on them spending up that massive amounts of certs in short order before shiny new weapons are released.

Really, shameful greedy decisions on SOE's part that make it clear they care far more about padding their bank accounts than creating a great game. Roll back the damn servers, fix this fiasco, and do a normal refund like a normal company that gives a **** about its customers.

Because the "game-breaking" options they can unlock with those certs (whatever you might consider those to be) are available to everyone. There are 207 BR60+ on Briggs, do you log out every time a high battle rank kills you?

There are 207 BR60+ on Briggs, do you log out every time a high battle rank kills you?

Nice trollin, bro. Didn't say anything about rage quitting or how this affects me in individual combat. Point is, and I don't see how you can deny, that part of the game is earning certs to increase your effectiveness and versatility and there's been an understanding that certs are tied to how many points you get.

Ultimately, ignore all that. Not interested in how you can pick apart arguments. Real question to deal with is: Why would they refund certs when people paid SC? Anyone have an answer to that, other than SOE is a bunch of greedy *****?

Certs, unlike weapon purchases, are not sidegrades. They literally make your character better. What's even more a pretentious disregard for the time and dedication spent by their playerbase to advance and earn those certifications- The refunds were given across every single alt-character of the account. Players with multiple alts who were refunded (even appropriately) 20k+ certs were essentially just handed multiple BR 60s. This is inexcusable.

This is Open letter to Higby by TheDukeOfBreakfast. i copy and pasted it here in official thread, so higby have a chance to read it.

---------

To Higby, Smedley, and all the Planetside 2 dev team,

This open letter is intended to convince you, without recourse to insults, demands and recriminations, to reverse your recent cert payout for duplicate item purchases.

We know that you guys are really overworked. We know you put huge effort and long hours into creating new content for Planetside 2, refining the gameplay, and generally keeping the game fun for your players. Too often the silent majority don’t voice our appreciation of the work that you do. Instead every change you make is accompanied by angry demands and howls of complaint from an entitled but unfortunately vocal minority. It’s a poor reward and it must be tough.

But the vast majority of us do appreciate the work you do and love the game you’ve made. We know you implemented account-wide item unlocks, even though you didn’t have to, because you wanted to treat your community well. We also appreciate that you didn’t have to give out a cert bonus to those who had previously bought duplicate items for alt characters or in bundles: it was a discretionary goodwill gesture to your community. It said a lot about your generosity and positive attitude towards your playerbase.

We do also realise that mistakes can happen. And the overwhelming consensus is now clearly that the cert payout was a mistake. Among the players, the majority view is that the payouts were unsuitable and over-generous; in a small minority of cases, enormously so. Many players (myself included) have received thousands or even tens of thousands of certs, the equivalent of many weeks’ or months’ playtime. In the “1 SC = 2 certs” calculations you used, there are a great many documented cases of players receiving the equivalent of hundreds of dollars of payout. Even if your investigations have uncovered no error in your database script, and people are receiving the certs as you are intended, this is enormously and disproportionately generous and game-affecting.

People rightly feel that this was arbitrary, and that players have been entered unwittingly into a PS2 sweepstakes with the winners being granted a sizeable gameplay and monetary advantage. Despite some trolling comments to that effect, this is not an issue of jealousy: nobody is seriously suggesting that everyone should be given tens of thousands of certs because a tiny minority received them. Amongst players I know, those who received large (1000+) or even huge (30,000+) cert payouts have voiced disappointment. Even though they play for fun, not for unlocks, it has hollowed out any legitimate sense of achievement or progress they attached to the certs they had earned through playing.

The payout has also shaken the community’s confidence in Planetside 2’s game economy. Whatever the noble instincts behind it, and however small the minority might be who benefited, giving some players these large payouts in compensation for relatively inexpensive repeat purchases has undermined the perceived value of in-game items like Boosts, monthly Premium subscriptions, and Alpha Squad membership. People bought those things because they wanted to support the game and make it a success, and felt they were being rewarded for their contribution. They have a reason to feel unfairly treated when their dozens or hundreds of dollars’ of support are dwarfed by an arbitrary and discretionary payout for a minority issue.

It’s not just players who feel this way: it’s clear that the dev team and SOE policymakers are also unanimous in thinking the cert payout was a major misstep. That much is obvious from Higby’s official statement on the issue, which goes so far as to call the payout a “mistake” and states that revisions to company policy mean this won’t be repeated in the future.

There is clear consensus on both sides, therefore, that the payout was a mistake. The issue becomes what to do to fix it. SOE’s current policy, stated through Higby, is that the payouts will be allowed to stand, because (in so many words) “the mistake was SOE’s and we aren’t going to punish players for our error.” Although obviously there were good intentions behind this decision, it is gravely misguided.

It was a mistake to make the cert payout. It would be a far greater mistake not to correct it while you still have chance.

First, although it would obviously be painful to roll back the servers to a point before the cert payout, it would be a momentary pain. The players will have to deal with the consequences of SOE’s error and the loss of a day or two’s play, but will recover. Leaving the issue to fester, on the other hand, means it will continue to hurt indefinitely.

Second, by taking back the cert payout you are not “punishing” the players who benefited from it (myself included). Players buying items in the past had very clear warnings and full knowledge that unlocks were character-specific. They were explicitly told when buying duplicate items within bundles that they received no discount or additional copies of the item. They contracted on those terms. They are not “entitled” to a refund and have no “right” to compensation. Anything given back by SOE to those players is discretionary and based on goodwill. Players who were given certs were being offered a pleasant and unexpected bonus; altering or redacting that gift now, for everyone’s sake, is not depriving them.

Third, the cert payout risks fundamentally damaging Planetside 2’s integrity as a game. Games require their players to suspend disbelief and to invest themselves into their mechanics. That requires consistent rules that the players know and can appreciate in advance. Suddenly remunerating a small minority of players, for an arbitrary purchasing habit, with something that others understood could only be attained by hundreds of hours of play and/or considerable monetary investment, is an egregious abuse of the “game rules” as the players perceive them. When a game’s rules are openly abused and applied inconsistently, they are exposed as fictions. When the rules are exposed as fictions, the game becomes a farce. Players will stop “believing” in them and will stop playing soon after.

Fourthly, this cert payout is not in SOE’s financial interests, and thus not in the interests of PS2’s future. It is going to hurt SOE’s bottom line significantly. F2P games rely on a committed and paying minority funding the overall costs of running the game. You have elected to give some of those players an enormous cert bonus. This has negated the appeal or purpose, to those players, of several key recurring revenue streams in the game: weekly Boosts and monthly subscriptions. Those players are going to stop giving you their money, as they have no need to. Furthermore, other players who are upset at the situation are having their confidence in the game’s economy broken down. Notwithstanding that some players may leave entirely, the rest will have their perception of the value of boosts, subscriptions and so on undermined. This will depreciate the amount they fund your game.

Therefore, Higby, SOE, et al: it is absolutely imperative that you reverse the cert payout at once.

If needs be, roll back the servers. Time is of the essence: it has already been 48 hours and the longer it goes on, the more painful it will be. But it can still be done. Correct your mistake, roll back the servers, apologise to your players for your error, and if needs be show them all some goodwill for their inconvenience. A couple of hundred certs, or a nominal cosmetic item, would show enough good faith.

If you are unable or unwilling to do a roll-back, a viable alternative would be to run a reverse of your database script. Reset all players’ certs, free of charge. Let them keep their stats from the last few days and any items they unlocked with Station Cash; but relock items they bought with certs. Then deduct any cert points you gifted them from their cert bank. Then let them cert themselves back up. Many players would be grateful just for the chance to re-roll their characters anyway.

As for players who did buy significant quantities of duplicate items: we know you do not have authority or means to refund them Station Cash. They are not contractually entitled to it. Offer them an alternative reward: a reskin of whatever common-pool guns they bought in duplicate; a token to unlock a new special-edition item (cosmetic or weapon) to be released in the future; a decal. But not this. Not weeks’ or months’ worth of certs.

Please, SOE, put your mistake right while there’s still time.


Please note the views contained herein are entirely my own. They are not condoned or endorsed by my outfit or meant to reflect on their official position on this issue etc. etc.

2000 certs isn't that big a deal.

But just as a statto and wary of these kinds of answers in general; is that 5% of all people active in the last month, 5% of paying players, or 5% of all accounts since you launched? Because 5% of the player population when only (say) 5.1% have actually paid for SC clearly is a very high percentage of error.

In a (non significant admittedly) sample of our outfit, 3 out of the 15 or so I spoke to would be in that 0.03% - which clearly doesn't stack up ... roughly by a factor of 100

Roll back and fix the mistakes!

Reverse your recent cert payout for duplicate item purchases.

Too bad no mention of a total recertification. That would have been key imo. An olive branch to the level-headed of the mob.

And some of those that got 100k certs are probably dead accounts too... given the low BRs on them. Plus multiple characters likely belong to the same person.

Its insignificant, but people will make a mountain over a molehill, cuz they got and I didn't.

-.-

[offtopic] hey, devs, how long you need to fix Convergence issues, forhonestsake ?

Mob? What mob? If this was really an issue this thread would be in the hundreds of pages not stalling out at 24 with less than 40 unique posters.

You guys have yet to see an honest threadnaught of really irritated players and I doubt you ever will unless soe really screws up by the numbers in some future event.