So, what're the complaints this year?
"The site's lagged all to hell!"
Tch. the site always lags during events. This is the simple result of tens of thousands of users all hammering the site at hard as they can for hours on end. You can plan for it to some extent, but ultimately it's a case of shoring up the servers with sandbags and lumber, and hoping it holds.
"It's a total spamfest!"
Events are always spamfests. Always. It's all "BUMP TIL U GET [insert event item here]", hundreds and hundreds of threads of it. So this time, it's just a bit more explicitly a spamfest. But if you wanted to, you could make a little thread with your buddies and post away in there without getting too badly spammed - all the spammy types blatantly went for the "150+ ONLY!!! [ZOMG ENFORCED]" threads anyway, seeing as they were so good as to advertise their high grunny-counts in their thread titles. biggrin You could've made it social if you wanted. 3nodding
"Bajillions of bumps just for an avatar change that'll disappear after the event! Lame!"
To get the Stage 5 transformation you need a lot of grunnies. Yup. I've seen you guys bitching about that. OK, well, what would you have done different? Give people an item at Stage 5? Haha, nice, then you get the people who don't have time to spend the whole weekend online complaining because they couldn't get the Stage 5 items, and they're helluva expensive on the marketplace (which was a complaint with last year's G-Corp labcoats). Wah wah wah. You can't please all the people all the time.
Once you've seen what the Stage 5 thing is (and you could find out pretty easily from watching the top ten grunny collectors), if you don't like it you can stop spamming and go back to your normal behaviour, in forums delightfully free of spam because all the spammy goons are over in the event forum. biggrin
"The items suck!"
That's a matter of opinion. I think they're cute. whee Anyway, it's not particularly worth complaining about - the event items hardly took any work at all to get, as thirty five grunnies to get both items should take, what, an hour or two. Then you've got the event items and it's all good! Either that or just buy them on the Marketplace for a pittance, since the market's flooded with 'em anyway.
In short: Whining about how the event sucked doesn't help anyone. Make useful critiques of what you liked, what you didn't like, what could've been done better and how, or quitcherbitchin'. biggrin
As an aside, with all the hatin' being directed at the admins for people's disappointment, I'm not sure how the admins can be held responsible for users being assholes. confused
People could've taken the event two ways:
They could've viewed it as a fun and frivolous game, and enjoyed themselves while spamming away, with the happy end result that they get Stuff (TM) and zombie pixels. They could have helped out those with fewer grunnies than them, and in turn been helped out by those with more. It could've been a happy community-building event of cooperation and communication and bluebirds and rainbows. Some users had a go at this, with communal bump threads where those with more grunnies would help out those with fewer, and it was all cool. That's how it should have been.
Or they could view it as a game that they must win (for whatever they define as winning), a game with optimal play strategies and efficient modes of behaviour and so on, where nothing matters but getting their grunny count as high as they can. This option, which was followed by quite a few users, results in those above getting pissy at those below for interfering with their optimal play strategy, and those below getting pissy at those above for not sharing the good stuff. Everyone's looking out for number one, no one's taking time to help out other people so other people have to take what they need without permission. There's flaming, ignoring, cussing out and all-round bad behaviour as users fixated on "winning the game" cast aside any pretense of polite behaviour in pursuit of their goal.
Basically, the admins can provide the events, but it's up to the users to make of it what they will. Maybe it's foolish for the admins to hope for the best and assume that users won't be self-serving little snots, but I think that, while it might be misguided, it's preferable to reaching a stage of cynicism whereby the default assumption is that users will always make the worst out of any situation.
- Zahir
Community Member