Profile of theblitz6794

Dear Company of Heroes fans:

It’s been nearly a month since the launch of the Western Front Armies, and we wanted to take a moment to address community feedback surrounding the War Spoils system.

Our intention behind the War Spoils system was to create another avenue to introduce new content to our players. War Spoils is part of an effort to create an ecosystem where players earn additional premium content just by playing the game. Before its existence, certain types of content were only available through a physical purchase and though not intended, we recognize this created a ‘pay to win ’ perception with some playing our competitive multiplayer mode.

We put the War Spoils system through user and player testing, sourcing feedback on it prior to its release. During Alpha testing the system dropped timed/temporary items. The feedback on this was overwhelming: players wanted to be able to keep their rewards. Based on this, we changed the system so that any items dropped were permanent. In order to balance the system and create consistent drops for all players, it became necessary to drop duplicate items. We have been planning on adding value to duplicate items since the shift, but also wanted to roll out the initial system so that it could launch with the Western Front Armies release. Our intent has always been to see the War Spoils system evolve over time. As a thank-you to all of our existing users, we granted them with every piece of legacy progression content from the previous system. In giving away this legacy content, we created an increased likelihood of existing players receiving duplicate items from a War Spoils drop. We realize there is still more work to be done.

To date, the War Spoils system has dropped over 527,832 content items. We would like to advise players to not delete duplicate content you receive, as value will be added to these items as the system evolves.



From observations and interactions with the community, we’ve identified the following issues as high priority to address

A purpose and value for duplicate items
A need for correlation between skill/game outcome: If you have an awesome game, the system should account for that
The inclusion of Western Front Armies Commanders in the store, available for purchase


So What’s Next?

Starting on Tuesday, July 22nd you will start to see Western Front Armies Commanders in the Free Commander Rotation. We will continue to also feature other commanders, ensuring that players who don’t yet own the Western Front Armies still get to try premium content.

In addition to placing the Western Front Armies Commanders in the Free Rotation, we will be adding them to the Steam store for purchase on July 23rd. We have received requests for this, and it is something that we can quickly move on. We will NOT be walking away from the War Spoils system once Commanders are available for purchase, and want you to know that we will still very much be working to refine the system. We recognize that while many players have been very vocal about wanting to purchase Commanders, there are those that would prefer we improve the War Spoils system. We will be working towards doing both. Our team is dedicated to investing the time needed to make refinements to the War Spoils system, and we will continue to read, solicit and consider your comments. We are not done working to improve your gameplay experience – this is something we will always be working on.

We encourage our players to continue sharing their thoughts and feedback on the War Spoils system, and there are currently two ongoing threads where this can be done. You can do so on Steam here and in our own forums here. We are reading and monitoring both of these threads.

As our efforts progress in refining the War Spoils system, we will continue to communicate with our fans.

The Relic Team

Jump back to quoted post20 Jul 2014, 04:45 AMLucas Troy

Sorry, I wrote than in a misleading way - the stars weren't "taken away," it was just that they stopped giving them out, so they never lost their rewards, just stopped getting new ones. The conclusion: giving out the stars motivated the kids, but trained them to place less value on reading itself.

You know when people say "I played for three hours and got nothing but a stupid face plate, why bother"? That's what I mean. They were playing before with no possibility of a reward, but with random rewards thrown into the equation, the playing itself loses some of its value for some reason.

edit:

Maybe this is a psychology experiment?

"What if we took something that people already did for fun, and then attached an aggravating award system to it?" It's actually fascinating.