Welcome to the Wizard101 Message Boards

I will tell you exactly what happened. KI is to cheap to let us get mega snacks from waterworks so they took it away. Now you can only get mega snacks from certain plants and buying them from crown shop. But i am thinking in the future they will take mega snacks away from gardens cause that is just how cheap they are. But then you have to look at the other side of the problem. They only did that cause they need the money to buy new content to add to the game. Without the money there would be no new stuff, KI would go bankrupt and probably have to shut the game down. So there is a good side of this and a bad side.

vader1004 wrote:

I will tell you exactly what happened. KI is to cheap to let us get mega snacks from waterworks so they took it away. Now you can only get mega snacks from certain plants and buying them from crown shop. But i am thinking in the future they will take mega snacks away from gardens cause that is just how cheap they are. But then you have to look at the other side of the problem. They only did that cause they need the money to buy new content to add to the game. Without the money there would be no new stuff, KI would go bankrupt and probably have to shut the game down. So there is a good side of this and a bad side.

I agree with your cheap assessment. Wizards101 must become aware of how upset and disloyal its player base is likely to become when the players lack a way of training up pets without spending tons of money or tossing away their real lives doing the same tedious pet games over and over and over and over again. I quit games for those types of reasons as I'm sure many others do as well. The mega snacks is a high level type thing to go for and the time requirement needed to get those snacks from water works was a balanced and fair trade off of effort and time and gave high level players a reason to play.

Now I see that gambling for the best equipment in booster packs is becoming more prevelent in this game, and again I think illy of Wizards101 as being cheap. When the best equipment is from blister packs and cash shops I tend to quit whatever game it is as it stops being about playing and more about cash. Wizards101 is supposed to be a children and family friendly game, blister pack gambling kind of ruins that for me. Just chatting with the players in the game displays to me that they are looking at gambling as something that is more normal and acceptable than ever. I don't really want to teach children that they should gamble, it just seems like it is soo very wrong to indoctrinate children into this type of thinking for cash greed. I don't mind the packs for cosmetics and mounts which are again cosmetics, but when it comes to equipment to me it changes the game away from being child and family friendly. I personally don't want to play popularity through cash games, and hote what they say about our society.

I agree 110% with seasnake Wizard 101 brags about it's 20 million player base at worst all family acounts at $6.95 each = $139 million a month in subscription fees Does KI really need the $ from a crown shop to stay afloat and introduce value that is not so great to children.

If all the best gears are crowns ownly at least at 1st not to mention just easier to get which basically teaches kids why work for it easier to just buy your way through.

Then go the way of other so called free to play MMO's and dont have a monthly subscription just put everything in crown shop.

C'mon want to be a Family Game and boast yourself to be such a game then uphold some family values.

Thank you

norr4687 wrote:

I wrote to KI about this and how I felt about it. This is what they send me as a response.

Hi there!

It seems that Luska has figured out that everyone is stealing his items and has found a new way of hiding them so he won't lose them anymore.

It may take a while before he feels safe enough to bring them back out into the open at the same rate again for you young wizards to get your hands on again.

Regards,
KingsIsle Support

This is what they told me. Now weather or not this post get through is up to them. I should also tell you that I sent a message back to them. Telling them that I was offended by the fact that they included me in this statement by saying everyone. I feel I deserve an apology. And others who also did not "steal" deserve an apology too!

that sounds like their polite way of telling you that they don't care

norr4687 wrote:

I wrote to KI about this and how I felt about it. This is what they send me as a response.

Hi there!

It seems that Luska has figured out that everyone is stealing his items and has found a new way of hiding them so he won't lose them anymore.

It may take a while before he feels safe enough to bring them back out into the open at the same rate again for you young wizards to get your hands on again.

Regards,
KingsIsle Support

This is what they told me. Now weather or not this post get through is up to them. I should also tell you that I sent a message back to them. Telling them that I was offended by the fact that they included me in this statement by saying everyone. I feel I deserve an apology. And others who also did not "steal" deserve an apology too!

Maybe we could hit luska in the head with a brick, he would get amnesia and and forget that young wizards are " stealing " his stuff. First we just need to find some bricks. Now lets see where did i leave those bricks...

norr4687 wrote:

I wrote to KI about this and how I felt about it. This is what they send me as a response.

Hi there!

It seems that Luska has figured out that everyone is stealing his items and has found a new way of hiding them so he won't lose them anymore.

It may take a while before he feels safe enough to bring them back out into the open at the same rate again for you young wizards to get your hands on again.

Regards,
KingsIsle Support

This is what they told me. Now weather or not this post get through is up to them. I should also tell you that I sent a message back to them. Telling them that I was offended by the fact that they included me in this statement by saying everyone. I feel I deserve an apology. And others who also did not "steal" deserve an apology too!

I found KI’s response to this rather interesting. It struck me as somewhat childish – “You aren’t playing fair, so I’m not going to play anymore.” I glad by the way, that KI came back with the apology and explanation that they were responding in character. While I generally do appreciate KI’s humor in their efforts to uphold the sense of the game in all areas, they fell a bit flat on that one.

However, with respect, I see a rather disappointing trend here. It seems KI wants to punish its customers for using its game in a way they did not intend. This is something that makes no sense to me. When they send their product to test realm to work out the bugs, they get a small percentage of customers that do just that. They try the product and report the problems they find. Do these testers find all the bugs in the system? No, they don’t. Clearly that is evidenced in the number of patches that are always made after any new release goes live. Why is this the case? Because you have a much larger sample of people using the product and thus more problems are likely to be uncovered. The larger customer base actually is helping KI create a better product, one that works the way it is supposed to.

How is finding out about things like Luska any different? It shouldn’t be. Yes, it may take longer for such a thing to show up and be discovered, but in the end, KI has the opportunity fix the problem, to make it work the way they intended. But, for KI it isn’t ending there. They seem to feel the need to punish their customers for a perceived misdeed. Perhaps I don’t look to the negative side of things that often and don’t see the problem. I don’t think the first person to find this sort of thing thought “Wow I’m the first to find this, I should report this.” I think it is much more likely they think that’s kind of cool, and they start to tell people because they wonder if others have heard of it or seen it happen. Before you know it, many people have heard of it, but perhaps no one thinks to report it because surely someone has already reported it. Even if someone recognizes that this might be something KI would consider an exploit, they still might not report it, because again, surely KI knows about this already. After all, it is being talked about all over. I just don’t see malicious intent that deserves punishment. I see it as an opportunity to create a better, product that works the way it is intended. I think KI should be happy that they don’t have a pharmaceutical product that made it through “Beta testing” but when it made it to the mass markets, a problem was discovered, injury occurred, and they got sued for it before they could improve the product.

norr4687 wrote:


that sounds like their polite way of telling you that they don't care

seasnake your right they prob dont really care. But I do have to say the did send an apology. Said they where just answering with an in caraecter response. While at the same time yelling with all caps. I guess most the people I have seen saying they are greedy is true. Still not sure where I stand on that though.

Maybe we could hit luska in the head with a brick, he would get amnesia and and forget that young wizards are " stealing " his stuff. First we just need to find some bricks. Now lets see where did i leave those bricks...

LOL vader1004 thats to funny. Maybe we can just keep asking nicely for them to fix it though. But I dont really think they are listening to us.

Asking a billion times solves nothing. Hitting a certain squid in the head with a brick solves problems

Yes, all I see it as is KI finding another way to make more money and get people to pay for more game time. I see it like this, take away the mega snacks people can earn from waterworks that help speed up pet leveling progression, people spend longer training pets less time working on characters or other projects. The more time people waste on leveling their pets the more game time they pay for to make up for time lost working on characters or other projects or vice versa working on characters or other projects first and not having enough time to work on their pets. This or now being forced to buy mega snack packs off the crown shop. I believe if KI was fair about this and willing to compensate for removing the mega snacks they should reduce the amount of experience it takes for a pet to reach epic take it down from 1000 to 725 that's if they actually really cared I would really like to see a Reasonable response from the staff to this Forum other than this lame excuse

"It seems that Luska has figured out that everyone is stealing his items and has found a new way of hiding them so he won't lose them anymore.

It may take a while before he feels safe enough to bring them back out into the open at the same rate again for you young wizards to get your hands on again."

p.s why even offer mega snacks as a drop in water works in the first place if you didn't want people to farm them? you must of expected that people would?

This is nothing new, just a continuation of a trend.
When the bazaar first opened, you could buy and sell crowns items for gold. That was taken away. And trust me, I would so love to sell my level 5-10-15 crowns items for gold at the bazaar and know some lowbie could use them, than selling them to an NPC for a pittance.
You could also buy and sell dropped pets at the bazaar. That was taken away. So what can I do with 6 extra Greater Imp pets? NPC sell them. And it would not cost KI a darn thing to let those be sold in Bazaar because they are not a crowns pet.
Bosses used to drop permanent mounts. That was taken away and though we were told that it would be back in a couple months (in August 2010), I have not seen it yet.
You used to be able to enchant treasure cards ahead of time so you didn't have to have a deck full of enchants when going to solo a boss. That was taken away.
And even their sister site, KIFreeGames is pulling the same stunts. They announce that for August you could win permanent mounts and crowns. Then the site goes down to 'update codes' from mid-August until September 1st when now all you win is low level snacks and reagents. Half an hour and half a million points nets you a peanut and an acorn. I can get those on a free account in Triton Avenue. What a bonus.
KI will never accept that things don't work quite like they planned and leave a beneficial item in place for the players, they will just take it away after you get used to it. So....get used to it.

seasnake wrote:

there wasn't any abuse here that I can see though... the lower level players struggled in WaterWorks and didn't want to do it, the higher level players kept doing WaterWorks over and over again for the food cause it was the only thing for them to really do that helped with things any longer

now that the food is gone, my maxed out friends and I no longer have anything to really do as taking a month to level up a pet isn't viable for us to remain playing in the game... going for food was one of the very few top level things that allowed those that had everything maxed to do anything, not being able to do anything with my friends is a game killer for me

I do not have much anger towards KI, for I know they are playing a balancing game and cannot please everybody. That being said, my playing time has drastically reduced because of this very thing. Megasnack farming was tedious to begin with and now there just isn't enough to keep me logged in.

I simply tell myself to be patient.


Devin Darksong – lvl 60 Death
Digby Darksong – lvl 60 Life
Duncan Darksong – lvl 60 balance
Dylan Darksong – lvl 60 Storm
Dustan Darksong – lvl 60 Myth
Dolan Darksong – lvl 60 Ice

natenkate wrote:

And even their sister site, KIFreeGames is pulling the same stunts. They announce that for August you could win permanent mounts and crowns. Then the site goes down to 'update codes' from mid-August until September 1st when now all you win is low level snacks and reagents. Half an hour and half a million points nets you a peanut and an acorn. I can get those on a free account in Triton Avenue. What a bonus.
KI will never accept that things don't work quite like they planned and leave a beneficial item in place for the players, they will just take it away after you get used to it. So....get used to it.

Sorry left this part off post i just wrote.

I play Doodle Dug at KIfreegames 1st reward "tier1" 1500 points easy to get yes.

Games there work in tiers 1-7 ever notice item choices are the same reguardless of score just more of them also anyone notice they lowered the gold award amounts lol.

Suggestion higher the score/tier along with the multiple drop that the quality also increase.

Otherwise alot easier to just play game to its minimum requirement to receive a prize than shoot for highest to tier to receive 3 of that same quality of prize.

But either way Kifreegames is just that free!

But more would visit with a little tweak.

Just a Thought

I'm not angry with KI so much as frustrated and confused, and feeling somewhat disappointed in the apparent lack of respect they are giving us. I don't begrudge them a profit, I understand they need that as much as the rest of us do. And yes 130 something million a month sounds like a heck of lot of money even with expenses taken out, but I know that isn't what they are actually getting. Many people just bought areas rather than subscriptions, so we have no way of knowing if the 20 million members is actual users or just subscribers. KI is a privately owned business so they aren't on the Stock Exchange, so we have no real data on their profitability.

That being said, I can't see how 2 guaranteed mega snacks going through a tower that takes a good team an hour to do, and bad teams much longer is going to break them. It gave legendary wizards something to do, something to work for. And it gave them time to be with friends to work together and visit with each other. KI certainly has the right to do what ever they choose in programming the game as they see fit. But this certainly could have been handled much better. They had to know when they posted in the maintenance that they were adjusting snack drop rates with Luska and Sylster that people automatically thought they would be getting the 2 snacks back. If they had warned us, communicated with us up front that this was not to be the case, I don't think the disappointment would have been so great.

As it is, the effects of this action are already being seen. There are a great many "perfect" realms available out there even at hours that the realms were always packed. And I've noticed in passing through the Commons, that there aren't crowds there as well. So, I guess for those that were suffering from lag from overcrowded servers this is a good thing. And there are less scammers and rude comments going on in the commons now, there just aren't the number of people to make it worthwhile I guess, so that is good too. And come 2012, when KI starts bringing in the 10's of millions of Chinese subscribers that have been reported to be anxiously awaiting Wizard101's arrival there, everything will work out for them.