Fixed the link so it didn't have the space at the end!
Also, fun fact: There was a reddit mod who won't be named that cried about us never linking our sources and we were a bunch of scumbags because of that. They were clearly too stupid to click on the author of the blue post block - and you just proved that the links are readily available.
Your frustration makes sense. This is also the first inn-vitational where we have a smaller overall team and up until a couple weeks ago I was the only publishing person. Thankfully we have a new social manager that was able to promote this at all. It’s not ideal to us either.
I understand they're short staffed, but I just find it so hard to believe there wasn't anyone who was able to put something small together to just tell people it was happening via an official blog. Blizzard has such an unbelievable amount of red tape they can't get anything done. Which is very funny considering the thread that Dean wrote late tonight which has as a part of it:
The group ultimately responsible for making a decision on a given feature should be small. Really small. Like 1 person, maybe 2. Not a voting system, not a design leadership group, not even a a director group. One or two people who are actively working on the thing.
Now, of course, they are completely different teams at the company, but its just such an entertaining yet bewildering contrast. I'm so glad I'm not in that kind of position and I hope that anyone else on staff here never has to go through a million processes to get something live.
There's a ton of extra stuff to spend stuff on this year. It wasn't really our intention to let you get everything, it's stuff to work towards in the future and I expect our Winter event this year will be much the same. I believe giving people more options is nice because they can pick their own priorities of what is the coolest to them and that means we might end up seeing quite a bit of variety across the site for the next year.
Everyone who participated every day should have been able to earn over 1000 candy, which is enough for all 3 borders and a couple of extra things. The Little Devil Teemo stuff sitting at 666 candy was there as an "ultra-rare" fun thing to do and I would not have expected many people to go for it.
So here's the Candy breakdown (Oozefest lasts 28 days):
560 Candy from Trick or Treating
Everyone was able to visit 20 houses per day. (28x20)
400 from Scavenger Hunt
40 clues in total x 10 Candy each. (Last year we did 1 Candy per)
~80 from Random Events
This one would definitely vary for folks but the very active people should have received around 80 Candy in total by the end of the event from just random events.
140 from Daily Tasks
5 Daily Tasks x 28 days.
On Halloween, October 31, we ran a "Big Bar" event where all Candy gains were doubled on the site so it was like having a 29th day and I didn't include it in the calculations above. Also, folks who participated in our Card Design Competition received some Candy too.
So that's 1180 with full completion every day.
On Wordsearches
Word searches rewarded gold instead of candy so there was some potential candy there but we didn't do it. The reason being is these word searches are available year-round but our candy purchases in the shop will not be so we can't really give out candy for them. And I think it would be unfair to change the currency rewarded after the events ends.
Last year's Candy earning breakdown was:
20 per day for passively browsing the site.
64 clues that could be solved for 1 Candy each.
2 daily tasks.
The event ran from October 25 until November 3 which was 9 days of gains.
That was 180 Candy for browsing, 64 Candy for clues, and 18 Candy for daily tasks for a total of 262 Candy. (Borders were 75 Candy each or ~1/3 of your candy earned. Was about ~1/4 this time).
Things We Could Have Done Better
One of our biggest failures IMO was being more transparent about your progression. I would have loved to do a little "story line" showing the houses you visited throughout the day and how much more "energy" you had to visit more. I wanted to push something out for this during the event but stuff just gets too busy to reliably get stuff done. Maybe if Hearthstone hadn't of dropped that huge patch.
I think we should have allowed for passive gains as well as the active gains through Trick or Treating. I think it was a very cool flavor thing to do and the possibility of increased community interaction was neat, but some folks who are more passive users on the site lost out since our random events although flavorful, didn't exactly bring in enough Candy. Balancing the two together would be a good idea for next year.
Also, things should have started in October and stayed in October. Wasn't much we could do about that one, but I laugh a bit each time we push out a spooky-themed word search and its clearly November.
Things I'd Love to Know
Did the event feel too grindy relative to previous events?
There was certainly more interaction required on everyone's behalf rather than the passive gains of last year.
Was there any aspect you felt could have been communicated better?
Was the event too long?
What sucked? What rocked?
We'll do another post-event survey to collect feedback so I'm not too worried about being responding here (and if you do, please do our survey when we post it as well so feedback can be collected in a central location).
We'll get a fix out this week to deal with the format - honestly, I wasn't even aware that people were using it still since the majority of the syncs come from either our HS Deck Tracker plugin or Firestone.
Thanks for the more detailed report. Definitely seems like a caching issue of some kind and I know this one will be a huge pain to figure out because our deck widget system isn't the simplest thing. I'll see what we can do about it!
I'm not having any problems completing the daily task for Oozefest. The Parties nav link is correctly taking me to the Parties feature on the site as I'd expect.
Could you please describe in detail exactly which steps you are taking and what you see when you are getting this problem?
Rotating sets every expansion would be too silly. It wouldn't be possible to have a huge shakeup at the start of the year.
I don't think there's much of a problem with some sets not lasting as long as they "should have". Imagine if we had an extra 8 months of Jade Lotus nonsense when that dropped with the December Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion? I'd rather not!
Impossible to know. Sometimes its an hour later, other times its 3-4. Just depends how long it takes for the updates to get approved by Google for Android and Apple for iOS.
Yeah, not a big deal if people cheat. You can already do a few things to help find words and if you're really crafty, there's other stuff you can do too.
Its not even like we could even properly enforce it server-side. There's always a way around it and we're going to rely on user input somewhere. Inb4 server-side authoritative word searches so people just start bruteforcing them.
Stuff will be in the database soon (tm)
I'm so glad we have someone who speaks spaghetti on staff. Now I'm hungry, thanks Avalon.
Fixed the link so it didn't have the space at the end!
Also, fun fact: There was a reddit mod who won't be named that cried about us never linking our sources and we were a bunch of scumbags because of that. They were clearly too stupid to click on the author of the blue post block - and you just proved that the links are readily available.
Considering they couldn't even be bothered to promote the event, I'm not surprised we didn't get packs.
According to Eric from Blizzard Esports Publishing:
I understand they're short staffed, but I just find it so hard to believe there wasn't anyone who was able to put something small together to just tell people it was happening via an official blog. Blizzard has such an unbelievable amount of red tape they can't get anything done. Which is very funny considering the thread that Dean wrote late tonight which has as a part of it:
Now, of course, they are completely different teams at the company, but its just such an entertaining yet bewildering contrast. I'm so glad I'm not in that kind of position and I hope that anyone else on staff here never has to go through a million processes to get something live.
As stated in the article, no packs :P
In 5 minutes, 1 PM Eastern (10 AM Pacific, Blizzard Time), that's the normal Hearthstone time when stuff happens.
There's a ton of extra stuff to spend stuff on this year. It wasn't really our intention to let you get everything, it's stuff to work towards in the future and I expect our Winter event this year will be much the same. I believe giving people more options is nice because they can pick their own priorities of what is the coolest to them and that means we might end up seeing quite a bit of variety across the site for the next year.
Everyone who participated every day should have been able to earn over 1000 candy, which is enough for all 3 borders and a couple of extra things. The Little Devil Teemo stuff sitting at 666 candy was there as an "ultra-rare" fun thing to do and I would not have expected many people to go for it.
So here's the Candy breakdown (Oozefest lasts 28 days):
On Halloween, October 31, we ran a "Big Bar" event where all Candy gains were doubled on the site so it was like having a 29th day and I didn't include it in the calculations above. Also, folks who participated in our Card Design Competition received some Candy too.
So that's 1180 with full completion every day.
On Wordsearches
Word searches rewarded gold instead of candy so there was some potential candy there but we didn't do it. The reason being is these word searches are available year-round but our candy purchases in the shop will not be so we can't really give out candy for them. And I think it would be unfair to change the currency rewarded after the events ends.
Last year's Candy earning breakdown was:
The event ran from October 25 until November 3 which was 9 days of gains.
That was 180 Candy for browsing, 64 Candy for clues, and 18 Candy for daily tasks for a total of 262 Candy. (Borders were 75 Candy each or ~1/3 of your candy earned. Was about ~1/4 this time).
Things We Could Have Done Better
One of our biggest failures IMO was being more transparent about your progression. I would have loved to do a little "story line" showing the houses you visited throughout the day and how much more "energy" you had to visit more. I wanted to push something out for this during the event but stuff just gets too busy to reliably get stuff done. Maybe if Hearthstone hadn't of dropped that huge patch.
I think we should have allowed for passive gains as well as the active gains through Trick or Treating. I think it was a very cool flavor thing to do and the possibility of increased community interaction was neat, but some folks who are more passive users on the site lost out since our random events although flavorful, didn't exactly bring in enough Candy. Balancing the two together would be a good idea for next year.
Also, things should have started in October and stayed in October. Wasn't much we could do about that one, but I laugh a bit each time we push out a spooky-themed word search and its clearly November.
Things I'd Love to Know
We'll do another post-event survey to collect feedback so I'm not too worried about being responding here (and if you do, please do our survey when we post it as well so feedback can be collected in a central location).
Hey all, sorry about that but we've fixed an issue with "I have no clue how this hostel has a 4.3 on Yelp." from Week 4 so now it properly triggers.
We'll get a fix out this week to deal with the format - honestly, I wasn't even aware that people were using it still since the majority of the syncs come from either our HS Deck Tracker plugin or Firestone.
Thanks for the more detailed report. Definitely seems like a caching issue of some kind and I know this one will be a huge pain to figure out because our deck widget system isn't the simplest thing. I'll see what we can do about it!
I'm not having any problems completing the daily task for Oozefest. The Parties nav link is correctly taking me to the Parties feature on the site as I'd expect.
Could you please describe in detail exactly which steps you are taking and what you see when you are getting this problem?
Anduin loves to heal the opponent. *BREAKS KEYBOARD*
Long time problem, I blame Shadows for never finishing creating forum titles.
I have no idea when we'll fix it.
I think Murlocs will need to wait on next year if we're going be looking at thematics, though I suppose they could always pull another Brrrrrloc lol.
Rotating sets every expansion would be too silly. It wouldn't be possible to have a huge shakeup at the start of the year.
I don't think there's much of a problem with some sets not lasting as long as they "should have". Imagine if we had an extra 8 months of Jade Lotus nonsense when that dropped with the December Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion? I'd rather not!
Impossible to know. Sometimes its an hour later, other times its 3-4. Just depends how long it takes for the updates to get approved by Google for Android and Apple for iOS.
This.
Have fun doing the puzzle or have fun breaking it. Either way, wins a win!
Yeah they always have been.
Yeah, not a big deal if people cheat. You can already do a few things to help find words and if you're really crafty, there's other stuff you can do too.
Its not even like we could even properly enforce it server-side. There's always a way around it and we're going to rely on user input somewhere. Inb4 server-side authoritative word searches so people just start bruteforcing them.
One of my favourite machinimas :D