Although I can get into the Arena (lost 2 1/2 days of play after tournament end on Saturday however), I have chosen not to participate this week either, which is too bad, because it seems a lot of the competition has been disabled due to more Rovio server issues. But even with this handicap, there’s no way I will ever reach close to the top player because I have a life and am not giving this game any more time than it already robs from me.
Top player in my league already at 1000+ stars. They must have been able to run the Arena since Saturday without any outage. I bet that person is thinking, “Hawlright…” (if it’s an actual person). I would have to play consistently winning 10 stars every game for the next 48 hours and I still might not even catch him.
Last week I was lying in bed playing for over 2 hours and kept my eye on the player above me. At one point, after about 45 min of me playing, their score was 20 stars or so ahead of mine and hadn’t moved during that time (I assumed they were just offline and not playing). As I got closer, and closer, suddenly their score went up another 200 stars!! I get it that we don’t see updates until they’re sent to the server so how in the heck did this happen? Are updates only sent every x hours for every player? My score seemed to move in real-time as I played…. and it would take at least a couple of hours to successfully gain that many stars… something is decidedly fishy…
And since I’m seeing most of the players in my ‘league’ this week are also repeats from last week, I keep thinking about something that @hank said once in the forums- when asked about if the Arena players are real people, he said something along the lines of “yes, unless it’s early in the competition and there isn’t anyone scoring yet, then those are placeholders until enough players get in there and fill up the roster…” So I wonder if enough people are just dumping the app and we are only playing/seeing these miraculous ‘placeholders’?
As stated earlier: you want people to pay money for your app then you better make sure you give them what they pay for. This means upholding the consumer/business agreement to keep your service working as expected.
Rovio is operating a restaurant where people come in, and pay before they receive their order. In return, some of them get a plate full of more than they expected; others get cold food from last night; still others sneak in, don’t pay and find a way to sit at a table and fill their bellies and management just overlooks this because they can’t figure out how to block the entrances; and yet others receive an empty plate/substandard fare and the waiters ignore them when they complain. So the management fires most of the staff in an effort to retain revenue and the few remaining workers have to do all the tasks. People get fed up because now the place is also dirty and it’s anyone’s guess if your order will even be filled.
How long would a business like this last in the real world? Who would go back to eat there after an experience like that? Rovio needs to give their heads a shake and put some attention on what matters…
