JWA Survey Results: Compensation Issue

After the disastrous Log-In Issue of Patch 2.9 and the resulting compensation that Ludia released to the community in the form of a premium incubator, the forums were flooded with comments from people that were canceling VIP and stopping their spending in protest. After the initial compensation announcement, Ludia has not made any additional announcements regarding the issue and it seems like people that were directly affected will not be getting anything different from the global premium incubator sent to the entire player base. 

GamePress conducted a survey shortly after the compensation was announced to get an idea of what the community thought about it. The survey is now closed, but the original article can be found below. We had 1500 people respond to the survey and we sent the entire spreadsheet of raw data to Ludia last week. We will not be sharing ALL of the data with the community as there were 650 comments in the free comment section alone and many of them are....NSFW. We will, however, share the results of the survey questions and would also like to highlight some of the comments that were made (including some directly addressed to GamePress). This survey was anonymous so we have no idea who actually filled it out or who made what comments. 

As we mentioned, we had 1500 people complete this survey and they seemed to be from a variety of different arenas and a variety of different players as well. Here are the results from each question:

What arena are you currently in?

As you can seem a majority of the players that completed the survey are in Aviary, Library, Gyro Depot, and Shores. While we understand there are players in lower arenas in the game as well, it seems the majority of the players (at least of the ones that completed the survey) fall in these arenas. 

Were you affected by the 2.9 Log In Bug? (Not able to log into the game after patch 2.9)?

So according to our survey, there were at least 400 people affected by the bug. We acknowledge that this is a small percentage of the full overall playerbase, but we also don't know how many were affected that didn't complete the survey. I think anything over 25% in our dataset is actually a pretty significant number.

Do you think the Compensation package (premium incubator sent to everyone) was fair compensation to those that experienced the 2.9 Log In Issue?

I think this was the most intersting question given the results of the question above. Although only 25% of people were actually affected by the bug, over 90% of people surveyed didn't agree with the compensation issued. This means that even those that weren't affected by it, didn't think it was fair and comments on the forum supported that as well. 

Do you spend any money on JWA? (Prior to the compensation announcement)?

We have a pretty good mix of players in terms of spending. 31% (450) of players are completely FTP and do not spend money in the game at all. All others surveyed range from big spending to small bundle spenders.

This question was important to us because we wanted to see how many people actually spent in the game and in the next question we ask how many will be changing their spending habits. This is to get an idea of how the bottom dollar of the game could be affected if people did stop spending. Once again, we understand this is a small sample of the actual playerbase but I think it does give a good snapshot of what things look like. 

Will you be cancelling your VIP and/or cutting back any of your spending as a result of the announced compensation package?

We asked this question specifically because people were saying they would stop spending and we wanted to see how many planned on actually doing that. According to our survey, most people who spend plan to cut back spending in some way. Now if they actually do it or not we can't say, but it seems like people did plan on cutting back. I hope they are as well since that seems to be the best way to make a difference. 

In addition to the multiple-choice survey questions highlighted above, there was also a section of the survey for a free-form response. We had 650 responses so we will not go over them all but there did seem to be an overlying theme with most of them. Most people thought that those affected by the log-in should have received extra compensation of some sort. There was a list produced of what people could have missed out on but we also know that list was based on an end-game player. It could also be theorized that they do not have a way of identifying the players that were actually affected. I am not a game developer and I do not have access to their system so I can't say either way, but it does seem like people just wanted those that were affected to get something a little extra. 

I think it was a kind of meh compensation, but I think asking ALL the lost prizes for the players who had problems would be very surreal, and it would take a long time, I'm not sure of the right compensation, but I believe that who should be compensated was the one who was affected.

Missing a week in this game involuntarily is a big deal for daily players. They missed cash, coin, boosts, FIPs from drops and chests. They missed a week of raids and Apex DNA that cannot be acquired in any other way. They missed in-store offers, DNA donations, hard cash links, a week of very good event dinos and general hunting/darting. They were unable to play in the tourney, which affected not only them but their alliances too. All while Ludia continued to post events on their social media pages as though nothing was wrong. A single premium incubator sent to everyone is a nice general apology but it's not just compensation for what these players missed while unable to play through no fault of their own. Ludia needs to make this right, they've lost some players over this and will lose more.

Another theme was communitcation. Once again this topic comes up. As mentioned above, it's possible that they didn't have a way of identifying players or they may have had another reason for doing the global compensation. The issue we had as a community was that Ludia didn't communicate that to us. We still don't know why decisions were made. I know they can't always tell us everything, but I do think that would have helped some in this situation. And that's what a lot of the comments reflected as well. 

It took much to long for solving this problem. And the lack of communication bothered me the most....I have learned in life justt be honest and you will earn respect...Now with your silence you get disrespect and people were losing all patience and trust in solving the problem

They should have handled communication better when the problem was being solved And the compensation seems very bad to me compared to everything that the players who suffered this lost by not playing during those days

These were just some small samples of comments made and there were plenty that also thought the compensation was fair and the community should be grateful for what they got. Unfortunately, many of those comments aren't family-friendly so we can't publish those. 

There were also a couple of comments directed at GamePress that I would like to address. Especially these 2 comments in particular:

I'm saddened by the reaction that the GP discord community has had on this topic and the 2.9 changes, and the game in general. Instead of choosing to celebrate the things we collectively enjoy about this game, we always seem to gravitate towards complaining. If I were a VIP member, I would for sure seek perhaps a free month of service as compensation, since I am paying for a service and not receiving that. Thats a normal makegood or re-compensation in business. But why choose to be more negative than that? Why not just enjoy the game we love that many of us get to play for practically free. I am a newer player and I really love the game, its strange and offputting to me that the strong sentiment by the harcore 'fans' is always so anti-Ludia and complain-y. Ludia isn't perfect, the game isn't perfect, none of us are perfect, life isn't perfect or fair. But how you handle that is a choice, and I wish more people would demonstrate grace and the positives, especially on a fan-centric media outlet like GP. Sometimes I wonder why I play a game that everyone who plays seems to enjoy trashing so much. I actually have a challenge for GamePress: write an article talking about the five reasons this game is better than PoGo (which is true) and why people should try it. Lets try to spread whats positive, instead of choosing to glom on to what we may not like.

I wish gamepress would invest more energy into releasing relevant informative articles as quickly as they seem to be able to release opinion pieces and surveys complaining about the state of play

First I would like to thank them for their comments. I chose to highlight them in this article because I wanted to show that I read every single comment and I hear what you are saying. For the person who challenged us: I do not play POGO personally and I am not sure if we can do a direct comparison on the 2 games, but we at GP will try and include more content similar to what we have been doing in the last week with the Featured Creatures and the state of the meta article. I know things have seemed negative and I will make a vow to personally work on that and try to create and publish content that will help and encourage gameplay. I'm hoping Patch 2.10 will help with that and I do like seeing people still enjoying the game we all love or at least loved at one point.

I will, however, also still continue to try and advocate for the community when I feel it's needed. I do think it's important to point out things that have gone wrong, and hopefully, we can make suggestions so Ludia can make things right. We want GamePress to continue to be a good source of game information but we also want to try and help improve the game in any way possible. We are here for the community so please continue to let us know how we can improve and make things better for y'all. 

We hope Ludia is able to provide more insight into this situation and we hope the comments and survey results help give them some insight into how the community feels about it. Although a small majority, I do hope it's a good representation of the player base. I am looking forward to Patch 2.10 to see if any issues will be addressed with that and if Ludia takes anything away from this: Please communicate with us more. We have asked it before but I truly feel a lot of these major issues would be mitigated by better communication. Thank you again to everyone that filled out the survey, we truly appreciate it! Make sure to join our discord for more conversations and all of the up-to-date info in JWA!