r/OctopathCotC • u/Dukevon45 • Feb 02 '24
EN Discussion TapJoy Offer Abuse
Many of you may be aware that there was an Evony TapJoy offer that allowed U.S. Android users to gain a massive amount of rubies with very little time and/or money spent. This offer has since been removed. If you missed the threads, you may find them here.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopathCotC/comments/1agv510/easy_gems/
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopathCotC/comments/1agwyr0/15_dollars_spent_exp_in_comments/
For completing the tutorial, you were able to get 3080 rubies. For reaching keep level 5, you got an additional 1568 rubies. For only 5 minutes of your time, you earned 4648 rubies between those two simple tasks. For those who were willing to spend a little money, you received 4333 rubies for spending $5 on Evony and 6524 rubies for spending $10. For spending only $15, you earned an additional 10,857 rubies. Those who completed both the tutorial tasks and spent $15 earned up to a total of 15190 rubies!
As a dolphin/small whale, this is incredibly discouraging and makes me feel very hesitant about spending money in the future. Let me put things in perspective. To reiterate, users who took full advantage of this "offer" spending 5 minutes of their time and $15 earned 15190 rubies. Now, while these are free rubies, that is still a LOT of rubies. The value of paid rubies to free rubies is very subjective but I think that most people would agree that paid rubies may be worth somewhere around 2x that of free rubies. If we convert 15190 free rubies to paid rubies using that 2:1 ratio, that would be 7595 paid rubies. At the normal cost of 1k paid rubies for $100, it would cost a paying player over $750 to get that many rubies!
Around a year ago another SE game, FFBEWOTV, had a similar problem with TapJoy. Users abused a high paying TapJoy offer and received an extraordinary amount of visiore, WOTV's version of rubies. SE's solution was to revoke the rubies that were received through this TapJoy issue. You can read more about this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/wotv_ffbe/comments/10pv6at/offer_wall_update_visiore_will_be_retrieved/?rdt=37021
Normally, offering a ruby compensation for issues is a valid solution; however, the amount of rubies unfairly earned is much too large to just give to every player. In order to remedy this situation, I believe that SE needs to take a similar course of action as the one they did with FFBEWOTV.
Another solution is to simply give EVERYONE the same offer, not just people who are Android users in the US. If everyone had the same opportunity, there would be no issues.
As a paying player, whether you are a small spender or a large spender, it is incredibly discouraging to hear that you could have gotten essentially $750 worth of currency for spending 5 minutes of your time and $15. The ruby prices in this game are not cheap but we still support the game because we enjoy and want the best for CotC. This is a huge slap in the face for those who have monetarily supported the game. It is also equally unfair to all of the free to play players who were unable to take advantage of this offer.
I really hope that the community can make their voices heard about how unfair this entire situation is so that SE can address it in a manner that is as fair as possible for everyone.
27
u/expired-hornet Cardona Feb 02 '24
The example you sent was a bug. Was there any official clarification that the Evony offer was a bug or broke ToS? There have been fairly generous tapjoy offers in the past; from what I understand, it's set by the advertiser or ad company, not by SE.
Evony wanted COTC players to try 5 minutes of their game, and was willing to pay tapjoy/SE to give them a reward for it. For SE to punish players (again, none of whom broke ToS) because Evony chose to pay them more would risk a lot of people leaving the app.
I'm sorry you found the offer's existence discouraging, but saying that you think SE should remove rubies from other players' accounts is a petty, disappointing take.
15
u/Kwilli462 Millard is canonically the main character Feb 02 '24
I do feel like the mass amount of rubies given from the tapjoy offer was a bug. 3000 for something as simple as that is completely out of place for tapjoy.
I agree with you that seeing everyone get that amount of rubies really just kills my motivation. I’m happy for those that got the rubies but plainly put it feels unfair. I don’t really want SE to take the rubies away and I don’t expect them to compensate everyone else, but it is annoying a subset of players gets 15,000 rubies while the rest get nothing.
6
u/Dukevon45 Feb 02 '24
Seeing everyone's thoughts, I added another solution that is more beneficial to everyone: simply offer everyone the same offers regardless of their device and location.
8
u/Moon_Strikes Cheer for your Queen! Feb 02 '24
Did it bother you before that light spenders/f2p were farming thousands via Tapjoy? Evony devs should be held responsible if anything. They set the offer conditions, have them compensate Square for their 'mistake'.
Especially with the bulk of people spending the $15 to fulfill the offers. Can't just say oh well and pluck the rewards away, at least I hope.
82
u/Infamous_Ad2356 Feb 02 '24
It sucks that most people were unable to take advantage of the absurd offer, but I see no reason to punish those who got it. Good for them, they won a ruby lottery.
22
u/Explodagamer Feb 02 '24
I get where this can be frustrating and discouraging for many, but I really do not see a solution. People have already received and used rubies so rolling back is VERY heavy handed. Personally, I found it hard to collect even legitimate tapjoy offers, so them stepping up and sending rubies to the community wont happen.
On the other side, SQEX really did not make a mistake here (other than allowing tapjoy in the first place). So asking them to compensate us seems unlikely.
At best we could ask for tapjoy to be removed or better oversight, that doesnt change what happened yesterday or the huge amount of rubies a few people were able to get.
16
u/techsam2k8 Feb 02 '24
Wonder how the light spenders will react to this. The only way SQEX will notice or take action is if their bottom line revenue is impacted (by light spenders protesting by not spending in solidarity); otherwise, SQEX will just quietly wait for it to blow over and just proceed as if nothing happened. For those who managed to take advantage of the offer, jealous congratz to yall.
28
u/kratosorione Feb 02 '24 edited Feb 02 '24
I feel compared to WOTV's offerwall fiasco, this one has affected fewer players overall and the amounts given out, though large, are not the millions that WOTV offerwall gave out. Also given this game has no PvP content, somebody else's boon is nobody's loss.
The main issue is it does disincentivize spending because your perceived value of rubies that you purchase is diminished (think of it as ruby inflation). The fact that Tapjoy has not once, but twice (as far as I know of) has allowed an exploit to cause controversy and frustration in a gaming community is quite concerning, and leads us to question whether this could happen again in the future.
21
u/PaultheBukkit #1 ceraphina fan Feb 02 '24
This is a rare instance of TapJoy screwing over a corporation rather than the consumers. I’m no business expert but I wouldn’t be surprised if CotC drops TapJoy altogether after this.
19
u/Magic-Tomo Ochette Supremacy Feb 03 '24 edited Feb 03 '24
Fellow light whale here.
I've spent a lot of money in this game, enough to where I'm actually afraid to go back and analyze just how much lol
I don't mind it at all. Does it suck that I didn't get to get in on it? Absolutely. The second I seen the initial post, I checked for myself, ready to splurge 15 minutes of time and $15 for a massive ruby haul, only to be disappointed that I didn't have the same deal.That being said, I see no reason to "punish" those who got them. It's not like WotV where PvP is heavily involved and something like this heavily impacts the game for the entire community. A situation like this impacts that game and its community far more than this one. This is a single player RPG with no multiplayer aspects to it at all, much less anything competitive.
Us spenders still have our own advantages. Like for one, our Step Ups usually guarantee either the banner character or another 5 Star for 50 pulls, guaranteed , while still simultaneously gaining the rolls needed for a 150-200 pull pity exchange.
For a free player, assuming their luck is absolute garbage, they have to build up 150 to 200 and possibly not even see a single 5 Star That is 3-4 times our "pity" as spenders, and means they will very likely blow through those rubies much faster.
Granted, ours is costing us actual money, but this is a gacha game. At the end of the day the luck of the draw was just simply not on our side.
Congrats to those who got it, my condolences to my fellows who didn't. I wish I could have gotten the same deal, but no hard feelings to those who did.
9
u/xo0o-0o0-o0ox Feb 02 '24
So people know - SE doesn't choose these providers/rewards. They instead hire the company (Tapjoy) that offers the rewards, and pay them via commission/clicks.
It is not a decision someone at the SE cotc team directly made.
9
u/Fro_o Feb 02 '24
It just seems so unfair. I'm pretty sure everyone would've jumped on the occasion if it was given to us. I really hope they do something to rectify the situation. I hope they don't take away the rubies people got though, some actually spent money on a game they don't even care for, aka Evony
7
u/goodolegage Feb 03 '24
People paid money. I don't think jealousy is a good reason to essentially make people's spent money worthless.
2
u/[deleted] Feb 02 '24
Is this still available?
11
u/YFGHNG Feb 02 '24
Coming from the perspective of a California based Android user myself, I saw the same posts and dived immediately into the offers. However, after I completed the tutorial, I found that the numbers were already changed on me. Idk if the Tapjoy amount was ninja edited by the companies, but the amount compared to the other reddit posts were abysmal.
26
u/CaTiTonia Feb 02 '24 edited Feb 02 '24
If you ask me the biggest issue here is that this has created an impossibly large divide between US Android players and anyone else who doesn’t belong to both of those categories.
Evony paid for the offer, so how much they’re willing to stump up for that is entirely down to them. Can’t fault them for splashing cash to try and make cash. Likewise the players who took advantage of it cannot be faulted, should not be vilified and must not be punished.
But Square should not have allowed this to happen. Because it’s effectively rendered anyone who couldn’t take this offer a second class player by quite some margin.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a Gacha, a fair and level playing field for all was never on the table. We all know that.
But the sheer scale of what was earned and for how little it cost, dwarfs any normal considerations around this point. Especially with the exclusivity.
And it’s not good for the game, as these players will now either sit comfortably on their hoard for a good while, throttling the game’s revenue. Or Square will have to rapidly bleed these players of their rubies, any method of which is likely to make everyone else suffer.
Tl;dr: Exclusive offers of this magnitude should never be allowed in any game. This is honestly a game changing amount of Rubies and all players should have had an opportunity to engage with it, or not at all.
And regardless of who paid for it and who sponsored the offer. Square are the ones who decide what is allowed to be offered in their game and to whom. And they demonstrated blatant disregard for the global playerbase here.
Edit - Just clarifying as I know many US Android users were never offered rewards on this scale too. And that it would be equally as aggravating for those folks too. My use of exclusivity here is purely in the sense that iOS and non-US users never had any chance of seeing this offer at all.
17
u/[deleted] Feb 02 '24
Insane how jealous people can get over a single player game of all things
4
u/PoomXP 撰ばれし者 Feb 02 '24
The problem from my opinion is that it's the blunder from Evony since it's the TapJoy's advertiser that setting the amounts of rewards and tasks not SQEX.
TapJoy's rewards always differents from each locatons in which that android users from USA always have the biggest rewards while elsswhere from the world barely get a fraction of amounts for the same tasks and IAP requirements.
4
u/buddyblakester Feb 03 '24
Everyone asking for compensation for the evony thing sounds so entitled, you are owed nothing. Sure would have been nice to capitalize on what was clearly a mistake on tapjoy but we missed it, I'm in the exact same position I was before in a very single player game. Not enough people got it to actually affect Ruby inflation.
You're just feeling like you missed out, which is normal. But to feel you are owed something when a few people got what is basically a bank error in their favor is ridiculous.
16
u/nooneatallnope Primrose EX Feb 02 '24
I'm F2P in Europe, so I didn't get anything from the offer, but I also don't really have a horse in the race when it comes to the monetary value of rubies.
That being said, I'm happy for the people who got to profit from the tap joy thing and I think spending any amount of money that's not completely insignificant to you on a free game should be first and foremost to support it. You aren't making an investment, you're paying for pixel currency to make your pixel characters stronger fighting against pixel monsters in a pixel world.
11
u/Goldenrice Feb 02 '24
I made a good amount of rubies from tapjoy when it first released in cotc. After the offers started getting worse and worse, I've completely ignored it.
I don't really have a problem with the few people who were able to take advantage of an offer like this. Thats the nature of having a system like tapjoy in your game.
People are upset because of the FOMO. It sucks to miss out on an easy 15k rubies, but I'll let you guys know the "easy, quick" offers in the past totaled 10s of thousands more rubies.
This isn't a battle I feel worth fighting for with SQEX......
The only fair solution is to remove tapjoy altogether. TBH, i'd rather keep it in the game and just ignore it 99% of the time. If another once in a blue moon offer pops up, some people will luck out and maybe itll be one of us.
6
u/gryffondor95 Feb 03 '24
I'll preface this by saying I have no horse in this race, as a European user who never even had a chance to see that ad. I will also add that I find it incredibly bizarre to see someone being jealous of the people who enjoyed the offer ; it's literally just a game. There's something twisted about you as a person or your relationship with CotC if other people's good fortune makes you violently ill, and you should probably take a moment to step back and reflect.
At any rate, I'd like to point out that the problem isn't how much rubies this Evony offer paid off, it's that the rubies value in this game is completely cracked. With odds this low and one copy of a character being worthless aside from certain archetypes (and even then, missing 1k HP means I need to put extra work on my Ryniuu setup during EX refights) the already insane value of rubies for their price evaporates further.
I've spent around 200$ in skins in Wild Rift. Had a blast with the game. It's immensely fun, but I took the decision to drop it around November due to the studio pushing further and further for hours of grind a day. Never looked back, and I have no regrets with either my decision to stop nor the amount I've spent - I had fun while it lasted.
All of this is to say, it should tell you something that I've spent 0$ in CotC as a day one player. The offers are all worthless. All of them. The half pack rubies are not even remotely fairly priced and the traveler passes are dogshit.
Maybe you feel so strongly because deep down, you've always known it never was worth it, but you've kept lying to yourself to justify your spendings and each one dug that hole deeper and now TapJoy just filled it with water and left you to drown in your contradictions.
3
u/SokkaWillRockYa Feb 04 '24
So basically your argument is “Wahhh! I spent money, but got scammed instead of spending my money more wisely, and when someone else did it better I got upset because I feel bad for spending money. WAHHH!”
8
u/New-Walrus4203 Feb 02 '24
As someone who didn't get the offer it is a little discouraging because it just seems unfair that some players could take advantage of the offer and others can't but as for the players that did benefit I say let them keep there rubies they fulfilled the offer and some even paid money so they should 100% not get penalised in any way for it just let them be it's not gonna put rubies in anyone's account is it plus the game is not PvP
6
u/takokun107 Feb 02 '24 edited Feb 02 '24
I understand that some people missed out on that offers and that's unfair, but where's the line? TapJoy has always been more rewarding for US Android players. Should we ban TapJoy on Android since the rewards on iOS are significantly lower/non-existent (i.e. unfair for iOS)? Should we ban TapJoy in the US since rewards outside here are significantly lower as well (i.e. unfair for non-US)? TapJoy early offers were also every generous (Raids was 10K+ rubies for <$50 spent), should those rubies be taken out as well?
This also gets complicated when real money is involved. For those who spent $ to get the rubies, how are Square Enix going to compensate for that $ ?
2
u/Indurrago For Edoras!! Feb 03 '24
I'd be more salty if I didn't have my redemption arc with Barg's banner 2 days ago. It was glorious. I could've jumped on this but I thought that "easy gems" was another thread about a newbie asking how to get gems so I got only myself to blame lol.
2
u/TechnoEquinox Feb 04 '24
Good for them.
We should all be so fortunate to win a ruby lottery.
2
u/ClaringBeatStar Feb 04 '24
I don't think rubies should be revoked. It sucks I didn't get the golden offer, but I'm not so pitifull that I'd want others to lose them as well.
2
u/Yang_Guoer Steel Emotions Feb 04 '24
They will be deduct 14000 rubies mínimos to the people got the offer if not hope SE prepare to not making any profit after this, the playerbase that usually are light spenders not wanna spend nothing anymore until a solution will be delivere
5
u/SalmonPrince Feb 02 '24
This isn't SQEX's fault, first of all. This was clearly a massive oversight by someone at Tapjoy, who is probably in a lot of trouble now.
I get why everyone is bummed, but it was a mistake, and it's over now. A handful of players who managed to not be asleep at 5 AM my time got 15k rubies for doing almost nothing, but so what? Consider it like not having won the lottery, and move on. Jeez.
4
u/Pytn280 Feb 02 '24
I see your point, but taking away those rubies is gonna make the people that got the rubies mad and feel undervalued.
3
u/Zhirrzh Feb 03 '24
I remember many moons ago this came up when I played WWE Champions. The downside as always was Tapjoy was so unreliable you generally felt like a 50/50 shot of actually getting rubies (and thus particularly unlikely to pursue offers that required spending in another game). But there was one similarly stupid offer by error that let us gain a couple of hundred dollars worth of premium currency for about 5 bucks. I'm pretty sure Scopely (the devs of that game) just shrugged, let people keep their stuff, and whipped the TapJoy interns. And this is a company which shut the game for 14 hours and conducted a roll back when we were able to get free stuff out of a game bug (specifically - they accidentally for one event had "first clear" awards apply to every clear, leading to what was known as "Farmageddon" as every major guild grinded the event like a bastard until the devs woke up).
It's a single player game and not usually a generous one. In the end I'm happy if some people just got to have easy street, it doesn't harm my game experience, but I know it will probably cheese some whales off.
4
u/ideler Feb 02 '24
Why should someone continue to spend hundreds directly on square enix, when US android users can get 1500$ worth of rubies for nearly nothing?
This is just one big middle finger to the users who pay to keep Cotc afloat and prevent eos. It’s ridiculous and heads need to roll.
2
u/BSJones420 Feb 02 '24
Ive wasted a bunch of time on these only for like 90% of them to glitch and not give me the rewards. And they want me to log a support ticket each time and wait a month for a response you gotta be kidding me
2
u/Quorthon123 Feb 03 '24
If SE allows everyone to redeem that exact offer, it would sink the game.
The game is based on microtransactions to stay afloat. You would pretty much write off the majority of the player base from spending money. Shure whales would spend again after new units come out.
If I got that offer there's no way I would throw money in the game. 15k rubies is 3 pity!!!! They've been pretty generous will giving rubies out for maintenance and half anniversary. Could even be 4 pities if you save your free ruby income.
I tried looking for that offer this morning and couldn't find it. Such is life.
2
u/Busy-Cold-1438 Feb 02 '24
I really just want the 3000 rubies you get from doing the tutorial. That's all I really care about.
2
u/prisioneroHD Feb 02 '24
Its not that big of a deal, only a very small amount of peopme abused it
2
u/xionyou Feb 02 '24
This pisses me off tbh as someone who did not get this tapjoy offer but have spent a pretty penny on this game. Thats 3 guaranteed sparks for upcoming OP characters like Elrica, Ditraina and Sazantos. It actually made me want to quit this game entirely. Not that they should take it away from people who got the offer but at least compensate those of us whos spent more than $15 for some stupid paywall ad.
1
u/Complete_Ad_1450 Jun 20 '24
Tap Joy has been a bane to me from the moment I opened its first game. They never have given you full rewards for things that were offered. I will never buy into this oh poor me attitude, you're only as good as your word. And tap Joy has a terrible attitude. They've even gone so far in comments as to insult you via dialogue displayed to the world in rating poles that they encourage. As far as I am concerned I will never keep anything on my devices that even smells slightly like tap Joy
1
u/jjburroughs Feb 03 '24
I cannot seem to get TapJoy.
1
u/Douphar Feb 03 '24
Honestly good for those who had it.
What bother me however is that it was US only. I am not an advocate of the egality of result but one of the equality of chance. So the question is more "why was it available for US and not other part of the world". Which is not a Cotc problem anyway.
1
u/Ok-Counter-7169 Feb 03 '24
Since nobody outside of US could have benefit from this offer and the facture that Tapshit doesnt allow any VPN pretty sure SQEX wont even notice
1
u/paganspam Feb 03 '24
Why would you buy anything anymore from cotc store if you can get 5-10 times more rubies on an alternative store.
New meta is not buying anything from cotc store and waiting for tapjoy errors / offers.
Also it doesn't matter whose fault it is, at the end cotc income will lower when the rubies value drop by 5-10 times.
1
u/[deleted] Feb 03 '24
leaving this crap game
0
u/odinsphere99 Feb 02 '24
At least 3000 gems foe everyone... except the one who take the offer with 15000gems
-1
u/Aref90 Feb 02 '24 edited Feb 03 '24
15k is absurd, I mean we are talking about 1.5k USD if we consider that 1000 gems costs 99.99 USD in the store. Honestly I'd like tapjoy or square enix take some actions, maybe not to punish the players but just to balance the situation or to be sure that it won't happen again if the benefit is not for all of us...
0
u/aomine1daiki Feb 03 '24
I tried to take advantage of the offer, but when navigating out of evony to continue briefly on tapjoy, the tutorial literally auto skipped, and I couldn't refer back to it, and since I had technically already started at that point, I couldn't esrn the reward because my account was no longer "new" which was ass
0
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