Week 2 Leaderboard Results and Economy Update

Commanders!

The first two weeks of the GOG launch have been a whirlwind of activity here at GOG HQ. The live nature of a full-scale global launch with features that can only be tested at scale has created several unexpected challenges. While our minting systems and general web3 economy are performing within expectations, there have been numerous challenges with Leaderboard Rewards and scoring that have adversely affected player experience and created delays in the announcement of rewards. For this, we are sincerely apologetic. While we did anticipate problems to occur (hence delaying $GOG token rewards until week 3), the number and severity have required the full resources of internal teams to resolve.

In this post, we will discuss some of the critical issues we have encountered and provide the community a 24-hours window to give us feedback before we distribute rewards.

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Issues relating to Week 2 Arena Leaderboards

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The Week 2 Arena game mode was impacted by two critical bugs that we were able to troubleshoot and identify through the kind and vigilant alerts from our community.

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Critical Bug 1: Revenge mechanic was added back before Settlement

Week 1 saw issues with the revenge mechanic which unintentionally incentivized farming revenge points on weak defense squads. As a result, we deactivated the revenge mechanic for week 2 while we focused on fixing the issue. While a remedy was found (punitive scoring from revenge), the feature was prematurely deployed on the last day of Leaderboards. This resulted in players not being forewarned about the need to prepare adequate defense squads and misallocated ticket spending.

We determined that as this was a wide-scale systematic bug that could not be fixed via point adjustments or refunds, we have decided to rescore Week 2 Arena Global Leaderboard to exclude points earned on the last day. This means only the first 6 days are used for the basis of Arena rewards. The cut-off time is UTC 4:00 - i.e., before the ticket refresh on May 28th.

In order to compensate our players for this inconvenience, we have increased Week 2 Arena Rewards from $15,000 USD in Ascension Seals to $20,000 USD in Ascension Seals. We will also compensate all players who participated in the Arena with 600 Rubies.

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Critical Bug 2: A handful of players were permitted to use extra tickets in Arena 

There was an unexpected interaction between the Refer-a-Friend (RAF) reward system and the Arena Ticket system which resulted in 13 players being able to use more than 15 tickets a day in Arena mode. There is no indication that any of these players were even aware of this advantage. The total number of extra tickets used per player did not exceed 10 for the week. Regrettably, the two top-ranked players in the Arena Leaderboards received this benefit.

As this affected only a small handful of players, but for these players, they experienced a large impact, we have decided to manually adjust their leaderboard points and rerank the Arena Leaderboards with the adjusted points. The formula for adjusting these players' points is to take the average points that they earned in Arena throughout the week and reduce their final points by the number of tickets they were able to use.

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Adjusted Points = Player Total Arena Points - Excess Tickets Used x Average Points Per Match

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The result of this adjustment is a reordering of the Arena Leaderboards. For example, Rank 1 and 2 players are now ranked 4 and 5. As these players have been impacted through no fault of their own, we have decided to compensate the affected players with bonus Ascension Seals to bring their rewards back to their original ranking. The list of players affected by this adjustment is reflected below.

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Feedback regarding the distribution of Leaderboard Rewards

We have taken feedback onboard regarding the distribution of Leaderboard rewards. While players were quite satisfied with the amount and prizes on offer, there were concerns that our rewards skewed too top-heavy. One of the primary goals of GOG's economy is that it is sustainable in the long term. For this reason, in the initial launch period, we have exercised caution by structuring rewards to mitigate against value extraction. However, it seems we may have been overzealous with our approach and inadvertently removed the excitement.

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Endless

After analyzing player behavior and refining our anti-bot/anti-exploit measures, we have decided that we will distribute Week 2 Endless rewards in a more equitable manner. This means the first-ranked player will receive a smaller portion of the overall rewards, and more rewards will be given to the tiers outside the top 1,000. We hope this can provide a broader segment of the player base the opportunity to onboard into Web3 using our minting functions.

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Eligibility:

1. Must login using Passport

2. Rewards distributed after 30-May

3. Subject to discretion and verification

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Arena

For Week 1 Arena Leaderboards, players experienced frustration that a very desirable Tavros Mythic Guardians was provided during a time of bugs and balance issues. We performed hot-fixes during the week (e.g., capping commander level) to try to balance progress. Ultimately, the decision to award the Mythic Legendary was part of a pre-launch Town Hall commitment we made to the community, therefore we were obligated to honor this promise.

In Week 2, we have re-evaluated the rewards and prizes for Arena Leaderboards. We have decided to provide more meaningful prizes to our Top 10 players in the form of highly sought-after Chroma Guardians. Simultaneously, we have removed low-value Guardians from the prize pool (e.g., Rare Founder's Guardians), but significantly increased average Ascension Seal rewards for the top 1,000 most competitive players.

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Eligibility:

1. Must login using Passport

2. Rewards distributed after 30-May

3. Subject to discretion and verification

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Anti-cheat and withheld rewards for Week 2 Leaderboards

Due to the nature of digital ownership, any web3 game economy is particularly susceptible to bots and bad actors. We have embedded strict anti-bot and anti-fraud detection algorithms in our game. However, these systems are still being tuned and calibrated. Regrettably, this means that some false positives (i.e., innocent players) will be picked up.

We are continuously refining and iterating our methods, and over time we expect more accurate detection and fewer false positives. We appreciate your patience and the hard work of our customer support teams as we tweak these systems. For innocent players who received a mail that provided notification of suspicious activity, your rewards have been allocated but are currently withheld pending clearance. We encourage you to log a support ticket and provide information regarding why our systems may have flagged you as high risk. Generally, things like using non-supported functions (e.g., emulators, VPNs, Tor, etc.) will increase the likelihood of your account being flagged. Please share any information you have that will help us review your case.

Every week, our internal risk and support teams run a review of the metrics and analysis. In cases where we believe we have made a mistake, we will retrospectively release any outstanding rewards associated with your account. This will be notified in your mail.

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Week 2 Leaderboard Adjusted Results

Based on the above adjustments and changes made, below you can find the Week 2 Leaderboards results:

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Distribution Plan and Schedule

Due to the large number of updates and changes we invite a consultation period and will solicit feedback from the community. Our intention is to release week 2 leaderboards rewards before the weekend. 

Next week we intend to share more information about Week 3 leaderboard rewards including boss rush rewards. Our live daily global Leaderboards will also be made available on the website. 

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We thank you for your patience and support Commanders, see you in Elderym.

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