In this short article, we want to shed a little more light on how our compensation decisions are made and who does it. Those who read it carefully will be theoretically armed for future economic and balance changes!
[h2]Compensation Department[/h2]
STALCRAFT is a constantly evolving and changing game, and any changes always leave someone dissatisfied. To mitigate this, we came up with a compensation mechanism, which proved itself well and didn't initially seem like a daunting task.
However, the further into the woods we got, the more it became clear that there was no single regulation for all possible situations, and we needed to actively apply an individual approach to each of them, especially when it came to rebalances, barter changes and other sensitive areas for players.
Quite quickly we came to the conclusion that we need to form a separate team of "elite fighters", consisting of experienced specialists who together can think of the most elegant and compromising compensations possible!
The Compensation Department is a group of responsible people consisting of employees from the analytics, game design, programmers and security departments.
The department has an idea of all the upcoming changes in advance, decides on the need for compensation for one or another update, as well as determines their composition and deals with the direct implementation.
At first glance it sounds simple, but in reality the department constantly has to balance between various "spiky" and other unpleasant chairs to find the solution that will sufficiently satisfy the players, will not damage the economy, and will maintain confidence in our decisions.
[h2]Types of compensations[/h2]
We haven't told much about how our compensations are organized, so it's a completely dark forest for players, from which for unknown reasons a promo code will fly out, or a handful of exchange coins in the inventory, or suddenly a free upgraded gun will be given.
There's nothing much to tell about the simplest compensations, like promo codes for unscheduled maintenance or other malfunctions - everything is in our posts in plain sight. Another thing is in-game bugs and changes. And this is where we will try to dispel the darkness!
So, at the moment we can distinguish three main types of compensation for in-game bugs or changes:
Important clarification - when calculating large compensations, we take into account player activity over the last year from the release date of the changes.
Usually, the "generosity" of compensation is strongly influenced by the number of people who will receive it. And if you constantly strive to serve absolutely the entire player base of "Stalcraft", it will be nearly impossible to offer anything of value in compensation.
Therefore, we have worked out for ourselves the optimal rule - to consider as affected those players who participated in the activity during the year. For example, farmed during the year for barter, which was later greatly simplified.
[h2]Feedback from players: what does it affect?[/h2]
We, of course, listen very carefully to players on all resources and centrally collect and analyze their feedback through tech support, speakers and moderators.
Sometimes there are cases when somewhere there is an oversight, undersight, omission. And players always pay attention to it successfully - we don't remember that anything like that has ever escaped their omnipresent eye!
However, close work with feedback and frequent response to players' requests had an unexpected opposite effect - some people started to think that by actively complaining and making a big deal out of it they could get a better compensation and influence the developers' decisions.
Here we would like to note separately that such behavior only harms the audience - it creates background noise, behind which the real problems may not be seen. Just like in the fairy tale with the boy and the wolves!
That is why it is important to deny selfish thoughts and write only honest feedback from the heart!
That's all for now! We hope that we have more or less managed to familiarize you with the work of the Compensation Department and shed at least a little light on the existing processes. You will remember us again next month!
With love,
EXBO Compensation Department
