Dear Counterplay Games,
It seems Duelyst has finally grown up to become part of the pantheon of online CCGs with some actual longevity, and you’ve earned that. When I look back on the months I’ve been active with this game and it’s community I got an overwhelming sense of dedication, integrity and overall good faith from your developers and moderators and you cultivated quite a few true believers who would consistently sing your praises in message boards, videos, streams and take time out of their days to voluntarily bring new people in and mentor them when they did. @ArdentDawn (AD) was a player like that, and they wrote an extensive open letter to you following the release of Denizens of Shim’Zar, airing his concerns and articulating the reasons why they would no longer invest money into the game any longer, and take a serious back seat in terms of investment overall. I don’t know if they’re even still playing. The second major expansion to Duelyst brought similar controversy, but even more concerning, in my opinion.
Truth be told, I wasn’t involved with the game long enough to really understand AD’s mindset back then, I didn’t have enough history with the game to really grasp why the reduced drop rate on Orbs felt like such a betrayal worthy of extensive backlash. Objectively the move seemed understandable to me: the Core Set had grown to be too generous so the drop rate had to be dialed back for future expansions. A business decision to be sure, but an understandable one, I thought at the time. The real issue (it seems to me) was that you couched on the trust you had built up with the community in order to withhold that information to the players, benefiting off the assumption (that you left uncorrected) that drop rates would be similar to the established rates and thus inflating the amount of people who would buy the expansion based on that inflated value proposition. The issue wasn’t that you made a business decision, it was that you abused the trust you had built up through your horizontal interactions with the community, showing that community members had been suckers for assuming good faith on your part. As AD put it:
Back then it could be argued that it was simply an oversight, something you hadn’t even thought about and just sort of ‘happened.’ But now you’re older and more experienced, and a large professional publisher has gotten involved: that level of benefit of the doubt can’t apply anymore. And honestly, I believe you’ve done something similar, but this time on a larger scale. But before I get into that let me consider why a person like me got so involved with Duelyst so you might better understand where I’m coming from at the end of this post.
Why I Like Duelyst
I’m not much of a competitive player. My upbringing has led me to experience very high stress responses when confronted with competitive time-bounded situations, meaning I get stressed out playing more than a few matches a day. Playing Duelyst has been one of my ways of dealing with this handicap, and it has served me well so far. I’m with Duelyst because I love the pixel art, I love the deck-building, I love turn-based tactical games and I especially love the kind of people the game has drawn. Griefing is the lowest I’ve ever experienced online, the community is spirited, open and respectful, the mods are fair and involved: it’s the closest I’ve seen to a perfect online community so far. We haven’t seen significant social upheavals since the legendary @raqyee left (I’d have preferred they stayed honestly, just in a more respectful form). Finally, you’ve proven to be responsive to community concerns and feedback; before all this became apparent I was prepping to write a huge exposé on how Unearthed Prophecy próved without a shadow of a doubt that CPG listens to their community. The expansion reads like an itemized list of exactly those things the community consistently said they wanted: minimal RNG, support for older Keywords, boosting slower decks, cool combo pieces, support for underperforming archetypes, heaps of board-centric cards, an emphasis on playing more minions, punishing majority-spell decks, promoting reactive strategies (Sentinels) and probably more. It’s insane when you really look at how much you’ve done to make an expansion that we’d like and it’s not controversial to believe that this is your finest expansion yet. All these factors combined have made me a very passionate community member. you’ll likely never see me in S-Rank or placing in tournaments, but I’ve tried to be a force for good for this game, because I believe you’ve earned all the recognition you’ve now started getting. On an even more personal note I’ve even been approached by your team members who thanked me personally for striving to be exactly that and I can’t begin to tell you how much it meant to me that you actually cared enough to even notice. So why am I now writing what probably reads like an overlong obituary?
What Happened?
Bandai Namco happened. I was excited about the announcement that you were partnering up with BN because I assumed good faith on your part (silly me) and that you would only make a deal with a publisher if you were absolutely sure the game wouldn’t be negatively affected, or at least that you’d inform us well in advance of any negative changes the partnership would cause. As it turned out Bandai Namco was not ready to actually do their job of providing customer support (account linking outside the US is still broken) and a region lock secretly went into effect that locked out at players of at least one country (Russia), which has since then been defended by our BN community contact thusly:
CPG customer support has been taken over by calculating, corporate people who are fine with locking out paying customers without even warning them about it, and then pretending it never happened because it only affected a small amount of people. To boot, BN refuses to tell us if any other countries have been affected, and whether or not players currently playing in those countries might find themselves suddenly locked out, even after spending money since the partnership began (as alplod proved was possible). The most famous victim of this phenomenon @hulk12345/@alplod has finally been acknowledged after being called a liar, needing to provide video evidence before BN would even properly look into his case and offering a half-hearted non-apology with an offer to buy them out.
Other support issues will hopefully be sorted out soon, and the Diamonds payment system’s screwy price points is a jerkoff move, but one that I could’ve personally begrudgingly lived with. But here we come to the real similarity with AD’s open letter: it really really sucks that people from (at least) Russia are getting region-locked, and I don’t believe that BN is being truthful when they claim it’s impossible to make Duelyst available in Russia. As others (notably @Aeruniel) have pointed out: games like Hearthstone and Shadowverse are playable in Russia, meaning the issue is far more likely with BN’s policies rather than any law preventing them from publishing in Russia. Regardless of that, it’s possible that CPG felt compelled to accept the deal anyway because they were reaching a breaking point in terms of keeping Duelyst going into the foreseeable future: the small Russian player contingent could’ve been a sacrifice they were willing to make, however begrudgingly. However, you did not tell us about any of this.
Your partnership was all smiles, benefits and upsides, but you again lied by omission by failing to inform us that players were going to be locked out of Duelyst, their very existence even ultimately denied until coerced by video evidence. @hulk12345 is currently very angry with this whole situation, and what some might not understand is that this is no longer just about being locked out of Duelyst or losing money: it’s about being suddenly pushed out of the game, cut from its community and then being branded as an illegitimate member of that community. We human beings build up relationships with the things we get involved with, and suddenly getting inexplicably removed from those things gets us deeply, intensely upset. If CPG had chosen to warn us ahead of time that there was some sour with the sweet we would’ve been angry and upset, some of us might have even left the game, but it wouldn’t have done any significant damage to your reputation and the trust your players have in you. Now, who knows? Is it safe to spend time and money on Duelyst or will you arbitrarily get removed from the game, your money and time now forfeit without even an acknowledgement? What is the next betrayal going to look like? This erosion of trust and good will makes gamers hesitant to invest their resources into your wonderful game and makes them less likely to support and promote the game to others, and this is only worsened by the fact that you’ve installed @stormshade as your go-between, putting up a wall between the community and the developers that wasn’t there before. We assume good faith from the developers but only if we can have actual meaningful contact with them, and that bond is weakening by the day, especially after someone presumably strong-armed @ThanatosNoa into posting that aggressively power-washed PR message recently.
The issue is that we trusted you, got burned, and are now having trouble forgetting that so we can trust you enough to invest our time and money into you again. That’s why we’re begging you for some kind of public statement (that is nót written in vague legalese and does not ignore key questions): to reaffirm that we’re not suckers for assuming that you’d warn us if you were going to make a decision that is clearly only harmful to (some of) us. Trusting that we wouldn’t stick up for Russians because we’re not Russians betrays how the people now pulling the strings don’t understand that you’ve put in countless hours to build an actual community rather than just a loosely affiliated collection of self-interested individuals. We (not all, but plenty of us) care if you screw one of us over, both on an emphatic level and out of worry that we might be next. Which leads me to ask: what now?
What Comes Next?
After much consideration I think there are six recommendations I want to give voice to, aimed at different groups involved with Duelyst in some way.
For CPG & BN: Remember that F2P games live and die by their reputations. You’ve armored your TOS to guard against legal action but games don’t do well if their players don’t trust that their investment (time and money) is going to deliver them decent value; stunts like this erode that trust and Duelyst doesn’t have the momentum like Hearthstone does to shrug off a few thousand people every time they do so. The next time something comes up that will definitely harm our interests I suggest you inform us ahead of time, and do so in terms all of us can understand. Maybe I’m wrong and you’ll shrug this incident off as just a bump in the road (BN likely doesn’t care either way), but games have been broken over breaches of trust before and will again, and Duelyst can’t continue to exist without players who feel comfortable spending real-world money on it, like I used to do and almost did for UP.
For everyone sticking with Duelyst: Some of you might not care about all this, and others might simply care about Duelyst more. I think that’s understandable even if I don’t agree, but I implore you to function as the game’s memory for future incidents. Be the next @ArdentDawn who can recollect what has happened in the past so future people like me don’t get burned, unaware of the game’s development until then. Make sure to ask the right questions and provide information information the next time CPG/BN makes an announcement or promotes a Preorder or whatever else so other players can have the information needed to make informed purchasing decisions because (as history has shown) CPG is unwilling to do it for us.
For everyone outside the US just getting into Duelyst: be careful and only invest time and money in Duelyst at your own risk. Hopefully BN will see sense soon and publish an overview of restricted countries and supported countries so you can make an informed decision if you want to get further involved with the game. In the meantime, NEVER mention your location here, the subreddit and especially to customer support because you might find yourself unexpectedly locked out of your account, even if by accident. To any Russian players here who were not yet purged: good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
For @hulk12345 and anyone else affected like him: keep petitioning CPG to unban your account so you can at least play the game when you’re in another country if you like, but if it’s too much of a hassle or just not happening I think you’re probably best off taking the buy-out before BN changes their mind. I don’t think there’s a ‘best’ next step now, just various flavors of crap.
For me: I’m out, for now. My personal morals don’t allow me to support a company with this kind of attitude and policy, and I’m not willing to amend my morals to continue playing a game whose creators I can’t trust anymore. I’m not deleting any of my accounts (here and in-game), I’m just going to stop posting and playing for the foreseeable future and instead just keep an eye out for a while to see if things get better. If CPG/BN’s policies improve or my morals weaken/change I might pop back in and see if I want to get stuck in again, but I’m saying goodbye for now. I hope there will be someone else willing and able to post and maintain Healyonar Tactica threads, Spoiler Compendiums, think pieces and so on, but I suppose it’s not going to be my concern anymore, for now anyway.
Boycot or Not?
I’ve been feeling very attracted to boycotting CPG/BN until they change their silly policies and #BringBackAlplod, but I’m not in a position to argue either way if I’m not going to be involved anymore. The dilemma is that a boycot doesn’t harm BN (why would they care if Duelyst fails, it’s not like they put in a lot of effort supporting it), makes CPG less important for BN so petitioning them for change becomes less likely, and the most likely players to take part in a boycot are those who are already unlikely to spend (more) money, so they’re not really lost sales. Players will likely choose to either stay or leave, accept the situation or not and those staying will likely behave as they would normally: why stay otherwise right? If it were me I’d boycot Duelyst until CPG installs some kind of legacy ruling that unbans people from now-restricted countries (both those who registered pre-BN and new ones) so they can at least play Duelyst while outside of the national borders of the restricted countries. I wouldn’t want to support a game that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore if I happened to move to another country at some point, personally.
Regardless of the politics I’ll continue logging in and seeing how things develop for probably a few days to a week, until the point where I feel like I’ve ‘let go’ of Duelyst enough to start looking for another good game to practice not-freaking out by competing in. I’ve spent way too long writing all this, but at least I’ve got it off my chest. I’ve saved the entire text of this post so I have a backup if this gets lost somehow.
Cheers, and thanks to almost all of you for being awesome people.
