The community's reaction to this whole ordeal really showcases how toxic we have become recently. (long rant below 👇)
Before everyone calls me a Supercell bootlicker, let me clarify that I do think Supercell needs to do a better job with the testing for these events as almost every single event so far has had important bugs, balancing issues, oversights etc. If they're planning to have these events so frequently, it shouldn't be acceptable for such a large company to make these mistakes so often.
However, the community never stops for even a moment to think from the developers' perspective in situations like this. If we look at the stats provided in this tweet, we can see that only a very small fraction of the people who played the game yesterday were affected by this bug, and out of those players only a tiny amount got a massive amount. The vast majority of players aren't even aware that this bug happened at all, and yet we're acting as if half the players were able to buy the entire shop.
A common request I've seen is a compensation of about 1k pizza slices. That's enough slices to buy an entire legendary skin or almost enough for a legendary brawler. It's enough slices to buff the amount of slices a f2p player was supposed to get by 50%. And this amount would be given to TENS OF MILLIONS of players. It would essentially completely break the economy of this event and ruin the event for Supercell. And let's not forget about the fact that this is a collab between Supercell and Disney, who are likely expecting a profit as well.
Another request I've seen is for pizza slices to be taken away from those players who were affected by the bug, resulting in a negative amount. This sounds reasonable on the surface, but as they said here, most of those players didn't even know why they got those slices. Supercell generally doesn't punish people for mistakes they made themselves unless the people abuse them willingly.
Yes, a very small percentage of players got a massive head start and that's not fair. However, 300 free slices is still a pretty decent buff over the 2k we were supposed to get, and we're getting these free slices because of something that didn't even impact the vast majority of people around us. Supercell definitely deserves some criticism here, but the sheer scale of the outrage from the community in this case comes off as really immature and toxic for me, and this recent increase in toxicity is a big reason why I'm not as active in the community as I used to be even though I still play the game every day.
We're running into issues delivering the 300 Pizza Slices compensation due to the high number of eligible players and the inbox not properly supporting these large numbers.
As it stands, if we had used this method, the delivery could have taken up to 20 days to complete! To avoid that, we will explore a different way to deliver them. We aim to deliver the compensation to all eligible players next week after maintenance (most likely next Thursday, January 9th).
Also, players who had purchased 250 Pizza Slices for 79 Gems should have already been delivered 250 Pizza Slices directly to claim from their inbox.
We’d also like to talk about the decisions around the compensation and solutions for the Pizza Slices Bug:
👉 WHY IS THE COMPENSATION 300 PIZZA SLICES
This was both to compensate for the lost day of progression and as an apology for those who did not get/use the unintended extra currency at the beginning of the event.
We also re-generated all 3 quests that were live at the beginning of the event so that they could be completed again for extra progression.
We understand that 300 Pizza Slices is not the same as what some of these players got to spend, but compensating everyone with a value too high would then create another issue with the event's economy.
The original plan was that an active player would be able to get 2000 Pizza Slices in total (more depending on your performance in the Contest), so 300 is 15% of that, and the value of 2 pizzas is roughly around 1 gem.
This compensation should still give everyone a good push to help buy some of the higher-value offers in the event without hurting the game economy and demotivating players from playing the event
As a reminder, this will be delivered after maintenance next week ⚠️
👉 THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE AFFECTED AND THE PIZZA SLICES USED
Of all the players currently playing in the event, 3.6% have managed to spend 300 or more Pizza Slices, and only 0.4% have used more than 2000 Pizza Slices in that first day (which most likely buys every offer in the Shop).
On the first day of the Event, the most a player could spend was a little above 2000 Pizza Slices at the Pizza Planet Shop. Once an offer is purchased, it is only regenerated the day after. So, even if a player had 10000 or more Pizza Slices, they were not able to spend it all.
Of course, these small percentages still mean many thousands of players, but this should give more clarity and help understanding the actual impact of the issue.
👉 WHY DIDN'T WE REMOVE ITEMS OR DEDUCT PIZZA SLICES FROM THESE PLAYERS?
Most players are not on social media and were unaware there was any problem with the event, so any kind of punishment felt wrong.
The fairest option would be to remove every item collected with these extra Pizza Slices, but that, unfortunately, would take a lot of time from the team because the removal needs to be tailored to each case. Also, a mass rollback or removal of items is very risky and could generate more problems in these players' accounts.
So, instead of focusing on the players with extra Pizza Slices, we decided to give more to those who didn't get any extra. But as explained above, we couldn't give a lot due to the high value of this currency.
👉 HOW IS THAT FAIR?
It's not. And we won't pretend or try to justify that it is.
However, due to the complexity of removing the collected items and the confusion that may be caused by deducting their Pizza Slices, we opted to compensate only the players who were not affected by the issue.
When we make these calls, we do the best out of what we can in the time we have. This issue had a time limit because if it went on for more than a day, more offers would be generated, and the difference in rewards would be greater.
Based on the options, tools, and time we had, this was the better option among all the others we discussed.
Still, it is probably not the best due to the short timeframe, but one that still rewards you, the players, more than we initially planned for the event.
👉 WHAT HAPPENED (RECAP)?
In case you missed all of this, at the start of the Pizza Planet event, a bug caused some players to start the event already with some Pizza Slices. This happened because Pizza Slices replaced the Krusty Kash as a temporary currency in the game.
At the start of the event, this amount of currency was supposed to be reset to 0 for everyone, but it only worked for some players. This means that some players who had some leftover Krusty Kash from the previous event ended up getting this currency back as the Pizza Planet event started.
To mitigate the situation, we decided to reset everyone’s Pizza Slices to 0 and compensate only the players who had not used the extra Pizza Slices.
👉 WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
You can continue playing the event normally, and once we have more concrete details about the delivery of the compensation, we will communicate on our social channels.
Again, we are sorry for the rough start of the event, but hopefully, this can give more context to our decision about this issue.