[2021] Spread the word

Hey, as we've said many times, we've heard your feedback on this, but we're not going to change anything about the way we're doing it.

The mouse variant in this picture is coming to the store and was always going to be.

With the others, you've massively underestimated how many people have them. Your numbers are way out.

Spamming this image on Twitter/Reddit/Discord/etc won't change anything.

Nope.

There's two mice.

One has been in the store.

The other is going in the store soon - which is the one given out to streamers early.

I don't know what else they could possibly mean.

Listening to your community doesn't mean you have to do EVERYTHING they say. That would be utter chaos. Especially when it's just a small vocal minority.

Also - "Spread the word", and similar sentiments that encourage us to be spammed, is really not the one. That's not the right way to get us to acknowledge something, and in this case, we have acknowledged it multiple times, so the purpose of 'spreading the word' feels like 'force them to do something through pressure', which really isn't it. I hope you all understand why that's something nobody would appreciate, company or individual.

lol

Definitely, more breadth and variety in our giveaways that mix-up the accessibility of it is something we'll do in the future.

We've only done a couple so far so it's easy to feel like "Oh, those are the only kind of ones they'll do!" but that's actually "Us trying a few out first", if you understand what I mean?

Seconding this - we are actively trying to come up with more ways of giving them away, hopefully that are deemed more fair. If anyone has any ideas for ways we can do this that don't require dev work (i.e. in-game competitions) and can be run by a Community Manager please fire away! We'd love to hear your ideas and hopefully do some of them!

If we removed a level every time a group of players told us to, we'd have no levels.

Hey, thanks!

Yeah, it was due to - at the time we made the Season 2 marketing assets - it wasn't decided which costumes would be fame path, which would be DLC, which would be featured... etc...

We have limited resources so our trailers are actually filmed during our playtests. We need to test all the costumes out, so they're all unlocked and people just wear whichever they like.

We've tried to get better at it for Season 3.

It was still really difficult though.

For example, we had to cut out all the footage that showed the Santa costume... which was a LOT of footage.

It even ended up with a Santa on one of the loading screens.

It's so hard to film marketing assets, while testing, while deciding which costumes will be used for what, and without it having any spoilers and reveals.

We definitely did a better job of this for Season 3 though, and will hopefully do a good job of it on Season 4 and beyond too.

I do like this, the only trouble is that the exclusive costumes can't be given through, say, a streamer giving a code to one of their viewers. The streamer would have to somehow privately get the user's Support ID from them (which is in their in-game settings), then get the Support ID over to us for us to send the costume. I really love the idea though, I wish we could do it via DLC code or something.

Why is that an oversight? I mean, we do WANT people to pay for the DLC. We're not running a charity here, we are a company. It's an online game with server costs. That's why we sell DLC at all.

As well though, we have TONNES of costumes available for free in the game without paying.

When Season 2 launched... yes... the whole of Season 2's costumes and store rotation was already planned out. That's why dates leak weeks ahead of time.

We're launching Season 3.5 next week, and it locks down all of the costumes and store rotations up to Season 4. We've been filming the trailer, while the store rotations are planned, while bugs are being fixed, etc... it's all worked on simultaneously by different departments.

We don't just come into work each day and be like "Hmmm, what costumes shall we throw into the store today" - it's all planned while we're working on the update - and while we're filming trailers - and while the content is being created.

Same with shows - same with news feed posts - it's all scheduled ahead of time.

Agree with this - it was a mistake on our part! We're doing our best from now on to not include DLC variant costumes like that in main promo art or trailers, they didn't feature in the Season 3 promo material at all so we're going to continue to do this as best we can.

There are some limitations, like in gameplay trailers and clips. A lot of the time we record footage from playtests before we choose which colour version is going to be in the DLC, and which won't (therefore won't be in the shop), but all the costumes are available to use in the playtests. We still do our best now to try to cut footage which shows the colour version that isn't going into the DLC, so hopefully it won't happen again, but for Season 2 it was just a mistake on our part that we've learned from.

Hi, apologies for the late reply but we'd finished work for the evening when you posted this.

Just wanted to jump in about the Dark Knight Insta contest because that was something I ran, and you are very off about the full logistics of this contest. They weren't given to people who had a bunch of followers and fast little videos. Out of 24 winners, only 5 of them currently have above 100 followers (this is over a month later, so it could've been less back then), so to say that they were given to people with a bunch of followers is unfounded. I looked through the posts from most recent downwards, rather than using the 'Top' tab as I wanted to ensure it was fair as the posts that would come up first in the Top tab would be people with lots of followers who get a lot of likes. Besides, half the posts that come up in the Top tab are selfies from streamers, so it wouldn't have been a productive way for me to go through posts. 10 of the winners had posted videos (not necessarily short), 9 posted art and the rest posted things like screenshots, a poem, music etc. I tried to make this as fair as possible, picking people who worked really hard on things like art or video editing or poetry while also giving people who can't necessarily make art or edit videos the chance to win by also selecting screenshots. The majority of winners did win with videos or art though, as I couldn't ignore the effort put into those pieces just to award it to someone who posted a screenshot to make it seem more fair. It wasn't random, because people had complained about RNG in previous giveaways, so I just picked posts that I thought were deserving.

On the last day, I also posted a story saying that I'd be continuing to award Dark Knights to people who post things I love, which I have been doing this month. The reason for this is just that there were so many more than 24 people who deserved it. I don't do it every day, I just do it in my own time now when I can look through the posts as the constant barrage of "when is today's winner being posted" and "why is it late" and "please look at my post" was just too much to continue committing to one each day with a public announcement, but people have continued to get messages from me giving them a Dark Knight throughout this month and I'll keep doing that in the future.

Hope that clears some things up about the Instagram competition as I do see a few incorrect takes on how winners were selected, so I'd rather just be totally transparent about how they were picked to clear things up.