Why NOT to play Pet Planet/Tron Dogs...an Admin's perspective

in #tron6 years ago (edited)

I started this game one week after release, when Justin Sun had shilled game.com as a new partner and that this new love.planet game would be released where you can collect these "cool" dogs and buy stores to sell these dogs to make profits.

I first want to say that I apologize to the people who are still playing this game, but I've tried constructive criticism, giving my suggestions to the game people, rioting for changes in the telegram, etc. But they don't change and don't seem like they want to. So writing this is me giving up on this company, and no longer wanting them to take money from any current or potential new users.

I have been a huge community member/admin from January to April. The first month was extremely promising with so many active users who were highly excited and spending lots of TRX on buying these pets. Many many features were promised by Chinese New Year, including breeding, other languages in addition to English, and events. However I believe only events were released on time. I will talk more about events later. Thus a post was made by game.com

Reason 1: Constant Delays
If you have been playing this game for quite a while, you will know that none of their deadlines have been hit. Things have constantly been delayed. As of right now, people are STILL waiting for an EXCHANGE to sell their dogs as well as a way to gift pets to other users. These dogs are NOT on blockchain. If you are a programmer, you will know that its not that hard to transfer ownership of a non-blockchain asset or be able to buy/sell these pets on an exchange if they just allowed them to be purchases using their in game asset (GTC), which by the way is also not considered the same as their GTC that is on the blockchain. It is basically used as a medium to get back your main currency, which in most peoples cases was TRX. People are getting fed up with ONLY BUYING, without a way to sell their pets to other users (still 4 months later).

Reason 2: Ridiculous/Plain Stupid/Greedy Updates
Even though updates were constantly delayed, many of them were terrible. As shown in the screenshot above, pet owners were allowed to restock their stores with supposedly "free" 130 dog restocks for a few weeks. This was due to their slow updates. However, this was taken back very soon after and they released 26 dog packages for 200 trx that gave a profit of 400 trx. That means from the initial free dog stock where you got 2000 TRX profit (50%) from 130 dogs (2000 of which went to the game company), you now only got 200 TRX total profit (25%) because the game charges you 200 TRX, for the dogs, and then takes half of your profit. So they basically halved the profit share we got, even though we did all of the work to sell the dogs to other users. This update was obviously made with the intention to take more profits, when ZERO other features had been released to the game to make up for the profit loss. People who used to trade other store owners to sell out their stores, now were even more in the hole because they no longer could sustain trading with other people due to the profit losses. This may have increased the games profits for the shorter term, but they lost a lot of possible revenue from people who were constantly trading and buying in the game. This is the beginning of their "short sided, greedy thinking."

An example of a stupid update is after people were rioting in the main game.com channel telegram due to the wide use of bots to purchase the legendary pets and event pets. The most basic update (A slider for purchasing)/daily limit took weeks to implement. After it was implemented, they decided to create the same limit on BOTH epic/legendary pets, both of which have very different drop rates. Epics are at least 3-5x more common than a legendary pet, yet knowing their own drop rates, they set the limit the same. If this doesn't disturb you as a customer, I'm not sure what does. How does a company who produces a game, NOT consider their own algorithms with releasing updates to help the userbase. Obviously, many people were asking many questions of why or how they came up with these updated limits because it was clear it didn't make any sense whatsoever. This made people feel that nobody in this company is even testing their own game, or listening to the feedback of their most active users. RED FLAG

A small update that I almost forgot to mention was "Upgrades." I'm not going to go into the costs or requirements of upgrading, but they released upgrading FIRST before breeding/mini-games/battling/etc. (most of which are still not released). They allowed their initial users to upgrade their pets, with no obvious benefits, spending up to 250 GTC (1250 TRX equivalent) to upgrade any rarity of pets before giving us an obvious use case. Me, thinking of this as a red flag, encouraged all of the communities NOT to upgrade before seeing what they were used for. The game even released an event to upgrade your dogs for GTC prizes which felt very scammish because people were being tricked into spending lots of GTC to try and win this event, when they wouldn't get close to getting that amount of GTC back unless maybe they were in the top 3. As of current, all upgraded commons/rares/(maybe even epics) are pretty much worthless and these people are stuck with these maxed lvl dogs that nobody cares for or even values. People who are selling their accounts can't get any value from these maxed rares and commons which is extremely sad, and they feel stuck in this game with no way out as their is no exchange, and a serious lack of buyers. They are stuck "hoping" that the game will bring in many many more users or FINALLY release the promised, but constantly delayed updates. Good luck to them. It's very sad to have such high hopes for a company, but begin to realize the updates they constantly release are just trying to get profits for themselves, without a viable product to sustain interest from users. They just keep screwing over their initial core users by making them spend spend spend in a endless black hole of spending.

After breeding was FINALLY released, people were of course extremely excited to finally make use of their upgraded pets. It was extremely promising as the bred pets were really cool looking, and would probably be much more rare than the first generation of store bought pets as they were be MUCH LESS of them for the future exchange. However, this again was a huge fail on the game. First off, breeding was free. They stated that it could change in the future, but you would think that if a game decides to change profit margins, they would announce it first, right? Lol, nope. Instead they decided to change the profit margins without announcement, while also allowing people to spend up to 5000 trx per breed, WHILE ALSO releasing an event that increased breeding by 60x for a few day period. Let me break down why this was so shady and unethical. First off, you changed the profit margins without telling people. The only way the community figured it out was from people who had more than one account and bred by themselves, and actually had to go and calculate their profit margins on their own because they were seeing that they were losing money. That means, most of the community with one account (this was most people at the time), were unable to notice the profit margin changes because they can't see what the other user won from the total GTC spent. They only mentioned it to the community once people were asking a lot of questions in the game.com telegram. The admin there, "David," basically stated that as the game is a beta, they don't have to tell the community that their was an supposedly small update to the game. Like wow, how is this a small update when it has to do with money value??? How do you not announce a profit margin change to your current users, while also increasing the speed at which breed by 60x, while also allowing people to spend 5000 TRX for one breed, without any obvious benefit...A person who spent 5000 trx to breed a dog could potentially lose 250 GTC(1250 TRX) from breeding ONE DAMN PET, UNKNOWINGLY! That's the most fucked up part. People were posting their pets for 5000 TRX, so a random person wouldn't snipe the pet on the breeding list since it was so expensive, not knowing the game was taking profits at that time. I really hope this update explains itself in regards to how shady it was. Obviously, many people were not happy.

When they finally released the restock packages (20 trx, 200 trx, 2000 trx) that was promised when the game first released, they were NOTHING SPECIAL AT ALL. It was the same stupid package we've been buying for 200 trx, but with pets that were 2000 TRX instead? WHY THE HELL would I buy the same pet I can purchase for 20 trx for 2000 TRX???? WHY? WHY? Because the game wants people to spend spend spend without getting anything back. They think the core users are all whales who want to donate money to the game? lulz. Anyways, people obviously rioted in the main game.com telegram channel, and the 20 trx packages were taken out right away. The drop rates of legendaries was also changed for a short period of time on this day with some stores having 5 legends on one damn page out of 26 dogs. So while changing prices on pets with no benefits from each price, they also released way too many legends into the market from a supposed "bug." There were store owners who took advantage and bought many of these bugged packs while the people who weren't on the game all day, weren't able to take advantage. There was no "rollback" to make up for this discrepancy. Because obviously, they made money that morning from everyone scrambling to buy the spam of legends into the market. Currently there are many 2000 TRX pet packages that were purchased that people are STUCK with because nobody wants to buy a rare for 2000 TRX when you can buy the same one for 200 TRX, unless you like to gamble? But why gamble, when house always wins at a much higher percentage than the casinos.

Desperacy finally hit when they allowed buyers to buy more than 1 pet per page. Now people can purchase as many pets from another store as they want. The limitations of purchasing have been removed because they still want people to keep buying, without having a way to sell. I keep saying this same stupid thing over and over, but the game keeps encouraging spending with every damn update. Red flag after red flag. Buy many dogs PLEASE! FUND OUR PLATFORM! YOU WILL PROFIT!? yeah...right...

Finally, they recently released more currencies to purchase stores with. Now the pets have different prices based on the currency that the store was purchased on. With the game activity at all time lows (based on the community chat activity: our channels were highly active during the crypto bear market.), they are now making it harder for buyers to purchase pets because they are all on different currencies. If I were to purchase a store with MANA lets say, and I bought into the game with MANA to purchase dogs, I'd be limited to a small # of stores I could purchase from, in comparison to TRX. Now I'm stuck with this currency in my account and need to get other currencies to purchase pets from other stores. It just wasn't a well thought out update. There is no way to exchange currencies in game to make it easier, and these people who are buying into these stores with the new currencies are going to have a rude awakening of why they aren't getting any sales at all. My advice: sell your store back to game.com NOW before they "suddenly" update that they are no longer refunding stores at buy back prices (they claim this won't happen, but with all of the greedy updates they have released, I don't doubt it can).

Reason 3: Lack of communication/unprofessionalism
Having played games for over 20 years of my life, I expect a degree of communication and professionalism from the game. The community constantly has requested the game to give more information on update release dates as well as what kind of changes and why they were made. They have tried to improve in this department, but still give no reasons of why they made these updates and how they are trying to make the game better (it's usually, we want you to spend so we get more money). The biggest red flag was the breeding profit margin update with no announcement.

Their PR rep, David, has even gone to call the community members "complainers" and asked if he needed to the "math" for us. What kind of professional has these types of responses in ANY reputable company. They would get instantly fired. Also, they have not once apologized for any of these types of things. Just made stupid ass excuses for everything without ever owning up to their constant mistakes. Even a nice explanation for stupid things they release/update would make people feel more comfortable about spending the thousands they have into this game.
davidunprofessionalism`1.jpg
complainers.jpg

Another example of a stupid excuse is comparing themselves to other crypto companies and saying that they are far beyond others. Why compare yourselves to other crypto companies? So unprofessional. When I asked to be compared to a big game company like blizzard, and riot, my comment wasn't even considered as they know those types of companies do a MUCH better job communicating and updating their users.

TLDR
Don't buy into this game right now, maybe ever. With the way they have done business thus far, I doubt anything will get better when they finally decide to release the game on August, 8th, 2018. My guess is, everything won't even be done by then since that was a target they set when the game first released, and they haven't hit one deadline yet. They keep making people spend to fund their game which now, just feels like a scam. I personally kind of hate Justin Sun for shilling this game and making so many users spend thousands, and now being stuck without being able to do anything.

Feel free to comment anything you want. I don't mind if you disagree/agree with me.

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Don't mean to spread #FUD, but I can relate. I haven't sold a dog in almost 3 weeks. Understandably, it's early, but I'm really not having fun, and this is quickly becoming a waste of time.

As a speculator in a few projects, it REALLY REALLY hurts my trust when deadlines are not reached, or even worse, they are quietly overlooked. I understand #blockchain can be thought of as "new waters," but communication is critical, as we've supported the idea and endeavor some at earlier stages than others.

Seeing this quote made me sad: "But I can promise you this; by the end of February, Pet Planet's core functionality will be perfected."

Not sure how #Tron would even consider GTC as a #SuperRep, when they don't seem to have consistent direction, and enough leadership to set deadlines and stick to them.

Although, I really hope I'm wrong, in all aspects.
Peace and Love Dogs.

Great points you have made. Again, I’m 100% for the community of users as we had built this game together. I’m seriously hoping things get drastically turned around for the core users who have invested so much with high expectations for this company

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