Update on Coruno

Yesterday here on Mobile Gaming News Network (MGNN) I released an article on the controversy surrounding the mobile game “Eternal City”. If you want to read the whole article yourself, you can find it here, but as a quick rundown, here is what is going on. Two days ago on Tuesday, June 11th, 2019, the official social media pages of the game announced the introduction of the character “Coruno” onto the South East Asia (SEA) server of the game. The following day they announced that Coruno would be on an upcoming Gacha banner with another character named Fennick.

Official artwork of Coruno that can be found on the Eternal City Official Facebook Page.

This angered a lot of the long time player base that had moved over from previous servers to the SEA server due to the localization of the game to English there. In every previous server for the game, Coruno was a welfare unit(a unit gotten for free through game play, usually a quest). Many players who were angry took to the games social media pages to voice their frustrations. At the same time they spread word around the community urging people to stop spending money on the game. This was done to show the company behind this decision that they were not happy with this decision.

This leads us to the events of yesterday after the original article was posted. Firstly, I would like to make a correction the original article. In one of the final paragraphs I mentioned that the update with the Fennick/Coruno banner was to go live on Thursday morning/ Friday night. This was not only a typo -it was meant to say Thursday Night / Friday Morning- it was also wrong. The update happened last night, ending at 1:02 am PST / 4:02 am EST after an extended maintenance.

Before I go over what the publisher did to “fix” this controversy, I must first talk about the actions taken in the community Facebook group over the past day. Many of the players who were outraged by the Coruno controversy went to the games public group on Facebook where they hoped their voices would be heard. Instead, what they were met with was a ban from the group if they talked negatively about the Coruno Gacha banner. This includes bans for simply linking the original article in the group. Yet everything has continued to escalate after the maintenance notes were released last night and this morning.

In game image of the banner that Fennick and Coruno appear on.

All rights for the game assets are owned by X. D. Global, the publishers for the SEA server of Global City, and DeNA Co. ltd, the developers of the game.

In the maintenance notes for the update released this morning, X. D. Global finally gave a response to this controversy. However, it is a horrible response from X. D. Global.

“Note: After evaluating feedback from our players and community, Coruno will only drop as a full Wielder, and not as shards, therefore making it easier to achieve Coruno.” https://www.facebook.com/EtenalCity/

To fully understand why this response from X. D. Global is so bad, let me explain the Gacha rates within Eternal City. Within Eternal City a S-rank Wielder has a 0.25% chance to drop as a full Wielder, or a 6.75% chance to drop a S-rank Wielder piece. An A-rank Wielder has a 1.5% chance to drop as a full Wielder or an 8% chance to drop an A-rank Wielder piece. If you do not get A full Wielder, but got multiple Wielder pieces, you can get the full Wielder by exchanging a certain amount of pieces for it. By removing the ability to get Coruno pieces, they have made it harder to get Coruno, not easier.

Players’ Experiences

While many players in the Eternal City community have had major problems with the current Coruno controversy, according to multiple players in the community, this is not the first problem that the SEA server for Eternal City, and many believe that this wont be the last problem. All players who have spoken to me will be named anonymous in this article, and any and all photos used will have any personal information blocked out for privacy.

The first player I talked with today, Player 1, sat down with me over discord and over the course of nearly three hours, explained a lot of the problems that the SEA server has gone through since launch. While talking with Player 1, they laid out what they believed were the three biggest problems that the game has had since it launched. However, Player 1 did recognize that their first point was not something that people will agree is a huge problem, but they did want to point out the problems that it creates in game.

What was this first problem that Player 1 pointed out? It was the fact that the SEA server is taking events from the older servers and releasing them in a seemingly random order. This allows players of the game to get items for characters that are not currently obtainable. Player 1 believes that this will eventually lead to something major breaking in the game. While this in itself is not a big problem at this current point in time, Player 1 believes that the way that X. D. Global has handled this situation in itself has lead into the major problems that the community has with the Coruno and Fennick Gacha banner.

Image from within the game.

All rights for the game assets are owned by X. D. Global, the publishers for the SEA server of Global City, and DeNA Co. ltd, the developers of the game.

Image from within the game.

All rights for the game assets are owned by X. D. Global, the publishers for the SEA server of Global City, and DeNA Co. ltd, the developers of the game.

Both of the pictures above show items that are used for Wielders who are not available in the game yet. If the events had been released in their proper order, then this would not have happened.

Both the second and third problems that Player 1 laid out to me are connected, with both having to do with the Fennick / Coruno Gacha banner that was released. The first of these two problems, or problem 2, deals with Fennick. According to Player 1, the previous Gacha banner that the SEA server got, which granted the players the ability to get the S-rank Wielder Ruriko and the A-rank Wielder Yuri, was also supposed to include Fennick in the banner. Normally, this would not be a huge deal. So what if a paid unit was moved to another banner, you were still able to get that paid unit. Right? In the case of Fennick, while he was “moved” to the banner with Coruno, his Wielder pieces were still obtainable in the previous banner.

Most people, upon hearing this, would think “cool, so I can get a unit’s pieces before the banner. I guess that is not too bad, it gives me a head start on getting that unit from their actual banner.” However, this is not where the problem lies. For Player 1, the problem lies in how X. D. Global handled this incident. When the infamous 41/40 Wielders obtained was found, X. D. Global was repeatably asked what they were going to do about the issue. Most times, though, X. D. Global would simply respond saying that they did not know about the bug and could not give a date as to when it would be fixed. According to Player 1, the biggest problem in regards to Fennick, is not the bugs, nor the solution that they implemented, but the way that they fixed it. Player 1 believes that X. D. Global did not own up to their mistake as they simply went straight to the player and compensating them a S-rank Ruriko piece to make up for the bug. Player 1 feels that X. D. Global is too incompetent to admit their mistakes and instead will try to discreetly handle the situation.

The third and final problem that Player 1 laid out to me is, you guessed it, Coruno. However they did not say much about the Coruno controversy that I have not already covered, but instead told me a personal anecdote of theirs. According to Player 1, they were the first person to be banned from the Eternal City official Facebook Group. They claims that the following message/rant that they sent to the group is what got them banned.

Text of the “first post” to get banned off of the Eternal City Facebook Group. This screenshot was taken and used with the permission of Player 1 themselves.

After my talk with Player 1 ended, I had several other members of the Eternal City community reach out to me and tell their own sides to this story. Surprisingly, all of the players who reached out to me echoed similar sentiments that Player 1 did. After combing through leagues of Facebook comments and scouring the front page of the games sub-Reddit I came to a simple conclusion. A vast number of players that play Eternal City on the SEA server share this common sentiment towards a single entity.

Review of Eternal City after the patch was released Thursday morning.

The majority of Eternal City players have no trust in the creators of the game anymore. Blame was put onto both the developers, as shown in the picture above, and the publishers: X. D. Global. Even with so many players losing their trust in the creators of Eternal City, there are still those who have trust in them. There are those who believe that this is a one time occurrence. There are those who do not understand why players are making such a big deal out of this. For those of you that fall into these categories, Player 1 had something that they wished for me to tell you.

For those of you who believe that those speaking out against this should stop whining. For those of you who do not understand what the big issue with turning a free to play welfare unit into a paid Gacha unit is. Welfare units are implemented to help players with upcoming content, but are usually slightly worse than their equivalents in paid units. If no one speaks up here when the first welfare unit is turned into a paid Gacha unit, then the creators of the game will try it again with the next welfare unit. And if no one checks their greed, then what will they do next? Eternal City has had many collaboration events in the past on other servers. What if the paid Gacha units from those become locked behind a massive paywall? What then? If no one stands up to the greed that informed their decision to turn Coruno into a paid Gacha unit, then all players of Eternal City will be at fault when that very same greed destroys the game forever.

Why?

So why? Why did I start covering the Coruno situation? Why did I make this follow up article? More importantly, why did I expand on this article? Why did I ask for interviews with players of Eternal City? If I had been asked this a mere three hours ago at the time of writing this, I would have given some hollow answer about greedy anti-consumer practices. While this was definitely part of it, writing that out felt extremely hollow. I could not put out this article with that as my answer. So I stepped away from my computer and thought about it.

After sitting and thinking about it for three hours, I finally came up with an answer right before I went to bed last night. I wrote these two articles because I believe in the message that is being sent to other game developers and publishers. What X. G. Global has done with these decisions are greedy and go against what a clear majority of their player base wants. While I have hoped that X. D. Global would reverse Coruno back into a welfare unit, it sadly does not look like at this point in time they plan on doing so.

But despite this, the Eternal City community has become a shining beacon for other companies. But instead of being a beacon telling them to come do the same thing, the community is a beacon warning other games from doing this. The Eternal City community shows every other game company that if they try to do the same greedy practice as X. D. Global, then their loyal player base will leave them.

I wrote the original article on Eternal City because I truly hoped that X. D. Global would change Coruno back to a welfare unit. While I still hope that X. D. Global will get their act together, I wrote this article, talked with the players of Eternal City, and talked about my own feelings in this article because I believe that the Eternal City players have shown what all players should strive to show when faced with situations like these. I know that I will continue to stand with the Eternal City players as much as long as the game continues.

If you are a player of Eternal City and feel that anything I said in this article is wrong, feel free to post it in the comments below or you can message me on twitter at NtwelveMGNN (@NtwelveM). I would love to hear all sides from Eternal City players on anything I said in this article.

Author’s Note

Before I leave, I have some thank you’s I need to make. On Mobile Gamine News Network we have an editor and writer who goes by the name of Cheap2Play. Cheap, I need to say thank you. The first Eternal City article would not have gone as far as it did if you had not taken the initiative to post the article on the Eternal City sub-Reddit. I also would have never been able to finish this article if it had not been for you helping me gather pictures and sources. Even though I am the writer of this article, this is just as much Cheap2Play’s article as it is mine. So again, Thank You Cheap2Play.

Thank you to everyone else on the MGNN team that helped me gather stories, pictures and news for this article. It would not have come together as fast as it did without the help that you guys gave me.

Finally, thank you to the players of Eternal City who talked with me about the state of the SEA server and how it compares to the other servers. Hearing everything you players told me has helped me learn more about the game and how the players of the game feel towards X. D. Global and the developers of the game.