So far, I’ve directly asked GR, JB, Taytron, and Shawn if there is an issue with the content of this thread and gotten no answer…

Scopely has made several misleading statements, published misleading odds, and attempted to hide discussion of these issues. This thread is designed to give a small sample of these issues. The mia promo(33% odds shown, actual odds much much lower) and dozens of other such issues are left out for brevity’s sake. At some point, I may try to compile a list of more with descriptions, if users would like to see this, feel free to send me dates, descriptions, and screenshots/thread links. I’ll try to add them at the bottom when time allows it. Thanks.

June 2017

Interview published on emery.com of Scopely Co-Founder Ankur Bulsara. The interview centers around data systems and their employment towards maximizing player spending

https://emerj.com/ai-podcast-interviews/techemergence-comscopely-ai-analytics-gaming/

November 2017

Forum user Hashi creates a thread discussing the interview and raises a very important question.

…one of the first use cases—that was to predict, or really estimate, lifetime value of people that we wanted to bid for. This is important because you need to calibrate your bids, and rather than make up a bid, you want to have some confidence that you are not overpaying and you want to bid as high as possible in a growth phase without bidding above your LTV…it’s really critical at first to get these games at scale, because if we don’t, you’re going to have a hard time creating enough social critical mass to make the game interesting, to create enough social competition, to create enough of a user base. (15:26) From what I gather, you’re looking at immediate activities that these people take…have they taken the micro-actions, are they the kind of engaged users that do these things that tend to become the kinds of people with this likelihood that end up paying us X…I take it that this is what models are getting trained on. AB: That is a more accurate description, and the other point I would make is that the other reason why we can’t wait four or five months…is the game will have evolved so much in that five months that essentially it’s a different game…this goes back to live content and frequent updates, and we try to have one release a month with a big new feature…one of the things we look for, from a data perspective, is are the new cohorts monetizing at a higher level than the old cohorts? Our product needs to improve over time, and this is why you need a little bit more machine learning to be more highly adaptable to these kinds of early signals that may be indicators of future spend.

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I want to give you the opportunity to address something that is very important to us older players. As you may have seen from my other post, from the small sampling of people who took my poll it seems the majority of players on these forums are your long-term, loyal players. However there are some nagging issues that we as a community have been sensing for a while, and this quote frankly kind of gives credibility to some of the more ‘outrageous’ claims I’ve seen over my 2 years of playing, lurking the forums, and participating in the forums. Namely, the adjusting of odds and the theory of ‘lucky’ accounts. From above, Ankur says “…predict, or really estimate, lifetime value of people that we wanted to bid for. This is important because you need to calibrate your bids…” So this is saying straight out that we are part of a number game, in which we players could provide a potential XX amount of profit to the company over the lifetime of our account, our lifetime value (LTV). Nothing wrong with this, as we all are grown ups and know this is a business. However, let’s get into how your bids are calibrated. Next, the interviewer says “From what I gather, you’re looking at immediate activities that these people take…have they taken the micro-actions, are they the kind of engaged users that do these things that tend to become the kinds of people with this likelihood that end up paying us X…I take it that this is what models are getting trained on”. To which Ankur answers “That is a more accurate description…” So now we’re really getting some insinuation that, using data collected on players, that data is being used to nudge or otherwise influence players to further spend. How is this applied on a practical level? Well, it is widely theorized that newer players sometimes get better pulls, which is often displayed when older players pull event items on their alt accounts. Their older account, which perhaps has already hit its lifetime value (LTV), often pulls bad rewards, while their alt account, which may still be getting ‘groomed’, magically pulls the best reward possible. So, can the ‘odds’ be adjusted on accounts or not?

His question is answered directly by then Community Manager Kalishane, her answer is then responded to by Senior Software Engineer Combat Devll.

Interview with Scopely co-founder - FASCINATING! General @Dash @CombatDevIl @CombatMan @kalishane @Agrajag @TheWalkerDude I’ve been thinking a lot about this following quote… …one of the first use cases—that was to predict, or really estimate, lifetime value of people that we wanted to bid for. This is important because you need to calibrate your bids, and rather than make up a bid, you want to have some confidence that you are not overpaying and you want to bid as high as possible in a growth phase without bidding above your LTV…it’s really critic…

September 2018

Scopely launches offergate, the most obvious showing that the information provided by Kalishane and Combat Devll was incorrect. Players in different in game “regions” were shown vastly different pricing for the same items(hold on to this in your mind, we will come back to it later). Forgive me if some of these pictures are marked up, some players reporting these issues wish to remain anonymous for fear of issues coming from scopely.

This image was part of a series of offers that cost some users approximately $35

This image is part of the same series, where it cost other players approximately $1,600

$1 Offer For New Players General Let me post this for clarity Imagine that a new player came in and got all 12 of these for $36. Would you, a veteran player, be mad because the money, time, and energy you spent on the game does not yield a roster like this? [image] [image] [image] [image]

Since then, there have been other discrepancies on offers between various regions. Newer regions consistently receive better deals on items, pulls, and coins, either by differing odds or differing pricing.

January 2019

September 14th 2019

Venturebeat comes out with an article of a discussion with Spencer Tucker, senior vice president of Scopely.

Highlights from the interview include

Spencer Tucker: “Hey, someone spent between $1 and $50,” that’s a bucket. We want to determine content to push them above that $50 threshold over a certain period of time. Maybe we price it as a percentage of their last 30-day spend, instead of a fixed actual cost. We do that differently against that entire distribution of the population. The goal there is to move people up in terms of spend velocity between buckets over time and get them more engaged in the purchasing experience, and ultimately treating purchase activity as a retention funnel.

GamesBeat: Some of that sounds like pricing airline seats, different prices for each passenger.

Tucker: Price discrimination is one thing. You could offer the same good at different prices. There are other ways to do it too. You treat value as the relative thing, aside from price. This might come into play in an MMO. You have a lot of people having conversations about how much something costs. If you do price discrimination, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to sell you this sword for $100, and sell this other guy the same sword for $20.” But then those two people meet online and ask, “Why am I paying this much while you’re paying that much?” They don’t have the context to understand it, so you have a negative reaction from that level of transparency.

Remember that mention of offergate above? The response to that was one of the negative reactions to this level of transparency.

Tucker: If you treat the value as the relative thing, the distribution for that value is more probabilistic, like mystery boxes are obfuscated in some fashion. Then you can keep that value exchange behind the scenes. They’re paying the same price, so you attack a price point on a relative basis that moves a lot of volume, but the number of times they have to make the purchase to ultimately acquire that good is variable based on how much the spend over that 30-day rolling period.

Audience: So you’re talking about shifting the odds.

Tucker: Shifting odds, or shifting the–in a practical sort of example, one thing we do is we say–we’re doing this now. We’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to create a mystery bag. We’ll call that bag the same thing regardless of what bucket you fall into.” From a player-facing standpoint, the bag is called A. It’s A for everyone. The price of A is 99 cents. But the thing that varies is the quantity or the range and probability of the range of items within that bag.

John Linden: Are you guys able to publish odds, then? Because if the odds change per player, what’s the legality in Belgium and other countries with new regulations around that?

Tucker: We do publish odds. It depends. Right now we have a number of approaches there. We can class content. We’re publishing odds based on a class. Rarity and things like that.

Linden: But that would still shift per player too, right?

Tucker: It does, but the class is a bucket. Think of it as rarity tiers. Orange rarity has a bunch of stuff in it, but there’s a range within that tier, and you’re publishing the percentage of that range, of the total range. That’s one example. Another example is, if we talked about mystery boxes–this is something we haven’t done yet, but I think in the future there’s alternatives to mystery boxes that are effectively very similar, but function in a very different way from a player-facing standpoint.

To parse though all the lingo and give an easier to understand explication, here is what he is saying. 6*, 5*, 5* ascendable, and 4* are all rarity tiers. They display the odds getting something from each tier accurately. In side of each tier though, they can manipulate the odds either towards your 6* being the promo toon, or a toon nobody uses anymore, based on player spending habits. They make lower level spenders more likely to get the promo than higher level spenders. They do this to encourage lower level spenders to spend more frequently and to draw out higher level spenders into pulling over and over until they get what they want.

Notice in this section, he distinguishes between things they are doing(which he says are the manipulations described above) and things they aren’t doing yet, which is manipulating refreshes within the game(think supply depot having valuable toons within it, then adjusting the likelihood of that toon showing up with a refresh). He discusses this in length later in the article

So what we are left with is an article showing past, present, and future ways odds are being dubiously presented and manipulated based on player spending habits.

September 17th 2019

In the face of massive community backlash scopely releases a statement on the topic. They say the SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT’s comments made do not represent how Scopely operates any of our games, including The Walking Dead: Road to Survival.

Additionally, they say A Scopely executive attended this event, and outlined his personal opinions and potential scenarios of what could be done in the future of gaming.

However, the article directly says We’re doing this now

They also say

To clarify what has been discussed in the forum, we want to emphasize: Purchase experiences in our game are the same for all players and we do not have different odds for different players . Odds in Premier Recruits and all other odds-based experiences are the same for all players . We do not decrease player odds based on past spending behavior, age, engagement or any other behaviors.

However, this flies in the face of the screenshots above, which directly show differing odds and costs between players. We also know from cake gate(listed below), that odds presented can be grossly misleading and inaccurate.

We’ve also seen promos significantly changed during their second run of sales(not before the second run, during), so players are purchasing an item with a perceived value as scopely is selling it and directly changing that value, with direct announcement from scopely. When a third party developer announced it, his post was deleted and they are no longer allowed to speak here.

Other toons have been released and when used they cause the player’s game to crash. Morgan being the top example in my mind. These toons that people paid for are either fixed after many months or aren’t fixed at all. It took 3 months to fix Morgan, by that point he had been rendered obsolete by power “creep”.

Morgan crashing during auto farm Bugs The New Speciality Morgan is bugged in the new update … during world/roadmap/Territories stages when auto farmed the last walker is hit with morgans specilaity + rush … it does not go down and is stuck on a screen until you Flee or close the app, costing you energy and time i let it go the first few times thinking territory glitch but was happening a lot of times now

Different Promos Bug Bugs Can you also dive into the Morgan bug? You know, the one where stages can’t be finished. Edit: Looky here: Or here: Or there:

What are your pulls? Off Topic If she is like follow-up Morgan, she probably crashes the game too.

Posts disputing the claims of scopely are frequently closed, then hidden, so they are either only able to be seen with a direct link or are deleted entirely. I’m sure this post will be one of them, along with thousands of posts in scopely’s thread discussing this issue and others.

Why is all of this important? It shows a repeated lack of transparency and ethics coming from scopely. It shows a series of statements that run counter to the truth. It shows that even if you get what you’re spending for, it may be edited WHILE it is on sale, without notice, or it may not work for months. All players should take note of this moving forward and be aware that what you see is likely different from what others see and what you get is certainly different from what others get. Beyond that, if you complain about it, your complaints will be hidden or deleted.

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Cake gate

In The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Scopely currently has a gacha wheel up with an advertised chance of getting a particular collection item (cake) of 33%. I did 40 pulls on this gacha wheel, and had 2 successful pulls. If we analyze the statistics and calculate the probability of getting 2 or fewer successful pulls out of 40 attempts, it is about 0.002% (1 in 50,000). I’ve attached a screenshot of an online binomial probability calculator that confirms this probability.