Changes to contest rules/policies

[Sarick]

I'm not saying the increased bandwidth of more player entries is the cost. Nor am I saying the increased number of pixels that need to be distributed to winners is the cost. The cost is the effort that SE would need to put towards changing a system they already have in place. What I was saying is that this change will cost some amount of man-hours that we can only speculate over how much it is, yet everyone is talking about it as though it will take no time, no effort, no money whatsoever.

I think I pointed this out in post you quoted :P "The only real cost of the contest is managing/distributing the items." Still if a person is paying a subscription for a service that isn't free those efforts should be included with the package. If not its considered not supported. I could understand if the service was FREE but it's a paid service. When people joined the management system they wasn't made aware that it would restrict character in game opportunities every time they decided to make a contest.

As you later point out, attempting to get your accounts split to new SE accounts involves going through a lot of red tape. As with any large company, even the simplest actions can require comical amounts of work. So how much are these changes worth? Would you still support them if it required all updates to be pushed back an entire month?

I doubt it would need a lot of work. If it does it'd be because they designed the system wrong at the start to make it difficult to transfer. It's been done before on others. The red tape is actually getting someone willing to help. When I wanted a password reset the phone rep said it was impossible to recover the password or reset it. This was caused by SE spamming those orchestra events to the POL and main email accounts. It made the Icon blink constantly until I was able to delete the mail off the account!

On the forums I posted about it and someone mentioned the account management had a mail reset option. I went in there and FIXED the problem. The support options failed when the public knew more about a fix then the paid staff. The staff was incredibly rude about it when I ask to talk to someone else.

The issue I'm having here is to get both accounts equal access contest forums etc. We/I shouldn't need to separate character accounts into different management accounts just to access a contest for each of them. What set me off the most is some players support bad policy in a selfish way to try and block fairness changes. Contest policies are major complaints. Just like the one time recovery policy that is very restrictive.

As for updates being pushed back a month, I doubt the support staff, legal team, the web designer and the programmer are all the same person. I can see where you're coming from in a coordination standpoint but really setting the updates back a full month for a contest. The management system is just that it should be used to pay for the accounts. Frankly, I don't know why some unlock-able trinkets can't be unlocked in game using moogle codes.

I get it, things where done wrong the 1st round. Saying that it'll take a month to fix and set back the updates a full month implys you don't have much faith in the support/development team. I guess we can agree on a few things. ;D