#yeah i’ve been debating this since 2019 with no forward motion

[mylittleredgirl]

had a little panic fueled burst of productivity that accomplished nothing because i traced the needed prerequisite activities back a bunch of steps to the town office, which closes at 3:30. my brief periods of effectiveness can’t be scheduled like that!! this task was put on my list in late 2019!! i can’t wait another 4 years!!!

[dappersheep]

Food Fantasy: An Analysis on what killed a Golden Goose (2/3)

Welcome back. Before we get started, disclaimers again! I do not own the game or its characters, nor do I claim to know the history and future of the game. What I am entitled to are the thoughts and opinions written within this post. You may or may not agree with the points spoken of here. This post also remains untagged from the main foofan tag. Only my followers will see this.

We are now on the second part, so let's go forward under the cut!

Elex

And here we have our beloved global publisher that most of seem to have Stockholm Syndrome for. Don't lie, at least half of us are still playing this damned game due to sunken cost fallacy, sunken time fallacy and the cute/hot jpegs.

In 2018, everything started out fine. Sure, maybe we had some translation mishaps here and there -coughwe'llgettothatwreckagelatercough- but overall, Elex was running the game fairly well. Rewards were on time, we had active social media and support, and a discord was set up!

Hint: Please note I use quite a bit of sarcasm in most everything I say.

And then somewhere along that road, things got derailed. And I mean it like, we're in the midst of a trainwreck in slow motion and we've only cleared the initial collision and still hurtling forward or backward into a steel wreckage ticking inferno.

Problems started cropping up as early as late 2018, just a few months after the game was launched in July.

⦁ Art contest mishaps. You know when you hold an art contest on Facebook out of all places with its shitty tagging system, you're bound to have entries lost to the void, people forced to register an FB account just to participate (seriously, who even has an FB account that isn't just there to appease family members?) and having to wrestle with figuring out how FB's tagging system works. Add to that the panel of judges happen to be Elex staff who don't have a good eye for good artwork (we actually had a kiddy figure drawing win over a well drawn one during the last contest!) and that they ALSO weren't very good at organizing such contests on FB... well, we had several grievances over that.

⦁ Region blocked FB announcements. Strangely enough, I stopped getting announcements around Father's Day of 2019 while everyone else outside of SEA kept getting updates. Turns out that someone on Elex's staff really didn't like SEA players or was just really bad at fixing the settings for the group and never bothered to revert it back. It didn't matter in the long run though, because...

⦁ Abandoned social media platforms. FooFan Twitter, FooFan Facebook... they all floated slowly into the void and was never heard from again. And this was before the 2020 pandemic.

⦁ Remember what I said about Discord? Yeah, apparently, they opened one up a little too early and the staff in charge of it knew zero about how to setup and mod a discord community, and didn't even have the manpower needed to mod the influx of members that came in! Suffice to say, they had to get help from top players and mods from the FB groups to come in and sort things out because someone kept pinging @ everyone every few seconds other than the usual chaos that comes from a server with no filters and people trying to turn the discord into Global Chat 2.0, minus Russian hours.

⦁ Also in line with the point about abandoned social media platforms, they've also mostly abandoned the discord too and only pop in once in a while to check the bug reports or lost accounts. You have a slightly better chance of response with the in-game support. Only slightly. And there's a running joke with several variations on the main discord that the Owner account of the discord server was manned by an intern-kun who never bothered to pass it on to the next unfortunate soul left to maintain this game.

⦁ Favoritism. Funtoy is also guilty of this but they don't publish the game for Global. If you're a top spender the likes of maxing out your cash rebates within the three months or so and you kept spending even beyond that, Elex could possibly invite you to a funky little club where your voice is more important than say... 99% of the playerbase. On top of that, if you keep spending, you could technically also ask for stuff like getting this frame over that frame, or well.... delay certain features from coming to Global for over a year. Now you can simp AND be heard! (Note: In 2021, it's possible that that club may be dead too, as all things shall be)

⦁ SJW Friendly. I don't know if Funtoy themselves have anything to also do with this particular decision... but it's saying something that after a certain little tiddy tantrum from the community side, Elex decided not to announce anything about a certain event's fate and when asked by it by other parties (not me) they either lie through their teeth, or beat around the bush with a non-answer.

⦁ Partial translations, mistranslations. Now, I understand that a lot of Chinese grammar and semantics are confusing to translate properly into several other languages, but you'd think Elex would have given their translators more context to the character or the mechanic to avoid such mistranslations that later set off gender debates or worded the skill/artifact description a little clearer. That is... unless Elex really is hands-off trying to get to know this IP from the start and only gave it the most bare minimum of English where they can cut costs for it, so people can understand it 'well enough' to throw money at an obviously not beta-read quality game.

⦁ No translations. Yes we do have certain parts of the game that are in Chinese since forever since xx patch. Some characters' voiceline texts are still in chinese, especially during the Pledge scenes. More recent artifacts are also in chinese with no announced translation in sight. And don't get me started on the Food Soul bios, or lack thereof.

⦁ Delayed events. Prime example? We had weeks of minor events/no events and still Elex managed to eff everything up for our second Anniversary in July 2020. We ended up getting the Croissant event in late August with barely any apologies and compensation for the delay... and this likely would have never arrived as 'early' as it did if people hadn't been railing about where our Anniversary event was. As it stands, we are several minor events behind CN, at least a year and a half's worth behind. I know Global had requested heavily for more spaced out events (to save resources, not that it actually worked with all the nerfed rewards we get) compared to CN but this is extremely ridiculous.

⦁ Delayed permanent features. Hm... Guild Wars, Sky Tower, Bar, that Wuchang Fish Showdown... several Quality of Life updates.... that new permanent pool update... Food Souls still missing their JP voice packs... Food Soul Bios... *slowly ticking off more than I have fingers and toes*

⦁ Customer Support is whack. You'd be lucky if you got someone who understood your problem/inquiry right off the bat AND did something about it efficiently. You'd be luckier if they answered you honestly if you were inquiring about event updates or other buggy features or reporting hackers.

⦁ The Great Turkey and Apple Incident of 2020. Well, if you were around for that little SNAFU during the Turkey re-run event, you'd know a percentage of people suddenly got logged out of their accounts and had a baller of a time trying to get their accounts back. You were especially unfortunate if you were playing on an iOS account because even if you did bind it (like a responsible player should be doing), you probably still wouldn't get it back in time to rank properly during Turkey. Some Android players also experienced this, but it wasn't as bad as what the iOS players experienced. And then there was the compensation mishap for that too.

⦁ Hacker-chan and not-so-uwu Hacker-teme. Hacker-chan is a meme. Hacker-chan was a harmless player who regularly topped in Top Showdown every week for a time to send a message to Elex just how easy it is to hack the game in certain rankings and invited Elex to ban them every time, just to test how competent Elex is. In the end, Elex has proven to be incompetent and also glaringly stupid about how their published game works. Hacker-teme is a collective of individuals over time who have cheated the game during important ranking events or in somewhat important permanent battles. If you tried to report a Hacker-teme with evidence to prove it -and trust me, people repeatedly have-, Elex would tell you that they're not cheating and/or lie through their teeth that they're 'investigating the case' and then not do anything about it and let them keep their event ranking and thus get the rewards while someone who actually worked hard/whaled hard to get the spot gets denied. In one case, they believe that if an account has rebate points and the player level is at least around level 80, then the hacker-teme is obviously playing the game fairly. Never mind that their units happened to have low to no artifact nodes opened, and not high in ascension.

And that is the end of the Elex saga. I'm aware there's likely more things about Elex that I've missed, but feel free to add on to this analysis post with your own thoughts.

The last part of this trilogy is probably what many of us are waiting for, for obvious reasons.