Your analogy is actually pretty funny because I used to work at an athletic facility with a pool. Once a year we had to drain the pool for a week to do maintenance. Every once in a while someone would have an accident or the water would get contaminated for a while, and we'd have to shut the pool down. Also power outages, fire alarms, thunder storms. All sorts of things could render the pool unavailable.
We routinely had to say "yes, I am sorry. You have a pool membership, but the pool is just not available right now. This is part of running a pool." Some people occasionally canceled membership, but most understood because they liked our pool. It was an awesome pool on the 5th floor with a view of Central Park. Trekking out to Coney Island to swim in cold ocean water was not a preferable alternative, so they stayed members.
This reminded me of my last vacation.
I took a few days with my fiance and we went to a polynesian-style resort. It's in Orlando, Florida and they had an awesome pool. We had just went away to some theme parks not long before that and I wanted to just hang around the pool, work on my tan a little, I had designated time off from work, and so did she so we can enjoy our stay at the resort. Unfortunately, it rained a lot and we weren't able to use the facilities as we wanted to. We understand that stuff comes up and happens and it's all gravy.
I'm a restaurant manager and the food analogy is another one I can relate to. I've had people order 20 wings, eat 15 of them and say "they were too dry, they were too wet, under-cooked, overcooked, etc." I look at them and explain that if they would've alerted their server to the problem we would have happily taken it off their bill. However, we have a policy where if people eat a majority of the food, there is nothing that we can do about, and it's to prevent certain unscrupulous individuals from taking advantage of a razor-thin margin business.
Blizzard is probably far from being a razor thin business, and the resort can't control the rain, but it's the same principles of human understanding I think that matter most.
"I've cleared the whole game over and over again with 1200% magic find. Then you just walk in and get a godly item on your first trip through inferno! Why should you get a godly item?!?!?! I've been a bigger fan! I've played more! I had more magic find!!!! Why you?!"
Luck. It's a part of the franchise.
This is not even comparable.
In both of your examples, both players had the ability to try. The problem is with Blizzard giving rewards to the people THEY selected in the first place. Personally, I believe being selected to participate is just reward by itself, but to further aggravate loyal fans who would love the chance to be picked but weren't, by making it absolutely impossible to reap the same rewards, somehow, is absurb. Everyone who has played Diablo 2 to some extent knows how random MF'ing can be, that's the point. However, everyone has the ability to keep running stuff and increasing their chances through more attempts. Eventually they will be rewarded with good drops. It will happen in time. Rewarding people who were selected by Blizzard to participate is not analogous to your example because the ones who weren't selected had absolutely no definite control over their chances to play the beta.
Personally, I don't care. The FoS is worthless and people that actually care about them will ignore it because they know it was completely luck based. The sigil is the worst offense, but I really could care less about what someone's stupid banner looks like, because I will never be looking at them anyways. I just think it's a dumb move by Blizzard because beta testers were expecting nothing and doing this just infuriated a large chunk of their player-base.
While I understand the usefulness of a website like this and the potential it could have in helping others improve their characters or learn what they should be hunting for in the world of Sanctuary, I think it's pretty useless. Innovative technologies are only innovative when it solves a problem or fills a void that "needs" to be filled.
I'll be too busy playing the game to care about it. Don't really care who does what first, especially when so many firsts are results of exploitation anyways.
1
This reminded me of my last vacation.
I took a few days with my fiance and we went to a polynesian-style resort. It's in Orlando, Florida and they had an awesome pool. We had just went away to some theme parks not long before that and I wanted to just hang around the pool, work on my tan a little, I had designated time off from work, and so did she so we can enjoy our stay at the resort. Unfortunately, it rained a lot and we weren't able to use the facilities as we wanted to. We understand that stuff comes up and happens and it's all gravy.
I'm a restaurant manager and the food analogy is another one I can relate to. I've had people order 20 wings, eat 15 of them and say "they were too dry, they were too wet, under-cooked, overcooked, etc." I look at them and explain that if they would've alerted their server to the problem we would have happily taken it off their bill. However, we have a policy where if people eat a majority of the food, there is nothing that we can do about, and it's to prevent certain unscrupulous individuals from taking advantage of a razor-thin margin business.
Blizzard is probably far from being a razor thin business, and the resort can't control the rain, but it's the same principles of human understanding I think that matter most.
1
This is not even comparable.
In both of your examples, both players had the ability to try. The problem is with Blizzard giving rewards to the people THEY selected in the first place. Personally, I believe being selected to participate is just reward by itself, but to further aggravate loyal fans who would love the chance to be picked but weren't, by making it absolutely impossible to reap the same rewards, somehow, is absurb. Everyone who has played Diablo 2 to some extent knows how random MF'ing can be, that's the point. However, everyone has the ability to keep running stuff and increasing their chances through more attempts. Eventually they will be rewarded with good drops. It will happen in time. Rewarding people who were selected by Blizzard to participate is not analogous to your example because the ones who weren't selected had absolutely no definite control over their chances to play the beta.
Personally, I don't care. The FoS is worthless and people that actually care about them will ignore it because they know it was completely luck based. The sigil is the worst offense, but I really could care less about what someone's stupid banner looks like, because I will never be looking at them anyways. I just think it's a dumb move by Blizzard because beta testers were expecting nothing and doing this just infuriated a large chunk of their player-base.
1
.... but I think they're still playing SW:TOR
1
I'll be too busy playing the game to care about it. Don't really care who does what first, especially when so many firsts are results of exploitation anyways.
To each their own.