I’m an accountability guy.
And to be fair - the optics on opening that building contest RIGHT AFTER a really rough patch with lots of hot issues and arguably not enough communications about said hot issues … it does look kinda bad.
However - consider that there are parallel paths at play here. 1) Due to production challenges, due to issues with the Public Beta, it is possible that they had to shift or push their AoH delivery date to when we received it. On an entirely seperate path… 2) the plans may have already been in place to do a little bit of a TLC event with the player community with Yogtober. We have had some amazing building contests before. They are often well attended, and generate a lot of interest for those builders who play.
For better, or for worse, I believe that these two very separate events coincided in a poor way. While we, the players, were click-clicking refresh to see what the heck was up with our Living Settlement, a pre-planned, pre-scheduled build event notice went out instead of AndyB coming to tell us that they are working on fixes.
The cards did not fall this way because Funcom does not care. The cards fell this way because sometimes that’s what cards do.
I am not the best builder. But my interest has been piqued by this event. ALSO - Funcom HAS performed some solid communication recently about the AoH problems. And that helps this to feel a lot less like a slap in the face. I fully believe they did not intend any of this to be a slap.
It’s just how the cards fell.