u/rubenwe

Ja, unser Support geht durch alle Mails durch und kaputte Ads werden an die Netzwerke reported und entfernt.

Gerade am oder nach dem Wochenende sammeln sich halt ein paar Mails an und unser Support geht alle der Reihe nach durch.

Sorry, dass das mit manchen Ads nicht funktioniert, wie es soll! Finden wir auch doof.

This shouldn't be the case. That sounds like a technical issue. If you get one of these: can you use "write us" in the settings right after and send us a mail, so we can track down the exact ad and network that's causing this, please?

Thanks and sorry!

One thing to consider is that not all work ends in visible updates. Two of the biggest chunks of work we've had on the game are being wrapped up right now.

One of these is that we are reworking the game backend substantially and migrating over while in production. Optimally, this has no visible effects except working more reliably and being a new base that we can build upon for coming features.

The other big chunk of work should hopefully make ads work better: having them load more reliably and avoiding failures to reward etc.

But there's also new content in the works :)

Sometimes devices cache the available updates for a while. Try again tomorrow :)

You should be able to set the default email app in the system settings.

Settings > Apps > Default Apps > Email

That should change which app is opened.

Easiest is via "write us" in the settings. That also gives us access to the leaderboard IDs etc.

We'll add this one to the profanity filter as well. That's for the report.

I get that there can occasionally be emergencies and that a minimal queue is good for high utilization. But honestly, the economic damage of a full waiting room must in some cases be higher than the salary of another doctor.

Were removing these posts. Bit folks have to actually work on the games, eat and sleep, ya know ;)?

No need to apologize. I totally feel your frustration. If there was another way to do this with the same level of rigor and ease, then we'd for sure consider that.

There aren't any fixed groups. The distribution of folks that are in an experiment are usually equal between variants and fully random.

So if there were 1000 ongoing experiments (there aren't, of course) you should expect to see a treatment in about 500 of them. But given the lower number and how randomness works, it's a bit less evenly split but will equalize over time.

We also don't want to run experiments forever, but some measurements are just quite noisy in nature and need a good amount of data to even detect rather big effect sizes. We already do a lot here to reduce variance, by the way. It's not like we enjoy keeping features away from folks.

I'm not heavily involved on EV right now, so I don't know what the situation around that test is and when or if it will be shipped. Maybe another dev sees this and can say something to that.

I think you're taking "response" a bit literal here. Response in terms of measured response.

To give an example metric we look at: retention.

If we add something like the investor giving more gems, then there is a very likely outcome that folks will watch more ads. But ads also have a goal: getting users to do things. And often that is playing another game. Hence more shown ads doesn't just mean we get more money automatically. It also means that users might churn out of our game sooner. So there are two competing factors.

If we don't look at the statistical outcome here, we are potentially losing players or make less money overall.

We've shipped multiple things that lost us a bit of money, but had very positive effects on other metrics, by the way.

But there's always a chance that outcomes are just purely negative.

Not getting a feature and therefore the unmodified experience is also a treatment variant. The hypothesis that's being tested here is that adding a feature or change to the game has a positive impact.

Often, this isn't the case. That's why we, and most other studios, test these changes and don't just ship them based on gut feeling.

There are countless posts where we've replied in detail on this. If you search around a bit, you'll probably discover these.

But in short: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing

We flagged some phones that have faulty graphics drivers and other issues as incompatible a while back. This happened based on the amount of crashes we were seeing.

We need to take these actions because Google lets the kpis of some problematic devices influence the overall metrics.

Possible that there just weren't as many issues on one of these or just less users with that device overall, so it wasn't above thresholds.

Based on the way that this exploit is set up, limiting how much users can salvage when and some additional heuristics are for sure on the table.

But that's also what I meant with impacting regular users. Were taking out valid options on how to play to combat someone that's profiting off of our work.

leveraging an exploit the developers haven't closed

That's what's going on here. We know what's happening and how, but closing this also comes with serious drawbacks towards regular players. Were trying to mitigate some or these.

Eatventure is by nature a game that allows some offline play. So unless we want to prohibit that and make it an online-only title like Forgemaster, there's always going to be some level of exploitability.

The scammer in this case has probed and prodded at our protection and detection mechanisms that are currently in place until they found a workaround. Were going to make their life harder soon.

Either way - know that the EV team isn't big and that supporting exploiters like this is taking resources away from feature development if it becomes a big enough issue that we have to deal with it. Which this has become.

Devs are looking into it

First of all: it's fair to ask for this feature or to criticize its absence. If you like to see that, of course, voice your opinion.

The one point I want to clarify though: I'm not THE developer of the game. These days I'm barely A developer on the game. I help out with technical things when needed, but there are other folks working on this. I'll forward your post to the designer who's in charge of the title.

Why the downvote?

When did you send the mails? Support usually gets back to people in a few days at most.

How do you propose we handle this opt-in?

By letting people choose, were creating populations that aren't equal and aren't representative either.

There are multiple tests.

The assignment is fully random per test. So you might get some features or changes and not others. How long these run depends on the test and what's being measured.

So there isn't a concrete answer here.