SG Employees

General Discussion
1

I’m just want to know if employees are allowed to play Empires & Puzzles? If they play do they have any unfair advantage over non employees? I guess the company really couldn’t stop them from playing competitively with everyone else but I’m just curious if they can or can’t.

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They totally play, and i guess they get paid in ascension items :face_with_monocle:

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There’s SG staff (Petri etc), then there’s unpaid volunteers (Coppersky etc.)

I’m guessing Petri et al don’t have a lot of time to play, but if they do, I suspect they are not rewarding themselves with loads of goodies, or we would see them on the leaderboard (and I never have).

I can guarantee the unpaid volunteers don’t get nada; no pay, no gems, no ascension items, no free heroes. I appreciate this, because it is then truly volunteer to our fellow players. :slight_smile:

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When I was a dev at a different MMORPG, playing was not only allowed but strongly recommended. There’s really no way to spot weaknesses and opportunities like first-hand experience. As part of our compensation we were allocated (the equivalent of) some gems each month to use as we pleased as well as unlimited little freebies that couldn’t affect game play (cosmetic mods, etc.).

I have no idea if this experience is similar to SG’s policy.

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I could have sworn I’d seen petri in game and he was part of a lower level alliance and his defense team was a mix of 3* and 4*, not fully ascended. But I’m only like 80% sure I’m remembering that right.

6

See PM, Dante. :wink:

(20 characters)

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Volunteers? You mean players? We all play the game just like Coppersky unless there’s something I’m missing? I could be wrong I know she took time to write stuff for us players. And as far as Petri I’m almost sure when I started playing he was in the top 100 months ago…

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holy crap, I never knew you could actually send PMs. LOL apologies for ignoring your other stuff, I just saw them as litle bubbles on my icon.

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9

Coppersky and Rook both donate time moderating. If you’ve ever moderated a forum, you’ll know how much time that can absorb. Larger companies hire staff to run the forums.

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10

To everyone thank you for enlightening me…all very interesting.

11

I’ve seen Petri in action in Beta - since beta is a copy of your real game (to start), he’s clearly lacking ascension materials for his mix of 4 & 5* players just like all of us at least in his defense team :slight_smile:

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12

Thats a diversion my friend, don’t fall for it :face_with_monocle:

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I mostly said it for the ascension materials joke, since you know, we all get stuck on materials at some point :slight_smile:

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I played another F2P MMO for 5+ years, (which I will not reference here so this post doesn’t get bombarded with spam reports like last time) and the devs had two types of accounts public and private.

Public, with their current forum name and a gold color, was usually low level for helping out when the chat mods were on vacation or a new game play had been added (like alliance wars in Empires).

Private with a secret name to keep an ear out in alliance chat (both mercing and alliance elder) for exploits, problems, and needed improvements.

Found out last year the head of the game company had a private account in my alliance (aka guild) for all 5+ years (they knew me from their previous game an arcade style RPG on the iPhone that I wrote several walk through guides about).

So yes if you are wondering, any alliance fellow, or merc, could be a company spy. Though they are not usually the heavy player and they usually stay out of the top alliances that ban mercing (too much work to meet the minimum play requirements).

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15

Interesting…Now I shall be eyeing all my fellow players, thinking, “Is it YOU?!” :grin:

Fun to think about.

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16

Off-topic, but can someone tell me how to get into the PMs? I have a green message bubble on my icon but can’t find where to open the message. Help, please!!!

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EDIT: Click your icon (upper right), and select the “mail” items in the drop down list; it should be at the top.

Sorry for the blurry pic:

image
image640×1136 342 KB

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18

Nice to see Devs are like most Devs:

Tim: Yeah, in my alliance, for example (and I haven’t actually ever said that I work for SGG, and have been playing with them from the beginning) — there’s a belief that if you do summons one by one, you’ll get better heroes. I haven’t commented. It just doesn’t affect anything — but…what can you say.( Linky, linky )

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19

Private account

I disagree.

I think it becomes more clear Devs do play Empires, but mostly with 4* heroes and a Forge level 17.

A lot of the 5* heroes are so difficult to get, a private/ stealth F2P account will never have them.

F2P

The head designer/ owner of BoH, Brandon, had a private/ stealth F2P account in my alliance for 5+ years but it blended in because it was normal F2P not P2W.

We were very surprised, the day he turned on his Staff flag ( long story ), and said “Hehe”.

Dev Tim

Brandon logged in today to monitor the Talk Like A Pirate Day limited time seasonal event for those users still playing.

I image Dev Tim logs into his private/ stealth account when each new Challenge event v2.0 goes live to monitor for problems.

Silver / Gold arena

With a level cap of 40, Brandon was only level 30. With a power cap of 104k, Brandon had a power of 11k.

I expect Dev Tim to be in Silver/ Gold arena fighting 5* to 8* titans. A staff position like Dev Tim is unlikely to have time to grind Empires on his private/ stealth account as much as a server engineer. A friend of mine used to read novels while waiting for his code to compile.

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21

Check here

[As of Jan 29: Beta Applications are closed, but still being processed, and new players are still being added] Beta Tester Applicant Personal Requests for Updates [Staff response in Post 15]
You have to wait until applications are open

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