A review of the Advent campaigns

James
Jan 18th 2022
2,865 Views
4 Minutes

In this article we draw a conclusion about the Advent and Christmas campaigns. Unfortunately, there were individual incidents, including leaks and attempts at fraud, which we do not approve of. Otherwise, the campaigns were very successful again this year.

Contents [hide show]

Fraud attempts through double accounts
Agreements
Leaks and Hate
Acknowledgements

Dear Users,

The Advent/Christmas campaigns were very successful for the community. In numbers:

There were a total of 111 different doors to open.
There were 58 prizes to be won - from discount coupons to entire AddOns. Many active users were among the winners this time.
In total, there were 31 free gifts from the community of 29 authors.
The doors were opened by an average of 1420 registered participants. We do not record unregistered door openers.

Nevertheless, we would like to mention a few incidents that have upset us.

Fraud attempts through double accounts

Unfortunately, there were some users who tried to participate in the promotions more than once by using double accounts and thus increasing their chances of winning. Due to the large banners we have recently, we do not assume that this happens by mistake. To put it bluntly: anyone who tries to obtain winnings in this way is committing a criminal offence according to German law! We reserve the right to take legal action and have banned the user. As always, "objections" can be raised via the ticket system in the case of justified double accounts.

Agreements

Some modders had contacted us because there were no more agreements this year and so some similar mods were not distributed but came out one after the other. We made a conscious decision not to disclose who does what and when this year, because last year there were leaks from the modders. We try to spread out the doors as much as possible and not put similar mods out one after the other - but we can't completely rule it out. Every now and then, we have to postpone doors to other days (be it because a piece of content is not ready, the modder has internet problems or still has to fix a serious bug, or modders drop out again). Unfortunately, we can't take everything into account. At some point, the door is ready and changing it afterwards takes time, which we don't always have. After all, there are several doors per day due to the winnings, and each of them has to be translated as well.

Leaks and Hate

Leaks are inevitable with such campaigns. Due to the technical nature of the Advent calendar, we cannot prevent this (we have planned measures for next year); in particular, this year we had to upload the doors in advance due to absences in the team. Nevertheless, public spoiling is stupid. Think about newly released films. What really upset us was that spoilers were shared publicly in social networks (including supposedly "private" Discord groups) and that real hate groups formed around the Advent calendar and the WebDisk. The modders, who have worked for a long time on this and put their heart and soul into it, absolutely do not deserve this! There is also a lot of work behind map and bus mods, which is why it is absolutely inappropriate to complain that a new bus or a new map has not appeared every day! It is significant that the users who participate in such campaigns do not have any published content themselves.

For us as a team, this is one reason to consider whether such an advent calendar can take place again.

Acknowledgements

Nevertheless, we would like to thank everyone involved:

Aerosoft and HALYCON, who again supported us with prizes.
Wörki, who took care of the technical set-up.
Schleswig-Holstein, who took over the campaign this year, from writing to the modders to putting together the prizes and doors.
Lµkas, Erilambus and PG_97 for help behind the scenes.
All Modder who contributed something.
Advent Calendar Provided content for the advent calendar Awarded 138 times