Your next major sale is only two months away and you are convinced that it needs to come with a minigame. Minigames are easy, what could go wrong?

Luckily your company even provided you with a couple of tried and tested guidelines to help you shape the gameplay concept of your upcoming project:

• The term mini might give the impression that you create a very simplistic game. However, you should compensate that with several similar sounding currencies and a wall of instructions. We recommend you include at least 3 variables and a 10min long introduction.
  
  
• Players are trustworthy so you can include pretty much any mechanic. Why not try for instance unspoofable achievements or in game challenges?
  
  
• Create the illusion of a diverse and fair reward system by forcing the user to go through another system which essentially demands a ransom to access your seemingly free tokens.
  
  
• Most likely no one expect this to work properly so don't lose your head about it. You can still patch on the final day and call it a success.

A short timeframe and incredibly "high" expectations mean you need to prioritize your resources. Obviously, this means you should call for graphic designers to get involved and let them produce a ton of concept drawings and figures, which you will then use during these two weeks. A few programmers should be able to do the remaining coding bits just fine. Simply ask any teams which most likely don't need them (TF2 jumps to mind).

Keep in mind that your designers are very talented people and have worked on many different projects. To capitalize on that variety, you will want to demand an entirely new style, specific to this sale. One common misconception is that Seam mascots are supposed to be reused and memorable. They aren't. They need to fill up space on the website.

As you should already know at this point, your userbase has very high expectations from you so you need to find a way to get them hooked.

As a first method you will want to shock them with something new. However, the sale is only several weeks away and there isn't any time for a new surprise.

In that case you will want to go the other way and suddenly remove an expected feature, say for example the summer sale trading cards. Your public attention and enthusiastic engagements are guaranteed.

Due to a helpful tip from your coworker you discover the assets from the previous sale. You have little time left, so you just those is as well.








Always keep in mind that you must keep the instructions vague and changes them randomly during the event. If you do a good job, people might not even realize immediately that you only want their money.



Just a few hours before the release someone in your teams comes up with another great idea:
Gift a few players each day one of their wishlisted games.
Sounds cool to you, so you hastily implement that idea and throw in a line about random players on the winning team receiving a price from their wishlist. Surely that one can't backfire. Who doesn't love free games?

Perhaps some of your colleagues have already programmed such a game or worked on a previous event and want to provide you with feedback. Resist the tempting offer and do your project on your own. After all they might be only a junior developer and what do they know?

You can hear their despair in their voice, they start throwing in words like "snowball effect" and "event management". You are not sure what they exactly mean and why should you? They probably believe they know everything better than you and that's because they don't know your audience. This year it will be different and you can let your users choose freely.




Anomaly detection and xp caps?

They have such little faith in you that want you to prepare for accidents? They probably also laugh about you during lunch. In the great tradition of your enterprise, you will go all in without any safety checks and show them who's a big boy.

This is unbelievable. A few hours after launch, when people can finally load the webpage again, a coworker provides you with some troubling news: For some still unknown reason everyone seems to be choosing the biggest team named after a cute doggo instead of playing the hero in an empty team.



Clearly that is the players' fault, so what do you do? First things first, you never really cared about this event in the first place, so you naturally spend the next day with the VR team and try out these new controllers they created.

Of course, this is not what you are going to mention. You should post something vague enough that people will not be able to draw any definitive conclusion from it. Something along the lines of:

"The first few days of the Grand Prix have been dynamic and dramatic, to the point that some of you have started to wonder what's going on under the hood. We want to assure you that we are not manually intervening in the outcome of a given day's race. Each team's progress is fueled by its active number of players and the points and boosts they contribute."


However now someone points you towards the forums and demands you take action. After several hours of brainstorming and playing hit the pot someone comes up with the perfect solution:

Take the biggest anchor you can find and strap it to the winning team. Your players have shown they can't play your game properly so it's now time to take over and play it for them.


The intended solution


To make absolutely sure the biggest team does not win another time to check the statistics half an hour before the end.

What is this? Despite the heavy point multiplier penalty, that team is still in the lead?

You cannot let this happen again. You are going to grab a metaphorical gun, wait at the finish line and shoot that stupid dog before it can cross the finish line[redd.it]!















But now your forums get flooded with annoying corgi fans who, for some reason, find their decision having 10% the effectiveness of a different team's players unfair.

https://redd.it/c6mkc8
https://redd.it/c8iy34
https://redd.it/c6kx42
https://redd.it/c6uy34
https://redd.it/c6mh5k
https://redd.it/c6mfi2
https://redd.it/c6mnqm

Very ungrateful little players, but you get the order to fix it differently. As you glaze wanders over the website you notice a small empty spot and instantly now what was missing.

It is time to introduce yet another new mechanic into the still too intuitive contest and let players swap from the winner team to a random other one. Surely they will follow you this time.

The first day is over and a lot has happened already. As you come into the office the next morning, you notice a lot of your actual customers are complaining about your even on Twitter. How could that have happened? The sale always boosts the popularity of games and provides exposure to indie games, right?

Surprisingly, as it turns out, people don't use the exploration queue as often when you don't reward them for it. However more importantly, a lot of users are deleting small games off their wishlist.




As one fellow indie developer kindly explains to you, many people didn't understand your rules correctly and wanted to ensure only expensive games are in their reward pool.

Yet another unforeseeable issue, but you make sure to immediately start working it to keep a good relationship with your most important users. Explain when you can receive a gift from Steam and what factors decide the game you will get.

Everything was already going so well and suddenly you accidentally notice a community post. Some people have found a way to exploit the non-existing checks in your code to break every leaderboard.




How were these masterminds able to cheat your system?

No one will ever be able to understand their moves.






Surely you go right and introduce caps and revert changes from offenders, right? No! It is absolutely crucial that you that you wait at least 3 days with a visible response, otherwise the public might get the impression that you closely monitor your event.

A few exhausting days of testing new VR titles later, you are ready to take action. And with that the first question arises: How do you know who cheated and should be punished and how do you revert their progress?






One option would be to validate the token balance and based on that evaluate if manual changes were made. However, this is where a big problem starts to become visible. This clearly requires a lot of effort and you cannot have that. Perhaps that is even against company policy?

No, you need a radical action of some kind, you simply take the game offline[redd.it] while you make your decision. Don't worry, your players probably already expected that anyway. Announcements or an explanation would only be distracting.

So, with only limited endeavor, you decide to go with the second option and revert everyone who has a higher steam level than St4ck on SteamDB.



A few refreshes later SteamDB does not list them as the highest profiles anymore, your job now done. Oh, it seems like those people now also have a Steam level that does not match their XP and thus require negative XP to level up. Well, not your job.

https://youtu.be/04QRIK45Et0


Now that you have some time again, perhaps an assessment of the impact and risks of such an exploit is advisable?
Good one, of course not. Why would you ever think that? What's the worst that can happen?



All of a sudden, your phone starts vibrating: A new video from your biggest fan! "Major Steam Exploit" in the title! You hectically click on the notification, but as soon as the voice narration is drowned too early by music again, you feel relieved; Valve News Network completely missed the point. Again.

https://youtu.be/mZuLsFoNkIs

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1787724194
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1792075533
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1791689623
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1791680844
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1791683418

Purposefully very overdramatic.
Only a moderator or junior developer would take this seriously.
Thanks for coming to our TED talk.