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Background
School of Dragons' oldest Dreadfalls were often very bland without any major event other than 3 decorated Locations (Berk, The School and The Farm), Fright of Passage, exclusive Dreadfall-related Items and newly released Dragons. In the year 2019, SoD decided to try something new.
After the success of the Stormshatter Event from 2018, School of Dragons thought in planning a special, Themed, semi-Live Event where players all around the world need to gather as much Candy as possible, like Trick-or-Treat, to gain exclusive, grand, Dreadfall-exclusive Prizes. On September 13th, 2019, Snod the Sneak sent all Supreme Viking Champion-ranked Forum Users a teaser private message, teasing about the future Event that was about to come[1].
This was enough to get users hyped and eager to see what they were planning, this was utterly new for Dreadfall, for the first time, they were planning on something big for a Holiday. The eagerness increased after yet another teaser done by Brynjolf in October 1st, 2019[2] and 6 days later, a manual countdown was being done by both Hyuckster and Brynjolf[3].
On October 10th, 2019, 5:18AM UTC, two new, never seen dragons were released in the Store for a very short time and for an absurd, expensive price, 2,500 
and 5,000 respectively[4], this alone nearly erupted the SoD Community as users who succesfully bought the Dragons could quickly grow it and leak it to the forums or make Showcase videos of such, that alone was rather bizarre - users were expecting SoD Developers to take away the bought Dragons and not refund their respective amount of Gems to the buyer, instead, they left users keep their initially released, bought Dragons, potentially spoiling a big part of the Event. To this day, it's still unknown if the initial release was intentional or accidental.
And then, finally, on the same day, at 8:00AM UTC, Update 3.3.0, the awaited Themed, semi-Live Event was released to the public. It has been dubbed the glitchiest Update yet.
Released along with:
The purpose of this Event was to literally collect as many Candy as you could, with the objective being to hit the respective amount needed to collect the Prizes, 15000 Candy being the amount needed for the Skrillknapper. The only way to get Candy was via Battle Events, Racing, Dragon Tactics, Daily Rewards, Daily Quests, the 4 Dreadfall Quests, Mystery Chests, harvesting Dreadfall Animals, completing Dreadfall Stable Missions, and exchanging items for Candy in the Exchange Cauldron. A Forum post from Brynjolf explaining how the Event worked as also writen[5].
However, this Update got known as something else: it was known and occasionally dubbed as the glitchiest Update yet. Its release was a chaos of bugs, glitches of all sort of severity, SoD Forum was full of glitch report with no end to be seen, going as far as players calling the Event pay-to-win inducing.
- Sync Progress Failure: It was the most common of the glitches, this prevented players from being able to progress through the Event as the game would automatically force the player to re-login the Player and redo the last thing they did, sending them to an infitine Sync Failure loop - this applies to nearly ALL methods of gathering Candy, special mention goes to Daily Quests and Fright of Passage;
- Glitched Ghost Ships: The Ghost Ships would often spawn to be unwinnable by a glitch, this includes spawning with negative Health, invisible, or simply invincible even if it can be shot at - if a player did succesfully beaten a semi-functional ship, the result screen would often not load at all and instead display an infinite loading;
- Racing stuck on Loading: The race tiself worked fine, it's only when you got to the result screen, it would load forever. This only happened in Multiplayer, however, which gave a total of 25 Candy for 1st Place, 20 Candy for 2nd Place and 10 Candy for 3rd Place;
- 19 Minutes: The Dreadfall Sheep was supposed to give 1 Candy for 15 Minutes, it instead gave after 19 Minutes, and it never got fixed throughout the Update nor did its description got fixed, essentially deceiving Players:
- Quest Acceptance Failure: Return of the Dagur was unacceptable right at the start, simply accepting the Quest would result in Sync Progress Failure;
- Floor? What's that?: On some occasions, the floor's collision detection would suddenly sappear, resulting in players fall through the ground and forcing them to leave the gamer for a quick fix;
- Where in the world are the White Pumpkin Seeds?: One of the Dreadfall Dailies, The Little Lost Dragon, has two variant pathways, one of them involves delievering 8 White Pumpkins to Fishlegs... which weren't available at the Store, making it impossible to complete unless players had planted and harvested hoards of White Pumpkins before the Dreadfall Update was released;
- Glitch Tactics - Part 1: Curse of the Deleveling Gas: By far, the most notorious of all the glitched Minigames, Dragon Tactics turned into a literal dreaded Minigame due to its terrifying glitch known to any viking who dealt with it: The Deleveling Glitch. This glitch attacked Vikings like a deadly virus and as soon as it targetted the Player, their Adventurer Levels would greatly decrease, from Lvl.50 to Lvl.8-Lvl.11[6] in one fell swoop, any attempts at leveling back up would immediatelly decrease back to the lowest Lvl., the worse is no one knew what are its exact origins, the only thing people knew was it came from playing Dragon Tactics and would find out the glitch was in affect after they:
- Realized after they got the freeze glitch in Dragon Tactics;
- Realized while doing a Dragon Tactics Level because their viking did no damage;
- Got it after a Dreadfall or Icestorm Level[7];
- Realized it after doing one of the introductory Dreadfall quests;
- Realized it after reading the forum about the glitch and checking the game;
- Glitch Tactics - Part 2: Now, Freeze!: As if the latter wasn't enough, some Dreadfall Dragon Tactics Levels would result in the game soft-locking on an enemy, around 3-4 turns in, constantly hopping from level to level, making it harder to determine what level can't be played and what level can. Or, if it wasn't the freezing that prevented players from completing the level, it would be the "Server Time Called Out"/"You have been Loggged Out" screens that would suddenly pop out, specially at the near end of the level, promptly kicking players out of the game. The requirement to unlock the Dreadfall Dragon Tactics Levels was also misleading, the requirement simply said to complete the tutorial when in reality, it required to complete GHOSTS!, this lead to multiple players being confused and unable to do the Dragon Tactics for days until someone said what the requirement really was or until it was eventually fixed.
As if these weren't already enough, the Mobile port of the game was still due to be updated and it only got updated in... 15th of October, 2019, meaning mobile players were 5 days in disadvantage from the PC players, resulting in a slow running start and a bigger need to rush to the end in hope of getting all the rewards. Fortunately, the Event was extended 5 more days (supposedly ending on November 11th and not on November 4th) and players who couldn't log-in on mobile platforms received 700 Candy though some thought this wasn't enough to compensate for the 5 days of waiting.
The general controversy surrounding the idea of School of Dragons being heavily pay-to-win has been haunting the game ever since the very beginning, but it's notorious nature comes from the general division: Team "Support Devs" and Team "Criticize Devs" with a small to no Team Neutral, it's hard to find a neutral player without them picking a side, no matter how subtle it will be.
- Team "Support Devs": They'll support and encourage almost everything the Developers do to keep their work, if the Pay-to-Win argument rises up, they'll defend the Developers, and in some occasions, criticize the other team;
- Team "Criticize Devs": They'll criticize almost everything the Developers do and point out the flaws of the updates, if the Pay-to-Win argument rises up, they'll criticize the developers, and in some occasions, criticize the other team;
- Team Neutral: Rarely seen, these will acknowledge both sides and attempt at staying in a neutral, unbias side, criticizing some bits and supporting other bits.
Take for example: Stable Missions. It's often considered as the Golden Age of SoD because the minigame offers multiple quests for the player to level up their dragons as well as collecting bundles that reward a specific range of Gems depending on the bundle, because of such, Team "Support Devs" uses Stable Missions and the ability to gather Gems from those missions as proof SoD isn't unfair or pay-to-win inducing; however, Team "Criticize Devs" will bring the fact some, if not, most of the Missions are heavily relying on a specific Dragon Species/Skill/Age limitation, specially the Gems Missions - for example, Loki's Maze from Slot 2, a mission that rewards a Big Sack of Gems, is exclusive to Mystery classed Dragons, if a player only has a Hideous Zippleback, the player will only have a total of 25% of success.
However, unless another Update in the future will beat the record, Update 3.3.0 - The Great Dreadfall Update, will forever be known for its notorious Pay-to-Win controversy and constant argumentation within the SoD Forum. As explained under the former tabber, the Dreadfall 2019 Update was considered as the glitchiest update (yet), with glitchies that heavily interfered with the game's progress, including an entire port update that only came to light 5 days after the update's release, but the accusations of its unfairness and Pay-to-Win nature came to light when some users accused the Dreadfall Event of being "rigged" and unfair[8][9], that is, users would accuse the Event of being unfair and unwinnable by design, with the Event's intention being to force players to buy Candy and Gems with real money, for a quick, greedy buck - the removal of nearly all the ways to gather Gems, with exception of Long Night Flight which requires Membership, made the situation worse as players who weren't prepared for the Event or had a very small amount of Gems were doomed from the start.
Some would list the reasoning for such accusations, these included:
- Battle Events with less rewarding prizes (for exmaple, a Gold Battle Event gave 30 Candy from both variants) and were very glitchy, often with health glitches or it rewarded nothing at all;
- As mentioned before, the removal of nearly all the ways of gathering Gems, with exception of the Long Night Flight;
- Glitches such as Sync Progress Failure kept players locked from increasing their Candy progress;
- The early release of both Dreadfall Dragons (Dreadstrider and Skrillknapper) is seen, by some, a very unfair move as some were able to buy them and not have to deal with the Candy farming-inducing Event;
- The Ad-speed up features, or ahything to do with Ads, weren't working for most of the players - this didn't helped with the fact the Candy Stable Missions were often very long;
- The general distrubutions of the Candy per Minigame and Exchangeable Items felt unfair and unbalanced to some, for example, the Thunder Run Racing Dreadfall Tracks gave 1 Candy per 20 Hours, while finishing in first place gave 15 Candy per 20 Hours;
- Dreadfall Chests costed Gems, with the most rewarding costing 250 , with the lack of ways of gathering Gems, players could barely open them due to lack of Gems;
- One of the methods, harvesting Dreadfall Animals, also costed Gems, but often only rewarded 1-2 Candy depending on the Animal;
- Dragon Tactics takes the cake as being a dreadef feature throughout the entire course of the Event, freezing enemies that cuased soft locks, constant server errors and logoffs, with the biggest offender being the Deleveling gltich that can only be fixed by contacting Jumpstart's Customer Support since according to the Admins, the glitch can only be fixed manually;
References
