hi5 Player Transfer Complete / Ongoing

First off, we would like to "thank" hi5 / Tagged for kicking all 3rd party developers (including KANO/APPS) off their network and giving us a gracious time-frame of less than 30-days to do so while taking into account their users that invested both time and $$$ into KANO/APPS games. It is also important to note that hi5 gave us limited support during this process and actually shutdown the site at 9pm Pacific Time on the 28th when up until that point we had been told that we had till the end of the month.

We have always tried to do our best to do the right thing by the players, on day 1 of what can we do, we had unrealistic expectations of what we could do with respect to transferring over players partly due to the time-frame but also due to the differences in hi5 itself with respect to payment options and the level of competition. For example, looking at a hi5 level 8000 Viking Clan player did not have to fight through the same rivals to get to that position in Facebook so it is not fair to either player to drop them in at the level they obtained in hi5. Ruling out a hi5 direct 1:1 transfer we then looked to options to compensate a players time that has been grinding away in a game everyday for 3-years and/or investing $$$ that was fair to them but also fair to the network that that player was going to, plus we had 30-days to put it all together!

With the packages, we have tried our best to take all considerations into account and fairly reward hi5 players for their achievements / time spent on their appropriate game and compensating $$$ spent on their previous character, that was both fair to hi5 players but also fair to Facebook/MySpace players that have also invested both time and $$$.

Now there have been some concern from Facebook/MySpace players with respect to these packages and a lot of misconception. One that I have heard is that a player was given 4k Favor Points and 12,000 Skill Points which is simply not true, in fact there was no Skill Points offered beyond the kick start level that some players were offered. Favor Points packages were based on both play and pay. For Facebook / MySpace players, I would like to ask how much would you value 3-years of playing a game every day, $50 a year, $200 a year, or some other amount? It is not an easy question to answer and is something we tried to quantify through achievement reached in game, gamer points and $$$ spent. There have been complaints of some players receiving +12k of points assuming that these players are given a whack load of "free" points which is another misconception, it is no secret that players pay to play our games, that is why we are in business here to serve you the players, if you lost your games would you want points purchased, because that is what we tried to take into account when awarding points compensation.

End result, we have made about 50% of the transfers that registered their emails with us and will be working best we can to get the rest of the players that over.

Due to the nature of this project, it will be on-going with weekly reviews to measure the progress of hi5 players settling into their new homes making the appropriate adjustments to keep all parties satisfied with the outcome, a big part of this will be listening to our communities feedback and concerns which will hopefully result in more allies and rivals in all the games which will be better for everyone.

In final with respect to the hi5 decision to remove all third party games, we are proud of the KANO/APPS team for stepping up to put together and execute a transfer plan for the players of hi5 with all the other issues that we were faced with for the month outside of this. And hope that the players recognize that we are likely the only developer on hi5 that did anything for the players, if we aren't we would love to hear it. And to hi5 / Tagged we wish you all the best with removing all the games that the players of hi5 have invested time and money into for the past 3-years and are now forcing them to play Tagged only games, good luck with that!

For continued discussion we would love to hear your thoughts here: http://forums.kanoapps.com/showthread.php?6424