The Problem With Making Assumptions

So, apparently there is an ages old saying about assumptions hitting us in the face... Wish I had heard of it before, because I only learned about it today. Maybe if I had given this some thought I could have helped avoiding an uncomfortable situation... Well, can't really change the past though.
Ah, and a side note, the context/story of this one will be kinda long, but I can't quite resume it without going through a lengthy explanation... So bear with me, alright?

Well, what happened? I was playing Adventure Quest with some friends on discord and a War event broke out. A War event is essentially the only form of cooperative gameplay that exists in the game. Essentially, the entire community of the game needs to kill a large amount of enemies in order to reach the end of the war. Paired up with that, there is also the sense of competition to see who kills more mobs and gets on the top of the leaderboards.

In recent years we also got some improvements to this system, with exclusive rewards now being given to everyone that kills over 1000 mobs, as well as to the top 25 and top 50 players of the competition.

... Well, when you add exclusivity to the mix in a 17 years old game, people can do a lot of things to get it... The competition gets pretty fierce and stuff, so... Sometimes some people were really close to one another at the 25th spot and were scared of not being able to get the price because one would be overtaken, so... They just decided to have a tie. If both had the same amount of kills, both would get the prize, right? Well, yes, they both got the prize. Hooray for a happy ending and staff being nice enough to give those extra rewards to people~

I should note that the staff of AQ is unusually close to the playerbase and we communicate with them directly pretty often, this is important because it means we can actually ask what is the expected resolution in terms of ties and stuff like that, which gave us the answer of them honoring the tie and giving the rewards to all players tied.

Generally those ties involved 2 or 3 players, they were pretty chill and things worked out nicely... Until one faithful war had a few things going for it...
1) It was very competitive.
2) It was the closure of an awesome storyline.
3) It had some amazing and very cool rewards to the top 25.
4) Rewards weren't ready by the time the war was about to end, so staff tampered with the war meter and made the amount of mobs near the end double... So when there were supposed to be 60,000 mobs left, suddenly became 120,000, which added around 8h of extra warring before the war ended... This made many people panic because they would be working when the war ended now, and so they might lose their top 25 spot.

With all this paired together, it was kinda unsurprising that people decided to tie at a given spot in order to get safer on the top 25... Only... That spot wasn't safe enough. One of the people involved in the tie would be gone for the next 16h and that was definitely more than enough time to get pushed out of the top 25 even with 3 people tying at 8500 kills... So they started seeking other people to agree with the tie, not only by going to other AQ discords to talk about it, but also PMing people on forums and changing their character name to "Tie at 8500 kills" to make the message clear in the leaderboards.

The result? A 9-way tie from the 22nd to 30th spot with 8500 kills... So well, 5 more people would end up getting the exclusive reward than expected... Honestly, this was a blast, we were celebrating and cheering over what amazing accomplishment we achieved (by "we" I mean the community, since I wasn't involved, I got only 3000 kills this war. But I was celebrating with them)... Cause you see... Ties require a lot of trust, anyone can sneak just one kill above and hurt everyone else involved... And some of the people in this tie were people none of us ever talked to and joined in just by seeing the movement happening in the leaderboards.

So uhn... Then comes the game lead giving out the rewards and says:

This... Made people kinda mad. Especially because the list on the top 25 was rearranged by how old a character was in case of a tie, so suddenly people that got to the 8500 kills earlier and could have gone much further ended up not getting a reward due to being willing to help others out in getting their rewards too.

And we were like... "But we did nothing wrong, we only wanted to help out others, we weren't screwing anyone over nor did we have any ill intent, we just had a strong camarederie, why are we getting punished for that?" And there was a pretty heated discussion on the forums over that with a players VS devs kind of thing. I mostly stayed out of it myself, but I was totally on the players' side.

Fast forward a day or three (I forgot how many) and the staff decided to give the rewards to everyone in the tie, but will not be giving extra rewards to any future ties anymore. Hooray, happy ending! \(^^)/


So... What does that have to do with assumptions?

Well, thing is... There was a big miscommunication that caused this whole issue, and it was caused by a simple assumption that both sides had... Well, 2 assumptions, one on staff's side and one on player's side, that directly contradicted one another.

Players assumed staff knew that all ties, since the very first, had always been engineered, and therefore assumed staff condoned the ties.
Staff on the other hand assumed the ties were mostly things that happened by chance and wanted to give the rewards to the tied players in a gesture of good faith and to not punish anyone due to their bad luck of being randomly placed in the 26th spot when they both had an equal amount of kills.

So... For players, what we did was an incredible feat of trust on one another and of rapid organization of something unprecedented and with an absolutely fantastic result.
While staff thought we abused their good faith and decided to game the system. For them, we essentially took what should be a gesture of kindness and turned it into a way of turning the system around in our favor... Staff was angry. And we could see that in their replies.

And we honestly didn't get where that was coming from? Why such a crazy kneejerk reaction? We kinda accepted that they didn't want to start giving extra rewards in future ties, but why apply it retroactively to this war too when there was no ruling about ties whatsoever? And like... We weren't really harming anyone with that, rather, we were just giving more benefits to a few people, everyone was winning and nobody was losing... It felt kinda crazy.

It took quite some time to understand each other's side and the base assumptions each one had... That we thought they had always been okay with engineered ties, while they thought the ties happened by chance in the past, and that we were now abusing their good faith to our own ends.

It was kinda mindblowing tbh, because like... It really felt like it was super obvious to us that the ties were planned... I mean, how will 3 people stop their kills at the exact same spot? This just won't happen... But staff assumed that we were on good faith and not trying to rig the system, and we assumed they knew we were engineering it.

This was honestly a real feel bad situation, we were at the conclusion of an amazing saga with amazing rewards and with many implications to the future of the game's storyline, and then suddenly all discussion about it stopped and started focusing on exclusive rewards and on how players believe staff were being too harsh and should give them out, while staff were assuming players were breaking their trust and needed to be taught a lesson that there were limits to our actions.

And all because of... Well, 2 small assumptions on each side, assumptions that for us felt so so obvious that they just had to be true... But they weren't true at all.

What am I taking from this? Well... That communication is key I suppose? I mean, those words are some that have stuck with me for a long time and I think most people can agree that communication is key for pretty much anything... I just came to realize that we sometimes think we have a common ground to work from, and that everyone has that same common ground, we assume that we all feel the same way about something because it's just obvious everyone thinks like that... Except that we don't, not always.

So I guess I'll try to be a bit more mindful and ask things around before assuming someone views something in the same way I do... I wouldn't say it was a big lesson or a meaningful lesson or something that will change my life, but... It was something that I will remember, something that was blown out of proportion due to a simple issue of miscommunication, with 2 sides making different assumptions that completely messed up the way each side thought things should be handled. The kind of thing that could be easily avoided if we talked for a few minutes in advance about how we felt on it.

Oh well, that was that, this was not a healthy experience, but I think it did end up in a good note and that we will remember the results of it for a long time~
Hopefully nothing of the sorts happens in the near future though... I hate this kind of confrontation.