This is going to be a long one.

I wanted to check Raid out because a friend of mine has been playing for like 3 years now. I have always thought the game looked like a bit of a meme with its ads and what not lol. so i finally decided to give it a go. i have no real experience with gatcha games or any type of collection based game oher than pokemon, if that. counts. So i tell this friend, who happens to be my roommate that id like to try to play. he got really excited because raid supposedly has this referral program that would get us both free rewards, plus he wanted someone to talk raid with. he gets me started on my laptop. he sends me this email with a link and tells me to make sure i have no privacy settings that will prevent raid from tracking my data and he has me click the link which takes me to Plarium play and then prompts me to download the game.

 Everything goes smoothly. then i go through this tutorial which, in my opinion needs to be skippable and replayable. Any game that doesnt have a tutorial that you can both skip and replay at any time has failed. I get through this tutorial finally and we get nothing. No rewards for me and nothing on his referral program. We think hey, maybe it needs to update so i hit level 10 within like an hour and still nothing. Roommate contacts support and talks to a fellow named simon. Before my roomate even gets a reply he sends this gigantic wall of text because he says he wants to give plarium as much info as possible as they are known to talk a while to respond and he wants to limit the back and forth. He gives our usernames and ids and explains how he guided me through every step of the process and how he clicked the referral link from the email and downloaded the game from there, etc. Well Simon shocks us all by replying within about 30 minutes which is apprently rare.

 He proceeds to give this a list of requirements that must be met in order for their system to recognize new players and assign them to the referral program. The list is exactly what my roommate explained we did in his initial message. Apparently there is nothing that can be done. you can only use one device because it only counts devices that have downloaded the game for the first time. Roommate says there are ways around it, but i say f that and f plarium. I just wanted to join a new community and have fun playing a game with a friend, but this is how new players are treated? For arguments sake lets say we messed up somewhere during the process, so what? why cant you fix it?  "Too bad. We could easily fix the situation, but we make way too much money to be bothered." is what im hearing. You cant tell me that these referral rewards couldnt simpy be gifted outside of the program and it would be the exact same thing, and you also cant tell me it would hurt Plarium to do so. I played an hour of Raid. It was honestly surprising how much fun i had doing menial tasks after a horrid tutorial. Now the company in charge gives me the middle finger and i give it right back. Thank you, Plarium, for stopping my journey short under a company that clearly doesnt give 1 Telerian turd about its players.

Sincerely,

The Kraken That Never Was