Conclusion is this: The team has no clue, players who bothered with this event fooled themselves into a false belief that the system was fair and just while those that either had no intrest or knew that it would be a total fail like 90% of the recent other events ended up happier than everyone else. Sad.
Last thing and it is a real question, was it known that it was a bell curve to get the reward or is this a guess that I read?
I think you're slightly wrong there; they didn't fool themselves that the mechanism was fair... they fooled themselves that they could win, which from the individual perspective is the same as saying it's fair; after all, I'm a good person, I've worked hard, I should have a good shot at the prize. It's primarily a moral judgement, and they couldn't imagine that it might not be fair after all.
And some people no doubt further blinded themselves to the reality, just like they do when they buy a lottery ticket or vote based on tax cuts for millionaires because although they are poor right now and it goes against their self interest now, they think
"one day I'll be rich and why should the poor get any of my cash then...?!" The desirability of the outcome meant they didn't care that it wasn't fair, but their ego and greed blinds them to the fact that in an unfair system it's unlikely to be you that rises to the top either.
But let's not blame the player for that; That's human nature, and in the MMO genre, where people come not just to play games but live alternate lives, the design of a game should take human reality into account. We need programmers who are also accurate psychologists first and foremost because they are in the business of entertaining people. But what you often get instead is the kind of game design that thinks we should have variations of cut throat competition or lotteries in game, without understanding that people come to gaming as an
escape from that. They play to witness progression, become the hero, generally do things they don't or can't in real life. Some of the attitudes remain of course, but programmers are often blinded by thinking great events are defined by the experience of the person who won the great prize... (partly due to the higher rate of Libertarian or Randian attitudes in that demographic, but that's a debate for another day) But the damage done to the wider community if they feel they lost unfairly can be catastrophic.
You ask if it was known it would be a curve? It required a little thought, but yes, it was. Here's the patch notes;
- It is possible to get all four rewards if you are among the top contributors during the event and any combination thereof (Tier 3, 2, and 1, or Tier 2 and 1, or Tier 1 only).
- It is also possible to not receive anything if your contributions are not on par with the distribution of other contributors.
Publish 76 - UOGuide, the Ultima Online encyclopedia
Notice it says "Top Contributors" This means, by definition, it has to be scaled not against an absolute line, but against individual performance, set at the top end. So where does the curve come from? Ahh now maybe the devs didn't realise this; maybe they did and designed deliberately for it due to that perspective bias I mentioned... the curve comes from human nature again, the normal engagement people have with anything; a few will boycott it completely, there'll be a majority who do a bit or some, and the odd few who do superhuman levels of anything. That people will play was obvious; we all wouldn't mind winning a lottery, right? And just think how excited the winners will be!
Of course, to win it, you had to do more than everyone else... and there was no cap on what everyone else could do. Even if the Devs designed a straight line response (20% of all Cure submissions in each Tier say) the one or two people who do 1400+ cures will push the line into a curve... my bet however is that they actually designed a curve reward system on top of that; that at Tier 4 there's only 1, or maybe a few winners as a fixed result.
What made the event design worse is the setting at the top end but not letting people see the submissions. I've written before, but World Of Warcraft did this with PvP and it was a soul eating monster, so much so that Blizzard eventually redesigned the entire mechanism because of the negative effect it was having on people's lives... You couldn't stop, because if someone stopped an hour after you did, you didn't progress. If they used AFK bots, or hired actual character playing services to keep you in Battle grounds, you couldn't progress. As I also mentioned, when I realised what I was becomming, I was doing 16 hours a day STRAIGHT PvP; 8 hours sleep, fighting all the time to keep points up, afking only to eat at the computer... then I did the sums and realised due to people botting etc overnight, although I could get to the final rank, I needed another 2-3 weeks on that regime.
That's where blind competition with no input cap leads I'm afraid. That we can all be weak enough to do it doesn't absolve any dev team from looking hard at the sort of design that encourages it. I learned this from my experience of second generation MMOs... and it's such a shame to see that UO is tending towards bringing all their mistakes back into the 1st generation game that originally avoided it, and ignoring the third etc generations and how they corrected it.
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