PHB Review: Daily Pop-In

For the past two weeks, Poptropicans were eagerly logging in every day for the Daily Pop-In, a giveaway event from the Creators where a new promo code would be given each day that could be entered in for a prize of some kind. Now that the final prize is out, here on the Poptropica Help Blog, we’ll be reviewing the event, which ran from July 27 to August 7, 2015. Let’s pop right in (pun intended)!

First there was the anticipation. The week before the giveaway, the event was announced on the Creators’ Blog, prompting excitement from players who were eager to get their hands on some freebies. From Captain Crawfish’s post, this was the initial pitch to us players:

The prize varies every day — it may be credits, or an item, or a costume. You’ll have to come back every day to get them all, because each code will only work for one day!

Credits! Items! Costumes! And, judging by the limited edition gold Pop Star costume featured on the promotional image from the Creators’ Blog, there was even the wild hope that they might be re-releasing retired items like it, especially considering the desire for rares among the Poptropica community.

Monday rolled around, and we rushed to redeem the first prize: 200 credits! Not bad! Unfortunately, that may have been the peak of the prizes, which we posted every day in this PHB post. Tuesday’s prize was 50 credits, which was an okay amount, though quite a decrease from the first day.

Wednesday’s prize was considered by many to be a joke: a measly 5 credits. It was such a disappointment that Poptropica even tweeted an apology, and a promise that it would get better, but things weren’t looking so great already.

Thursday’s prize was 75 credits, which could get you a costume from the Store, but four consecutive days of credits was pretty boring – and definitely not what people had hoped for when they read about getting “credits, or an item, or a costume.” Where were the non-credit prizes?

Friday’s prize finally offered something other than credits: a Fart Gun, which would blow a cloud of green smog and turn other characters green. Strange, but a welcome change, and the code to redeem it was up all weekend. It was kind of like an old prize from a Despicable Me ad.

Then came the second week of prizes, and we continued to hold out hope that perhaps this was the time for more cool items. But Monday’s prize was a repeat of Thursday’s: 75 credits.

Tuesday finally brought along a more interesting change of pace: a Twin Power that would make a clone of your character follow you around! While it was recycled from an old ad prize, the fact that it wasn’t credits and that we could keep it made it much more welcome than most of the previous week’s prizes. Perhaps there was hope for more cool items to come.

Wednesday’s prize was the third repeat of the 75 credits prize. Seriously? While 75 credits is great on its own, the novelty had worn off on many Poptropicans, who were desperately hoping for something new. The discontent was growing in the comments section of the PHB post where we were announcing each day’s new code, among other places within the Poptropica community.

Thursday’s penultimate prize was 20 credits, which, while not as terrible as 5 credits, is still close to being useless. However, it is worth noting that when you add up all the credits awarded up to this point, it totals 500 credits, which is a pretty decent amount. After all those credits, they had to have something great for the final day – right?

Friday’s prize ended the event with 100 credits – yup, credits, even down to the last day, and only half of the amount of 200 they’d given out on the first day! Well, Poptropica had a chance to end with a bang, and they kind of blew it. So what went wrong in this Daily Pop-In event? Let me count the ways…

• The promise of credits, items, and costumes at the beginning sounded amazing, but the actual giveaway didn’t live up to expectations. The number of days where credits were given out (eight out of ten) was very disproportional in comparison to the promise of items (of which we received two in a total of ten days), and there were absolutely no costumes given out.
• The promotional image used a limited edition costume (the golden Pop Star), giving out the (false) hope that retired items might be re-released in this event. In fact, they could have done that – they’ve done so in the past – but they missed the opportunity, and again, expectations fell short.
• The amount of credits awarded each day was not so well done. While we can give credit (heh) to the fact that they did add up over time, there are a number of issues with the way they were divided. Starting off with 200 worked as an attention grab, but to end with less than that (100) made the structure fall flat. There were three different days in which the amount was the same (75), which only added to the feelings of “not again!” from players. And who wants to log in just to receive a negligible amount (5 and 20)?
• Credits on their own are not that useful to members, who can already access every Store item for free. The only use credits would serve to members is to buy items to keep being able to use after their membership expires, but I doubt Poptropica should be trying to give them a reason to let their membership expire in the first place.

Still, for all these shortcomings, Poptropica did give us free stuff – so it’s only right that we acknowledge the good points of the giveaway as well. Thanks, Creators. 🙂

• We received a decent amount of credits: 600 in total. That’s enough to get you 8 Store costumes (at 75 credits apiece) or two gold card items (250 each) with another hundred to spare. So, if you haven’t had the chance to fully appreciate the Store’s offerings from lack of credits, now you do.
• Giving us credits also meant that you could choose what you wanted as opposed to being given a prize that didn’t quite interest you.
• We did receive two interesting new items that we can now keep: the Fart Gun and Twin Power.
• There were no glitches to speak of in the whole process. Every day at 12 noon EST, without fail, you could log in to see the new code on the map and enter it to immediately receive your new prize, which wouldn’t disappear.
• While credits may not have been that useful to members, they are pretty useful to non-members: a sign that the Creators are still catering to the non-paying population! Thanks, Poptropica!

And there’s more good news from Captain Crawfish on the Creators’ Blog – they’ll be doing more giveaways in the future! Hopefully, they’ll learn from their mistakes to make these events the best they can be. 😀 (There is the Timmy Failure weekly giveaway to look forward to!)

We’ve had an absolutely blast giving away so many free credits and items over the past two weeks. The Daily Pop-In Prize is over for now, but you can bet we’ll be doing more like this in the future!

(Okay, “so many items” might be a stretch, Captain. 😉 )

Anyway, thanks for reading this PHB review on the first ever Poptropica Daily Pop-In event, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section! Stay popping, Poptropicans.

–  SFish  –