Moving into the final two weeks of the year and into the post season saw growing unrest among the players on Huddle as the laundry list of self inflicted wounds from the Topps team grew higher than most Christmas Trees. First the good news, the Christmas (12 Days) promotions were kind of a blast. Very similar, well exactly the same really as the Thanksgiving promotion. Here’s a free ticket or two, here are a bunch of ways to earn more. Card exchange has stuff to redeem for. The twist this time is that in addition to the usual classic player signature cards (Merlin Olsen? Is this sponsored by FTD?) most of the redemptions are for mysterious wrapped presents whose contents will not be revealed until New Year’s Day. (not sponsored by U2) One would assume we will see the same sets represented as the Thanksgiving promotion as well, Signature series (possibly in a fireworks motif) Signature variants of some of the marathon cards etc... Hopefully they will be worth the effort once revealed, another potential source of dissatisfaction if the cards revealed are less than stellar. Some will be upset no matter what as their chosen blind redemption turns out to be from a set they might not care for. There were two “Mood” cards to collect. They gave everyone one free variant, if you could collect all 5 you get a Signature gold version award. The first was met with groans and outright mockery. Jay Cutler hasn’t been under center in over a month and has a face so sad that Sad Keanu Reeves would rush to comfort him if he saw it. Also everybody apparently hates his guts. This award was issued promptly. A few 12Days later they did one for Matt Ryan, who looks like he is happy and who is a really good QB that people like. No award ever came of that one. One of the main ways to earn lots of tickets was to do the “Pick Em”s for the Christmas weekend games. Pick right and get a ticket. Thankfully those did arrive at their promised time on Tuesday morning. The other big promotion set (at least for me) was the Holiday Signature variant set. Limited to 150 copies, 16 cards to collect in very short order for two “Legends” signature award cards (Jerry Rice and Tony Dorsett) and two holiday tickets. I was going to pass on this but a fluke pull on the regular Saturday Signature Marathon landed me the GOLD variant which is limited to 10. I collect Silver so I started fishing and got the perfect offer for me, the Silver I needed for my set and 3 of the Holiday Signatures to get me on my way. A lot of crosstrading and a couple of buys on good old eBay and I managed to lock in all 16 in plenty of time. And we wait. And wait. And still waiting now with 3 days until tickets expire in the card exchange with no award cards and no tickets. Which brings me to the unrest part of the Huddle report. We are now in week 17 of the last leg of the 20 week marathons and NONE of the awards from those set in multiple variants have been awarded. Light finally appeared at the end of the tunnel today as checklists appeared with deadlines of December 31st. So as we’re boozing it up our faces will glow with delight as each new award finally comes to rest in our stacks shortly before we blow chunks in the front yard (a holiday tradition). I can’t even count all the sets that have gone unawarded on top of the Marathons. Vapor,Valor and other prominent sets. The grumbling in the transmissions has gotten so redundant and downright mean that the Topps team has a ways to go to get back to “people having fun” mode. To make matters worse they have been plagued with problems on the contests, one of the consistently fun things in the game. One week it’s "All Day Sunday" contests with Thursday and Saturday games included in scoring. This shuts out anyone who joined on Sunday morning thinking they had a fair shot only to see a raft of players already with tens of thousands of points on the board. The next it’s a contest that they offer 10x Game only boosts for then the night of the game players find these cards not able to be used because some dope made them playable in the wrong game. Countless coins down the toilet for the players who took the bait on that or worse traded good cards for useless GO Boosts. In short, despite some fun things even the much more simple and less release heavy game Huddle is struggling amidst a lot of problems that Topps should have been able to avoid with a little more attention. I for one hope they can streamline things now that we are moving into the Playoffs. With less games and teams to deal with Topps will hopefully take the opportunity to fix some of the damage they have done and get back to adding fun to football for the fans and less taking our wallets while we blow chunks in the front yard. UPDATE! The Holiday Signature awards dropped around noon along with the tickets! Closure seems to be Topps' New Year's Resolution and that is a very good thing!
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On a week that saw a broken Evolution drop that resulted in the first Apology Variant" in SWCT since the reign of ToppsSteve and an Autograph drop that went out in TWD with no transmission that resulted in another "Apology Variant" it's no surprise that Huddle's kind of a mess this week too. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!
Apparently they decided to replace all the watercoolers with big bowls of spiked eggnog and the managers went on vacation. Everything has been pretty jacked up and people are pretty pi$$ed at Topps. So par for the course. Marathons wave three ended and unlike previous waves they have yet to issue any awards. Past waves have ended and promptly awarded the following monday, NO GUITAR MERCY! That was the expectation set. No awards have come and no sign of them coming any time soon. Topps Finest also wrapped up with Wave three last weekend with deadlines set in transmission and stated times for awards to be issued.......and no awards for those have come either. Especially egregious considering the real money paid by their whales for the Gold Variant inserts at 10 bucks a pop. It's not all bad news, their 12 days promotion for Christmas has been one of the most generous of all the Topps apps with decent free cards and some pretty exciting things to chase in daily packs. The one turd in the punchbowl was the Mood chase which is a fairly popular set which for 12 Days offered a free card in one of 5 variants of the most glum and miserable looking Jay Cutler with a 48 hour limit to collect all five for a signed variant. Of course that went off without a hitch and the signature of the player that pretty much everyone hates went out right on time. Perfect. The one usual shining light despite product problems is usually contests but even those have been jacked up. Last week's "Premium All Day Sunday" contest got off to a roaring start by including the Thursday night and Saturday night games, crippling anyone who joined on Sunday's chances of ever winning an award. But they made it up to them by then not counting any scores for the Sunday Night game. FML, seriously guys? They ended up quietly refunding coins spent to join but only to people who opened tickets. Wow. One would assume at some point they will run out of alcohol, the bosses will come back with nice suntans and they will hustle around to try and catch up. That always goes well. UPDATE: @Doctor_Flammond WRITES: 1h1 hour ago@TedSallis Good points - Awards still missing for Valor, Vapor, marathons as well. Agree about the great freebies this week though. |
Gregg Keefer
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