That would take literally one sql query.
I am not a database pro, but I studied them in university and I worked with them a few times and have friends administrating databases. I know exactly how hard it is.
You’re saying it so, as if that’s some kind of bad thing. Why?! A lot of players left because of lack of loot and unfair randomness. Basically they burnt out. And fair compensation, let me emphasize - fair compensation, could bring them back and change their attitude to you; make them respect you, possibly even love you.
But putting that aside, if you pay attention to the comments, you will see, that no one is complaining about red items compensation, only about cosmetics. There is 2 reasons for that:
1.) People are not dumb. They realize, that there is no way to compensate for reds, because there is no way to know how many chests were obtained by each player. With commendation chests the situation is completely different, and it’s is very easy to calculate the number of chests each player has received during their playtime.
Unless, of course, you keep track of all opened chests, but that’s unknown to public, so we presume you do not.
2.) Players actually care only about 3 things. These things are: green dust, cosmetics and bad luck/duplicate protection, with hats being most important of the three. And if you provide them with those, they will be pretty happy and satisfied, and will praise you indefinitely.
So yes, people don’t care about red items as much as you think. They just want hats, different builds and not to get frustrated by rng - simple as that. This things are not obvious, and realizing them took me dozens of hours, but you’re a community manager, you spend hundreds of hours here and on reddit. Can’t you see that at least statistically?
And if you do not believe me, I made a post with couple of hundred links and over a hundred likes, posted on april 22. And these 3 things have been listed there at that time already, with green dust problem being evaluated as most important one and randomness frustration as second most important. Only mistake I made back then, is underestimated how much people love hats - I think hats availability should be #1 priority. But even then it was clear that hats are very important:
It would be crazy not to do that. Actually, that’s a very common practice.
For example in LoL players got rewarded with tons of dust when rune pages got removed. So much dust, that they could buy, idk, 20 champions or so. But Riots did that, and that didn’t break the game.
In HoTs, when Hots 2.0 went live, players retroactively received chest for every level they acquired before rework. Not a 30% or 50% compensation - a 100% retroactive rewards with hundreds of chests for veteran players.
These are just a couple offhand examples. And Idk how you do not understand that, but that kind of behavior is exactly what players expect from you, because such behavior is common, logical and fair.
…
And I would love to ask one and one only question, if I may. Do you think it’s okay, that completing your game (getting all items) would take several thousand hours?