CaptC… as a BBE player for more than 18 months, I have seen the game through multiple lenses. However, I am a little surprised that as a reputable moderator of the BBE forum you would choose to make incorrect assumptions about me instead of simply asking questions that you could have then used to accurately form a response.
Even though your questions are absent, I will still provide on-point responses.
1) In the first words of my initial comment I thanked the BBE team for fixing the most recent BBA bug promptly on a holiday. And I do so again.
2) To your point on booking bug tickets, I have done just that. In all, I have likely submitted nearly a dozen tickets on various problems... including one which was preventing me from being able to sign-in to the game. While each received a response, I was never asked for more. Indeed, on the sign-in problem I referred to I received a successful workaround not from support, but a veteran member of my own studio during a brief time I was able to sign-on and get into studio chat.
Now, it is certainly possible that support was working in the background to solve my problem without informing me (since I do click the checkbox allowing them to get into my account), and I commend them for doing so. But in my experience, your allusion to how support tickets are handled Is not what I've experienced in the real world.
3) Your comment about the miserliness of Misty may indeed be correct, but the demeaning statements directed at me in your third paragraph are unsupportable and inappropriate. If you review my actual words you will notice that the subject of the sentence was "19 diamonds" not that diamonds are charged.
On Monday I spent 190 diamonds (10 tries = $2 USD) plus my daily free try to upgrade an item that I've been trying to upgrade through most of December without success. In 11 tries, I not only failed to get an epic upgrade I didn't even receive a rare upgrade.
I am happy to buy diamonds because I recognize that maintaining the game and its servers require revenue. While I may not be a whale purchaser like some, I have spent more on this game by far than I have for any AAA title that I've ever played. And while BBE has improved over time, it is not -- and does not pretend to be -- equal to a AAA game. It's FTP and diamond dependent and I knew that when I started playing.
Instead of assuming that I was somehow ideologically opposed to BBE making a profit, if you'd asked you would have found out that my issue was with the rate specific items are charged and the results gained. For 190 diamonds, I should have been able to BUY the item upgrade, not be without both the diamonds and upgrade. Other examples of a whale-biased game economy are littered throughout BBE, in my opinion to its long-term detriment.
It is cheaper (and more profitable) to retain a pool of consistent low-level purchasers then it is to have to spend the ad dollars necessary to compensate for player churn in the hope of gaining a whale. That is economics 101.