f13.net

But it gets better.


You can see the threads here (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-hunter&T=395671&P=1) and here (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-hunter&T=399330&P=1).

It seems to me Blizzard has a couple huge issues here.

1) Their Community Managers are not being told correct things until AFTER the fact.

2) Their patch schedule really really sucks.

You know, I found it hard to believe Blizzard would let people know a bug was coming in a patch and do nothing to fix it before release, but I accepted the possibility because of their track record with patches for World of Warcraft.

Apparently, someone along the line at Blizzard failed a math or elementary programming course...

AbilityCooldown = X

NOT

AbilityCooldown = X + (WeaponSpeed)

WTF?

I really do love the game that Blizzard has designed, but they really fucking suck at handling a live MMO.  I'm talking BC3k, sb.exe, GEAR/GodMode/aimbot/halo2invis FUCKING SUCKTACULARLY AWFUL BULLSHIT GODDAMMIT!!!!!11

Ahem...Where-The-Fuck have the devs been, in relation to ANYTHING?  Who in their fucking right mind hired these CM's?  I don't give one fucking damn about slow content updates; I'm not catass-prime and have no desire to rush through this game when there are so many lovely alts to design.  I don't even give a shit if they lose boatloads of customers; I hate b.netters en masse and would probably shatter their kneecaps in real life or place them on my dead pool were I to find out some of their real names.

What I want is for them to help the classes/skills they've accidently borked, improve the classes they've worked to actively destroy(warlock anyone?), and fix their motherfucking major bugs like they do gold and dupe exploits.  Most importantly, I want to hear from the people that actually work on the game, not some beret-wearing, cheese-eating corporate mouthpiece who knows jack and shit about the goddamn service they represent.

That's right, Blizz.  I called it a service, you french-fellating motherfuckers.  The game is bought at the store, after that first month it becomes a service and carries reasonable expectations of satisfaction, you profiteering fuckholes.  So far your grade is F minus minus, assholes.

Who says we aren't all about ponies and sugar cookies?

Same as it ever was, the Blizzard remix.

Bah, you'd have more bile if you were still playing the game.

Ok, so does that mean you are willing to pay 3 times the cost of the game, and 4 times the monthly subscription fee so they can actually use dev's as community managers?

No such thing as a free lunch, and if you want the dev's answering your questions on the forums, you'll for damned sure need to pay for it.

And for what it's worth, I'm not talking out my ass--in fact, I just got hired two days ago at a game development/game tech company to put their support division together, and my prime directive is "Thou shalt not distract devs"...and that's not being haughty, that's being business smart--otherwise you'd never get anything done at all.

Shut up. It's not a fucking free lunch when they are pulling in around 20 million dollars a month from subscriptions. They paid everyones yearly salary that worked on the game in the first 2 months it was out. They can now afford to stick some dipshits on the forums that know their ass from a hole in the ground.

The guy was mis-informed about the state of a bug/suspected bug. As soon as he discovered/was informed otherwise, it was corrected. Honestly, do you think he pulled the first summary of the suspected bug and it's impact out of his ass, or did he speak with a dev and/or manager to get his information?

If anything, blame the dev/manager that gave him the wrong information, but it's not the messenger's fault.

And while I'm not claiming at all that WoW isn't making some really good money, slim to zero chance that they paid even past dev and production costs, not to mention infrastructure setup...much less enough to staff their community managers with development engineers.

Their forum monkeys have a habit of this.  It's nothing new and I barely take anything they say at face value unless it's something so simple and straight forward like "you will be able to buy 16 slot bags at 50 gold in Orgrimmar next patch".

Just the other day Tyrien or whoever just told the rogue community that improved backstab was merely a 30% increase in crit chance rather than adding 30% to the rogue's current crit chance.  This touched off a 20+ page thread over nothing.  Improved backstab was working fine and in the way that rogues want.  It just took one sentence from their mouthpiece that everyone KNEW was dead wrong to throw the entire community into a fervor.

WoW has sold over 1.5 million copies and it's still number 1 or 2 on the PC Games best selling lists month after month (except for the period where they stopped shipping out copies cause they didn't have enough servers). Just on box sales alone you are talking $30 million or so (once you strip out distributor and retailer markup). At 1.5 million subscribers a month that's over $22 million *a month* in subscriber revenue. The game has been out 6 months now so that's somewhere around $90 - 100 million in subscriber revenues to date. If that plus the box sales is not enough money to have covered their development costs and their ongoing expenses the entire MMO market is fucked and everybody working on MMOs should just give up now.

The $10/hour the tech support people make isn't enough for them to care.

Ok, so does that mean you are willing to pay 3 times the cost of the game, and 4 times the monthly subscription fee so they can actually use dev's as community managers?


www.coh.com (http://www.coh.com)

City of Heroes's Statesman - their lead freaking designer - as well as Positron, designer, and geko, lead programmer I think - all frequent the boards.

I think WoW's designers are having too much fun with their money hats to, you know, talk to customers and such.

If you had 2 million people addicted to your very own crack pipe wouldn't you be?

Yes, I would. I'm not blaming them, just stating an apparent fact.

There is a lot more involved than just paying off development costs is my point. WoW wasn't made indie style while everyone else had full time jobs and worked in their spare time for "promise of success"--it had all sorts of investment requirements, and most of them get their money first, not to mention the ongoing costs of everything else involved in the major AAA title development, production, and in this case online game ongoing costs.

And as the quote I referenced said, "the first two months" are a hell of a lot different than the last 6-9 months.

The original reason why I responded in the first place is that in my own opinion at least, game customers want everything under the sun, but don't want to pay for it. Games are first and foremost a business, and one of the most expensive costs post production/launch is customer support.

Think for a moment how many posts alone happen in the WoW forums. You couldn't have one dev post there--you'd need an entire staff posting..and you'd also still need community managers directing the correct dev for a particular question (since no one works on everything in the engine) to get the most accurate answers.

I do find it interesting however that the MMOG community itself is so focused on getting developer interaction at the forum level as if it were a "right"...which console game do you play that has an official forum where the developers of each game sit there and answer questions daily? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't know of many like that.

It's been mentioned before that Blizzard is a horrible company on the CR front, even as far back as Diablo.  It's also been mentioned how horribly, horribly unprofessional they are as a whole.   Great place to work at, but lacking the business decorum to understand communication and it's importance with the customer base.

Before WoW or EQ2 were released, folks in this community predicted that WoW was definatly going to have the numbers and the superior product, but that they'd drop the ball in the handling of a live game.  EQ2, on the other hand, was predicted to have a crappy launch and perhaps be able to pick folks up due to superior patching, additions, and understanding of CR.  (Of course that was before they pulled their 'whoops, we lied Frogloks aren't actually questable yet.. here buy some SOEbay swag." stunts.)

  It's amusing to see at least half of those predictions come true.


Oh, and just for the record Caydeim is a she.

Who gives a shit if a developer chats in the official forums for a console game? They're near unpatchable at this point, while all MMOGs promise new content. As such people demand new info direct from the Dev's mouths so rumors don't get started. Every day, a different developer (whether it be a designer on monday, programmer on tuesday, artist on wed, whatever) should give an update. It's easy, takes 30 minutes, and really pleases all those forum trash who sit around bitching about the game instead of playing.

Edit: Oh and after reading Shockeye's post instead of just responding to Zepp, let me just say: Blizzard is not fit to run an MMOG. Period.

Or another option is to just nuke the damn official forums and do something a'la EQ1.


So long as they actually answered questions it'd be more useful than the current forums, and I'd hardly miss the 'find the stupid thread for the day' game we have going.

So we are getting our panties in a twist about a company who made an error in PR? Yeah the sky is falling guys. Look out below!

Even that isn't going to work however--on Monday, the dev of the day or whatever is going to be discussing things that were probably in dev months ago, and have already been through (what little may exist) testing, and ready for release. They certainly can't discuss things that are actually being worked on right that week, because just that--it's being worked on, and most certainly isn't going to actually go in exactly as it is that day/time of posting.

And the big problem really comes in the sheer numbers that are out there--because once dev's start up any sort of dialog, it becomes an expectation. And even if you guestimate that only, say, 5% of the game's population reads the forums even once a week or so, and only half of those might post a response and/or a question, that's 50,000 posts to sift through a week.

FYI, I'm not in any way defending WoW or Blizzard's customer service/pr here...but the principle is applicable to any game that is patchable really...and it's just not feasible to have actual developers spending time on the forums in any sort of consistent manner...when the expectation is set, it becomes a demand, and then you wind up having all your dev's on the forums instead of in the code.

The dev team sure had ample time to post in the forums prior to release.   Almost seems backwards, given that you'd imagine that is the time they are most pressed for work, needing to release the live game and all before spending more money.   This is the MMO environment, though, so it's not like I shouldn't have expected this, especially from Blizzard "D2 1.10" Entertainment.

I am tempted to apply for a job in their customer service department in france. I am looking for a new (better) job anyway and working in a different country can only help my resume. Also this is my only chance to get "in" the industry since I have less than none coding skills. I even like to work in "customer support" since I like to help people. Yes, that is how nice a person I am. Having experienced their support in that game (or lack thereof), the bar I would have to jump can't be that high.

Sadly, this is one of their requierments : "Excellent written and verbal communication skills in your working languages"

I think I can express myself just fine, but I am known to be quite overconfident, especially regarding my language skills.

Why do I write this ? I think their customer services is so bad, even I could do better ... :evil:

BEWARE- WRITTEN LATE AT NIGHT, LONG, RAMBLING, NOT MUCH POINT, SKIM IF YOU WANT BUT I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND READING IT

Seriously, I just stopped trying to make sense about 35% of the way through it.  I recommend scrolling to the bottom and looking at the point by point list.  In fact, I'm just going to shrink it all except the point list at the bottom so that it doesn't eat up the whole damn page.  I'm a frigging genius.  And considerate.


Someone already pointed out CoH.  I'll go into a bit more detail with that.

Posts since 5/23/05
Statesman- President of Cryptic and lead designer: 25
Positron- Next highest designer: 0 (last post on 5/20)
Manticore- Lead story designer: 4
Gilgamesh- Community "fluff": 23
CuppaJo- Community manager and forum mod: 27
Lord Recluse- Lead Designer for City of Villains: 3

Then there are some more who respond with technical stuff, like Case, Valdermic and, until recently, Vyvyanne.  Note that this is just after E3, so they were actually slower than normal except for Cuppa who always posts news bits.

Now, States probably has more free time on his hands than folks like Positron because he mostly gets to call the shots around the office.  I'm thinking, though, that that's the case with a lot of Presidents/Lead Designers.

I'd be curious to know, actually, how many posts the community managers from WoW forums have since 5/23.

Some of the posts from the devs are fluff to joke around, some are of substance.  One by Statesman was actually on a similar subject...


Maybe Cryptic just has a higher standard regarding community interaction.  I'd say it's a worthwhile investment on their part.  You cannot beat Cryptic for sheer charisma as a development team, and their community really feels attached to them because they don't hover above, hidden among the clouds, proclaiming judgements and nerfs without any apparent direction.  Usually, when they do nerf something, they explain why.  And usually, reasonable players agree.  It's better than "There is no nerf, it's in your imagination" or "It's working how we want, the previous version was too powerful."

Cryptic tries to give you a sense of WHY rather than WHAT, and I think that's why a lot of people feel so attached to the game.  Hell, I barely even play it anymore but I can't bring myself to quit.  WoW I quit the day I got bored.  The very day.  And I haven't once looked back.

And yeah, they really do respond to PMs.  The same day you send them, no less.  And they're not form letters, either- they actually relate to what you said in your initial PM.  Coming from DAoC where you had to be on the Secret SECRET boards to really expect a response (Note I said Secret twice- I was on the Secret boards, dev responses were more common than on the Vault but not exactly what you'd call reliable) this is pretty amazing for me.

I still maintain my subscription to CoH even though I don't play the game so much.  Because I still feel like I'm part of that game.  WoW never felt like that, and it was easy to leave because of it.  Guild Wars doesn't feel like that and it'll be easy to leave when I get bored (though it wouldn't matter for them much, given the lack of a monthly fee).  I'm just a rabid fanboy for Cryptic, and they earned that.  Before CoH's release, I was VERY skeptical to say the least.

And hell, while I'm rambling how about I throw in a completely unrelated remark- this whole thing REALLY reminds me of Sanya on DAoC.  That poor woman.  Every Friday she'd do a grab bag of questions from the community, and she must have contradicted herself every other week.  Some of the stuff she was told by other Mythic employees to put as answers really made me wonder if I was unknowingly playing some other game by some other company that was only vaguely similar to DAoC.  While I always liked Sanya, Mythic as a whole really, really left a bad taste in my mouth (insert fellatio gag (pun intended)).  A lot of the time they just seemed incompetent.  I still remember a few things- like announcing that they'd give instant taunt shouts to Paladins, Berserkers, Friars and Wardens to make up for their lack of any sort of ranged attack to pull enemies.  What?  Oh right, Wardens can use bows, forget we said that.  And then there's the whole Ripper debacle.  It's bugged, it's not bugged, it's bugged, it's not bugged, it's barely dealing damage as an extremely expensive and difficult to pull off manuever, well the spreadsheet says that it does more damage than almost anything else in the line and is therefore one of the most damaging attacks in the game so send us test data that shows it's broken, okay here's the test data that proves it's broken, <silence>....... hello?  Hello?  About Ripper.... <silence>  Uh.  Okay, well, we players did some more tests and we figured out why it's broken. <silence>  Turns out it's... hey are you listening? <silence> Well, okay, here's what's broken, so now you should know where to look, and here's a really obvious and repeatable error that shows that this is the case.  <silence>

As far as I know, Ripper is still broken.[/size]

So yeah, let me try to wrap this all up.
-Devs can interact with the communities.  Cryptic has proven this.  Does it have to be a post every single day on schedule?  No.  But a few posts a week can go a long way, especially if they're of real substance.
-It is in the interest of the devs to do so, as it creates a feeling of attachment to the game. (It's much easier to quit a game where the profits are going to a bunch of faceless bluenames than it is to quit a game supporting a bunch of really likeable people who genuinely want everyone to have fun in their world.)
-I am such a rabid fanboy for Cryptic that I will continue paying for their game even when I'm not playing it.

You know, I think this might be my best post ever.

Maybe I expect too much from a game, but when I pay $50-$60 for a box, $50-$60 for expansions, and then $13-$15/month ($150-$180/year), I expect customer service.  I'm paying not only to play the game, but to be treated with respect - which means real communication.

The only games I have played so far that treat customers with that type of respect is Cryptic.  I feel burned by Mythic and Blizzard.  Plenty of other people feel burned by SOE (I didn't play SW:G long enough to).  What that means is that I won't go out and buy EQ2, Imperator, and WoW2.

The goodwill of paying customers - particularly the obsessive compulsive types attracted to MMOGs in the first place - is being too easily dismantled and denigrated by game companies.  They really can't afford to piss people off, but they don't realize that yet - especially the tards at Blizzard who are too busy having fun with their riches right now.

Cryptic proves that semi-frequent dev posts on the forums are very possible and have a positive effect on the forum monkeys.  I've never played WoW, and now that I'm marginally able to spend the time, it seems a lot of the people I know are jumping/have jumped ship.  At the same time, I have kept my CoH account active since launch and will never regret spending the cash to keep the account open.  I play it when I get the need to play.  Some weeks, I have more time than others. 

But the thing is that I know what's being worked on, at least enough to keep me happy, thanks to the posts from the devs.  There's still speculation, etc., but at least when something gets out of hand, they come along and say, "Here's what we can tell you."

/agree

I think I'm still paying for CoH but haven't played it in months.

I've let my subscription lapse again...

I may be reupping when I get back; I would miss the comic too much.

It seems NCsoft is on a roll with picking good dev houses (Cryptic and ArenaNet).

And possibly NetDevil.  We'll see.

WHAT WHAT WHAT? Let's do some back of the envelope calculations.

They HAVE sold 1.5 million copies of the box. That's confirmed. Let's just say that if they made $10 a box (on a $50 box, not including collector's editions), that's $15 million dollars on boxes, after I'm sure the publisher and retailers got their cut. Maybe they get more per box, maybe less, but $10 is a good fucking start.

$15 million doesn't cover production and startup costs? Ok, maybe it doesn't. Then let's just assume that of those 1.5 million subscribers, only 1 million actually paid for 1 month before quitting (which we know isn't true because they claimed 1.5 million over 3 months after release). Now, just assuming that of the $14.95 per month they extract, they only get say $3 out of it. Just three dollars, less than 25%. That's another $3 million. Now, the budgie on WoW was supposedly around $20 million, maybe as high as $30 million.

At $21 million after the 2nd month, I'm pretty sure they've made back production costs and more, because I'm putting some pretty low goddamn estimates on how much money they actually get out of things. First off, I'm pretty sure they won't sign a deal on the CD's that doesn't let them recoup the entire initial budget on sell-through. So if they signed a deal that gave them $15 per box, that's $22.5 million on just CD sales.

And just to add on to what schild said:

None of the devs have to be posting on months old dev issues. None of the devs HAVE to waste time on the forums (nor should they see it as wasted time). But it all goes back to having a good process in place, and MMOG's SUCK AT PROCESS. It's why MMOG's are so buggy, why they get such bungled releases, etc.

The Community Manager SHOULD be collecting and collating all the issues that need dev attention. He/she should have a staff that read things, send the important ones up to the manager and the manager then collects it all and earmarks it on the weekend (or Friday) for dev attention. On Monday, the Monday dev gets his list of things to answer from the CM, answers it on the forum and gets back to coding work. On Tuesday, the Tuesday dev gets his list of things, posts his things and gets on to important work. See, things you consider important, you put an actual process on, like programming tasks.

Now, personally, I think official forums are cesspools of stupid, wastelands of ignornant ball-lickers who scream for dev attention like rockstar groupies lust for Gene Simmons' cock. I think the noise FAR outshouts the good on official forums, ESPECIALLY on really successful MMOG's.

But... and here's the big thing... if you are going to provide official forums as any sort of means of communication with and to the users, you goddamn well better think of it as something important. You are providing a SERVICE (not just a game, a fucking service). You are being paid for it. That means what your customers think is important, and you have given it the official seal of importance by having an official forum. So to ignore it, to not use it except sparingly, and then badly when you do, shows a lack of respect (no matter how well-deserved) for your customers. If you build it, they will come, and if they come, you'd better expect they want to be paid attention to. Otherwise, just toss off unofficial status to the Vault and let it fester.

a) I think official forums are a fucking waste of space...  really they do so much more damage then good.

b) I think that having class reps, or class advocators or anyone whose pretend forum job is to care about particular sub-groups of the playerbase is a GIGANTIC fucking mistake.  Which leads to warrior issue threads, what about warlocks threads, hunter bug threads, mage bug threads, blahblahblah complaints about how much ass the rep on the rogue board kicks compared to the shaman board...

c)  I think its criminal that all MMOG's dont just have a dev journal, dev blog, whatever.  It doesn't need to be up for discussion or debate.  The dev doesn't need to even pretend to read the thousands of useless crap that spews from most class/skill/faction/gamestyle advocacy group on any MMOG forum.  But there does need to be something that clues the player into the direction the game is going.

For WoW this means, nuke the fucking shithole forums that have done nothing for anyone ever and expand http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/ to include all the minor fixes, skill tweaks, class tweaks, item tweaks ect.  Even in broad terms:  "Examine dps/itemization of bows versus guns, also examine possibility of adding arrow crafting sometime down the road"  whatever.  Dont leave that shit up for debate because it isn't up for debate.

(http://hometown.aol.com/dumbblondeforsur/images/jimmy38.gif)

(http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/pics/99tnickburns2.jpg)

WoW Asia.

Interestingly enough, this is pretty much how we did things when I was the CM for UO and how we will do things for DDO and LOTRO (and have already started to for AC and AC2). We don’t have developers assigned to days of the week, but we do have weekly reports that demonstrate community issues along with recommendations to help solve the problem when applicable. And when we can’t answer something, we ask someone who can. We sift through the noise (I'll get into that in a second) and find the signal for the developers because, well, that's our job. It’s not a perfect process yet, but we’re working on it.

I might catch some flack for this, but I really do think we did a good job of using the forums in UO to obtain and react to player feedback. For all of the noise that did exist on those forums, we got the feedback we needed most of the time. I say that having been both a CM and a developer and I can cite dozens of examples where message board feedback was used in a positive manner. Again, it wasn’t perfect, but we did have a process in place and I do think it had a positive impact. It is my goal to expand and improve that process.

And I would argue that when that is the case, the fault lies with the CMs, not the players. The customers have the right to speak to the developer and they will do so in the manner that they are allowed to and/or are encouraged to. And it's a bigger issue than just forum moderation, although that is part of it. I think we (CMs) have done a poor job of educating players on what the purpose and goals of the forums are and of molding an environment cohesive to achieving those goals. We also far too often encourage the wrong behavior, most of the time without even realizing it.

I see some people advocating that we should stop talking to players because the noise is drowning out the signal. I can’t disagree with that more. One way communication is cop-out and an admission that you don’t know how to communicate with your customers. One-way communication achieves nothing other than to send the message that you don’t care what your customers say or what they want. If you stop talking to your customers all you are doing is admitting that you don’t know how to. I do think the idea of a weekly developer update is a good idea though, but that doesn’t excuse the team from checking the feedback and posting some follow-ups.

If nothing else, this is my biggest issue with OCR…as Community Managers, we need to start managing the feedback loop, not just react to it.

Ok, now let's factor in:
1) Interest on credit and/or investor return on investment
2) infrastructure + NOC center operations, insurance (disaster recovery, etc.), including all of the servers stood up as the numbers spiraled
3) Bandwidth
4) emergency recovery (backup servers, etc.)
5) marketing costs (yes, it was mostly viral marketing, but still adds in)
6) adminstrative overhead

and then factor in having 300+ customer support personnel (giving them 1 to 5000 subscriber ratio, which some say is a good guestimate), plus the customer support facilities, etc.

Again, I'm not in any way saying that they aren't making quite a bit of money, but especially during the first 6 months there are a ton of costs as well, and my gut tells me that they aren't handing over corporate jets to each dev quite yet.

You may be right, but its too late now.  Before a beta even exists you will find fucking special intrest groups advocating for everything under the sun and concerned about class/race/faction/pve/pvp/catass/solo/group/raid balance.  I can't wait for the time when there are official organizations that lobby for improved aggro control in games where they find tanking too difficult or some other form of nonsense.  It will happen, because the squeeky wheel does get the goddamn grease pretty much every time.  The players know this and many have so much of their life invested in these games (/played > skill thx much for that) that they WILL spend an extra hour or two from work or mom's basement raising holy hell over miniscule injustices faced by their chosen character sub group(s).

Money is not the reason that Blizzard, SOE and Mythic do not provide good customer service.  Paying more money would not ensure better customer service.

Cryptic has a fraction of the subscribers, yet provides excellent communication and CS.

The others don't do it because they don't think they have to.  They think it isn't hurting them now.  They are wrong.  How many people will not play another game put out by a particular developer because of a soiled reputation?  I'll wager I'm not alone in my feelings on this.  If Cryptic comes out with a new game, I'll preorder without knowing anything else about it other than it's a mmog put out by Cryptic.

Whenever there is room for improvement - and there is a lot of room for improvement - someone will come in to fill the void.  So Blizzard better enjoy their cash now, because they will not be on top of the heap for long without radically changing how they treat their customers.

[Edited to fix grammar]

I doubt it, Xan.  Giving a fuck about what raving asstards on your forums think won't hurt you much because raving asstards on your forums are (a) about one trillionth of your player base and (b) for the most part hopeless addicts anyway.

EQ dominated the market with similar/worse customer relations, now WoW dominates it.  AC and now CoH were famous for their friendly, communicative devs, and both games were insignificantly tiny compared to EQ and WoW respectively.

The lesson to draw from this is how your message board monkeys treat the raving asstards on your official forums means jack and shit.

Yes, but realize this is still a relatively new genre.

In order to attract those who are not the addictive compulsive types who continue to pay for shitty customer service - i.e., normal people - the vast majority of the population - MMOG companies need to do a better job of treating customers with respect.  How many of these people play a mmog for a while and then quit because they don't trust the mmog company any more?

I know people - marvelously addictive types who love to play these games - who won't buy an SOE game because they got burned from EQ.  They won't even consider purchasing EQ2.  Others feel similarly about Mythic, and I note people beginning to feel that way about Blizzard.  Blizzard had great customer devotion before WoW.  It's burning through that rather quickly now, however.

EQ2 should have been a mega-hit, and would have been, I think, except for the poor reputation of SOE.  I didn't buy it, and I didn't even play EQ.  I just know a lot of people who did, and heard the complaints.  It scared me off from even bothering to try it, and I buy a fair amount of games.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about all of this.  Simply because this all squares with how I feel about it doesn't mean many others do, but perhaps I'm exposed to more who do because I do.  (Can you follow the doo here? doobydoobydoo).

My experience has been that normal people make up a very small minority.


I suppose that's what normal people do? Personaly I choose not to play EQ2 because nothing I read or heard about it made me think it would be that much fun. I'm not playing Guild Wars much these days because the retail implementation of PvP isn't that much fun either. And I quit WoW after realising that none of the stuff I had yet to do was going to be very fun.

Now this might strike you as being very odd, but I think you'll find that if EQ2 had been made by Blizzard and WoW by SOE then SOE would be the one with the subscribers.

I personaly think that good communication from the customers to the developers is going to keep people playing the game more than good communication going the other way.

If there's a problem with the Warlock spells that stops me casting half of them I want to know the devs will be aware of it, and fix it, ASAP. It would be nice to hear back from them on the issue too, no doubt, but it's much more important to me to get the problem fixed.

I doubt.

Bolded emphasis is mine. I'm not too sure I agree with that statement. I would go so far as to say I think that's part of the problem.

Fans of MMOG's especially feel as if they have some entitlement to have developers listen to them. You can see this is some of the attitude in the whole MMOG ranting community, or in sites like this one, and even in some of my writings on the subject. I believe it is because of the inherent communal aspects of MMOG's that they believe this. However, I do not think this is an inalienable right, say on the level of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I think it is more of a conditional right.

Players of an MMOG are customers of a SERVICE. That's the important part. I think in regards to SERVICE issues, such as bugs, downtime, lag, availability, UI usabiity, playability, griefing and harrassment etc. players have every right to communicate with the developers. They need that feedback loop, because those are the things that the developers should never fuck up, and if they do, they should fix it as quickly as possible. But things like balance, story/backstory, and the development of the creative aspects of the game? Fuck no. These are the things developers need to decide upon, need to lay down and need to stick to. It needs to be their game, their world. Otherwise, you get the Mythic overbalancing problems, you get flavor of the month bullshit, etc.

Bugs that cause imbalances, yes. But balance itself in the hands (or even touched by the hands) of players? Fuck no.

If all of those things did not factor into the price of the box, the # of boxes needed to be produced and the amount of the monthly subscription such that all of those combined would take care of it as long as X% of the boxes were sold, then the business managers for the company are fucking idiots who do not deserve jobs in any industry. All of that shit is or should be budgeted into production costs, especially the server farms;  and the CS personnel costs and maintenance overhead should be factored into the monthly subscription fee.

Except that you can't, because there are hard and fast industry expectations for both box cost and subscription fees. While we see incremental attempts to modify both (more successful in the subscription fee aspect), just this community alone has said time and again that they won't pay ++ bucks for a game above what they expect, regardless of how good or bad it is.

But that's not really the point of my post--you said that in the first 2 months they should have completely recovered their research/dev/production costs, and be rolling in the dough...all I'm pointing out here is that in my un-informed (as to their actual budget, costs, investments, etc.) opinion, they haven't gotten quite into the "completely rolling in the dough" point yet.

I think this is a naive point of view: When you call "customer support" for any large scale application vendor, do you get the developers, or the minimum wage customer support staff that couldn't understand a lick of code if they ate it? Microsoft certainly doesn't give you direct access to developers in any way, and I don't know of other industries (except for possibly small scale shareware/independent software applications) where any customer can get access to a developer.

In the healthcare information sector, specifically vendors that provide applications, I know of zero vendors in the entire industry that let customers of ANY type even send an email to a developer, much less call them or expect the devs to read forums of any sort. And these are applications that cost hospitals millions, if not tens of millions of dollars yearly, including "support agreements" in the 5 digits per year.

I think we actually agree to some extent here. Let me clarify my original statement. When I said they have a right to speak with the developers, I didn't necessarily mean directly.

I do think that players should be heard though. Whether its about a bug or their opinion of a creative design they have a stake in the future development of the game. I totally agree that players should never be used to drive design (that's bad) and it's one of the reasons I have always been against polling players on design decisions. But this is the crux of my point. We (OCR) haven't done a good job of educating players on exactly what kind of feedback we want from them and then working to create an environment that facilities and encourages the feedback we want. We let them just post about anything and everything and then are surprised when people feel ignored. We also need to be more willing to say "no" to a player's feedback and take the time to explain why we said no.

It's the developer's job to choose a direction, but once that direction is chosen they should absolutely seek feedback from their subscribers - even if just to tweak the design. More imporantly, the community team should be involved in those decisions, representing the players in design and development meetings, before the design is even presented for feedback.

One should NEVER allow developers to speak directly to or directly with customers. Developers aren't known for their tact. I think all communication between developer and customer should go through the filter of a community manager, both ways, someone who understands how PR works and can polish up the dev comments and filter out the "cock" from the customer comments. Even the dev posts should go through the CM before going public, simply because. I think we've all seen enough instances where that didn't happen and things like "Being a victim is FUN!" get through.

And yeah, Calandryll, customer's expectations are not being managed at all well. I think it's an example of too much legalese (in long EULA's on forums and games) and not even clear talk. Things like forcing players to read FAQ's on forums, so they learn about things like the quote function, or the search function, before being allowed to post, etc.

As for tweaking designs with player feedback, I don't think that serves much good unless you go the "Team Lead" direction that DAoC did. Mostly I think that because the majority of players can't see past their dicks in regards to game changes.

Hehe..ok, I thought we were saying opposite things, but it sounds like we aren't...that was my whole reason for posting in the thread, in that it sounded like people felt is was a requirement/absolute right for players to have direct access to dev's...and that's just not feasible either economically or diplomatically in my opinion!

I think what Cryptic does is great, but I don't feel I need to be able to bitch directly to a dev either. I like knowing upcoming things and I have no problem with CM's as long as they are kept in the loop. Blizzard seems to have a problem with this.

I still say that the only things players really need are:

A semi-comprehensive list of what the devs are up to, it doesn't need to go into too much detail but if they can keep a blog/journal/log style thing so players know what to look forward to / worry about.

A test server, that players can access and some form of feedback mechanism available when they put a new build on it so that players can at least feel like they are weighing in on new patches.

Thats it.

Scrap everything but server boards and tech support, call it a day.

I agree. All I really want is info on what's coming for the game, patch notes, and someone to call if I have a technical problem or billing error. That's it. And I'd say there's a large percentage that don't even need that much, as long as they can successfully log in and play they are totally satisfied.

Agreed.  Cryptic provides well beyond that, but I thought they were being shown as example-of-what-is-possible, not example-of-what-should-be-the-norm.

SOE, Mythic, Blizzard and others with shitty CS have it because it's not a priority - they think it doesn't matter.  And to be fair, Mythic at least tries to have decent CS - it's more the problem in communication breakdown between their CMs and devs.  This is a problem that shouldn't have ever been, and I have no idea if they still suffer this problem because I quit the game a year ago and haven't bothered checking back.

Customers remember. Iin new markets people become more sophisticated over time in terms of what they will and will not put up with.  The MMOG market was very specialized with EQ - when EQ started, a lot of people didn't even own computers.  That is no longer the case. 

Companies can either cater to the miniscule part of the market that SOE relieds upon for success, or they can attempt to gain more customers - which will mean they need to become better than they've been in the past.  Rarely has providing shitty customer service been a method of becoming successful - certainly not in a mature market, at any rate.  When you're the only game in town, sure.

[I think this poor horse is dead by now.  Suffering from chick affliction today - the necessity to say the same thing over and over and over...]

Blizzard's boards are simply excessive. I don't pay a sub fee so people have a place to go beg for quest walkthroughs, laugh about what some jackass did on some other server, or bitch and moan about whatever the problem of the day is. Do that somewhere else, I don't need that noise.

And devs should be busy doing their primary job - developing the game, not reading the ill-advised and poorly-typed ramblings of MomsCC24718 or BasementDweller12648.

People expect far too much sometimes.