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You never get another first impression
Creasian
Member UncommonPosts: 112
AoC is being consumed at an alarming rate. We all knew with hype and a pvp flavored game, that we would see alot of hardcore gamers come out of the woodwork. We also knew that there would be, always a given, some kinks at launch. Funcom however seems to be failing, at a even worse rate than SoE, in Customer support in and out of game. This, mind you, is something that none of us really expected from a supposed triple A mmorpg.
I can indeed forgive some kinks. I can understand them purposely not fixing certain class issues in an attempt to keep the masses from going to fast while they work out the kinks. I can also understand the 30 day free sub and letting them have a chance to fix things.
Yet, in all honesty, can ANY of you explain and justify the sheer lack of in game support? The petition they have is utter nonsense, and with a number of issues that plague the players, one would think that even PRETENDING to give a rats ass would be better than what is being done now.
I have been one of the ones who watched 4 hours go by and not see 6 petitions move. Being that close to next in line, 5 away, and never see it move, was just laughable.
I know AO went from p2p to f2p long long ago with paid content for subs, but this wasnt intended to be a FTP mmorpg at all.
The customer support feels like it. It utterly fails. Even SoE tried to look like they gave a shit. Their community relations people wont even jump on the forums to talk to anyone other than to make some high horse sticky about "ignore it... its never as bad as it looks or sounds!"
Starting to think they are afraid of their customers, or of confrontation due to lack of experience, and are just hoping things work out without them having to mingle with their customers. Or help them.
Comments
And if there's already a site/forum like this (except for their forums - I've tried those) then please enlighten me.
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/played: EQ, EQ II, DAoC, WoW, LoTRO, AoC, CoH/CoV, WAR, Aion, Tera, Wildstar and many others that don't merit listing
/playing: Clash of Clans, Hearthstone
everything that players are having problems with are being dealt with. there has been patches almost every other day to fix these problems. just because they dont want to hold ur hand and tell u everything is going to be ok u think they dont care.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
They put the trader back in and their is a bug that it will take your money. You can bet anyone affected by this bug wont be entitled to their money back.
The mages still arent receiving the correct magic rating due to both a bug in intelligence, and feats are also being effected that increase the rating.
They did not include a good amount of nerfs in the patch notes. The changes thus far for but maybe one or two classes has been nerfs not boosts. Some fixes were needed, including on my class, to avoid exploits. However there has been no real effort to fix major class bugs currently in the game.
Very little has been done. There was a fix for one archetype's destiny questline, but mages still have to skill a part because the npc is bugged. The fact that there are many things that werent broke in beta, but are broke at launch, is sheer idiocy.
I dont NEED them to say it is going to be okay. It is about communication. In the business world, not your backyard, support is paid for. We are paying for support. They should communicate with the players why they dropped the ball, and also front up as to why the in game petition system is so backlogged that even 6 petitions takes an entire night to answer.
Honestly, do you really feel this is a bad launch??? I am only a casual player and have only just left Tortage, but so far it has been a great ride and from what I can judge a very very smooth launch. Especially when you compare it with almost every other MMO launch.
From memory I can only remember two launches this smooth or smoother, Dark age of Camelot and Lord of the rings online. WoW had a decent launch as well, perhaps comparable to this.
I play on the european servers, perhaps there are differences in how the launch have been in the different regions? Or it could be that I play on a pve server since I really don't care for pvp???
Also, perhaps there is a lack of content in the upper levels? I really can't say anything about that yet...
The issue isn't the bugs or the errors, the problem is Funcom's complete silence to player concerns and a total lack of information being passed to the paying player base. I'm not upset at the moment, as I have no issues. However, there are plenty of players who cannot play at all due to some sort of bug and FC is offering no help. On the AoC forums there's a guy who waited 16 hours for a GM to answer his tickect to unstick his character and got no help. When he logs in he is still stuck, but to open another ticket puts him back at the bottom of the line. Other than help tickets he has no where to turn but to sit and hope a GM gets to him while he waits hours.
Its mostly due to people over-exaggerating both the positive and the negative aspects of the game. Things are hardly as bad as these forums would led you to believe. On the other hand, Funcom has a long way to go before everything is ironed out.
Well if the game was going just fine for me I'd probably be off playing it not posting on some forum, so I agree the forums probably show a higher rate of mishaps than the norm.
From what I've read it seems the only difference between Funcom and other companies is that other companies will have some person issues statements about how everything will be okay and Funcom doesn't.
I dunno I'd rather have that energy going into fixing the problem than have that energy go into someone telling me the problem will be fixed.
The real sink or swim will be if these problems are, ya know, actually fixed.
Never said it was a bad launch. It has bugs, which is to be expected.
If you HAD been effected by a bug and petitioned, then you would know what the problem i speak of is. I mean no malice in that towards you, just saying you need understand that the Customer support in and out of game has been the worst of ANY P2P mmorpg i have played. Even horizons had more devs on the forums talking than here. They even tried to help players in game more.
I havent seen a single player event in game yet. There is almost no personal interaction between the company and the subs. People are being patient for days for a petition and getting no where. They send emails and get no reply. There are some major bugs in the game, including certain npcs and zones that can send your money to the void, or cause other issues on your toon.
Did you know that intelligence dosent effect mages damage even though it is supposed to? That means that aside from your personal buff, and any feats that give a DIRECT % increase to damage, your spells never increase in damage until you get another rank, and then its almost nothing?
There are bugs effecting people at the lowest end, but they do not know, but it dosent really become apparent until they are around 40-50. So for most they do not know how bad the launch is because the beginning is easy and enjoyable. It is only when your forced to really think about your tactics in pve and pvp, or when it starts to matter period, that you notice the issues.
So with that and the fact that there is no customer relations, it is pretty sad state. With communications, issues can be understood and applied in context, allowing people to have more patience. People can adapt if they know no fix is coming for awhile, or priority is at the bottom. When they are waiting for each 4 hour patch for a fix that they really need, and get none, they are dangled on a line of frustration.
The more I read about Age of Crap, the more I'm so glad I decided to wait until they have a free trial to see if I liked the game. After reading everything I have in the last week about the game, I now understand why they don't have a free trial. I think they are afraid to run off even more people.
A tiny mind is a tidy mind...
How does this change someone's first impression of the game?
The issue isn't the bugs or the errors, the problem is Funcom's complete silence to player concerns and a total lack of information being passed to the paying player base. I'm not upset at the moment, as I have no issues. However, there are plenty of players who cannot play at all due to some sort of bug and FC is offering no help. On the AoC forums there's a guy who waited 16 hours for a GM to answer his tickect to unstick his character and got no help. When he logs in he is still stuck, but to open another ticket puts him back at the bottom of the line. Other than help tickets he has no where to turn but to sit and hope a GM gets to him while he waits hours.
This is just a guess, but my maths tells for it go something like this....how many people work at FunCom? say 300? how many of them are on costomer support..say about 20 to 50....it was stated that about 150 people where cracking bugs...and i am sure they have alot more mundane things to accomplish on a day to day basis...but as for the 20 - 50 figure..you can increase or decrease it to whatever reasonable number you feel is or should be appropriate. Now, how many people are playing the game? ohhh i think it was somwhere in the region of 400,000 minimum so far, now lets say that being a new game there are shure going to be alot of people finding problems that get fixed that cause other problems...so lets say 40% of these people put in a /petition that would be around 160,000 problems / by 50 = 3,200 problems per person per day...i wonder how many of them you could deal with on a person to person basis. I am lucky to get through about 30 - 50 emails a day at work.
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
The issue isn't the bugs or the errors, the problem is Funcom's complete silence to player concerns and a total lack of information being passed to the paying player base. I'm not upset at the moment, as I have no issues. However, there are plenty of players who cannot play at all due to some sort of bug and FC is offering no help. On the AoC forums there's a guy who waited 16 hours for a GM to answer his tickect to unstick his character and got no help. When he logs in he is still stuck, but to open another ticket puts him back at the bottom of the line. Other than help tickets he has no where to turn but to sit and hope a GM gets to him while he waits hours.
This is just a guess, but my maths tells for it go something like this....how many people work at FunCom? say 300? how many of them are on costomer support..say about 20 to 50....it was stated that about 150 people where cracking bugs...and i am sure they have alot more mundane things to accomplish on a day to day basis...but as for the 20 - 50 figure..you can increase or decrease it to whatever reasonable number you feel is or should be appropriate. Now, how many people are playing the game? ohhh i think it was somwhere in the region of 400,000 minimum so far, now lets say that being a new game there are shure going to be alot of people finding problems that get fixed that cause other problems...so lets say 40% of these people put in a /petition that would be around 160,000 problems / by 50 = 3,200 problems per person per day...i wonder how many of them you could deal with on a person to person basis. I am lucky to get through about 30 - 50 emails a day at work.
If those emails of yours were from paying customers who, in reality, will be keeping your company from having to do lay offs due to lack of revenue, then i would hope someone in your company would be saying to hire more to handle the load.
I have worked in the consumer world. Not talking retail, but sending out trucks of multi-million dollar equipment to work sites. If a customer has a problem, it is resolved and work out. No ands, ifs, or buts.
Not having enough people isnt the customers problem. It is the company who is supplying a service that is being paid for.
I must think that whatever you do does not include those 30-50 emails being worth anything on a money scale for the company because your logic is poor if it is. You offer a service, you get people to pay for it and dont CAP the service compared to your ability to support it, then the company is in the wrong and is doing bad business.
Right, then work out how many people you would need to deal with another...oh no im stuck.../petition to deal with those kinds of figures, its just not financially viable...I'm guessing you never worked close to the accountants before....
Dealing with a few hundred costomers a day ringing you or emailing you is nothing compared to an army of technologicaly challenged people who type /petition and expect an imidiate answer.
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
Oh and..ouch, this is exactly how companies go belly up, even companies that have been going strong for a hundred years i have seen them make this mistake, get it wrong and crash and burn.
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
I would like to note that in the case of computer software, or possibly any product, customer service is just about the last job to be hired for.
The main thing being, that until they have customers, there is no need for them. They anticipate a certain amount of customers and hire accordingly, training them and setting them on their way. If they need more people, they will hire more people.
Those people take time though, they have to not only understand the tools, but be able to discern if petitions and reports are worthwhile in the first place. It takes time to increase capacity. You only need a few people to manage a big product for a few customers. When you're dealing with many customers you have to sacrifice that personal level of interaction in ordfer to judge and move through the pile of petitions/reports and make as many people as possible content if not happy.
Like any new release, they probably had a team that was too small and some people in training all ready. To assume though that things will suddenly be solved for everyone in any short amount of time though is both ignorant to the reality of the situation as well as highly naive as to the differences in how it must be managed.
I do agree though that they should have a representative telling the community some of the things that is going on.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Of coarse they have PR. Its just that everyone is looking for a different answer to a different problem, if they make a seewping statement them in most peoples eyes they are not doing anything and are in the wrong, if they try and deal with every problem individualy they are not getting to everyone..and are in the wrong, from there side, dealing with the complaints they simply can't please everyone. All they can do is try to damage control and hope to ride through the storm of the opening 1-6 months
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
First impressions mean everything.
Don't believe me? Look at EQ2, TR, AA, and most famously Vanguard.
It's kind of sad that AoC left a pretty bad impression on many people, because it'll never recover, and it's a shame because it really is a good game but the cons outweigh the pros so far.
Exactly how i see it. These guys expecting that they should some how have a full team of staff to cope with all this only just after launch is crazy. It will take time to judge what is needed and apply correctly, not just suddenly hire a few hundred people on a whim who have no idea what they are doing just because they cant cope with all the /i am stuck petitions. plus, the ammount of these will drop and level out, so what, hire hundreds, spend months training them up, then be forced to fire most of them when the petitions calm down......crazy thought process.
This is also exactly what i was refering to when companies go belly up aswell, they over stretch thier books to a point they can not recover from when the market suddenly changes and the customers are no longer there but people still need to be paid, everything is cashed in and.....one dead company.
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
Exactly how i see it. These guys expecting that they should some how have a full team of staff to cope with all this only just after launch is crazy. It will take time to judge what is needed and apply correctly, not just suddenly hire a few hundred people on a whim who have no idea what they are doing just because they cant cope with all the /i am stuck petitions. plus, the ammount of these will drop and level out, so what, hire hundreds, spend months training them up, then be forced to fire most of them when the petitions calm down......crazy thought process.
This is also exactly what i was refering to when companies go belly up aswell, they over stretch thier books to a point they can not recover from when the market suddenly changes and the customers are no longer there but people still need to be paid, everything is cashed in and.....one dead company.
You forget that some of us were part of the guide program in Everquest. We know what a GM can only do, and what a player can be given permissions to do. There are certain powers that can be bestowed upon players who are selected that allow them to handle the smaller issues associated with players.
These guides can be given monthly free accounts. They could have done and gotten this ready during beta, and had these people on reserve for launch. A hundred or more could help the congestion in the in game petition system easily.
As I said. You forget that some of us have done this in the past. We know what can be done, how, and the benefits. Guide program, selected from the playerbase, can be a awsome cost effective tool for Customer Relations in game.
I guess I was talking on a different point of view than yourself.
qft
Exactly how i see it. These guys expecting that they should some how have a full team of staff to cope with all this only just after launch is crazy. It will take time to judge what is needed and apply correctly, not just suddenly hire a few hundred people on a whim who have no idea what they are doing just because they cant cope with all the /i am stuck petitions. plus, the ammount of these will drop and level out, so what, hire hundreds, spend months training them up, then be forced to fire most of them when the petitions calm down......crazy thought process.
This is also exactly what i was refering to when companies go belly up aswell, they over stretch thier books to a point they can not recover from when the market suddenly changes and the customers are no longer there but people still need to be paid, everything is cashed in and.....one dead company.
You forget that some of us were part of the guide program in Everquest. We know what a GM can only do, and what a player can be given permissions to do. There are certain powers that can be bestowed upon players who are selected that allow them to handle the smaller issues associated with players.
These guides can be given monthly free accounts. They could have done and gotten this ready during beta, and had these people on reserve for launch. A hundred or more could help the congestion in the in game petition system easily.
As I said. You forget that some of us have done this in the past. We know what can be done, how, and the benefits. Guide program, selected from the playerbase, can be a awsome cost effective tool for Customer Relations in game.
I guess I was talking on a different point of view than yourself.
Hmmm, an interesting idea, and one i would not have thought of implementing.....why? because it is a risky business asking people who are not responsible to FunCom in anyway to handle your PR. I think they will be fine to wheather the storm, post out generalised statements from time to time and have only the professionals deal with the issues until they can get a hold on it internally. Progressive thinking and seems cost effective initialy on the books but i the repercussions could do more harm than good IMO.
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
AoC's launch was pretty good in my opinion, didn't face any problems really, the lack of the trader was a minor thing, yes kinda sad you couldn't store the really nice things from start but that's about it. Not that the "really nice things" actually were nice things, upgrades were mostly minor unless it were blue stuff, which you mostly got from the quests.
So far they are doing it good.... I'm not super playing the game as it seems my interest for mmorpg has lowered greatly as the year went by. But AoC did a good job reviving it for now.
They did give me a great first impression and i felt like i were in the conan universe, as if he could pop out any second from some bush and yell "by Crom!!! Give me strength!!"
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
I agree totally. They have been patching things almost daily since the day of release, Funcom has posted approx. Time for severs coming back up and have been pretty close most of the time. They have been very clear as to what and why they are fixing, changing or patching things. I have not used in-game support since i have not needed it but sent an e-mail and got a response in about 8 hours. So not sure where the OP gets the idea customer support is no good. So far Funcom has had a good launch one of the best I have experienced and I get the impression they care about their customers.
Right now my first impression of AoC is "here we go again with another Anarchy Online launch".
I am sick of the "bugs are to be expected" argument. A few bugs yes, but the sheer magnitude of bugs, half finished features, and just plain broke items is in this release is unbelievable. CoH, LoTRO, and even EQII and WoW had much smoother launches compared to this game. Not saying any of those was perfect but nothing like this cluster messup. Only thing smooth about this launch were the servers did not crash.
Not only that but as the OP points out, Funcom seems to be overwhelmed by the problems. yes they are patching, damn near daily, but for everything a patch fixes it breaks something else. I emailed tech support about a game breaking bug that has stopped me dead in the water 48 hours ago and other than a "auto repsonse" have heard nothing. Moderator and tech support on the tech forums is no existent as far as I can tell.
As far as dis gruntled people only post on the forums. Well no kidding. when the game crashes at launch I am going to express my displeasure some where and since FC has not bothered to at least email me and say something to the extent of "we are working on your issue" I am going to vent here and on other forums. I did try and seek help on their tech forums but even there have received zero support.
I miss DAoC