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Customer support and Aventurine...........
Sooooo .......... the big day is supposidly within reach. Somewhere around 2 weeks and "Darkfall" will be installed on thousands of hard drives around the world. Eh Hem ....... assuming this is the case, knowing people will have problems with "Things", do you think Aventurine is prepared to deal with customer support?
I bring this up due to the fact that their level of communication with the potential customer has been a little limited ........ at best. I guess the release (Eh hem) could be "Perfect" and there will be no need for customer support. It is possible ....... I have just dealt with decent companies in this regard in the past. I have however dealt with some no so decent companies or worse ...... the invisible companies, the ones that you don't even get a "We're working on it."
Mr. Tasos seems pretty confident ....... I've heard the open beta statement more than once. That would help iron out problems, heck they would have a whole week to work on "Things" in preparation for the release (Eh hem).
What do you think ........ good release, bad release or a complete and total mess with no customer support?
~Hairysun~
Comments
Who knows how the reslease will unfold. I don't have a clear view on what's happening with the beta, so I won't comment on that.
As for customer support. I think it is overrated. The only customer support I need is that the devs repair the most crucial bugs with fast patches. Personally I have never contacted customer support for any game. If you have a problem in-game, analyse it, take a look on the internet and fix your problem (or learn a workaround). It's that easy...
Because the Internet knows more about the devs' game than the devs
I don't know how Darkfall's launch (eh hem) will turn out. Maybe they'll surprise me, but I seriously doubt everything will go smoothly and it'll be "perfect". I think only the most delusional of fanbois think that - the average one has some healthy skepticism.
If they do have an Open Beta, it'll certainly help immensely. I think they need one longer than a week for all that Darkfall's promising, but again, maybe this tiny little hush-hush company can truly revolutionize the MMO genre as we know it.
Damn, where's my laugh emote???
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A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
we better hope for a perfect release because we not gona get any communication from the devs. the community is screaming for update on buying/downloading the game but the devs have been silent for ages.
My blog:
Sigh... Yet another pointless speculation thread. Can't you atleast wait until the game is released before you start trying to analyze the customer support?
I have never had a customer support problem with any game, and I've played too many by far.
Why would anyone worry about this. If you're straight up you won't have a problem you can't work out of.
Asdar
What customer support?
Iiii-iiiiiit's.... me!!! *Hooray*
Its a valid speculation thread. Thats what forums are for, to discuss, speculate and theorize.
With as little info as Aventurine has provided, people have a right to be concerned, and yes, sometimes you do need some help from customer support.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Oh ......... com'mon now. What would be the fun in that.
On a more personal note ...... I am thrilled that you have decided to add your words of wisdom to the pointless speculation thread. I can't help but feel that your efforts are indicative of someone that really does care, but chooses not to admit it. It happens. Use this thread as your first step ....... we are here to support you in your coming out.
Help us help you speculate. With a little work I think you can become one of the greatest speculators this site has seen in years. You can do it .......
~Hairysun~
http://www.straightdope.com/
People that have never had a problem see customer support as a non-issue. Anyone that has ever had a problem understands how frustrating it can be. Would it be the end of the world if/when problems arise? Hardly, but one of the thing that frustrated people do is go to a forum site and express their thoughts.
A lot of unresolved problems leads to incredibly bad PR. Companies have ONE shot at a release, it dictates the overall impression of the game. I would love to see a LOTRO release for Darkfall, it would do nothing but help the already black and blue industry. It would also offset Aventurines apparent lack of advertising and PR. I suppose time will tell ......
~Hairysun~
http://www.straightdope.com/
Its a valid speculation thread. Thats what forums are for, to discuss, speculate and theorize.
With as little info as Aventurine has provided, people have a right to be concerned, and yes, sometimes you do need some help from customer support.
Aren't all speculations valid? After all, they're speculations. I'm just saying this thread is utterly pointless and wont lead anywhere.
It all depends on what we consider CS to be. If we are talking about in-game then I think its fair to say they will be lacking, however if the game itself gives what it offers I think a lot of people will give them a decent amount of leway. They are a small company and such will need time to sort their support out according to requirements.
However atm adventurine have a reputation for 'being on the quiet side'. During development to some degree they can get away with it, afterall we aren't paying for anything yet. Once its released though, paying customers will not put up with it. Their current habit of promising announcments or information and then coming back if and when they please can quite easily kill a game no matter what the game itself is like.
Pretty much all recent releases have suffered from poor community communication and will have lost numerous subs because of it. Thats from dev teams with greater resources and experience. Lets face it, lack of feedback from the dev team itself inevitably leads to forums like this one is right now, if you add subs to that there is no way it will be a good thing.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Its a valid speculation thread. Thats what forums are for, to discuss, speculate and theorize.
With as little info as Aventurine has provided, people have a right to be concerned, and yes, sometimes you do need some help from customer support.
Aren't all speculations valid? After all, they're speculations. I'm just saying this thread is utterly pointless and wont lead anywhere.
Why does it have to 'lead anywhere'? It's just a discussion, I've yet to see a thread on the DF boards that lead anywhere.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
I doubt it will have much in the way of customer support. Maybe very limited in game suport and support webpage or forum. Can't see there being phone support. There might be email.
I doubt this would bother a lot of people, I've never used customer support anyway. Every time I have ever had a problem with a game I have been able to find an anwser on the internet with very little effort.
The fact that they don't even have a marketing budget should show anyone with even the slightest common sense that this game is going to be a miserable failure.
Not because they choose not have one.. but because they simply don't have the money to have one.
If they don't have the money to market properly then they sure as fuck don't have the money to develop and support properly either.
Warhammer spent 600,000 on marketing.. which in reality is not even that much considering how much it actually costs to build the actual game itself.
If they don't even have a measly 300k to spend on marketing then how much do you think they actually had to build the game itself?
Budgets that have no room for even the most basic marketing do not produce AAA MMORPG's.
This brings up another interesting question.. What the fuck is their publisher AudioVisual doing? Shouldn't THEY be spending money on marketing?
All along Adv have kind of said it's about the game itself and at no point indicated it would be AAA.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
my guess..
at launch they won't have anything you might expect
they may have a lot of the features they've listed
but when it comes to customer support and the like..
don't expect them to do much
they aren't spending much time trying to pretend that they have much.. so don't expect much
Just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions.
Yeah, because you have absolutely no logic in your reasoning, I must be a fanboy. On the contrary, I think the game was destined to be very, very low subbed, buggy and most likely greatly delayed (or re-released 6 motnhs from now).
But I reached my opinion with the use of a brain. Without the need to talk complete nonsense, I used logic based upon the status of the development as we have seen it thus far.
In 12 days we will both see shrill.
Edit: I notice they have deleted your post, most pointless stupid moderation ever. You now get posts deleted and warned for calling someone a 'fanboy'? I think most people's ego would be able to handle such an isult without big brother lending a hand.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
All along Adv have kind of said it's about the game itself and at no point indicated it would be AAA.
You are honestly so blinded by your dedication to Tasos, that you have no idea how much of an idiot you are for trying to coverup the truth.
How are they even supposed to support 1-10 servers? They already have something like 300k registered forum users. Let's say that half of those end up buying the game to try it out right from the start. That is 15 servers of 10k people each. What evidence to you have to think they will even be able to support 5? They have said nothing about in-game support, and they have taken no visible actions to start. Now, with about 12 days until "launch" they will either needs to scramble to hire some, or simply have few servers, which means massive amounts of people will not be able to play, and therefore still cause them to lose more subs.
I would be willing to bet that WAR spent considerably more than 600k on marketing.
There has been more than one game this year that spent next to nothing on advertising and sold several hundred thousand copies.
One of them was written on laptops in Starbucks and got a metacritic score of 94% making it the 2nd highest rated game of the year.
In anticipation of your response "it's not a mmorpg blah blah" yeah heard it all before... of course nothing decent ever comes out of anything other than major studio.
Bad marketing doesn't mean bad customer support, those departments are not related.
We will se how the support works at launch, not earlier. We do have seen that marketing is not Avis strong point but that is really not something I care about.
I am not a fanboi but quite critical to ithat this game will be good but I don't make any judgement until after launch, anyone can guess but without any facts you could just flip a coin instead.
communication from developers before release (when they have no customers, and therefor no "customer support") does not have anything to do with their ability to provide it afterwards.
You think any member of the dev team is going to be answering your bug reports or gm requests? No.
Im not saying that DF will have great customer support, nor am i saying it will be bad....but to think that the communication prelaunch has anything to do with what it will be like post launch is ridiculous.
You aren't a customer yet...they owe you nothing.
---sig---
Click this for lulz: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/173737/page/6
ROFL you beat me to this reply and I agree, to many people are bashing the back out of this and tbh it's gertting frigging boring now, come on folks if you do not give a shit about this game just move on.
I would like to see it come and be as good as we all hope, but we all know it may or may not be anything like what we all hope for, but to keep bashing the thing before they even drop it on us is kinda stupid imo. Personally I can not wait for the date to pass so we can finally stop hearing all the whinning 24/7...Some of you people whine more than my ex-mothering law.
I am just glad I am away all next week and then I will not see the negitive posts on here.
Asbo
isn't customer support something that is/should be set up well before the launch of a game - let me answer that for you - you need some sort of customer support department BEFORE you have customers
and have you heard anything from anyone associated with this company mention anything - even as an aside - about customer support
(hopefully these questions aren't worded too harshly - you know how overzealous the moderators on this site are getting)
All I can suggest to people who need to be molly coddled is don't buy it, because I very much doubt you are going to get 5 star treatment. If you can't live without anything else then steer clear and save us the whines.
heheh - i love this
i can almost hear the gears of the universe shifting to make sure that you have major issues installing the game
i'm sure we won't hear one wimper from you on any website about it either - you'll just go quietly back to whatever game(s) you are playing now