Your Customer's Trust, Confidence and Loyalty

[Sahdee]

....They can work a little harder in the PR department.

*cough* ....what PR department? >_>

As per my understanding, their PR department is about as real and tangible as my ability to log into the game =D

Also, nice job in making a thread that tackles the issues everyone's talking about in a respectful and factual manner =]

On a side note, like others here, I'm getting increasingly annoyed at the people making excuses for a bad launch. Of course stuff happens, that's life. That doesn't mean that we need to lower our standards and expect bad service. It's almost like these people want us to blame ourselves for expecting any good things from a game.... anyone else see what's wrong with that line of reasoning?

If software developers/publishers made cars, they'd all ship with flat tires, no batteries, and only one spark plug.

To say that it's "normal" for software to be released this way is completely unacceptable.

^THIS

Alot of respect was lost this weekend

And that, right there, is the real problem.
That's what this all comes down to.

[WaffleWolf]

*cough* ....what PR department? >_>

On a side note, like others here, I'm getting increasingly annoyed at the people making excuses for a bad launch. Of course stuff happens, that's life. That doesn't mean that we need to lower our standards and expect bad service. It's almost like these people want us to blame ourselves for expecting any good things from a game.... anyone else see what's wrong with that line of reasoning?

exactly what I think too. Why is this a new excuse now? Shouldn't people learn from past mistakes rather than set it as the new bar? WoW had a bad launch therefore it is ok for everyone else to have a bad launch as well. It's normal.
I never quite understood why this is even a valid excuse for this kind of problem. Yes, if this was some glitching or massive lag then maybe it's more fitting of this reasoning, but isn't this problem a little bit on the grander scale of things?

[Sahdee]

I never quite understood why this is even a valid excuse for this kind of problem. Yes, if this was some glitching or massive lag then maybe it's more fitting of this reasoning, but isn't this problem a little bit on the grander scale of things?

I would certainly have thought that people not being able to play the game is kind of a grand scale problem, yes =]


I'm going to share this here, found it in another thread:



I feel bad for Yoshi, since he really did intend for people to get to play the game and enjoy it, and it's not his face that should be in that gif, but it's still an apt description of the experience a great many of us have had so far =/

The problem, as has been discussed ad infinitum for the last day, is an issue of a lack of hardware, or at least a lack in processing power on the hardware currently available. I've come to the conclusion that they're just stalling right now while they wait for the new hardware to arrive and be imaged, integrated in to the network and start being part of the load balancing. That is reasonably educated guess. Until that happens, we're screwed.

This to me doesn't seem entirely unplausible. In fact, quite the opposite.
Though one would have thought the time since P4 would've been sufficient for them to order improved hardware. Then again, if there wasn't anything suitable stocked nearby, who knows how long it would take to get there.

Mind you, how hard is it to get someone to post something along the lines of:

'We're very sorry to hear about the troubles many of our players have been experiencing. We'd like you to know we've traced the problem to faulty hardware. It's unclear why this problem didn't crop up during the beta.
We ask for your continued patience as we work to solve this issue. Rest assured our highest priority is to get everything back up and running optimally as soon as possible.
Depending on the duration of current malfunctions, we have plans in motion to add extra days of subscription for everyone who purchased the game to make up for lost game time. We appreciate your patience, please follow <insert informational source here> for further updates over the following days.'

Just letting the players know what to expect accounts for so much.
It's when people sit around for hours trying to log in before finding out it's just not going to happen that they get irritable. Even the token hours at the end of P4 made people more annoyed than anything for the simple reason that the extra hours weren't announced until an hour or two before they actually happened, which by then was late night or early morning, depending on which continent people were on.

It's also a basic principle of business that if you treat people well, you'll get loyal customers, and loyal customers will support you even if and when your product or service is found lacking.
On the other hand, if you treat your customers like dirt, even a good product is unlikely to save you.