Why I canceled and how to stop it in the future.

[jjm152]

Hello,

This isn't a rant or what not, but just a simple missive about an experience I had tonight on the game and why it caused me to cancel my account. Hopefully someone will read this and decide to take action on it so as to avoid losing customers this way in the future.

Anyway, tonight a group of about 30+ players decided to head from the Tryker capital to the Matis capital. We were doing very well until we reached the outer limits of the Matis lands. There were enemies there that had a bugged offensive power, an AoE dot. It was bad enough that the DoT was killing people very quickly, but as a side effect if you got killed by this DoT there was a chance that you could not be revived.

This happened to several people over the night, myself included, and there were GM's on the spot almost immediately. One of them said they were looking into "getting permission to do teleports". Well, after waiting about half an hour and no word I hopped into the BBS and was essentially told that they couldn't do anything for me at all.

It just seemed really really stupid to me. It's pretty obvious there was a bug, it had happened multiple times to different people. There were also dozens of witnesses to it happening. The idea that we were somehow trying to "scam" our way into some sort of reward we didn't deserve is just a laughable suggestion. Essentially I guess, I just don't understand the attitude.

This game has a very small user base right now. Also it is sadly rife with bugs. Things like what happened to me tonight are just going to happen, bugs are unavoidable under the best of circumstances and I understand that.

However, when these bugs occur some sort of action needs to take place other than what comes down to basically saying "suck it up". Given that so few people actually pay for this game right now, you would think that the powers that be would be hell-bent on keeping their current customers happy. The announcement of a "free week" of play was a step in that direction I believe, however when your game is so buggy, not allowing GM's to do something as simple as teleport a player back to his team is crazy.

Such a small, trivial thing, that couldn't even be "authorized". It seriously boggled my mind. I've pretty much had my fill of games where the customer service is nothing more than a glorified help desk. If you have to jump through a dozen hoops, wait, and wait some more, just to be told "sorry we can't do anything for you", then that doesn't equate to any type, shape or form of service that I can recognize. Customer interaction; Yes. Service? No.

My suggestion would be that given the shape this game is currently in, especially the huge proliferation of bugs, that whomever is incharge of customer service at Nevrax should make a decision to give the GM's and even Guides more authority to deal with bugs as they see fit. It is far better in my mind to accidently give one or two players some sort of extra help that they didn't deserve than it is to leave dozen more players stranded and frustrated due to not being able to have their issues resolved in a positive manner. The first thing doesn't cost anyone a dime, and the second one just cost Nevrax my subscription fee.

All it would have taken tonight to keep my happily marching along and paying for this game would have been a simple bump back to my team. We were already past the bugged monsters and within minutes of reaching the Matis capital. I could have logged there, gone to sleep and woken up fresh the next day to tackle Atys again. However instead I am writing this post and I'm probably going to wash my car tomorrow.

Atleast the car will be happy.

Later

[pandorae]

Who was this? I was part of the group ...

edit: also notice that 'than21' suffered a similar fate (mentioned somewhat less eloquently in another thread), along with several of my guild mates. While I understand that the GM's have rules to follow, these rules were proven to be absurd in tonight's instances ... especially after a GM watched this bug happen and was still powerless to remedy the situation.

[sycotiks]

Hello,

This isn't a rant or what not, but just a simple missive about an experience I had tonight on the game and why it caused me to cancel my account...


Later

I don't see why this would make you cancel your account, but oh well. See ya later.

[tovar]

Game companies need to give their GMs the authority to do their jobs, but too often they do not. A simple teleport would have left them with a happy customer instead of a cancelled account, and I can't see how any other player would have been upset that they were given an unfair advantage.

I had a similar situation happen to me in EQ many years ago, and while I didn't cancel my account over the incident, customer service issues is the number one reason I will never purchase EQ2. I had a manager once who always said "when a customer leaves the store unhappy, you've lost 20,000 dollars in business." It's not the dollar they spend today that counts, but what they spend tomorrow, and what they tell their friends.

[tekkor]

I don't see why this would make you cancel your account, but oh well. See ya later.

I wasnt even there and I understand why he was so upset. Heck...almost makes me want to cancel if this is the attitude and way the GM's and Dev's are going to operate on this young and very fragile at the moment game.

I know this is off the subject a bit but.....I really think this game has some great things going for it but overall.....its obvious they rushed the release to get on the shelves before EQ2 or WoW hits. There are a TON of bugs that quite simply never should have made it out on a retail release.

Now...i know what some of you want to say "all mmo games have bugs at release" and yes that is true...ive played almost all of them. But bugs like going to a village and 90% of the NPC's being called Civ_Mal_AVa_001 or some such crap is really a silly issue that shows they rushed the release to just hurry and get out before the other games launched.

I dont blame them in some ways as they do seem to have people like me buying the game as a stop gap while waiting for something else. However.......leading back to the subject of this post......

You might actually be able to keep some people on the game if you pleasently surprise them with a great game, avid Dev support and GREAT customer service. It seems that its not happening on all fronts.

Personally the biggest problem I have with the game right now is no player bazaar setup. They said its coming in patch 1 but that should have been out at launch or by now. Also I hate how things that are done so simple in all the other games like being able to gauge a monsters difficulty through a Con system is so horribly flawed in this game.

Anyway....thats another story.

[kisedd]

I agree a teleport would have been nice. It would have been a "surprise". However, because a player isn't surprised, and doesn't get his own way, he is going to throw a tantrum. Sure, he has every right to be upset. I just don't see not making it to Matis because that was my goal to be a game cancelling event. To each their own.

I haven't played a MMO yet that has ever helped players pass bugs. There was this huge epic raid in DAoC and the final area was bugged and we all died. Of course we called upon customer support. Did any of us get our reward. Nope. They put in fixed and we tried again, and it was STILL bugged. I gave up at that point, but others made other attempts over the coming weeks. I can think of many times in DAoC where customer service didn't change the outcome. Lost relics, broken quests, broken epic quests.
SWG has been the same way. Bugged Death Watch Bunker where players couldn't craft their Mandalorian Armor. That took weeks. I heard phase two of the Jedi Village was bugged so players couldn't advance in their quests. Much hue and cry over that.

In my opinion Ryzom has some of the best customer support I've seen in a game. Am I going to get everything I want? Nope. However, I get a prompt response and my requests are considered. That's more than I can say for any other MMO I've played.

[fiadd]

I agree a teleport would have been nice. It would have been a "surprise". However, because a player isn't surprised, and doesn't get his own way, he is going to throw a tantrum. Sure, he has every right to be upset. I just don't see not making it to Matis because that was my goal to be a game cancelling event. To each their own.

It wouldn't have been a surprise, the team was actually expecting that the gm's would be allowed to take some type of action. In the example you give, it was reasonable of the game gm's to not take any action, because it was not clear that if that raid hadn't hit the bug that they would have succeeded.

In this case we had a large group moving through the lands, a few (I think 5-6 of the 30+) got hit with this bug which made them unhealable after they went down, and thus could only respawn back at the border spawn to matis lands.

The people who didn't get hit with this bug made it to the matis cities and picked up the spawn point there.

Those who were hit by the bug stayed in the game until the group made it to the spawn point.

A gm/guide observed the final few cuttler fights and saw that the group killed the cuttlers quick enough to have time to heal any members who had gone down in the fight, but were unable to heal those who got hit by this bug.

Given the above, I don't think it's large of a leap of logic to conclude that those who got hit by this bug would have made it to the matis cities (the goal of this exercise) if they hadn't been made unhealable by the bug, and thus a teleport should not be out of the question. I agree that if you get hit by a random bug, there is usually not enough evidence about what would have happened if the bug wasn't there to justify the gm's giving out any help, in this case however, I don't believe that is true.

I would personally like a statement (Cerest?) as to the official policy of Nevrax on such bug problems. Should we assume a) regardless of the bug, what it does to you (including character deletions, etc) will not be rectified by any gm ever, b) action will only be taken if it renders your character unplayable (stuck, deleted, etc), c) gm's will be allowed to exercise discretion to compensate people hit by verifiable bugs when what the results of their actions would have been without the bug is clear, or d) is the cuttler instant unhealable death from their smell an intended part of the encounter and must be taken into account by players in the future?

EDIT: I should also add that what made me mad about this situation wasn't that the bug happened (bugs happen), or that in the end we weren't compensated, it was that we had to stand around for a couple of hours with the gm's unable to tell us whether they would be able to do anything, because there wasn't a set policy they could quote us and had to keep referring the matter to "senior gm's" who at no point ever interacted with the players.

[jjm152]

Who was this? I was part of the group ...

edit: also notice that 'than21' suffered a similar fate (mentioned somewhat less eloquently in another thread), along with several of my guild mates. While I understand that the GM's have rules to follow, these rules were proven to be absurd in tonight's instances ... especially after a GM watched this bug happen and was still powerless to remedy the situation.

This was Cornelia.... I still have like 3 (or is it 4 now?) free weeks left on my account. So I'll probably be around here and there goofing off/exploring. And I agree, the entire event was absurd. It could have been remedied in a few moments, especially once everyone was past the bugged stink aura mobs.

Anyway I have played alot of these games and Ryzom is the first one that I've canceled before the free month was up. Part of that is because of the bad experience and another part of it is that there are so many options out there on the market (and more coming) that I don't feel like I need to subject myself to a bad customer service experience/plethora of bugs in order to be entertained. Back when EQ was essentially the only game in town I was willing to put up with it, but now I'm not. Maybe the customer base is maturing on these guys, or maybe I just am... I don't know.

Later

[robin]

Looking into my crystal ball I foresee that SoR won't be around a year from now.

I really get a kick out of ready all the sickening suck up posts profusely thanking Nevrax for the free---week? Haha. They are NOT doing this to be sweet to you, they are doing this because people are cancelling accts left and right and they see the righting on the wall.

This is called damage control, my friends. Although I really suspect it is too late. You think "how wonderful, they are giving me a free week valued at a whopping $4." What you should be thinking is "I payed $45 for what is really worth $15, maybe $20 after the first patch?"

As someone said above, there are too many choices and the MMO industry has too many years into it now to consider this contentless, buggy mayhem "acceptable." Why settle for this?

Does SoR have potential? You bet! Huge! But..... about 1 year more of development from today. That's it. That's the problem. This game is NO WHERE NEAR RETAIL READY. NOT AT ALL! If you can't admit this to yourself and accept that you were suckered (hey, I was too), then I don't know what to tell you.

It's funny that NO ONE will say how many subscribers this game has. Ever stop and think about that? Why would that be such a secret? I hypothesize that if we all knew, you would certainly THEN realize the end is near, or that there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

I challenge Cerest the community laison to tell us how many NA server subscribers there are. How bout the others, too. C'mon, just humor me.

[cerest]

[QUOTE=robin]I challenge Cerest the community laison to tell us how many NA server subscribers there are. How bout the others, too. C'mon, just humor me.[/QUOTES]

Sorry, I can't tell you. What I can tell you is that it's more than 100 and less than 1,000,000.