EA, Mythic, and "customer service"

[Kareem]

@JonSaunders

Mythic are actually good compared to GOA, the people who run (and I use the term loosley) WAR in europe. So far I’ve been double billed 2 months in a row after I had canceled (previously was ok). I in fact swore that I would never deal with them but some of my friends were playing it at the time and raving on about it so I bit the bullet and signed up … silly me thinking that GOA had ever changed.

14 emails, 2 phone calls and still no where closer to resolving the issue and getting my money back.

This is why I have a policy of only playing MMOs and subscribing to them if they allow prepaid game cards.

[Mark_Asher]

@SpoofyChop

Seriously, Lotro and War and Conan are basically DOA in a certain sense. Their fates are predetermined. Eventually the minimal number of subscribers will dwindle to the point that it doesn’t make sense to keep the servers up. They need to pinch pennies until then because no amount of good customer service is going to make an also-ran game into a hit.

It’s sad, especially in the case of Lotro, but not surprising.

You could have said the same thing about EVE at one time too. I have no idea what the subscription numbers are for these games, but if they are currently profitable and the developers are willing to invest the profits back into the game, they can grow.

[JZigish]

From the small amount of insider experience I have here, I think part of the problem is the desire to be “fair”. CSR gets a lot of requests from people who are just plain cheating, and want items for free (ie, saying they lost something they never had). It takes a bit of work to separate out the cheaters from the people who actually had a legitimate problem, and individual CS people and managers err in a certain direction. So the first 4 csr people had probably just dealt with a bunch of cheaters that day and decided you were probably cheating, while the 5th guy decided you probably weren’t (requesting the same things 4 times in a row would also help indicate you weren’t cheating :P ).

I find both game designers and CSR people to be overly paranoid about people abusing their systems (because they feel ownership, and don’t want to be stolen from), and could really stand to be a bit more relaxed. Personally I think you should basically always give out the first few lost items to a player, and if they start to ask over and over for different items treat them like a possible cheater.