Mazuo
5201
Still waiting for my latest response, but yes, I’ve received that exact same form letter before too. Pretty damn silly to say you can only do store credit when at the same time you keep having Brad and others talking about if you find the game an unfinished mess, go get a refund from sales.
They’re pretty selective about who they choose to issue refunds to, as behavior in this very thread demonstrates!
Andrew
5203
What’s really bizarre to me is not that they might be refusing refunds or whatever, but just the really inconsistent policy. Some people get full refunds, some people get full refunds if they work with tech support or 75% otherwise, some people get full store credit, etc., with no apparent rhyme or reason. Of course, we’re not getting the full story here, but it still comes across as weird.
Telefrog
5204
Full refunds will be offered in a later patch. Trust us. We’ve got some great return processes we’re testing internally! It’s nothing like what you guys see.
Ingham’s Razor says: cock-up before conspiracy.
Which is more likely:
That $camdock spends time & money on giving some guy a refund, then decides "hey, we’re not losing customers fast enough right now. Let’s piss this guy off & hope he tells the world about it" and spends more time and money on retracting the refund?
Or that Stardock’s customer service - in the middle of a customer service crisis - makes a mistake?
Possibly. Personally I hope he’s sticking around because he’s been ordered to. Either way, I’m not so much grateful to him as I’m feeling sorry for him. Poor Island Doggie.
Andrew
5206
I keep reading $camdock as a Perl variable.
I can’t yet reply to PM’s here.
I will say it looked like a mistake. This is what happened.
- I send refund request email.
- The next day, the two transactions are on my CC.
- The day after that, I get the Stardock 75% form letter.
It’s like someone was going to do something nice for me, and then decided not to. I’m currently miffed off enough by the game and the toying with my money that I am just asking for a full refund…and to be able to keep it.
A mistake? Have you been keeping up with this thread?
(I jest, I jest!)
$camdock is a joke. Kind of like Elemental on release, Brad Wardell’s rather inconsistent statements and the incompetence of their customer service. :D
Yeah, I agree with you there.
I read it as something wholly other and realize I have a very dirty mind.
By the way, it sounds like Brad’s finally gotten it, based on that forum post. Poor bastard.
A friend mentioned he’s finally got through all the stages of grief: Denial (it’s fine), Anger (you QT3 liberal hater fuckers), Bargaining (how about if we patch it?), Depression (?), Acceptance.
That’s a strawman, isn’t it? I don’t believe that you seriously believe - if you’ve ever stopped and thought about it for a minute - that Stardock have a refund policy that’s absolutely unconditional. Of course there are rules and conditions to their refund policy, as there are for every other retailer in the world. And of course Brad - when posting on a forum or talking on a podcast - doesn’t in fact cut-and-paste (or read out loud) the entire refund policy every time he mentions that they have one.
-
I pre-ordered and played the beta, and distinctly recall the text of the purchase page warning me that there were no refunds on beta software.
-
I recently googled “Stardock returns policy” and the first result was in fact the Stardock returns policy, there in black and white for anyone who wanted to know what Stardock had in fact promised.
-
As a test just now I browsed to www.stardock.com, clicked on the “support” tab (seemed like the sensible place to look) and the return policy was right there under “general FAQs”.
Anyone who spent maybe 5 minutes doing this level of research would be able to answer 95% of the refund questions and complaints in this thread. Those of us who pre-ordered agreed to T&Cs saying that we weren’t entitled to refunds. If we get refunds it’s because Stardock are being nice. Those of us with technical problems are being asked to try to resolve them through tech support first before being refunded, just as the policy says. Those getting 75% refunds because they just don’t like the game are also getting exactly what they were promised in the policy.
If anyone really doesn’t know exactly what Stardock promised and is now unpleasantly surprised, they only have themselves to blame. They couldn’t be arsed to spend five minutes finding out. Now that in itself is no reason to be sneered at, most of us can’t be bothered to waste time reading the small print especially for a routine retail purchase. But there’s also no excuse for whining about it afterwards. Not when Stardock’s clearly stated policy is infinitely better than almost any other in the industry.
Telefrog
5213
Which forum post is that?
Being rational is against the rules in this thread.
REPORTED!
Tyjenks
5215
Yay! We are on the same page now!
[Achievment Unlocked] 5 Ass Kisses in One Day
Mazuo
5216
I don’t know, seems to still be pretty strongly in the denial and anger camps from what I see. Just this morning he rather flatly stated in the Drama Cleansing thread that anyone accusing them of dishonesty are ‘vile, nasty’ people that will be turned away from the official forum.
Further on, another statement about how it wasn’t any issue of honesty but just sheer obtuseness. I guess what I’m left waiting for is some statement about how that’s going to be rectified. If your company is so dysfunctional it can’t notice what many other nonprofessionals did, what is going to be done about it? Patches are great, but how are they going to improve things without an overhaul in how they actually oversee the project? Perhaps I missed some further clarification as I’ve mainly just been refreshing this thread for others’ refund statuses.
No, I think you’ve pretty much got it.
So I’m to understand that you thought that document was in fact a contract between you and Stardock? I guess it was an easy mistake to make…
Yeah, that’s definitely what I thought. Because Stardock’s intention in writing it certainly wasn’t to give customers a certain expectation.
Oghier
5220
Brad addressed this at in the Three Moves Ahead podcast. It does sound like there are some organizational changes coming for how they develop games, including a reduced role for the CEO himself. However, he remains attached to the idea that all the gameplay content (e.g., spells) can be done very late in the process, as the engine and core technology represent the bulk of the engineering hours. I believe he continues to underestimate the importance and the time required for polishing.
Everybody can’t be Blizzard. But they’re obsessed with polish and they’re enormously successful. Not a coincidence. While I do not believe Stardock should extend a multi-year development cycle for another year+ of polish, after the engine is done, it’s not something you can do in two weeks.
