Considering the game I’m not even sure if a normal player will understand if he’s duping or playing normally.
Fix the bugs. Not ban your players because your game doesn’t work.
Players that discover dupes are a RESOURCE for the game. You only need to REWARD them so that they tell you about the bug instead of exploiting it.
This is just an example about how SOE is stupid.
Fuck management. Stop blaming the players and fix the damned bugs !
The people you mention are actually volunteer players.
They can do this because, being based in Europe, there isn’t a history of volunteer abuse and subsequent lawsuits. MMOs based in the US have to be very leery of what they have volunteers do, and most (including us) just don’t use volunteer labor at all to prevent possible liability.
That being said, making sure the new user isn’t completely lost is absolutely critical to an MMO’s success. It’s no coincidence that every major MMO has either overhauled their new user tutorial or is in the process of doing so.
At last. The mmog industry is quite dumb at realizing the basics.
And I have to say that good games don’t even need tutorials when the game is already designed with the newbie expereince in mind (WoW as an example).
I don’t see how an interview with management would bring to light any new information. A manager only knows what the underlings tell her.
The underling responsible for banning innocent people because he didn’t think about the consequences is probably in complete cover-your-ass mode. I doubt that management will know the truth about what happened unless one of his co-workers rats him out. Welcome to OfficeSpace™.
I do think that the “44,000 people banned!” is overblown. That would be something like 1/4 of the entire subscriber base.
My girlfriend and I know five people who work in development at SOE really well, but none work directly on SWG. So, even if I pumped them for information, it’s still only going to be hearsay.
I haven’t played the game, so I don’t know if this is true, but some of the sources I’ve read about this escapade say that the numbers are characters banned, not players. Doesn’t SWG allow multiple characters per player?
[quote=“Roger_Wong”]
I don’t see how an interview with management would bring to light any new information. A manager only knows what the underlings tell her.
The underling responsible for banning innocent people because he didn’t think about the consequences is probably in complete cover-your-ass mode. I doubt that management will know the truth about what happened unless one of his co-workers rats him out. Welcome to OfficeSpace™.
I do think that the “44,000 people banned!” is overblown. That would be something like 1/4 of the entire subscriber base.
My girlfriend and I know five people who work in development at SOE really well, but none work directly on SWG. So, even if I pumped them for information, it’s still only going to be hearsay.[/quote]
Well, you could pump them for the name of someone who does know what’s going on, and how to get someone on the phone. I know folks who work at SOE too – but I’m not a journalist. I don’t do this for a living, or even a hobby.
What I fail to understand most is the willful ignorance. If this board were just a bunch of random hardcore gamers, I wouldn’t care, and I’d expect a pure gamer-centric viewpoint.
But there are people here who have the time, skills, and motivation to see what’s going on in SonyLand, and to find out the other side of the story, and no one is doing it. You can report on the gamers’ perspective if you like, but that’s yesterday’s news, not to mention obvious – like the guy who goes up to the mother of a man who was shot in Iraq and asks her how she feels. Well how the fuck to you think she feels? “Oh, I thought it was kind of funny. We laughed about it for a few minutes, and went back to watching American Idol.” I don’t fucking think so.
But now Sony’s point of view, that’s interesting. There’s an incredible dearth of facts on that side.
In the time you’ve read this post, Roger, you could be holding a name in your hand of someone who knows someone else who does know what’s going on, provided by your friends at SOE, along with a promise from them to get that person in touch with you.
Or you can find a name, e.g. “Kurt Stangl,” dial the wrong number on the switchboard, and ask for your old friend insert name here whose extension you must have mis-typed when you got it.
Then when you get the person on the phone, you use charm and politeness to ask about SOE’s perspective on the whole thing.
Actually, I strongly suspect anyone you talk to would immediately refer you to their official spokesperson/s. It’s what I do when I get calls from people who “misdial an extension”.
Yep.
Ever since some bright boy put up a web page about “turboing” there’s been a lot of customers who like to try and dial into a company via alternative access routes (I.E. not the main customer service or support reps). I get these calls from customers every once in awhile, when they cannily manage to outfox our phone-support system and get right to a developer (me). For all their hard work in outsmarting the system, I reward them with . . . a call immediately transferred to the normal customer support folks.
Rimbo, that’s a pretty good plan. And I’m sure that actual newspaper journalists do it all the time. Unfortunately, gaming journalists are not newspaper journalists.
Step 1. Get a SOE customer service manager on the line under false pretenses.
Step 2. To avoid getting hung up on as a crank caller, give him your credentials.
Step 3. Get hung up on as a gaming journalist. Wait five minutes.
Step 4. The phone rings. It’s your editor, and he’s pissed. SOE has just threatened to blacklist Imaginary Gaming Weekly from all beta/preview/review copies and all discussions with PR. Your editor does not fire you by the exact margin to which he managed to convince SOE that he’d never, ever run a real journalistic piece on their business.
Step 5. Find a line of work in which having a spine is actually considered an asset.
I’m sure this happens to pro journalists as well, but usually the offended party needs to be a third-world dictatorship with powers of exile or death over the offender. Multinational corporation? Just doesn’t cut it. Of course, the results are just as corrosive.
Your mistake is in Step 2. See, you have to play it straight all the way through.
Does anyone have any actual news about what’s happening in the game?
man, if i thought i could attempt to have fun in a mmorpg without the programmers and the griefers screwing me over i’d actually try one out.
DAoC works on this aspect.
I thought that your team lead program consisted of 100% volunteers. Has that changed? I had the impression that they got comped accounts while they volunteered, but that was the extend of their compensation.
So why don’t you try to develop a source on the SWG team? Journalists use inside sources for background material and to learn what questions to ask, and of whom, all the time. For that matter, you could use your current inside friends at SOE to learn who to cultivate.
The TL’s stille exist, but they don’t handle in game support, have scheduled hours they’re sposed to be on, etc etc.
They do get a single comp account.
Any word from our resident SWG guru, Brian Rucker?
DAoC works on this aspect.[/quote]
isn’t that the stomping grounds of the dark wolves
