I found this very amusing:
I find it very old. :)
Sorry just I’ve seen that link so many times on the WoW forums it has lost any punch it may have once had.
What I always do find entertaining is as far as the site says, it has been around since before Starcraft yet only now with WoW does it ever come up.
Hey Mom! I got a CCC on my report card! That means good!
Heh.
I’m sure it is old and what once was a horse carcass is now just an grease spot, but I’ve only recently been dissatisfied enough to bother looking it up.
Reading people bitch about World of Warcraft makes me wish that there really WAS a WAAAAAAAmbulance.
Don’t most game publishing companies have an F rating with the BBB, though?
Yes, most game publishers get an F. This has a lot to do with how the BBB works. If some disgruntled gamer complains to them that they nerfed Warlocks, they submit that complaint to Blizzard. If Blizzard does not reply, they get an F.
Yeah, it’s more a comment on the state of gaming fandom than the state of game publishing. Not to say that Vivendi isn’t a pile of crap. But I think gamers are often much more emotionally attached to their hobby than they should be, and pretty much every game/company around ends up with a big, healthy group o’ haters.
Being a former volunteer moderator of a few Vivendi forums, I can certainly attest to that. I’d never say that Vivendi is any sort of fantastic, wonderful company, but they tend to get more flak than they deserve just for being as gigantic as they are. When things get to the point where players call and harrass employees at work or home or call for developers to be fired because of this or that design choice, it’s just more than a little silly. People on the forums will say they’re going to contact the BBB over an otherwise great game just because a patch changed something they didn’t want changed. Honestly, I don’t see how any large publisher could possibly have a good rating with the BBB simply due the the sheer number of gamers there are out there who just like complaining.
Perhaps being unable to return a product if you’re dissatisfied with it plays a large part in why game companies get an F? The software industry is the only industry I can think of that gets away with this practice.
I believe initially Blizzard did allow returns, albeit directly to them.
Do retail stores allow returns on open movie DVDs and music CDs? I think when you have a product that can be copied, retailers are less likely to take returns.
I remember that Sierra used to have a really nice blanket return policy back in the King’s Quest days.
Of course, things were different then.
But yeah. Considering the used market and the general “I am the next internet Donald Trump” tendancy of teenaged boys you would probably have substantial returns after the games were either finished or successfully burned/copied to disk. Which would be no fun for a developer or publisher.
Vivendi still has a more or less unconditional return policy for the games they publish. The problem comes when people decide to sit on games they don’t enjoy, expecting a miracle patch to come out to fix their woes. When they pass the window to return the games to get their money back, of course it becomes a big ordeal and morphs into some sort of big conspiracy for a big company to steal their money.
Vivendi is a big water-delivery company, I’m sure they get a ton of angry customers all the time.
— Alan
This no-return thing is such a red herring. I worked at Vivendi and I know for a fact that you could return a game six months after you bought it and you’d get a refund.
Nobody does it. It’s pathetic. These gamers would rather complain than get their money back, because if they got their money back, what would they have to complain about.
What’s even more fun is when the people who pirate your game complain about it (or call customer service).
Sorry, put image in wrong topic. :oops:
When most people return games they think of returning them to the store where they bought them. Most (all?) stores don’t allow this if the box has been opened.
When I joined Mythic, we were out of phone lines, so I could either get the fax line or the main line. I chose the main line.
Which meant I got all the calls from the BBB. And we got tons of calls. As soon as a player would complain, the BBB would call us and ask us to join.
Sales calls. Never once an actual complaint. Always sales calls. - Always this guy: http://www.bbb.org/membership/index.asp
Take that for what it’s worth.
-Walt