Bonne Chance, good night
I just wanted to take a few moments before riding off into the sunset to express my disappointment with this years decision on holiday gifts. It took me with so much surprise and disappointment that I decided to rethink my idea of playing full time again. Earlier this week I broke out the beetles, re-stuffed the old bank boxes, dropped the house and cancelled the subscription renewal.
I had walked away many years ago to play lord of the rings online and never really looked back. The 23rd anniversary piqued my interest along with the news of the "big announcement coming". Its funny how you remember so much, locations of frequently visited vendor houses now long gone and the small tree that always seemed to trip you up when running from one place to another.
I had planned on simply returning to Great Lakes but after walking across the great empty that is, quite frankly everywhere you cant drop a keep or a castle I started to reconsider my choices. Atlantic is certainly very active but I just wasn't willing to spend money to transfer the number of characters it would take to move my "life". Ultimately I decided that if I was going to play on a low pop shard it would be somewhere it actually mattered and after the holidays I would commit to Siege. December in my house is a ridiculous mess of activity and I anticipated what time I would have to play would be x-sharding holiday gifts.
So, enough of the sad story - on to the meat of this.
Games, particularly subscription games need to do more for their Customers than simply keep the lights on. It is something called Customer appreciation. Ironically it was UO that took the lead with this back in the day and now everyone does it, some comically so. In this day and age with the prevalence of free-to-play MMOs, it makes people feel... well, appreciated for spending money every month just to have the privilege of logging in and playing.
Events are nice to have, but they shouldn't be considered a bonus in themselves. Events need to be staged on an ongoing basis to keep people's interest, not as some ad-hoc reward for being.
I've seen a number of people here and on stratics try to defend this decision and I'd just like to say to you : It doesn't matter if the gifts were just things some of you would just throw away. It's the meaning behind the decision and the lack of consideration for the Customer. A tradition was shattered and trust was violated. In the simplest of terms, I literally kept my account open for 3 months in expectation of this tradition. Depending on how it played out I was even willing to re-open 2-4 of my old accounts for x-shard trading. I was planning on purchasing most of the house deco packs after settling in on Siege. How many others either activated accounts or worse, didn't activate them because the tradition was broken? How much money has been lost?
It's sad, in a depressing kind of way and a shame. This game cannot afford to alienate customers.
I wish you all the best of luck and I hope I have the option of coming back and logging in for a 30th anniversary, that is if they don't cancel those too.
I had walked away many years ago to play lord of the rings online and never really looked back. The 23rd anniversary piqued my interest along with the news of the "big announcement coming". Its funny how you remember so much, locations of frequently visited vendor houses now long gone and the small tree that always seemed to trip you up when running from one place to another.
I had planned on simply returning to Great Lakes but after walking across the great empty that is, quite frankly everywhere you cant drop a keep or a castle I started to reconsider my choices. Atlantic is certainly very active but I just wasn't willing to spend money to transfer the number of characters it would take to move my "life". Ultimately I decided that if I was going to play on a low pop shard it would be somewhere it actually mattered and after the holidays I would commit to Siege. December in my house is a ridiculous mess of activity and I anticipated what time I would have to play would be x-sharding holiday gifts.
So, enough of the sad story - on to the meat of this.
Games, particularly subscription games need to do more for their Customers than simply keep the lights on. It is something called Customer appreciation. Ironically it was UO that took the lead with this back in the day and now everyone does it, some comically so. In this day and age with the prevalence of free-to-play MMOs, it makes people feel... well, appreciated for spending money every month just to have the privilege of logging in and playing.
Events are nice to have, but they shouldn't be considered a bonus in themselves. Events need to be staged on an ongoing basis to keep people's interest, not as some ad-hoc reward for being.
I've seen a number of people here and on stratics try to defend this decision and I'd just like to say to you : It doesn't matter if the gifts were just things some of you would just throw away. It's the meaning behind the decision and the lack of consideration for the Customer. A tradition was shattered and trust was violated. In the simplest of terms, I literally kept my account open for 3 months in expectation of this tradition. Depending on how it played out I was even willing to re-open 2-4 of my old accounts for x-shard trading. I was planning on purchasing most of the house deco packs after settling in on Siege. How many others either activated accounts or worse, didn't activate them because the tradition was broken? How much money has been lost?
It's sad, in a depressing kind of way and a shame. This game cannot afford to alienate customers.
I wish you all the best of luck and I hope I have the option of coming back and logging in for a 30th anniversary, that is if they don't cancel those too.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments