Being an MMO Journalist affords one the opportunity to make fun of a company, yell at them for a stupid mistake, and then praise them all in one day, or even in one article. Given that I’ve managed to fake myself as a trusted journalist this far, I think I can afford to take some of those perks with me.
MMO Fallout is all about the PR, so naturally my editorials revolve around public relations, and how developers and publishers react when the times are good, and when the times are bad. I’ve talked about everything from subscription convenience in Final Fantasy XIV, to the turing test for MMOs, to identity crisis, permanent death, to more famously charge-backs. I’ve discussed the public relations nightmare that was the Allods Online cash shop, the Aion server mergers, Turbine’s fraudulent surveys, the Square-Enix HR rep who said Final Fantasy XI was shutting down this year, Atlantica Online’s near-fraudulent charity scheme, and far more.
Forums are a place where we go to communicate with the developers on a mass scale. When something bad happens in-game, like say a bunch of players get banned under suspicious circumstances, or a massive void appeared where a city used to be, killing everyone who was standing in it prior to a patch. It also happens to be a place where developers can keep users up to date on breaking news, like why players should steer clear of ___ because it is killing people randomly.
What irks me the most, however, is that in the grand majority of these cases the developers manage to inflame the situation by, doing what? Deleting threads and posts made on the subject. What this tells your players is that while you have someone with enough time to scan the forums and delete their posts complaining about this issue, you apparently don’t give enough of a rat’s ass to have that same person just give a response and negate the need for the threads.
Of course I am most recently referring to Turbine, and an accidental mass banning on Dungeons and Dragons Online that left thousands of players locked out of their accounts for more than just a while, which Turbine later announced as a glitch in the automated system that handles bans for exploits. Massively had an article on it, since the mass bans happened to crash in on their public event on DDO. Of course, when the rants started hitting the forums players were met with threads being locked, deleted, and forum infractions handed out.
Part of working in retail has taught me that when you screw up, you can’t blame the customer for getting pissed, a point many of these developers seem to have missed. You can’t falsely accuse someone of cheating, ban them with no real explanation or method of appeal, and then expect them to not head to the fastest method of handing feedback in a white hot rage. This compounds when most of them just want information, something that you do not supply until it is at your own convenience.
As much as I’m sure my viewers think it pains me to knock Turbine; this isn’t good PR, especially toward those paying your bills. The bans themselves don’t even factor in as, as I have said, mistakes happen. Instead of letting people vent while you leave them in the dark, you decide to add insult to injury and give up infractions because people had a crazy notion to get angry over unjustified bans. The comments of the developer being too busy fixing the problem to comment on it are also utter garbage. This always crops up when an incident like this takes place, and every time those throwing around this talking point fail to respond to a simple comment: It takes less than a minute to write up “we’re aware of the situation, working on it,” on a forum. Hell, I did it in fifteen seconds, and doing so did not hinder my completion of this article.
So I will reiterate what I have said time and time again: Response means everything, and right now Turbine are about a step behind Star Vault’s “sorry, no patch to fix this gaping void in the map because the developers are off for the weekend,” in terms of taking a bad situation and turning the flames up to 11.
MMO Fallout 