Gauging subscriber numbers in an MMO that doesn’t want to reveal them is difficult. Although it is possible to go through a company’s financial reports and make an estimation based on income, you still won’t end up with a hard number. Gold farmers, on the other hand, are an excellent indicator of how well the game is doing. An easy formula to remember is that as presence and force go up, the population goes up with it. In Aion, for example, gold farmers see the game as such a lucrative market that they are doing everything short of breaking into the NCWest offices armed with pistols, in order to push NCsoft back and keep selling to the community.
So launching to one million accounts aside, if I had to gauge Star Trek Online’s success by how many spam bots I had to put on ignore this morning in-game, I’d have to say the title is doing well for itself. Cryptic also appears to be doing a decent job of banning the bots, as almost all of the accounts I put on ignore were banned by the time this article is coming out.
More on Star Trek Online as it appears. Oddly enough, I don’t remember Champions Online having this issue. Maybe gold farmers hate super heroes.
I have good news and I have bad news for you Cryptic fans out there, and in favor of the old journalistic value of stringing you along, I will start with the good news.
This news concerns Star Trek Online, which launched just yesterday. Despite the fanfare of the vocal minority on the Star Trek forums over the open beta and head start, Star Trek Online opened to better than expected numbers, one million accounts. Aside from being on the top 10 lists on Amazon, Steam, Direct 2 Drive, and other venues, Cryptic’s latest title has been doing so well that the company will be beefing up the server capacity in order to contain it all.
Unfortunately, where there is good, there is bad. While Star Trek Online players prosper, Chamions Online players are met with sorrow. Those of you who play Champions Online, and are at least moderately active in the forums, will likely know Daeke, Cryptic’s Community Manager. No, Daeke was not pulled out of a ship through its open hull (well, he wasn’t killed by it, but that is another story entirely. Daeke has left Cryptic, on unknown terms he is either not willing to talk about or unable to legally.
I think even those who constantly complain about Cryptic will be sad to see Daeke go, although the conspiracy train is already trudging out of the station. The speculators believe that Daeke was fired due to his slipping of the information that the next expansion in Champions Online would be a paid-for expansion, a factor Cryptic may have wanted to keep under wraps, especially considering the uproar the announcement has caused.
Gustav says: Don't say anything without a lawyer present.
Being the purported Cryptic employee that I am, I have to take as much opportunity as possible to spread uncertainty among those who would otherwise believe such claims. Granted, a talk with Cryptic will offer more specific results than, say, a talk with Jagex’s CEO Mark Gerhard (Ask him anything about the game, assuming he even acknowledges the question, the answer will likely be “I can’t talk about that at this time.”), but the question still remains as to whether or not Cryptic takes player feedback to heart. Take, for example, earlier last year I reported on Cryptic’s seeming lack of recognition towards their own test servers, not only making the mistake of having a two hour cooldown during the Blood Moon event, but after lowering the time making the exact same mistake on the Winter event.
Ask Cryptic is back, on this forum thread, you can literally ask Cryptic anything you want, on any subject, as long as it is respectfully worded (No, you can’t ask “why are you guys such Nazi nickle-and-dimers”). If the question is related to upcoming content, your odds of getting a straight answer are much more likely. Otherwise if you’re going to be giving a little bit of advice, you may be better off doing it on the feedback forums where you can be ignored on a more fulfilling level.
Not to say Cryptic doesn’t care about its userbase, but they have had something of a breakdown in communications ever since Champions Online, that is yet to have been corrected. Moments that make you wonder who in their right mind green-lighted that move.
The Atari of old was a great company that brought gaming to the home platform, with Pong and later consoles. Between the Pong box, the Atari 2600, Atari defined the industry, and was responsible for the classic games before the games we now consider classic, not to mention a console that spawned thousands of shovelware titles.
When the discussion comes to the new Atari, there is a different story. I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
I usually don’t talk about publishers, but since Cryptic Studios is obligated to use Atari as their publisher (being a subsidiary and all), I’ll make an exception. If you are considering buying a title that was published by Atari, it is in your best interest not to buy them directly from Atari’s store, especially if you may need to use any factor of their customer service.
Granted...
As a rule of thumb, I always do research to confirm a story before I write up about it. In this case, several players informed me that Atari has “purposely” broken their customer service in order to stop any cancellations of Star Trek Online before the game is released. Naturally, I went directly to Atari’s customer support page to investigate. What I found was that, when not busy formulating plots against Turbine (allegedly), Atari is busy not fixing their customer support contact page.
When attempting to contact customer support, one must first include a purchase number or email address, and choose from the drop boxes which category they are looking for. I filled out the first drop box with no issue, but then the problem hit me: The second drop box does not load, making it impossible to fill out the form. Having tried this with every major browser, on several computers through multiple networks, I can now say it is impossible to contact Atari’s customer support for their online store. Not only is it impossible to get refunds, but it is impossible to cancel orders, get support of any kind, or even contact the company to let them know that their support is broken.
If Atari is unaware of this problem, they must be feeling very proud of themselves that they must be making such great products that not a single person is emailing in with a problem. If they are aware of the issue, and if what the players are telling me is true about how long it has been broken, then this is just a drop in the bucket of Atari’s long history over the past decade of increasingly poor customer support.
I can’t say how Atari’s support is for download games, but if at all possible consider buying from another digital download service. Just remember that if something goes wrong, your only avenue will be dealing with your bank in the form of a charge back, because Atari (for all intent and purpose) is sitting in the corner with its fingers in its ears shouting “la la la la, I can’t hear you!”
The Atari of old was a great company that brought gaming to the home platform, with Pong and later consoles. Between the Pong box, the Atari 2600, Atari defined the industry, and was responsible for the classic games before the games we now consider classic, not to mention a console that spawned thousands of shovelware titles.
When the discussion comes to the new Atari, there is a different story. I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
I usually don’t talk about publishers, but since Cryptic Studios is obligated to use Atari as their publisher (being a subsidiary and all), I’ll make an exception. If you are considering buying a title that was published by Atari, it is in your best interest not to buy them directly from Atari’s store, especially if you may need to use any factor of their customer service.
Granted...
As a rule of thumb, I always do research to confirm a story before I write up about it. In this case, several players informed me that Atari has “purposely” broken their customer service in order to stop any cancellations of Star Trek Online before the game is released. Naturally, I went directly to Atari’s customer support page to investigate. What I found was that, when not busy formulating plots against Turbine (allegedly), Atari is busy not fixing their customer support contact page.
When attempting to contact customer support, one must first include a purchase number or email address, and choose from the drop boxes which category they are looking for. I filled out the first drop box with no issue, but then the problem hit me: The second drop box does not load, making it impossible to fill out the form. Having tried this with every major browser, on several computers through multiple networks, I can now say it is impossible to contact Atari’s customer support for their online store. Not only is it impossible to get refunds, but it is impossible to cancel orders, get support of any kind, or even contact the company to let them know that their support is broken.
If Atari is unaware of this problem, they must be feeling very proud of themselves that they must be making such great products that not a single person is emailing in with a problem. If they are aware of the issue, and if what the players are telling me is true about how long it has been broken, then this is just a drop in the bucket of Atari’s long history over the past decade of increasingly poor customer support.
I can’t say how Atari’s support is for download games, but if at all possible consider buying from another digital download service. Just remember that if something goes wrong, your only avenue will be dealing with your bank in the form of a charge back, because Atari (for all intent and purpose) is sitting in the corner with its fingers in its ears shouting “la la la la, I can’t hear you!”
This isn’t a regularly scheduled article, but since I’m deleting the “Champions In Court” category (not much to go on nowadays), I’ve decided to give Cryptic one last hurrah, and post up a few images I have sitting in my Champions Online and Star Trek Online folders.
Earlier last year, slightly over two weeks ago to be exact, I reported the announcement that Champions Online would be joining the unlimited beta group, releasing the tutorial for free forever. Players have the opportunity to play through the first fifteen levels, fight off the Qulaar invasion, and apparently making me look like a bribed spokesperson, or possibly a fanboy:
“At least with Champions Online, you’re not seeing the best the game has to offer, suckering you into buying the title, followed by immediate disappointment when you realize that you just bought a house based on the mailbox and the garage door, to find the rest of the building had been burned down in a fire.”
-Omali, MMO Fallout, on Champions Online
My apologies to Age of Conan and Warhammer Online fans, and my condolences to the families of the keyboards you broke in the process of writing me hatemail.
But there are more important things afoot! The MMO Fallout super sleuths (myself stalking dev posts on various forums) were able to come up with this quote by Cryptic Studios’ Daeke, showing that the company is giving strong consideration to opening up more of the game for the unlimited demo’ers to play.
Part of my job here on MMO Fallout is to point out the flaws in developers, and in today’s case: Cryptic’s major issue is that, for how much they hype up their player communication, they do not listen to players. I said this several months ago (You Have Public Tests, USE THEM) after problems arose concerning easily fixed issues with the Halloween event.
The issues that arose out of the Halloween event were easily fixed, and many of them were fixed that night. The most ridiculous, however, was the two hour countdown that each portal had on it until the next opportunity to participate in the event, meaning players spent more time hopping instances hoping that their portal of choice wasn’t taken. Issues also arose with perks not being handed out correctly; I myself missed half of the Halloween perks, despite several attempts at the undead heroes, because the system simply refused to acknowledge my participation in the fight.
And here comes the Christmas event, after the break.
We enter January as 2009 comes to a close, we look at the year before us, and the year ahead, and remember that life goes on, no matter what happens in the present. I’ve dubbed 2010 the blue moon year because it has the pleasure of beginning with a blue moon, an event that won’t be occurring on New Year’s Eve for a long time to come.
I’m going slightly out of character with this article, if anything just to be the one time a year I get to be a jerk and pick on the same companies I spend the other 364 days vying for the attention of (Thank you Tork, Hasbro, Aventurine, Cryptic). This is a comprehensive list of some questions I have going into the new year, that I hope to get answered by this time next year.
Players of the MMO Champions Online should be familiar with the game’s tutorial: Saving the city from the alien invasion. Starting today, players have an unlimited amount of time in that section of the game before they have to buy it. Level yourself up to the demo limit of 15 and see how you enjoy the scenery. You are limited to two character slots, and it appears you’ll need Steam for the demo. Check it out here.
I’d like to point out that Cryptic isn’t using a tactic like Mythic and Funcom did in Warhammer Online and Age of Conan respectively, in regards to the limitless trials. In those two games, they took the (according to players) most fun part of the game, and made them free. At least with Champions Online, you’re not seeing the best the game has to offer, suckering you into buying the title, followed by immediate disappointment when you realize that you just bought a house based on the mailbox and the garage door, to find the rest of the building had been burned down in a fire.
Champions Online is a fun game that truly deserves at least a try. Now that the limitless demo is here, there’s no reason not to download it.
MMO Fallout 