September 9th, 2008
Let me start of by making it clear that no I am not a community manager. This post is about a lesson that I hope the community managers at GOA have learned now. In particular our dear IanC. By now I will assume you at least have a rough idea of what happened with the Open Beta launch of Warhammer Online in Europe on September 7th, otherwise go read a few of the entries just before this one. Once a lot of people had gone to sleep after a long day of failures IanC decided to post a “Letter from IainC on Open Beta Situation”.
NOTE: The original post has since been edited been IanC to obscure some things I will talk about below, but if you check this link of the first reply that did a full quote you can read the original. Either way I will quote the interesting part below.
At first I thought great some feedback, something we were all lacking severely that Sunday. I get a bit through it and realise it is mostly him trying to make excuses and downplay the mistakes that were made. However the post so far didn’t really have much impact. No negative effect but not any positive either, a blank filler post in my opinion. Then you get a little further down near the end and you see the following:
A lot of what was said yesterday here and on other forums was entirely out of line. Of course you were disappointed and criticism is certainly warranted but frankly many of the posts made about the situation were borderline sociopathic. If having delayed access to a beta test really drives you to such depths of anger and fury then - and there is no polite way to put this - there is something wrong with you.
In that small piece of text he manages to light an even hotter fire under himself and GOA by displaying a complete lack of respect and understanding of his customer base. The player base, or I should say potential player base, is one that has a very large hope that this game will succeed and bring them many fun and exiting times with the game. All this hope has been building up over a very long time and then with all these problem people naturally get worried. It is like they can see the games potential wither away right in front of them. Now what do you do then in that situation as a community manager? Well for one you do most certainly not go on the attack against your customers. There is one post and one post alone you can do that will help in the slightest. That is the “we fucked up, it was entirely our fault” post. Do not make any excuses, just stand up and take the blame head on, show your customers some respect and put out a plan on how to move forward from here.
Fortunately there is someone in the Mythic/GOA partnership that at least seems to understand this. Marc Jacobs posted the following entry on his own blog. He writes:
3) I have read IanC’s post on the situation and I have just communicated to GOA my thoughts on it. I’ll simply say this, I do not agree with what he said, I do not support what he said and his comments were, in my opinion, way out of line.
At least there is still a glimmer of hope for the future. Time will tell if IanC will be able to regain the trust and respect of the EU community which is a requirement to be able to perform his job as community manager.
Sidenote: Through persistence and strong determination I actually managed to enter my open beta key in the account system and entered the game 00:22 the night between Sunday and Monday. I promise I will actually begin to write about the game Warhammer Online again and not just on the failures of GOA. I started a runepriest since this is so far the one I think I might do as my main char for live game. My first objective with beta, beyond testing and giving loads of feedback, is figuring out if this will be my main and how healing works in the game especially in large-scale rvr. I will bring you my views on this situation as soon as I get a little more playtime with my dwarf.
September 6th, 2008
GOA is the the company managing Warhammer Online in Europe. They were also the ones managing Mythics previous mmorpg, namely Dark Age of Camelot. Their managing of DAOC EU did not exactly have a good reputation. While I myself am also European I went for the US servers when I started DAOC purely based on the reputation of the EU customer service.
Now here we are at the brink of the release and all EU players are anxiously awaiting to see if Mythic and GOA will be able to deliver on their promises. Among others GOA now promises 24/7 support, which is possible due to game master relocation to Ireland, thereby escaping french labour laws which prevented the same service level for DAOC.
Few days ago when Mythic announced Preview Weekend+ for the Americans and forums went crazy with European customers crying foul and bashing GOA for still not having made the EU account center available. A long line of angry and disappointed customer comments on Warhammer Alliance forum especially prompted a response from Mythic’s very own Marc Jacobs. Read the full comment below. He brings up one especially valid point. No large mmorpg has launched simultaneously in both north America, EU and Oceania before. World of Warcraft release in NA on November 23, 2004 and EU was not until February 11, 2005. Even the newest entry, Age of Conan had a 3 day delay between NA and EU. I for one very much appreciate the simultaneous launch if it actually succeeds. Otherwise I would rather have waited a bit with EU release, however much more than a few days I would probably never have liked very much either way.
At the time of this writing we still have not seen any trace of the account center and it seems doubtful the account center server will be able to hold up to the stress on the load if everyone has to sign up only hours before the open beta. But let us see, GOA themselves has claimed they see September 7th as their launch day and not the 18th. If they can deliver on their promises tomorrow everyone will be happy. If not, well then I would not want to be in neither GOA’s nor Mythic’s shoes cause there will be a lot of disappointed customers which will certainly not help the games reputation at launch.
Folks,
Okay, I guess it’s time to either pour some oil on this fire or sand. I think it’s sand but it’s really not up to me, you decide.
1) I don’t know why the EUAC isn’t up yet, as you can imagine, that’s not part of *my* daily job description. I’ll check in the morning though.
2) Mythic and GOA speak just about every day on some level. We phone, email, etc. constantly. Anyone who says we are not in constant communication is not being honest. This doesn’t mean that things get missed or messed up sometimes but we are always talking to each other.
3) No operation is perfect and, to GOA’s credit, they are trying really hard to make this all happen. I’m not sure why some people think it is easy for two totally large, separate companies (with multiple divisions/studios) on different continents with different languages to coordinate something which has never been done before, launch an MMORPG simultaneously in North America, Europe and Oceania. Anyone who says this is easy is either lying or has never done this (the whole coordinate large companies things) before. It is precisely because GOA wanted to launch simultaneously (in order to ensure that the European customer didn’t feel left behind as in most other MMORPGS) that we are trying to do this for them. If they had said that it would be okay to launch 30 days later, some of the issues that have come up wouldn’t have been issues since they would have had 30 extra days to make them happen. But it is because they wanted the European player to have the exact same launch date that things got more complicated. Look, if they/us truly mess up and make mistakes, they/us deserve criticism. However, this absolute nonsense, yes nonsense, about either Mythic not caring or GOA not caring is both wrong and unfair. We do care, they do care and we are all trying very hard to make this work. If GOA and Mythic didn’t care we would not be trying so hard to have a simultaneous launch because, let me tell you, that a launch in Europe at launch+60 would have been sooo much easier. If GO didn’t care, they would not have made a fantastic commitment to the European player in terms of what they are doing with customer service and support post-launch for the game and they are following through on it but there are a lot of moving parts and yes, sometimes those parts get lost and/or broken. And if Mythic didn’t care about the European customer, we would not be working as hard as we are to ensure this simultaneous launch. It would be ridiculously easy for us to miss the launch day in Europe, apologize and then continue on our merry way. All it would have taken is us not working as hard as we are with GOA together and then no simultaneous launch could occur.
4) Some things are easier for Mythic to do than they are for GOA because we are the developer of the game. Everything is in place for us already (it needed to be) and it is easier for us to react more nimbly because we are the developer of the game. GOA has to react to what we do and given the time and language difference, sometimes that takes a little longer.
5) In terms of things like the Preview Weekend Plus, well, all I have to say is that our role is to get WAR in the best shape for launch and if that means we’re going to put the game up for a couple extra days to beat on it, we’re going to do it. If because of various issues it isn’t running in Europe then what should I do, stop the testing? Folks, that would be foolish and it could affect the game’s launch. These extra days are not so NA players can feel superior or to make the European player feel inferior but rather to beat the heck out of the game some more before Open Beta. As I posted several weeks back we are working on some major issues for the game (like pathing and NPC AI) and while we are testing them internally, nothing beats lots and lots of additional people and additional load on the system(s). I’m sorry if this means that European players can’t get into an extra couple of days but my #1 priority is making sure WAR is ready for launch on the 18th of September. And if my only two choices are have a PW+ and anger some people or skip the PW+ and possibly have more problems in Open Beta, I’ll choose to test some more and anger some people at the same time. BTW, GOA is right when they say that neither Mythic nor GOA promised this extra time to anybody.
6) Working with a developer like Mythic on a project like this is never easy. We have to make lots of decisions on the fly and sometimes these decisions have a tremendous impact on the game and on the community. However, I’ve never heard of any decision made by Mythic or GOA that was aimed at intentionally hurting the European fans, period.
I’ve always said that I’d rather have you mad at us now rather than mad at us at launch. So, be pissed if you must but we’re doing what we need to do over the remaining time to make sure that in a few weeks WAR will have a great launch simultaneously in North America, Europe and Oceania.
Mark