PR Nightmare

[Surebleak]

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, Bioware/EA has dropped the ball in a big way and this has resulted in a customer relations/public relations nightmare. Regardless of the debate on who should/shouldn't get in early, it being 7 days instead of 5 the failure of communications to the customer base on progress of early access has been massive.

 

I understand they may not have wanted to release what day has been invited or how many people this constituted. The people number would have been economically sensitive. However some simple metrics such as "x" % of pre-orders have received invites would have gone a long way. Now everyone is bent out of shape comparing pre-order dates and saying thing like "I know someone who bought the game last month and got access..." and "my servers empty why did Bioware go home early..." . The depth of anger of the forums is amazing. I lived through so many EQ1 expansion crashes and sudden patches waiting on the forums but the complaining was never like this.

 

This whole dragged out and uncommunicative process has sensitized people to the point that every in game issue is going to a game breaker/deal breaker. At the end of the day this will impact on their subscriber base. I know my brief experience with customer service was less than stellar. I downloaded the game client and got the error message about not having an active subscription. I sent a polite email to customer service asking if I was supposed to be seeing this and how to subscribe and was actually told to go read the forum.

 

I spent 30 years as an environmental manager in the oil industry. I had the happy job of answering environmental complaints. You don't tell someone to go to the internet and look. That's for troll chat... You answer their question as well as you can and if it's common enough, you have a ready to go answer. I helped write these for our CEO.

 

Hopefully they'll have a debrief tonight and get on their A game tomorrow. Alienating your subscriber base before the public release date (it's semantics... if people are playing and it's not beta, the game has launched...) is not good business sense.

[andrewtwofivetwo]

wait so people are complaining that they get 7 early days instead of 5?that sounds like a bloddy bonus then something to complain about

[Stantz]

were complaining that a few people get 7 days, a few people get five days, and it looks like a few will get 1 or 2 days, dont play dumb. The servers are up and its pissing off everyone that didnt get in.

[Skoobie]

How is Bioware doing exactly what they said they would do.....two days early....bad PR?

 

The only thing this shows is how immature and clueless the SWTOR playerbase can be.

 

That's the bad PR.

Edited December 14, 2011 by Skoobie

[JSykes]

were complaining that a few people get 7 days, a few people get five days, and it looks like a few will get 1 or 2 days, dont play dumb. The servers are up and its pissing off everyone that didnt get in.

 

It's been clear since the day pre-orders came out that EGA would be handed out on a first come, first served basis. Had you really wanted the full amount of EGA time, you would have pre ordered day 1 like a lot of us.

[potroast]

Yeah even deciding to do it 2 days early and give UP TO 7 Days isn't enough for the spoiled wow kiddies.

[Fifelaw]

Sensible post. Thank you.

[Matte_Black]

The real PR nightmare is how whiny and impatient BioWare's customers are. How can the Ray's show their face among other gaming execs again? Edited December 14, 2011 by Matte_Black

[Sedayeen]

This whole dragged out and uncommunicative process has sensitized people to the point that every in game issue is going to a game breaker/deal breaker. At the end of the day this will impact on their subscriber base.

 

Well, I think what BW may have failed to realized is that while they were trying to avoid these massive server queues, that is after all what people are actually used to.

 

Many people would probably wait in a queue for 4 hours rather than be locked out for 24 hours. I mean, if they're watching the #'s count down in a queue, they something tangible that tells them their status - as is - as you said, it has been rather 'uncommunicative'.

 

I'm not sure which way I think is 'best' but this certainly has created a lot more outrage than I've seen at other launches were people sat in long queues - maybe cuz thats what they knew to expect.

[Fadore]

Its bad PR because the rumor mills and blogs... When you have 75% of 2 million agitated, the rumors spread and multiply...

[azmundai]

The real PR nightmare is how whiny and impatient BioWare's customers are. How can the Ray's show their face among other gaming execs again?

 

See, to someone who runs a company, what that tells me is how out of touch Bioware is with their player base.

[LauZaIM]

The ones failing are mainly the ignorant customers.

[andrewtwofivetwo]

i preorderd on the 3rd meaning i will only get 1 day....you dont c me complaining ;P

[Aowar]

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, Bioware/EA has dropped the ball in a big way and this has resulted in a customer relations/public relations nightmare. Regardless of the debate on who should/shouldn't get in early, it being 7 days instead of 5 the failure of communications to the customer base on progress of early access has been massive.

 

I understand they may not have wanted to release what day has been invited or how many people this constituted. The people number would have been economically sensitive. However some simple metrics such as "x" % of pre-orders have received invites would have gone a long way. Now everyone is bent out of shape comparing pre-order dates and saying thing like "I know someone who bought the game last month and got access..." and "my servers empty why did Bioware go home early..." . The depth of anger of the forums is amazing. I lived through so many EQ1 expansion crashes and sudden patches waiting on the forums but the complaining was never like this.

 

This whole dragged out and uncommunicative process has sensitized people to the point that every in game issue is going to a game breaker/deal breaker. At the end of the day this will impact on their subscriber base. I know my brief experience with customer service was less than stellar. I downloaded the game client and got the error message about not having an active subscription. I sent a polite email to customer service asking if I was supposed to be seeing this and how to subscribe and was actually told to go read the forum.

 

I spent 30 years as an environmental manager in the oil industry. I had the happy job of answering environmental complaints. You don't tell someone to go to the internet and look. That's for troll chat... You answer their question as well as you can and if it's common enough, you have a ready to go answer. I helped write these for our CEO.

 

Hopefully they'll have a debrief tonight and get on their A game tomorrow. Alienating your subscriber base before the public release date (it's semantics... if people are playing and it's not beta, the game has launched...) is not good business sense.

 

 

Wait a minute an intelligent post. Something strange is going on here.

[medicalprobe]

Well, I think what BW may have failed to realized is that while they were trying to avoid these massive server queues, that is after all what people are actually used to.

 

Many people would probably wait in a queue for 4 hours rather than be locked out for 24 hours. I mean, if they're watching the #'s count down in a queue, they something tangible that tells them their status - as is - as you said, it has been rather 'uncommunicative'.

 

I'm not sure which way I think is 'best' but this certainly has created a lot more outrage than I've seen at other launches were people sat in long queues - maybe cuz thats what they knew to expect.

 

QFT

 

This is exactly how I feel on the matter. To top that, server populations are showing as light, yet waves letting new people in will not begin for another 12+hours.

[xorcist]

not to mention the exploit I heard about that people are leveling much faster than they should be. They need to do something about that too.

[DarthCosmin]

It's been clear since the day pre-orders came out that EGA would be handed out on a first come, first served basis. Had you really wanted the full amount of EGA time, you would have pre ordered day 1 like a lot of us.

 

I would have pre-ordered day 1 if I could. But it took EA 6 weeks to allow citizens from certain countries to pre-order..

[Kunovega]

Well, I think what BW may have failed to realized is that while they were trying to avoid these massive server queues, that is after all what people are actually used to.

 

Many people would probably wait in a queue for 4 hours rather than be locked out for 24 hours. I mean, if they're watching the #'s count down in a queue, they something tangible that tells them their status - as is - as you said, it has been rather 'uncommunicative'.

 

I'm not sure which way I think is 'best' but this certainly has created a lot more outrage than I've seen at other launches were people sat in long queues - maybe cuz thats what they knew to expect.

 

except those ques lead to more lag and crashing

 

the staggered launch is a form of que, but a much less server intensive one

 

if you stop and think about it, its genius and i can wait

 

if you dont stop to think and would rather rage that you dont have a 72 hour clock ticking down on your PC screen, than you will spend most of your life disappointed and raging on the internet about pointless things

[Diashie]

Got to agree with OP.

 

Why couldn't they simply have mailed everyone the day/time of their EGA beforehand?

 

That to me was the biggest PR disaster since it was an obvious course of action after they proved to have done it for beta testing.

[Skoobie]

 

Many people would probably wait in a queue for 4 hours rather than be locked out for 24 hours.

 

Then instead of all these "WAAA I didn't get in threads" we would have the "WAAA I have to wait in queue!" threads.

 

And if everyone was let in and the servers went down, we would have the "WAAA the servers crashed!" threads.

 

Point is.....people will complain about anything and there is no winning for an MMO company.

[Kunovega]

not to mention the exploit I heard about that people are leveling much faster than they should be. They need to do something about that too.

 

not quite an exploit, more of an oversight and one that was reported repeatedly all throughout beta

[Vrelkyn]

It's not like you change your mind about something of this nature in a week or two.

 

This had to have been planned for longer than that.

 

A communication fail of this nature really doesn't bode well for the future. Look at the AC switching talk, patching beta client to live client debacle and grace period unknowns.

 

Just terrible communication all around.

[Aowar]

Got to agree with OP.

 

Why couldn't they simply have mailed everyone the day/time of their EGA beforehand?

 

That to me was the biggest PR disaster since it was an obvious course of action after they proved to have done it for beta testing.

 

 

 

Worse, when they announced doing it this way numerous people tried to warn them of the disaster. All the did was lock everyone's threads.

[ZombieMeerkat]

BW/EA did drop the ball. They underestimated how selfish and nonunderstanding their userbase was going to be. No fault of theirs.

[Kunovega]

Then instead of all these "WAAA I didn't get in threads" we would have the "WAAA I have to wait in queue!" threads.

 

And if everyone was let in and the servers went down, we would have the "WAAA the servers crashed!" threads.

 

Point is.....people will complain about anything and there is no winning for an MMO company.

 

^this