Pilot Archive

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jafo1 wrote:

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CityHall wrote:
You may find that pilots are a diffrent breed... you may also find that I do not agree with your demanding tone.

You are playing this game of your own free will, just like the rest of us.

You speek of compinsation, what gives you the right to demand anything?

If the game is not worth $15.99 don't pay it, that is the only message any publisher understands.

P.S. I am not going anywhere soon, though if I did I wouldn't make a big stink... maybe say good bye to a few friends and then fade away...

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Hmm Im a Pilot and In reallife if My planes not Rite I demand they fix it. But thats my life on the line there. Yes Fixing things rather than Pushing new things to fix is what I support. And anypilot that thinks otherwise. Well a fool soon parted with his or mommys money I guess.

But SOE is Big Business if we all canceld say on Bria. They wouldnt look at it as OMG we lost X amount of paying customers. They would see it as We just saved X amount of money to repair the server.

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Look... I pay a subscription as well, as of now I am not at the point where I feel I am not getting value from it, if I was I would not pay (that is what happened with City of Heroes for me... I just stoped playing...) Yes where this a matter of life and death I would fell diffrently but it isn't... perhaps I assume too much about the SWG pilot community and for that I am sorry.

Realy all this talk of last chances, falure and only hopes is silly... SOE will be fine... it takes a lot less then what they have to turn a profit.

I never said I was not in support of bug fixes... it is just that I understand there need for new content, bug fixes don't bring new customers they keep old ones a little longer... SOEs stratagy is very likely to strike a balance between the two and that is what I "support" but in reality my $15.99 supports whatever they want it to and if I find that unfair I stop paying.

P.S. To the OP maybe I was a bit harsh but my oppinion still stands... it's a game and if it is not fun it is not worth paying for or working to fix as a customer. If I was as unsatisfied as you I would have stoped paying, as someone said above don't try to get me to fight you battles, if it was as bad as you say... people would write letters without being prompted but mor likly just quit and if a big chunk of the population quits suddenly they might change but untill then it is not very likly.

I realy don't like your Best Buy analogy... if I had that big a gap in judgment (to buy something bigger than a $50 game at Best Buy) I would want a refund.

Message Edited by CityHall on 10-21-2005 04:33 AM

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Supermite wrote:
The whole attitude of take it or leave it is horrible and does nothing to help the situation.

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Sure it does. When the subscriber base falls significantly, SOE wakes up and starts giving the players what they want. As long as the subscriber base is not falling rapidly, they will make changes according to their "vision".

Simply put, game publishers do not listen to gaming press. Game publishers do not listen to posts on their forums. Game publishers listen to cash. When their cash flow goes down precipitously, the publisher has to either decide the changes are 'good for the game' like the CU, or they start making things more friendly to the players.

(Yes, the CU was good for the game. Ground combat was ridiculously easy, dull and boring pre-CU. The CU is not perfect, of course, but it's better than pre-CU ground combat.)

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Why do I need to leave the game to be upset or fed up with the way the playerbase is treated. It really is not that simple. I really can't understand that people are so willing to just give up their customer rights for this game.

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You have no rights to this game. SOE lets you play. They can stop letting you play at any time. There is nothing illegal about bugs, or gameplay not living up to your expectations.

Also, no one would be willing to pay for a bug-free game. The previous poster who said a bug-free game would cost $150/mo is about right. It's very, very, very expensive and time consuming to completely test out such a large system. So if you'd like 1 or 2 publishes a year, and expansions every 3 years, and a huge monthly bill, you can get a bug-free game. It's pretty easy to say "there shouldn't be bugs", but it's much harder to actually not have them in RL (I'm an ex-software engineer, so I'm pretty familiar with software development).

As far as their CS goes, what exactly aren't they doing well? I mean, I've seen the random "I got banned for nothing!! SOE CS sucks!!" posts, where you later find out the person was exploiting and got caught.

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I work in a very customer service oriented environment. Our number one goal is to make sure our customers are as happy as possible.

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SOE's goal is to make sure their customers are willing to keep paying $15/mo. Their customers only have to be happy enough to keep paying.

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I cannot understand how SOE got to be a multimillion dollar company without understanding that the customer should come first.

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Because the customer is not always right. Around 10% of customers of any business are demanding people who will never be happy no matter what you do for them. In fact, ignoring that 10% will boost the company's bottom line, since these customers are so much more expensive than the rest.

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I don't know about you, but I read the patch notes. Nothing in there looked like it should have broken all the things it did.

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SWG is a very large and interconnected system. Making any change, no matter how trivial, is likely to create bugs. It's like the old saying about a butterfly flaps it's wings and causes a typhoon on the other side of the world. The smallest change in one place can have massive and unexpected repercussions in other parts of the system.

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I have played pre and post CU. The bugs are no better now than they were.

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Sure they are. The vast majority of the old bugs are fixed. We all tend to focus on what's broken instead of what's working, so we forget about all the bugs SOE sucessfully patched. We are talking about a game that was literally unplayable on day 1, so they've made quite a bit of progress.

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Even then, there have been a lot of fixes and balances to the combat professions since they were supposedly upgraded and balanced.

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Making changes to balance the game will stop just around the same time that they stop making changes to fix bugs. ie. Never.

As long as SWG is running, there will be balance tweaks and bug fixes. Some of them will be successful, and others will fail. But each tweak and fix changes this large system in unpredictable ways which will then require another tweak or fix, which will cause more unpredictable changes and the cycle will continue.

That's also why SOE doesn't hotfix every bug, and instead they try to wait for publishes. If you're going to perturb the system, it's better to go through 1 big mess than many small messes.

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Compensation comes in all forms Nacoa. It does not need to be a physical item or even money. I personally would feel compensated for the issues with the game if SOE made a public apology to it's playerbase and showed a renewed and concentrated effort to improve the game and the customer service.

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You're new here, aren't you?
SOE is MASSIVELY better at bug-fixes than they were back when the game first started. For the first year they were absoultely abysmal at it. From the outside, it looked like they just had nowhere near enough coders. Since then they've hired a bunch more people and so they're much, much, much more responsive than they used to be.

More to the point, to what should they be measured? SOE's CS is the same as every other MMOG. Go to the WOW forums, and there's people there spamming about how horrible Blizzard's CS is. Go to any other large MMOG's boards and there will be a constant theme of "this game publisher sucks!". It's the 10% I was talking about before. There's thousands of players who will be unhappy unless the game is exactly what they want, even if it is as silly as "a novice pikeman must be able to pwn all Jedi".

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I apologize if I have annoyed you. That was not my intent. Like I said, I am trying to rally the playerbase together in a show of displeasure for shoddy work we have been subjected too.

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Your message is a duplicate of thousands of other messages that have been posted on all the forums. There will always be someone unhappy with the current state of the game, and they will melodramatically proclaim that SOE is the worst or doesn't care about it's customers or try to arrange some sort of 'uprising' among the player base. There's a cluster of them after every significant change. And they're absolutely irrelevant.

This is a game. We have no rights to it. We gain no special powers by paying SOE. Nor should we. Game customers are the absolute worst game designers. If SOE gave us everything we ask for, the game would be massively easy, dull and boring. It's the parts that are hard that make it worth playing. No hard parts, no game.

You have to decide for yourself if this is a game worth playing or not. Part of that judegment is to see if you think the devs are moving the game in the right direction with bug fixes and balance changes. Part of that decision is determining if the CS measures up to your standards. If you find yourself playing a game that does not measure up, it is dumb to keep paying for it. However, if you're not willing to quit the game, then it's really not that bad. That's what all the "if you're not happy, quit" posts are coming from. Quitting is the ultimate measure of whether the game is good enough. If you can't bring yourself to quit, then the game is good enough.

Message Edited by Nacoa on 10-21-2005 03:02 PM

Wow Nacoa great post.

I don't think I could have said it any better.

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CityHall wrote:
Wow Nacoa great post.

I don't think I could have said it any better.

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Agreed, except for one little point. This point is that as customers who have signed the EULA we have no rights. That is a common misconception, as a paying customer I have certain rights, depending on the country I reside in that supercede the EULA, if those rights are violated then I can take action. The really sloppy Customer service I have recieved would fall into that category, however, I dont believe the small amount of money I pay a month is worth getting worked up over.

If it was my car that arrived with no wheels and only reverse working and when it had been repaired 26 times it had no windscreen and you had to push it like Fred Flintstone I WOULD complain. But thats cause it costs a lot more than this game, and well, this is only a game.

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CuchulainnDarklight wrote:
This point is that as customers who have signed the EULA we have no rights. That is a common misconception, as a paying customer I have certain rights, depending on the country I reside in that supercede the EULA, if those rights are violated then I can take action.

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(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not familiar with non-US law)

Typically, consumer protection laws only come into play when there was some sort of fraud on the part of the merchant or a massively defective product.

In your car example, the car dealer promised you a working car and you didn't get it. Thus, a "lemon law" would come into play. If the dealer had disclosed the condition of the car before the sale then you would not be covered by consumer protection laws.

All SOE is promising you is the ability to log into their game some of the time. Once they're over that hurdle they're done from a legal point-of-view. Subjective considerations like "the game is fun" and "good customer service" are not covered by consumer protection laws. There's no fraud, just a difference of opinion on what is "fun" and "good". And since you can log in most of the time, the product is not defective.

What, specifically, would be the basis of your claim under consumer protection laws?

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Nacoa wrote:

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CuchulainnDarklight wrote:
This point is that as customers who have signed the EULA we have no rights. That is a common misconception, as a paying customer I have certain rights, depending on the country I reside in that supercede the EULA, if those rights are violated then I can take action.

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(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not familiar with non-US law)

Typically, consumer protection laws only come into play when there was some sort of fraud on the part of the merchant or a massively defective product.

In your car example, the car dealer promised you a working car and you didn't get it. Thus, a "lemon law" would come into play. If the dealer had disclosed the condition of the car before the sale then you would not be covered by consumer protection laws.

All SOE is promising you is the ability to log into their game some of the time. Once they're over that hurdle they're done from a legal point-of-view. Subjective considerations like "the game is fun" and "good customer service" are not covered by consumer protection laws. There's no fraud, just a difference of opinion on what is "fun" and "good". And since you can log in most of the time, the product is not defective.

What, specifically, would be the basis of your claim under consumer protection laws?

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Also... what course of action can you take that ends in anything but termination of an at-will contract that can be terminated at any time?

If there was anything binding about the contract I would say that you had a point... but even if you won in court you would still not likely have a right to a refund... and that to me is the same as canceling.

Indeed the EULA covers much of this, it is only natural for them to cover themselves.

Aren't EULAs generally seen as not worth the paper they're (not) printed on anyway?

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Kryxal wrote:
Aren't EULAs generally seen as not worth the paper they're (not) printed on anyway?

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Read up on the UCITA bill, going around the various state legislatures. Basically, it makes EULA's legally enforcable contracts.

Rather nasty-sounding, and I'd better worry about it, since it probably applies in Canada too somehow...

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Kryxal wrote:
Rather nasty-sounding, and I'd better worry about it, since it probably applies in Canada too somehow...

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Wow that's... just wow... I am sure you have laws in Canada... and if SOE could no protect themselves I doubt they would sell the game in Canada, if you imported it you likely are in violation of the EULA forfiting any rights it grants you.

I'm just saying...

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Kryxal wrote:
Aren't EULAs generally seen as not worth the paper they're (not) printed on anyway?

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(disclaimer: still not a lawyer)

Sorta.

AFAIK, EULAs have never been tested in court. But we can wander off into the land of the theoretical.

It's easy to get a contract that you didn't sign ruled unenforcable. It's a little toughter if you did sign it. It's nigh impossible if you signed it with legal representation present and (ably) assisting you.

So from purely a contract point of view, the EULA should be unenforcable.

But then we get to the tricky part: The EULA is the only thing that grants you the right to play the game at all.

SOE/LA are exerting their copyright by controling the distribution of the software and the conditions under which it can be used. One of their conditions is that you have to agree to be bound by the EULA. If you don't agree to be bound by the EULA, you aren't allowed to have a copy of the software.

Copyright law is pretty close to universal in the western world, so a Canadian would probably still have to follow the EULA in order to play the game due to Canadian copyright law. The only way around it would be if there is a law in that country that explicitly forbade a clause of the EULA, in which case only the offending clause is removed. The rest of the EULA would be in force. AFAIK, there's no law in the US that forbids any of the clauses in the EULA.

Message Edited by Nacoa on 10-22-2005 04:02 PM

EULA's have been tested in courts, and usually have been overruled in favor of existing consumer laws. A few have been upheld. That's why the UTICA thing is scary, it'll force the courts to uphold the EULA's.

For interest: the few EULA's thathavesurvived court were upheld because UTICA had been drafted and seemed to be heading to a smooth entry into the legal system. UTICA currently (fortunately) suffers from widespread resistance including people from the industry it is supposed to protect, it's active in one state so far (virginia iirc), on hold in several others and not even in the primary stages in other states.