Now this is customer appreciation!

[forummuleonly]

I just decided to log on to NWO and play for awhile. I am still a lowly level 7 dwarf Fighter. When I got to the launcher I was reading the feed while it downloaded patches (Haven't logged on since about last Friday) and one of the ads in the launcher caught my attention. It said thank you to the players.

Now me, being completely unaccustomed to this strange phrase coming from an MMO, had to click it.

Wow. All I can say is thank you to the NWO team for the gifts.

I may not like the way that game plays, lol, the server was down when I was done patching, but if this is the type of customer/game team interaction/service they are offering up, well, that right there speaks tomes to me.

Sure seems like the management of that game really want to keep their players playing and paying to me. Management, yes. That is what good management does when things go wrong, they make it right even for those that were completely unaffected because they know word of mouth gets around.

[Charononus]

NWO battle cry

"Fixing one out of five exploits, ain't bad."

[forummuleonly]

NWO battle cry

"Fixing one out of five exploits, ain't bad."

Well, I cannot argue the point you are tossing. I can only say that at least they are fixing things.

[Wizza]

Well, I cannot argue the point you are tossing. I can only say that at least they are fixing things.

Except the fact they are not. They have handled the major exploit of the AH in the same way Turbine handles his exploits: fixed too late, banned not even the 10% of the exploiters and as a gift they gave us a bunch of nothing and 4k exp.

[Charononus]

I'm just frustrated by them, so many exploits and some of them so foreseeable by how they coded it. Then the community is getting very exploit oriented is the only way I have to put it with 20% or so of people in pugs wanting to exploit one part or another of the dungeon.

[slarden]

Not everyone is happy with the gifts but most are. I am quite happy with my sovereign elixir from Turbine as well.

[Keltarrin]

Ever consider that as a new game in beta, still being built, they're doing the best they can and while it may not be a stellar job, it IS a sincere one? I won't play it, but I also won't slam it for trying.

[Chai]

I like the way they straight up inform people what not to do because its considered an exploit, then compensate honest people who had to deal with temporary AH shutdown and server offline. The issue right now is they are like 3 or 4 exploits behind the curve. The ones they fix are older and the newer ones are still happening regularly. They also need to do a few things about some game mechanics that do not encourage community etiquette. Once those are taken care of the game will be solid.

DDO needs to take a gander at NWs crafting system. It hands down destroys the one in DDO - by still making the player grind time wise but not making them click millions of times just to level a toon up in crafting.

[Keltarrin]

DDO needs to take a gander at NWs crafting system. It hands down destroys the one in DDO - by still making the player grind time wise but not making them click millions of times just to level a toon up in crafting.

Which one in DDO? You've got the venerable Stone of Change, you've got Greensteel, you've got Cannith, you've got Epic, you've got... Well you get the idea, I hope.

[Chai]

Which one in DDO? You've got the venerable Stone of Change, you've got Greensteel, you've got Cannith, you've got Epic, you've got... Well you get the idea, I hope.

Take your pick, or toss em all in the pile, - All of which NW crafting crushes hands down.

Especially Cannith - where someone has to sit at a crafting interface for many hours in order to make decent gear. In NW the character isnt a crafter, they are a manager of assets, some of them people, who do the crafting work. If I tell my merc to go survey an area and hand him a map, he will tell me its an 8 hour job, and when I send him out, I can then log off, or play quests etc. In 8 hrs, he comes back with crafting ingredients, money, Xp, etc. Im not sitting next to the machine for 8 hours inducing carpal tunnel syndrome due to clicking the same 3-4 buttons repetitively.

So the "grind time" still exists, but the user doesnt need to be logged in staring at the crafting interface for that period of time. They can be playing quests, or heaven forbid - doing something in RL.

[FalseFlag]

by still making the player grind time wise

Which still sucks, since crafting should not be a grind at all.

I still think they should have adopted the system from Unearthed Arcana.

[Aolas]

Exploitation or freedom from oppression?

[Brendael]

I have been looking at a few other MMOs and I've been surprised at how pleasant and frequent the developer interaction with the community is. I get the feeling that most of the infrequent interaction we see from Turbine is a little passive aggressive and resentful of the community. It doesn't help that the only time we see or hear from them is when they've done something stupid like break the game or charged people 100 times.

If you are running an MMO your community is incredibly important and you need to nurture it or soon you'll find yourself bankrupt.

[Superhanns]

I just decided to log on to NWO and play for awhile. I am still a lowly level 7 dwarf Fighter. When I got to the launcher I was reading the feed while it downloaded patches (Haven't logged on since about last Friday) and one of the ads in the launcher caught my attention. It said thank you to the players.

Now me, being completely unaccustomed to this strange phrase coming from an MMO, had to click it.

Wow. All I can say is thank you to the NWO team for the gifts.

I may not like the way that game plays, lol, the server was down when I was done patching, but if this is the type of customer/game team interaction/service they are offering up, well, that right there speaks tomes to me.

Sure seems like the management of that game really want to keep their players playing and paying to me. Management, yes. That is what good management does when things go wrong, they make it right even for those that were completely unaffected because they know word of mouth gets around.

Thats good man, some of the gamer companies do care more about their playerbase, the game fallen earth/gamers first is cool like that too but in a slightly different way like you got live GMs being cool and helping you/kicking people who cant keep things clean, ddo could take alot of leafs out of alot of books, i will deffinatly be putting 100% of my gaming time into fallen earth once that more-grind-epic-tr rubbish comes.

[arkonas]

Which still sucks, since crafting should not be a grind at all.

I still think they should have adopted the system from Unearthed Arcana.

no offense but i think you're new to mmo's. i cant tell you one game where any crafting isnt a grind yet alone a game. their all grinds. its all the same thing. you rinse repeat. different mobs or same mobs just different styles. same stuff every mmo. its all a grind. lol.

[arkonas]

Which still sucks, since crafting should not be a grind at all.

I still think they should have adopted the system from Unearthed Arcana.

no offense but i think you're new to mmo's. i cant tell you one game where any crafting isnt a grind yet alone a game. their all grinds. its all the same thing. you rinse repeat. different mobs or same mobs just different styles. same stuff every mmo. its all a grind. lol.

[LucidLTS]

I like the way they straight up inform people what not to do because its considered an exploit, then compensate honest people who had to deal with temporary AH shutdown and server offline. The issue right now is they are like 3 or 4 exploits behind the curve. The ones they fix are older and the newer ones are still happening regularly. They also need to do a few things about some game mechanics that do not encourage community etiquette. Once those are taken care of the game will be solid.

DDO needs to take a gander at NWs crafting system. It hands down destroys the one in DDO - by still making the player grind time wise but not making them click millions of times just to level a toon up in crafting.

Yeah, pretty much exactly this, though "game mechanics that do not encourage community etiquette" might be a bit of an understatement

I'd also like to add that I *love* how they listen to their customers, reply to their concerns, and reverse course when something they decide turns out to have a downside they didn't consider or didn't give enough weight to. As an example, their recent decision to go from BtCoE to BtCoA met resistance from casual gamers who feared they wouldn't be able to complete gear sets, so they publicly anounced "OK, bad call, we'll go back to the drawing board to look for a different solution to 'need looting'".

And I don't mean this to be a "bash Turbine" post, this is constructive criticism. I *want* to keep DDO in business, I've spent a lot of time and money on this game and don't want to start over from scratch in a new game, but my whole guild save one is playing Neverwinter now, and honestly it's a lot less frustrating for a casual gamer. The "Enhancement trees" isn't a new idea, if you're going to borrow ideas, borrow some of these, they work!

[Uska]

Which still sucks, since crafting should not be a grind at all.

I still think they should have adopted the system from Unearthed Arcana.

SWG had the best crafting ever and it was a grind. Crafting should take some work and sacrifice I wish we had the real dnd crafting in place of what we do.

[Aolas]

I have been looking at a few other MMOs and I've been surprised at how pleasant and frequent the developer interaction with the community is. I get the feeling that most of the infrequent interaction we see from Turbine is a little passive aggressive and resentful of the community. It doesn't help that the only time we see or hear from them is when they've done something stupid like break the game or charged people 100 times.

If you are running an MMO your community is incredibly important and you need to nurture it or soon you'll find yourself bankrupt.

Visible vs invisible admin. It's the lesser of two evils but from my experience it's a far better decision for the admin to stay behind the scenes, you get into all kinds of problems with favouritism, nihilism and politics once developers become enamoured with the "fame" and popularity garnered from their public profile.

There should be more feedback though, it can be demoralizing to make posts without any kind of response and can isolate the community as you say. The way things should be handled is a liason (customer service representative or community manager) make a monthly post to give their replies to issues posted, at least that way there can be a debate on the community agenda. Ignoring your customers is usually a bad policy especially considering rival products competing for market share blah blah blah all that economics crayp. Sigh, always disappointing to have to resort to financial inducement just to get the donkey to move.