Sunday, May 24, 2009

Age of Conan - OMG, what did I miss?

Only their biggest debacle since launch.

Another foot / mouth / gun / foot scenario for Funcom.

Seems a mis-worded (according to Funcom) event fell to pieces while I was away. I do not know how it totally went down, but I can guess based on the many discussions on the EU forums it was not pretty.

Worded like so...

"People of Hyboria, King Conan, beloved ruler of Aquilonia, celebrates another year of his reign over the Jewel of the West. To honor this event, you all are invited to take part in the small festivities happening in the Tarantia Noble District outside of King Conan's castle tomorrow,Saturday 23rd May starting 3pm EDT."

What is of interest, is there is some wording about bringing your fireworks they gave all the players free for the year (yep, super lame gift), and to use them (of course not discussing how you can only fire them once every 8 hours...super lame) at this perfect time.

Now, when I read this, I imagine something is going to happen when we gather. Would YOU not assume the same? Isn't that what an event created by a company is?

Seems Funcom is stating this was misunderstood by the players. It should have been a player driven event...WHA???

"players expected the event to be more than it actually was planned to be. The actual idea was to provide players with a possibility to have player run activities in one spot for the anniversary"

Riiigghhhttt. I did not see that in the original message. Nothing in the original message meant for players to drive the event to me anyways...

Then they stated...

"In additon there were also technical difficulties that lead to the event not running correctly on the servers."

Wait a minute. How can a "player run" event have "technical difficulties".
I am confused.
Is it the fact the server cannot handle more players in a zone on one server? This makes no sense, and just seems to be a company discombobulated over their true meaning of the event.

In so many words, we planned an event, it was screwed, so now lets blame the player base for misunderstanding.

I guess you can figure out how the player community feels. A nice long thread exists here

The company had made so much progress in the customers eyes of this game, then this happens. How can a company survive with such an incompetent level of ineptitude.
I started to think the game could survive the long haul. But, now doubts set in again.

But, what did we expect of a company that did the same thing a year ago.

Truly disappointed to come home to this. Can't even play right now, I am so upset.

Ah well, long weekend anyways. Better get some rest instead.

Cheers

10 comments:

Talyn said...

How can a company survive with such an incompetent level of ineptitude.If they're inept at being incompetent, does that mean they're perfectly competent? /confuselation :)

Tempted to be snarky and wonder if one of Turbine's former temporary event guys snuck into Funcom for a day, but I won't go there. Or did I just? :p

Sounds like whomever is their community relations and/or events person needs a lesson in properly communicating with people who are not standing directly in front of them. I'm guilty myself of often saying things that the full meaning to me is plainly obvious then I get annoyed when the listeners don't get it, but I don't do that in writing. At least I hope I don't.

Anonymous said...

Reading through a number of pages of that thread it seems they have not really any tools in the game at all to create special events and it was a low priority for the development team to do something.

Hence the community managers had decided to make something at least, but obviously failed to clarify that it was not much they could create themselves in terms of an event.

But I think also that players might have built this up to be more than even the annoucement made it out to be.

Good to know anyway that running events is not something they have any good support for in the game.

Anonymous said...

Ouch, sounds like a lot of PR rubbish to me and them trying to cover their asses. They would've been better off just admitting them screwed up.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, OpenEdge, would you fancy doing a link exchange and add each other to our blog lists? I did your blog :)

My blog is: http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/

And do you know why Blogger isn't using my OpenID nickname or website URL? It used to work fine but now it's switched to my real name and OpenID website...

Elementalistly said...

@gordon

Got ya covered on the link love...as to Open ID, that I have no clue about. It should work...but have you had a blogger account in the past? maybe that is causing an issue.
It does show your ID is "OPEN ID'd", so not sure.

@Scott, Confusing language for a confusing situation...agree?

@Tesh

No matter the case on whether they had event tools or not. It all broiled (yummm,,,not fried) down to wording, and who is in charge.
The CM's did this, and made the company look bad because they fudged it up.
Bad language about the event, led to disaster, and from people who have little to not control of the game.
This is a PR nightmare, and hard to say how this will be fixed now.

I do not know how Funcom can live down more negativity is all.

Cheers

Anonymous said...

Nice one! :)

Thanks for the feedback too - I might email OpenID/Blogger about the issue and see what they say.

Anonymous said...

I'm not Tesh, Edge ;)

But it is certainly a PR problem, although I would not consider it a major problem though. But I can certainly see that it pissed off active players who were eager to get some additional proof that Age of Conan was back in the game. If nothing else, an anniversary is a quite symbolic event.

Elementalistly said...

@adingworld...

Oh man...sorry. Had another thread open and was reading a comment by Tesh, and confused you both...lol

And yes, it was a PR problem, that has certainly caused some waves...but, as I found out this morning...not enough to make everyones life incomplete in AoC world.

More on that later

Melf_Himself said...

An incompetent level of ineptitude would imply that Funcom are not very good at being inept. What you meant to say was that they have an extremely competent level of ineptitude ;)

Elementalistly said...

@melf_himself

You would be correct! And I should change my language as such...but I won't.

I am feeling a little Funcom today...uh, I mean inept!