Which other companies also have as many issues as Nexon?
I'm not bashing on Nexon or anything, but its more of a curious question.
All the "I hate Nexon" threads floating around is making me want to know if there are any other companies who are
just as unstable with connectivity and customer services etc... as Nexon is.
March 7, 2012
2 Comments • Newest first
VTC, a game company in Vietnam that sucks so much
95% of the population are hackers, in all their games, LITERALLY
10 trillion times worse than Nexon
[quote=Glinda21] want to know if there are any other companies who are just as unstable with connectivity and customer services etc... as Nexon is.[/quote]
Unfortunately, a LOT of companies think they can enter the very lucrative "free to play" online gaming model with an understaffed programming and customer service team and just rake in the profits. Their customers pay the price for that lack of foresight and eventual greed when the profits roll in and the company doesn't want to spend any of them on better service for the players.
As an example, I was playing "The Sims Social" on Facebook. It's an Electronic Arts property, but it's being run by the "Playfish" division of EA, not by EA themselves.
Playfish was a smaller company that introduced several rather simplistic Facebook games and had initial success because they were one of the first in the market.
EA bought them when EA decided to jump into the windfall profits which the "free to play" market has been delivering to many game companies.
Banking on the name "The Sims", the Facebook game shot up to #1 in the rankings on Facebook as people who were familiar with the Sims name eagerly joined up and started playing (and paying) beginning last August. (The game uses a "micro-transactional model similar to buying NX to get special items in the game.)
However- extremely poor programming and almost non-existant playtesting immediately started showing up as issues with slow loading times, inability to log in, and countless bugs and errors in the game began to plague the players. Customer service was terrible, although they did address "SimCash" issues rather quickly.
On several occasions, badly coded quests turned out to be unable to be completed, and instead of fixing them the "dev team" just said "oops" and passed out some "maplepoints" instead of fixing it and allowing players to complete the quests they'd been working on all week.
One thing I complained about very often in the "official" EA forum was the total lack of ability on the part of whoever was writing the text for the quests to write an understandable sentence explaining what to do and how to do it for things like the quests. (And they didn't even have the excuse of having had to translate from Korean.)
The quest would say "do this 5 times", without mentioning that you had to own certain items first, and then go to a neighbor's house to do it, it couldn't be done at your own house. Or they'd tie the quest to a random event (like the grass growing in your yard), and when that event didn't happen you couldn't complete the quest before the time limit expired. Really awful stuff.
And so, the number of players began to PLUMMET. The other Facebook games which had been bumped by "The Sims" retook the top spots in the ratings and the game started to slide. ALL my Facebook friends who had been playing quit, leaving me with no one to help me complete my quests and build my Sims house (they want you to suck in other players who will of course potentially buy lots of NX... er.. SimCash, so they make it impossible to do anything without "neighbors". It's come down to inviting perfect strangers to be your Facebook "friends" so they can become your Sims neighbors to advance in the game.
I know- that's all way too much to read.. but here's a picture of what happens to a badly programmed game with very poor customer service:
http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/144959615576466-the-sims-social
Scroll down to "Traffic Trends" and look at the first graph, "The Sims Social - MAU". This shows the number of monthly average users during Feburary-March 2012.
Notice the direction the graph is sliding.
Looks exactly like what's happening in Maplestory right now.