Looking thru the various posts on the boards and the lack of respect from a few individuals towards others never fails to amuse me.
With that little commentary out of the way let me get to some opinions I wanted to state.
1.) Playing AO is "by choice" and not a requirement of life. If the service isn't up to an individuals standards then said individual can take leave and spend his funds on lifes many other pleasures.
2.) FC seems to have offered more than what the game is. It does have a 4 year lifespan however and it might actually later turn out to be what they offered on the game box and maybe even more. I doubt I'll be able to last that long but some people might.
3.) Not everyone playing the game is like you or a clone of you, just deal with it and move on. *note this is targeted to a mature audience regardless of age. If you are pissed off about this statement then that means it wasn't directed at you =)*
4.) FC needs to handle the player base better. From what I've seen is that you have a few ARK's who even if they wished to state more about a question can't, the rest just don't have a clue at all. Same goes for GM's.
5.) You are able to track down players due to others sending petitions about exploits. You are able to identify exploiters and dupers due to your database which you reference. Yet you are unable to provide even a single response at times to petitions about disappearing items. Your official response hasn't changed since the "Pseudo Live Launch" of this game.
6.) You write an article that can endlessly be debated, work on a fix which would take months to completely implement, and a post fix player backlash which you probably won't recover from. What is the point of all your comments and questions to the players? I feel empowered by the fact that you opened the door for us to state our comments and suggestions. Pretend to consider them then turn around and implement fixes which we never asked for. Which is it? Do our comments really matter or is this just another failed attempt in trying to keep your customers happy. Personally I couldn't care less if you didn't take any input from us. At least I would know where I stand. This game will be what it is and we wouldn't have the notion that it would be anything more.
7.) The picture you have painted to the player base of your staff isn't a pretty one at all. You've been in the industry for sometime. Stop acting like a bunch of internet company boomers that had a great concept but had no clue as how a business should be run and a way to execute their great idea. It's not like you can IPO and bail on your players?
8.) Get rid of the ARK's responsibilities of addressing technical and other such issues they can't help with anyway. Keep them as Greeters to introduce the player/character to the game upon creation and again when they hit a key level point at a later time so they won't get drowned in too much detail in game.
9.) Hire more GM's and have a GM Manager who can make a call on the fly in regards to the situation. This won't give GM's any power to abuse and would need to have the GM Manager present to make calls on the spot to address player issues.
10.) DEV teams and CS teams should consult each other each time a major change is to be implemented. They can then devise a way to best implement it and come up with alternative ways or resolutions for players affected by said change.
11.) Hire a permanent team that can test changes/patches/fixes before they are implemented have them devote said gaming hours. You will then have full time AO gamers in house to question and get answers from. Plus you would still have the people who play on the test server sending comments and suggestions and bug reports as well. They can all be filtered thru the test team you hire to play the game and they can address the issues with test server players more directly. The DEV team then only gets structured information and not a mailbox full of unread email.
Well that's the end of my rant. Feel free to post if you wish but I just had to get this all down. Have a good day. =)
