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Why this great game sadly will fail
cleanor
Member Posts: 40
This is a very fun game, kudos to the developers for their hard work in creating something special. Many of us that had been looking forward to Neverwinter Online launching, feel you have exceeded our expectations.
The problem for you as a developer is that this game is not going to make it. Here is why:
The economic profitability of the game is driven off of micro-transactions, specifically the purchase of Zen. Like it or hate it (personally I like it) this is how this game is structured. The issue is that the behind the scenes infrastructure is not in place to handle the purchase and distribution of Zen, and when there are issues, there is no support system to handle billing issues.
Dozens of us, including myself, have paid for Zen over the past few days with credit cards, and had emails from Perfect World Inc. and Visa stating the purchase occurred. However the Zen never shows up at all. It's not in the Zen wallet, and no record of anything in the Purchase History (Zen Transactions). We cannot progress to the next step of committing our Zen to a game and server. There is just nothing there.
Every company can have issues with their systems, but when you are taking people's money, especially for the first time, you better have your ducks in a row, all of them. You only get one chance to make a first impression. At a minimum shut down your purchase system until it is fixed, or post a warning that there is an issue. If there is some reason you are deliberately delaying giving your paying customers the Zen that they purchased, please tell us that when we are buying it.
I was told by a moderator on this forum to contact customer service, so today I did, well tried to.
I got the number for Perfect World Inc.'s billing customer service area in Northern California. When I called, I got the standard recording saying that there were a lot of people calling, they were sorry, but please hold. No problem, I realize I am not the only one that has this issue. After two minutes I get transferred to another recording that says I should call back in a few moments, then it hangs up on me...
So I called back. 51 times today, and 51 times their machine hung up on me after 10 seconds to three minutes of hold time.
Devs I love your game, I want to support you financially, but taking your customers' money without giving them the Zen they bought, then having no customer support to help us resolve it, is the death knell of any business. Unless this is addressed and fixed immediately, all of your hard work was for nothing.
For every guy like me that cares enough about what you have created to post here to help you, there are 100 others that just said forget it in frustration and will never come back.
Fix this ASAP, and at the very least please communicate with us and acknowledge that there is an issue. I badly want to see NWO succeed, as things stand now it will not.
The problem for you as a developer is that this game is not going to make it. Here is why:
The economic profitability of the game is driven off of micro-transactions, specifically the purchase of Zen. Like it or hate it (personally I like it) this is how this game is structured. The issue is that the behind the scenes infrastructure is not in place to handle the purchase and distribution of Zen, and when there are issues, there is no support system to handle billing issues.
Dozens of us, including myself, have paid for Zen over the past few days with credit cards, and had emails from Perfect World Inc. and Visa stating the purchase occurred. However the Zen never shows up at all. It's not in the Zen wallet, and no record of anything in the Purchase History (Zen Transactions). We cannot progress to the next step of committing our Zen to a game and server. There is just nothing there.
Every company can have issues with their systems, but when you are taking people's money, especially for the first time, you better have your ducks in a row, all of them. You only get one chance to make a first impression. At a minimum shut down your purchase system until it is fixed, or post a warning that there is an issue. If there is some reason you are deliberately delaying giving your paying customers the Zen that they purchased, please tell us that when we are buying it.
I was told by a moderator on this forum to contact customer service, so today I did, well tried to.
I got the number for Perfect World Inc.'s billing customer service area in Northern California. When I called, I got the standard recording saying that there were a lot of people calling, they were sorry, but please hold. No problem, I realize I am not the only one that has this issue. After two minutes I get transferred to another recording that says I should call back in a few moments, then it hangs up on me...
So I called back. 51 times today, and 51 times their machine hung up on me after 10 seconds to three minutes of hold time.
Devs I love your game, I want to support you financially, but taking your customers' money without giving them the Zen they bought, then having no customer support to help us resolve it, is the death knell of any business. Unless this is addressed and fixed immediately, all of your hard work was for nothing.
For every guy like me that cares enough about what you have created to post here to help you, there are 100 others that just said forget it in frustration and will never come back.
Fix this ASAP, and at the very least please communicate with us and acknowledge that there is an issue. I badly want to see NWO succeed, as things stand now it will not.
Post edited by cleanor on
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Comments
Now I would not mind the bag being part of the store if there was an in game way to get bags or even expand your tiny bank storage.
Dont get me wrong I like the game, I like the gameplay, the graphics, the general helpfulness of the community but what I dont like and will leave the game for is how I would need to pay money for basic in game items that cannot be obtained any other way than through the zen store. And dont tell me its because its in beta or that the devs need the money to make content because look at warframe. Its in beta, it has a micro transaction store (Side note: the zen store is not micro transactions, some stuff is like buying a full AAA game) and the devs support the game with weekly updates without selling items on the cash shop that should be basic pick ups in game.
That's going to make other players that have experienced TECHNICAL issues with the store not working come in and talk about their experiences.
But a title like "why this great game sadly will fail"...is not going to get the right attention. Or even the right responses. The second post in this thread is a case in point - the poster there is complaining about legitimate pricing issues. But they're not talking about billing/zen problems.
I realise you probably already posted a thread titled something like that, if a moderator got in touch with you already. But still. Chances are, people are just going to see this as yet another complaint thread about some aspect of the game. There are a ton of those. Many people ignore them.
This game, like all of Cryptic's games, will forever be a mediocre filler game. That is, a game people play for a few months between real game releases.
why?
1. Apathy
Cryptic has never cared about players, ignoring feedback and criticism. While providing rock bottom support.
Take NWO's closed beta period. A few weekends done for publicity sake. No NDA, no real time to test anything. This alone proved they don't give a ****.
Notice how the CM's here never communicate with the player base? Community managers are here to act as a go between from players and developers, but since neither Cryptic nor PWE care about customers, that line is effectively cut. Marvel Heroes CM Rockjaw, listens to players and literally spends his time working with the devs to make the game better for the community. Its because of him mediating that the random super hero token system was removed in favor of direct purchases, due to overwhelming feedback.
You'll never see a Cryptic employee ever reconsider an action, or compromise.
2. Mediocrity
Cryptic is a mediocre developer house. They know, everyone else knows it. They are content to rush out a piece of good, but not great software, and then let it rot. Look at Champions, first month everything nerfed into the ground. STO? Klingon faction. Don't be fooled Cryptic may pretend to be attentive with NWO, but in a month they won't be doing anything.
This game will be "Cryptic MMO #3" and it will never achieve the level of success it could, because Cryptic is run on nepotism and managers that don't know how to do their jobs. It takes a really bad group of developers to make a super hero game where no one feels super heroic, but taking a quarter health bar from a convict's thrown bottle is what you get.
What you see now is what you get. Bugs will remain untouched for months or even years. CO still has a bug that renders action bars inert until you reload your UI and that's been around since launch.
3. Greed
Everyone rejoiced when Jack Emmert and Cryptic left CoH. Its because they are greedy and inept. Even Champions opened with a sub and cash shop. STO too, and STO was so awful and such an insult to Roddenberry's vision, that they had to hold "Come back to Us" enticement offers literally three months after release.
NWO continue this tradition with respec fees costing one dollar over the minimal zen package, thus forcing a ten dollar purchase to respec, 1% success rate on end game enchants, ten dollar single purchase bags, 30 dollar dresses, and forty dollar mounts.
Yes they need to make money. No they don't have to be greedy pigs about it.
So yeah this game will not fail. But it will NEVER be as good as it could have been, because Cryptic aims at the middle, and never higher. Because they just don't care.
The issue is not whether Zen is good or bad. PWE has chosen this to be their method of making the game financially viable, right or wrong.
The issue is that there is not a proper system in place for those of us that choose to buy Zen (they take our money but do not deliver their product), then have no support system in place to handle issues. What this means is that two things are going to happen: Customers don't want to be ripped off, so they will not pay for something they don't receive a second time, and therefore PWE makes no money, meaning this game still cease to exist. No one works for free.
This is an open beta, the time for these things to be talked about and addressed. However, when you are taking people's money, that is a problem that better be at the top of their list.
Yes I made one of those posts warning other people to be careful when buying Zen, and it got a lot of "Hey that happened to me too!" replies. The post was shut down and locked, which is fine.
This one is more about bringing a serious issue to their attention while there is still time.
Can you elaborate? You had no problem immediately receiving Zen you purchased? No problem talking to Billing Customer Service? When did you buy your Zen?
Yes I sure do. What we all are experiencing is that no history of any transaction is showing up. It says there is 0 Zen in our wallets, therefore we cannot transfer anything.
Which payment processor did you use? Google Wallet, Skrill, Paypal...? It's entirely possible there's some kind of issue with the payment vendor and not so much Perfect World itself.
This might have been ripped right out of my own head. Well said.
compared to big release like tera, swtor, lotro and even gw 2 this game is still great...now imagine if we have the completed game with all the races and classes.
sure this game has some flaw, but compared to other f2p and even p2p..this game is still quiet fun
Visa.
I got an email from PWE saying the transaction went through and that they have debited my money.
Was that a joke? They don't translate well on the web, you know.
The combat in Tera is miles ahead of this. Granted, if it wasn't free, I probably wouldn't play - take away the fancy graphics and combat system, there's virtually nothing there. Still, it certainly has Neverwinter trumped both graphically and functionally, and take away the foundry, the content is about as light. The real kicker here, is that Cryptic (or PWE, pick your poison) wants to charge you twice what En Masse is asking for similar items, and they're doing this while asking you to design your own stuff to do, and marketing it as a feature.
On a secondary note, it blows me away that people are so crazy about the Foundry. It was in CoH and STO has it, and they weren't particularly exciting in either of those... But I digress.
At least Tera is fully aware of what it is. Neverwinter is a county fair masquerading as a major theme park.
Sorry if this post might be bit offtopic but must say this: Well I had no major issues with Tera - I still got my toon in one of the US based server - its pretty good game.. well there are some issues though: the player base (like in Rift) were - lets put it this way, I felt compelled to try something other game (mostly kids, and for example in Tera had to disable public chat once and for all due all offtopic issues been spammed all the time, mostly topics related to US lol). But yeah, also the fact that Tera is based more or less on the previous games from the NCSoft - I've read that they did some copy pasteing from aion etc games when they made the Tera. But might be just rumors. In any case dont want to support games made by NCSoft even though Tera is hosted by enmasse in US but its licensed afaik from NCSoft.
About problems with zen purchases.. no clue. So far ive done multiple purchases and all were completed and delivered within 3 hours
Elf Control Wizard - Dragon
http://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/comments/1dry0g/neverwinters_f2p_model_what_you_need_to_know/
Obviously the complaints only come from lazy and/or cheap players.
I use PayPal and get it immediately.
I so agree with you.... was gonna purchase some ZEN till I saw how little u get for it.... too costly for me... I will play the game till I can't compete anymore, then i'll quit... zen costs too much....
Purchased it on the 6th.
- Want extra bags = Do quests. quite a few drop bags.
- Want nifty companions = Farm AD or gold and buy them.
- Do bounty quests for Seals = better stuff.
The only problem I have is that you should be able to earn respec coins. Sucks having to pay $6 if you want to respec.
Nope, you only get two from quests, one of 16 and on of 12.
Fanbois will be fanbois, ofcourse, but if you don't see that 10$ for a bag and 6$ for a respec is too much... well... then you're the target audience, lol.
Untill they nerf skills and force you one time too many to pay 6$ and even the biggest fanbois understand they are being taken for fools.
If you make the main game accesable and enjoyable for all, without having to fuss around in your inventory all day just so you can loot again. If you dont hand out mounts like candy for $$consumers$$, atleast not the topspeed mounts that the regular crowd wont see withing their first month of play.. Keep the game entertaining, and people will drop money on it. I`ve spend over 100 euro on Path of Exile, half of that i did not need. I enjoy the game, and i did not need to buy ANYTHING to have that good time. So while enjoying it, i decided to spend money to support and gain some spiffy graphics here and there
I totally agree with this. This is the exact reason I didn't like playing PWI anymore, the game forces you to buy basic things and some people like myself are not spending real money to be able to play some game.
Have a look at this, especially the "runes" paragraph. I have no problem with a "fair" f2p scheme, or even monthly costs for that matter, but in this game, everything you do is free at first but then suddenly turns to an insane cash grab.
I have gotten three. Either way, if you honestly feel like having your initial bag, plus, 16 extra slots, as well as another 12, isn't enough for you to enjoy the game and you feel pressured into spending $10, then you sir are the target audience. I'm content with what the game throws my way.
P.S - Love the fact that most of the DB's assume, because you like a game you are a "Fanboy" .../whatevs
While your opinion is valid, it proved to be wrong.
People have difference in opinions on why it will fail, it doesnt make any one of them less valid.
And its a **** good reason for devs to take a look, dont know what you were trying to prove with that comment.