The direction this company is going in...it scares me.

gamekillz · December 2012

Look, before you call me a troll, slowpoke.jpg, or noob, please hear me out. I have been supporting this company since the beginning. I've spent money on every single game released by this company (even the facebook game) and have done this all in the spirit of support to a company who gives me enjoyment. Alas, I will not be providing this company with any more money, and may stop playing their games if this company doesn't do a complete turn around, starting with the CEO and management.

I've come across a review site, where employees go to review companies and have come across disturbing news. It appears that PWE has lost its vision, of creating games for fun and enjoyment, and instead create them to milk them and have almost no plans to create fun, meaningful content, only content designed to take money away from the young gamers until the game eventually dies. We've seen this with LOMA and HOTK already, but it seems like PWE has not learned from its mistakes.

The employees there seem worked to the bone, and many good employees seem to be laid off for almost no reason but poor managerial decisions. Meanwhile, the employees with connections sit around playing games, watching movies, etc. How does this benefit the customer/fan base at all? The company appears to be corrupt, although good people still work there.

Look. I enjoy this company, I enjoy the community, and there are wonderful mods/gms that help support a good vision, but management doesn't see that. Us players have felt these effects for a long time and i'm only posting this so that my fellow consumers will know where their money is going. Hopefully somebody with a powerful voice in the company sees this and can help. If not, your customers will speak with their voice, aka, money.

I hope i'm not banned for this, i'm only doing what I see is a just act.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Perfect-World-Entertainment-Reviews-E285012.htm

Mooooooooo - Lost City · December 2012

gamekillz wrote: »

Look, before you call me a troll, slowpoke.jpg, or noob, please hear me out. I have been supporting this company since the beginning. I've spent money on every single game released by this company (even the facebook game) and have done this all in the spirit of support to a company who gives me enjoyment. Alas, I will not be providing this company with any more money, and may stop playing their games if this company doesn't do a complete turn around, starting with the CEO and management.

I've come across a review site, where employees go to review companies and have come across disturbing news. It appears that PWE has lost its vision, of creating games for fun and enjoyment, and instead create them to milk them and have almost no plans to create fun, meaningful content, only content designed to take money away from the young gamers until the game eventually dies. We've seen this with LOMA and HOTK already, but it seems like PWE has not learned from its mistakes.

The employees there seem worked to the bone, and many good employees seem to be laid off for almost no reason but poor managerial decisions. Meanwhile, the employees with connections sit around playing games, watching movies, etc. How does this benefit the customer/fan base at all? The company appears to be corrupt, although good people still work there.

Look. I enjoy this company, I enjoy the community, and there are wonderful mods/gms that help support a good vision, but management doesn't see that. Us players have felt these effects for a long time and i'm only posting this so that my fellow consumers will know where their money is going. Hopefully somebody with a powerful voice in the company sees this and can help. If not, your customers will speak with their voice, aka, money.

I hope i'm not banned for this, i'm only doing what I see is a just act.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Perfect-World-Entertainment-Reviews-E285012.htm

Tl;dr

Bubbles - Morai · December 2012

Heh.

PWE is an angel compared to the mother company, Wanmei/PW Beijing.
I would be more interested in stuff about them than PWE.

gamekillz · December 2012

Mooooooooo - Lost City wrote: »

Tl;dr

Thats okay. Your money not mine. I warned you.

gamekillz · December 2012

Bubbles - Lothranis wrote: »

Heh.

PWE is an angel compared to the mother company, Wanmei.
I would be more interested in stuff about them than PWE.

Thats what I mean. Wanmei is corrupting PWE slowly. Its going to affect us all soon if its not turned around.

EDIT: sorry for double post... rookie mistake...

bluestuffzzz · December 2012

gamekillz wrote: »

Look, before you call me a troll, slowpoke.jpg, or noob, please hear me out. I have been supporting this company since the beginning. I've spent money on every single game released by this company (even the facebook game) and have done this all in the spirit of support to a company who gives me enjoyment. Alas, I will not be providing this company with any more money, and may stop playing their games if this company doesn't do a complete turn around, starting with the CEO and management.

I've come across a review site, where employees go to review companies and have come across disturbing news. It appears that PWE has lost its vision, of creating games for fun and enjoyment, and instead create them to milk them and have almost no plans to create fun, meaningful content, only content designed to take money away from the young gamers until the game eventually dies. We've seen this with LOMA and HOTK already, but it seems like PWE has not learned from its mistakes.

The employees there seem worked to the bone, and many good employees seem to be laid off for almost no reason but poor managerial decisions. Meanwhile, the employees with connections sit around playing games, watching movies, etc. How does this benefit the customer/fan base at all? The company appears to be corrupt, although good people still work there.

Look. I enjoy this company, I enjoy the community, and there are wonderful mods/gms that help support a good vision, but management doesn't see that. Us players have felt these effects for a long time and i'm only posting this so that my fellow consumers will know where their money is going. Hopefully somebody with a powerful voice in the company sees this and can help. If not, your customers will speak with their voice, aka, money.

I hope i'm not banned for this, i'm only doing what I see is a just act.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Perfect-World-Entertainment-Reviews-E285012.htm

This is the way the company has been headed for years. It's progressively gotten worse, yes. However, over the course that this entire game has been released, the company backing it has lied more and more to the community, issues plague the company, community, forums, patcher, and game client.

I want to say it started when Frankie came in, but in reality it was a little before that. More when Xarfox made bold comments lying to the community, and the 200+ page packs thread was unsticked and never listened to.

Bottom line is, PWE has set out to push titles out (after buy-outs of developers and/or imports as w/ PWI), and milks them via the cash shop w/ over-priced and game-breaking items. If the community stops backing the game (as with LoMA and HoTK), the game is shut down and the process is repeated. PWE reaps the benifits, because they are essentially taking your hard earned money for access to little bits of server code to activate the code of something you already have on your PC, so that you can get some extra damage in a broken game and/or more shiny pixels.

Is this kind of language against company policy? Yes, most definitely. Anyone speaking the truth normally gets shunned quite quickly on these forums. It's generally pro-Wanmei/PWE or no-go.

The next games to go will be Battle of Immortals and Ether Saga. The company has stopped with most presence in-game and on the forums, combined w/ very little updates.

Nahktuul - Archosaur · December 2012

Worriesome.

However, most reviews on that website are by disgruntled employees, who recently got fired.

Understandably, all corporations are money driven. And they lay off people, to conserve money, downsize and recoup resources.

Some of the things said though, concerns me. For the sake of this amazing game, that still holds so much potential.

Bubbles - Morai · December 2012

gamekillz wrote: »

Thats what I mean. Wanmei is corrupting PWE slowly. Its going to affect us all soon if its not turned around.

EDIT: sorry for double post... rookie mistake...

You're 7 years too late for that.

As far as I can tell, Wanmei became the creature its been since 2005, after killing off Archosaur Studios.

I could go on about this but let it be, it's been this way for a long time. I'm still here for the love of the game. I have so many reasons to quit yet I stick around. b:surrender

Sheogorath - Momaganon · December 2012

ok **** it. The quote keeps getting cut off.

I'm not even surprised at this point

Xx_BeLLa_xX - Harshlands · December 2012

Is it the one saying employee love Friday cause free coffee and croissant?

Bubbles - Morai · December 2012

Sheogorath - Momaganon wrote: »

ok **** it. The quote keeps getting cut off.

I'm not even surprised at this point

Forums have been bugged forever.
Just type out your words, and if you need to copy paste something, do so in plain text to try to get rid of special symbols (for example, certain quotation marks).

gamekillz · December 2012

I remember that monster of a thread during Xarfox's era. At first I was honestly surprised that it was ignored, but after reading about the work ethic and culture that is developed there, it seems that no work actually goes to actively trying to improve their products, only to keep investors happy. This is a short term fix though, its not going to fly for a few more years unless things change. I remember when this game received updates regularly, now they happen once in a blue moon, usually only during expansions. This game was put on the back burner, like one employee mentions...

EDIT: I realize all companies are developed around a profit making plan, but PWE's plan seems to be a short term plan, to leech off the ignorant and new. Not dedicated to keeping a returning customer base.

Deceptistar - Sanctuary · December 2012

Its a company with chinese roots. What do you expect? >.> quality?

My guess is the downhill went deeper when Spoons GM was suddenly not working for pwi for unknown reasons

krisnda · December 2012

We do have a new CM you know...

Deceptistar - Sanctuary · December 2012

Krisnda wrote: »

We do have a new CM you know...

But he can only do so much if the parent company doesnt let him right?

im too scared to ask what happened to frankie..

krisnda · December 2012

What do you mean, Frankie made a goodbye thread.

And, yes that is true, but in that case it would be the parent companies fault, wouldn't it?

Praxalis - Archosaur · December 2012

CM's, who are supposed to keep the community happy and felt treated well/listened to, can only go so far. I'm sure it must be frustrating or him to have to push push push when frankie must've gotten apathetic a long time ago. All we hope is that he never looses the fire in getting things done because SOMEONE needs to light the torch under the staff.

Its not like the company cant change...I mean look they can prove, though albeit shoddy can still make content only for our version and not get burned by PWCN. Its not like it'd kill them to do more events, do more special event items or SOMETHING to stir up the servers and start making it more enjoyable. But of course if they continuously keep getting dronned it wont improve...

Allisandre - Sanctuary · December 2012

It's precicely because of this, and because of the direction PWE has been headed over the past three years, that I was SO disappointed to hear that the new NWN MMO is being published by PWE.

I mean, It's probably going to be an absolutely Epic game, that will get completely ruined by this monster of a company.

Bubbles - Morai · December 2012

Deceptistar - Sanctuary wrote: »

Its a company with chinese roots. What do you expect? >.> quality?

My guess is the downhill went deeper when Spoons GM was suddenly not working for pwi for unknown reasons

He was laid off.

I don't think he ever had the chance to make a good bye thread, he suddenly disappeared and bam, frankie showed up.

viciousminx · December 2012

Review sites like this one have to be taken with a grain of salt anyway. Access to Facebook being the only requirement to join, anyone can say they work for this company or that one. In my personal experience I find it best to go straight to the source instead of taking pages of this nature at face value.

skaitavia · December 2012

ViciousMinx wrote: »

Review sites like this one have to be taken with a grain of salt anyway. Access to Facebook being the only requirement to join, anyone can say they work for this company or that one. In my personal experience I find it best to go straight to the source instead of taking pages of this nature at face value.

This. It seems like anyone can claim to be an employee for PWE with what this site requires.

MANray_ - Sanctuary · December 2012

Unfortunately this an all too common example of prevalent corporate culture. And I mean global, not just China. It is often the investors themselves who promote such behaviour under the mistaken belief that their bottom line is better served with the SOBs in charge... The gaming industry, and MMOs in particular, has fallen prey to the Bobby Koticks and other bussinessmen with little love for gaming, but plenty of appreciation for "products" appealing to a large captive audience. It hasn't quite worked their way, with big title after big title consistently bombing, but any real change to the industry, and a true focus on customer satisfaction, remain but pipe dreams at this point...

PW (the game) is in fact a very valuable property and it is amazing the extent to which its managed to thrive despite gross mismanagement. We can only hope the game will limp on for a good while longer and that its bottom line will be sufficient motive to at least move management to ameriolate some of the more painfully obvious mistakes made. As for the employees other than wishing the very best for them and their families there isn't much we can do. Principled stands such as the OP's will only take their livelyhood away and as customers already we have a hard enough time trying to watch over our own interests.

Lesthar - Heavens Tear · December 2012

I'll sound harsh, but this kind of news don't surprise me in the least.
Yes, I know, tl;dr... Just skip it if you got no patience.
Oh and no need to flood by quoting me.
Just reference my post. Thanks.

First of all, it may be true that unhappy former workers could complain about their conditions back there. It's also possible that they could exaggerate it because they have been mistreated and sent off without due respect. Just twitter alone is a prime example of this.
And mods here are right, everyone can fake it, though it needs to be very elaborate and professionally typed... A thing that is really hard to attain as an amateur (especially the teens "dat tyep liek dis" -Just mock-typing them makes me cringe in horror-).

That said, with all we, the PWI community, have lived for a few years, I can hereby state that we never had any type of consideration from the higher ups, despite all the game revenues that the company sees as complete gamer support, like if the game had no issues*.

And so to begin:
It was rather fine until the anniversary packs arrived then came back a bit later on... (mostly because it was rather quiet still, early bugs like rubberbanding aside; PWI was still an early game)
How?
"By popular demand", they said.
This sentence alone left a permanent terrible, awful, vile, disgusting aftertaste in my mouth, as I could witness the refusal of many people to get them at the same time (even if I am sure they indeed massively sold). I lost consideration in the game management since that day.

Nowadays, all of you can see that packs are a full-fledged component of this MMORPG and that some people still buy them 'en masse', sometimes for a total of thousands of bucks. Perfect Packs International, yes.

Still, if it does bring the money on a legal way and that both parties are fine with it, but also guarantees the game will remain f2p, no problem.
I don't mind the idea that packs are in all varieties and are bound to never leave. It's the message behind them that irks me.

But the true problem lies as follows:
For me, besides making a lot of money, a successful company tries to improve itself and its products on a daily basis, with the help of the community. It strives on correcting bugs and glitches, but also takes into account the good suggestions of their customers.
What's more, it reckons its faults.

Yes, I can see the suggestions section of these very forums has a lot of good ideas (just isolate them from the bunch of silliness there) that could make the game more enjoyable.
Have they been considered? Nah. Never.

Even having GMs and devs steal the good concepts from there, implementing them in the game after a global poll** and neither acknowledging nor thanking the contribution of the community would be okay, because our input would have been registered.
We would be part of an involving evolution of the game. It would be a healthy process.

Instead of it, we are force-fed patches that have not been tested enough (seriously, by taking into account the discrepancy of time between the expansions in China and ours, is not the delay long enough so we get our own clean version?), issues that are about never corrected and repeated ToS breaching practices by some unrecommendable people, that are not punished enough... (among other downsides that plague an otherwise excellent game that I still enjoy a lot for its core?)

Yes, that is why I doubted frankie a lot and gave up on him (especially the "by popular demand" and empty promises marked with a "soon".

That is also why I still wonder about what V4 can do in the end***. I don't know if he will be passionate enough to produce/convey the little spark of change we all hope for after all these years.
I just hope he will be different, as in not being a yes-man.

I'll just wait and see whether the game will become more enjoyable or remain in the status quo and slowly sink to the lower depths (no, not the forum ones, but they are about the same kind).

*I still remember that Tony Liu interview on how PWI as a "perfect game". Oh my, the sadness, the fallacy, the parody, the blasphemy, the madness... *Sparta Kick*

**Sincerely... Did we ever have polls before new features are present in the game? The answer is just no. Never had and never will.

*** Yes, I know, he made possible the .ini partial change and I am extremely happy and grateful to him for it. That said, the real test begins now. Will he be able to change the minds of devs so the game radically changes for the better? I would not bet on it.

Teseanna - Heavens Tear · December 2012

PLUS b:victory ONE

Lesthar - Heavens Tear · December 2012

Teseanna - Heavens Tear wrote: »

PLUS b:victory ONE

Gee... You could at least have a more insightful comment. b:shutup

Puri_proc - Lost City · December 2012

gamekillz wrote: »

create them to milk them and have almost no plans to create fun, meaningful content, only content designed to take money away from the young gamers until the game eventually dies

sorry to tell you, but this is the very definition of any mmorpg or f2p game.
get people addicted and milk them. either via monthly fee, p2w sales, or time.

_Saikyik_ - Archosaur · December 2012

gamekillz wrote: »

Hopefully somebody with a powerful voice in the company sees this and can help. If not, your customers will speak with their voice, aka, money.

The problem I see with this is that there will always be those select few that will still CS enough for PWE to not care. I still have faith in V4 because of the ini editing thing but even if we don't, who will we turn to? Who will we ask help from? Who will be the one to convey our suggestions to PWE? I know that sounded like an attack but it's not. Only food for thoughts b:chuckle

CroPsy - Heavens Tear · December 2012

10 people wrote review on that website, and PWE have 200+ employees. So that's 5% of employees, and we can't even tell if all of those 10 people are/were PWE employees.

But, let's ignore that website, what do we have left?

Company that is currently publishing 14 games in North America/Europe!

Fourteen Free to Play games, that's way too much. They have lot's of developers, but so little support stuff and so few CM's and GM's. They make cuts where things matter - interaction with users. But then again, Wanmei is company from China and their strategy is to have more and more games each year. That's really faulty strategy and it will bounce of their heads in few years, when they realize that they have too many games to support, and they can't afford to hire more people to be CM and GM.

You can have the best game in the world, it will fail to deliver if you don't have good communication with community that supports it.

_Syzzer - Sanctuary · December 2012

PWE tries to kill this amazing MMORPG for soo long that always makes me wonder how it could survive for this long.I still enjoy playing it even if sometimes it makes me sad or frustrated because of bugs and glitches that exist for ages and were never corected.
I was never frustrated by the addition of stuff in the cash shop because a free to play game has to survive and make profit,nothing exists solely on good thoughts and rainbows but what makes me sad is that they dont use any part of the profit it generates in making the game better.
Anyway even if the official servers close i will be able to enjoy this amazing game on private servers .b:bye

missrosa99 · December 2012

At the end of the day PWI/PWE will be like any ordinary company for the purpose of making a profit it's the nature of business and sadly their employees must keep that in mind. But whether a product or service be a failure or success it's entirely up to the consumers it's directed upon.

I honestly can't blame the company or the employees I blame the player base who sat by and watched these changes happen and instead of collectively taking a stand against it, cash shopped some more and invested a little more of time into the game.

We're talking about a the company milking us and taking us for a ride when we're the ones allowing it to happen. So if it ain't broke why bother fixing or changing it?

As long as players still invest their money and pay their employees salaries and allow the company to make it's profit margins WHY would they even consider doing things differently.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · December 2012

We've tried to contact the company before. It is unfortunate that not enough of us get together to flood them with information.

Most of us don't speak Chinese, just as most of the people we want to contact don't speak English. Stacked on top of that the time and cost of putting effort into sending international mail, and the average motivation of the user, and we'd rather sit and QQ on a forum that the people who need to hear, don't even read. Which is rather pointless for anything other than venting our frustration into the void of the internet.

Just look at the numbers...
Hardly even 10% of the playerbase even bothers to use the game forums.
Of this 10%, I would venture that less than 5% of them would actually do anything to seriously contact the company as is described in the above linked thread.
5% of 10% is merely 0.5% of the playerbase that might actually contact the company. That's hardly even worth referencing a fly hitting your windshield in relation to the impact it would have.

Yes, I will go out of my way to let the company know how much we hate what they are doing. Sadly, I'm just one of the 0.5%, and a big corporation isn't going to listen to that small of an outlet.

The direction this company is going in...it scares me.

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