Are you happy with GOA's level of communication to the player base?

Are you happy with GOA's level of communication to the player base?

  • Yes (Please posts reasons)

    Votes: 28 24.1%
  • No (Please posts reasons)

    Votes: 80 69.0%
  • Unsure (Please posts reasons)

    Votes: 8 6.9%

  • Total voters
    116
  • Poll closed .

Nate

FH is my second home
Joined
Mar 13, 2004
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7,454
As the title says, would like to see what most people think of this. Do you find it easy to get the information you need/would be interested in seeing currently from GOA? Can you think of any improvements they can make? I for one can see that GOA's communication to the DAoC Euro players is one of the worst in the MMORPG's genre of games. Have you had it worse with another company and how does GOA relate to that service?

Things that would be nice to add such as the Guild News which Mythic currently have, it would enable small guilds which are recruiting to state their name openly to the community and be known to a wide variety of European players.

In my opinion community building is what it's all about in MMORPG's, if there is no community..there is no game, and at this time the DAoC Euro's community is becoming bitter and stale.
 

Boni

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Feb 8, 2004
Messages
1,607
Voted yes, im happy.

I think the level of communication from GMs is much improved in the last year or two. Ive seen posts from GMs communicating issues, being more aware of where their playerbases internet problems are and even replying to posts that arent really that constructive or are just 'help is daoc teh dOOMed?'. Had personal communication from GMs via email for things that couldnt be fixed, without being told 'Go play with Rightnow' which would be the easy cop-out. Not sure ive seen that level of service from other games, so thumbs up from me.
 

cHodAX

I am a FH squatter
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Jan 7, 2004
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Couldn't agree more Nate. Even when I played Jumpgate about 6 years ago and the game had only 1000 or so players there was an extremely strong sense of community within the game. This was due to a number of reasons but two very important parts the first of which was PlanetJumpgate which was a superb fan site run by a guy called Gossip who gave the players a base where they could find game information but also post fictional news stories but also drive the direction of the game, all that combined with a brilliant forum/comments system gave a real sense of life and belonging to the game. Secondly there was the JOSSH website, sort of homepage for the game developed by Netdevil. It had all the usual stuff like player/squad rankings as well as a huge array of statistics, there was also a fiction submition system to get roleplaying going but could also be used as a very handy way of declaring war on opposing factions or guilds. Both these pages really brought the game to life for the player, yes the game was graphically basic with a weak PvE system and all the meat of the game being the PvP system but it just worked because people could play the game in different ways and also mould the game in unimaginable ways because of the fiction and news services.

DAoC lacks anything like this and it shows, the game and the world itself feels utterly stagnant, RvR just becomes the same old RP grind because there is no story driving the action and no way for the player to influence the story in any meaningful way. Guilds don't have any way to declare war on other guilds, players can't declare vendetta on other players, the whole system lacks life.

Now how does this come down to GOA, well it isn't all GOA's fault so let us get that straight. That said though they have had the best part of 5 years now to get a proper web presense up and running, loads of time to develop ways of helping the roleplayers carve a niche by giving them a place to tell stories and drive the game. Instead they gave us a crappy statistics system that is slow and cumbersome, people ended up dumping the XML themselves to making meaningful use of the numbers. GOA couldn't even keep that up and running though, despite what they say the web portion of the game has never been a priority, Docwolfe could have come up with better in 5 months never mind 5 years. They copied what Mythic did but put no heart or time into it, so we ended up with a third rate homepage for the game with a statistics system that has worked for probably 2 years out of the last 5. That is their failure, both in communication itself and developing a system whereby everyone would be getting those messages. The DAoC EU homepage has never been a 'must visit' site for any player, most people get the news via word of mouth ingame or via forums like this.

It is a real half assed way to communicate to your customers when you can't even give them a site they feel they should be checking all the time. That is GOA's failure and Mythic haven't fared much better either.
 

rampant

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
May 7, 2004
Messages
1,565
voted no

they have a lot to learn about communicating with their player base. IMO they do not foster ANY sort of community relations - when was the last event that a GM held???

In fact from memory the last major event (in alb land) was eggy's costume ml raid (which was abused by mid and hib to do a relic raid) - sure there have been mre raids / ml raids - but that was the last interesting / fun thing to have happened.

I think they have lost their way with DAOC and are now concentrating more resources on WAR.

The weekly news that they give on their website is an absolute disgrace - its not written in English - but translated badly from (i assume) french.

Their support site is awful / the payment / subs site is awful.

all i can be arsed to complain about at the moment :) - im off flying!
 

ford prefect

Can't get enough of FH
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Aug 27, 2006
Messages
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It has rarely been my experience to come across a company that has such blatent disregard for it's customers.

The lack of communication is dreadful, and the customer service is some of the worst I have ever come across. I'm sure I am not the only one to get automated Right Now responces, that are vaguely relevant to my query, but don't actually answer any questions.

GoA, and to a lesser extent mythic, often make unilateral decisions about the game, about how it should/shouldn't be played and how realms should or shouldn't be treated, without actually asking players what it is they want.

The glastonbury fiasco is a perfect example. No efferot taken to find out why the playerbase was falling, doing nothing about remedying the situation, and ultimately taking the easiest option out, without asking players what they actually thought.

The situation on excal/pry currently being discussed in this thread: https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?t=212824 about AC relic raids says it all. And that particular problem is only going to get much worse with the release of the next expansion.

I'm sad to say that the pry/excal cluster will soon go the way of glastonbury, for the simple reason that GoA don't bother to listen to their customers.
 

Svartmetall

Great Unclean One
Joined
Jan 5, 2004
Messages
2,467
Yes, I think they do a very good job of communicating...now...in the past, GOA were absolutely appalling. I still think that how bad GOA were up until ~2 years ago has been a major factor in the size of DAOC's playerbase; GOA had a (deservedly) very bad reputation amongst gamers, certainly here in the UK. But if you compare what we get nowadays from our CMs to, say, the level of communication WoW players get from Blizzard on their official forums...DAOC's community actually does very well.
 

Raven

Happy Shopper Ray Mears
FH Subscriber
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Messages
44,617
i think they are barely average these days, still a huge improvement on 2 years ago though, i think requiel goes above what is required but has his hands tied by a retarded company (GOA)

anyway, if they are to expect to run WAR in europe then they need to make some big changes, rightnow is barely capable of problems as it is now, add the huge expected player base for war and goa are fucked and EU WAR along with it.
 

Vladamir

FH is my second home
Joined
Dec 28, 2003
Messages
15,105
As with what Raven said it begs the question as to how many people from EU will play on EU WAR or head overseas to the US version.
 

Wazkyr

One of Freddy's beloved
Joined
Jun 26, 2004
Messages
1,726
Voted yes. I'm fairly happy with their services.

My biggest annoyance is them closing the RN reports in 24/48 hours if i don't update it, even thou they didn't fix the problem, just like they push the problem away.
Else i wanted better rvr statistics like they have in US, bit sad we have to resolve to private persons making proper rvr information (eg. duskwave).

But overall i got nice service/info in my RN reports, and i like their weekly news.
Maybe u should have posted unsure tbh :p
 

Xajin

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Jun 11, 2006
Messages
126
My answer is "no". Many situations could've been avoided if GoA (and Mythic) had done more for the community. Have quoted myself from what I said in Requiels topic:

I quitted DAoC some months ago, however I thought I'd give my opinion:

In my opinion AC'ing is just one of many things that has gone from bad to worse, mainly as a result of an outdated ruleset (CoC), too passive gamemasters (will refer to that as GM further in my post) and game mechanism.


1. Outdated ruleset

DAoC is a virtual world, and like the real world the CoC needs to be updated frequently. Concerning outdated rules, we can draw a parallel to the real world; What do you think would happen if the system/government stopped updating the law, that until now has been updated every now and then to match todays society?


2. Too passive GM's

While I personally liked that you gave the community the free choice of how to play the game, you should surely have known/guessed already from the beginning, that it also would be the root to alot of trouble. This shouldn't be a big surprise, as it's what we experience in the real world all the time. While almost all countries has a different view on lifestyle, they have one thing in common, and that is the behavior/morale isn't as much controlled by the law, but by people that more or less dictates/states their opinion on what would be morale right to do. When it comes to this EU game, GoA are the most power to dictate what good behavior and how the game should be played (should, not necessary how it will be played). You could have done that, on the offical homepage, no?

AC'ing is today more used to cause grief towards an opponent, and is used as a way of veangence. The thing that started this is found long ago, and simply boils down to different playstyles that didn't match each other.


3. Game mechanism

This is the one thing that you have little to be blamed. However, as we are your customers and not Mythics, I personally think it's your responsibility to tell them when you're experiencing things going bad. Who knows? Perhabs Mythic could come up with an idea, that could fix the whole AC'ing incident (and other). I will here give you an idea of what you could write:
--
Dear sirs,

We have lately experienced an increasing numbers of Alarm clock raids, which have caused much grief and is one of the reasons, we are having a continuosly increasing droprate in the overall population the the UK servers.

We request your aid on what to do.

one of our <insert> have come up with an idea on how to fix the problem. The idea is, that you give us the option to adjust the guards on the different servers, and making them stronger (in form of level/hp/procs etc.) at off-peak times, so it's very hard/impossible for only 1-2 groups to take the relic.
--


Anyway, that's my few cent to this conversation.
 

Ati

One of Freddy's beloved
Joined
May 7, 2006
Messages
591
What a stupid question, it's fine.

The only problem is GoAs communication via advertising with the outside world. That is where the main problems lie.
 

Kuhan

Loyal Freddie
Joined
Sep 20, 2005
Messages
339
Ati said:
What a stupid question, it's fine.

The only problem is GoAs communication via advertising with the outside world. That is where the main problems lie.

what world you living in :eek6:
 

Raven

Happy Shopper Ray Mears
FH Subscriber
Joined
Dec 27, 2003
Messages
44,617
Ati said:
What a stupid question, it's fine.
obviously people most people who voted disagree;

Yes (Please posts reasons) 20 28.17%
No (Please posts reasons) 46 64.79%
 

Aiteal

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
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Messages
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There's a trickle down effect to consider.

Mythic, for all their Guild News pages etc are very very poor at communicating with their paying customers.

Having VN as some sort of unofficial boards instead of having an actual forum for playing customers to voice their concerns is at best a cop out and at worst blatant arrogance.

This leaves the customers in a position were they are unable to communicate on forums where they can voice legitimate concerns and Mythic as a provider of a service, and expect a reasonable answer to reasonable questions like any customer can.

Instead we see grab bags that rarely if ever answer any difficult questions.

As well as TL report responses that are so condescending it makes me laugh.

I think that the majority of the concerns with the exception of a lack of advertising and ingame support as prime examples are beyond the control of GOA's staff.

Stupid classes to sell expansions, boosting already stupid classes for those with ADHD and the ever popular buff-bot issue are beyond the remit of GoA.

Purely based on the lack of ingame support I would have to say no.
 

Lamp

Gold Star Holder!!
Joined
Jan 16, 2005
Messages
22,952
Personally I think they're doing an OK job given the decline in population, the fickleness of the player base, and the overall amount of whining, whinging, and negativity that permeates pretty much every post in on-topic FH threads.
 

Daedalus

Can't get enough of FH
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Feb 1, 2004
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In comparison to other MMO companies, a big yes.
Even Blizzard. People might argue otherwise, but look at the facts; the only interaction with the community happens through the official boards, all of the 'blue' responses are by the lead GMs. Dev-posts are rare and even non-existent in Europe. GM positions at Blizzard are positions at Customer Support, in other words, the GM's at Blizzard are not Game Masters but they're 1st-line Customer Support. The very same goes for a lot of other MMO's as well.

However, overall it's still not enough, especially compared to EA-Mythic Entertainment's communication with the playerbase and more importantly, what it could've been. Currently I'm not sure where most of the revenue is heading, there haven't been any price cuts and I believe (but I might be wrong) that GoA's DAoC department has shrunken as GM's seem to be less online and spread across the various servers.

Altough I'm not sure what to expect. We've seen TL-reports that had pressing issues but they don't always get addressed and if they do, usually not with the proposed solution, that pisses me off as a gamer. However, as a game programmer in the industry, I can imagine that even though your playerbase might give an indication of where the most pressing issues are, solving it can be somewhat impossible (it might unbalance the game or breaking core mechanisms) and all of the solutions the community comes up with are the obvious ones the team already discarted because they know the details.

Then, what else could GoA do? News from guilds? I don't know, personally I couldn't care less about what some guild's up to. So guild news as a regular feature just sounds plain boring to me. However, I would love it if it was possible if GoA would give notice of big events (like big guild parties, RL events, stuff like that) in their friday news, altough I believe that you can already ask them to do that. I remember this awesome in-game festival because a very well known guild was celebrating its 5th (or 3th, or whateverTh, I forgot) birthday. Or maybe it was a farewelll party, I really can't remember. But they asked GoA and they threw in some awesome scripting and turned it into an event. I mean, I doubt that they'd support a similar event, been there done that, but hey, what about something really new. They'd probably help out, that's community interaction for you.

I think they're doing okay now, altough if anyone at GoA can give DAoC-eu the spark of life reborn it deserves, it's the GMs. Come up with a plan, guys and girls, and plant it in the heads of those who pull the (financial) chains and watch the fireworks.
 

Heki

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Feb 16, 2005
Messages
15
Voted no.

Italian staff is not present, never seen a CSR in evening when I can logon, stupid reply from Right Now.
 

Awarkle

Fledgling Freddie
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Feb 1, 2004
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1,131
i have very good comunication with the gms partly being an E&E helps get incontact with gms when the shit hit the fan.

However if goa suddenly turned around and said "ok we are going to start hosting forums however if you dont have an active account you cant post".

And we will only allow you to post in your current active server slot. So hibernians can only use the hibernian side of the forum.

Everyone would still post here. i think that goa have probbly learned a lot from daoc and will host WARhammer online very well, i may or maynot be playing on the US servers. Its always a personal choice ill follow my friends probbly.

But i you want active gm interaction try the SWG boards where basically if you post anything negative your account is banned :)
 

Esselinithia

Fledgling Freddie
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Dec 23, 2003
Messages
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GOA loses customers at a rate I would call alarming, and it isn't only lack of advertisement, since that wouldn't make people leave. DAOC is one of the best rated games at mmorpg.com for good reasons. Many good reasons. Yet, GOA fails to keep its customers.

Communication isn't an one way street, you need more than guild news for it. You need to listen when people has problems, evaluate the problems and try to fix them, this is part of communication.

While in many other games you speak with customer support, and it seems a weaker link than speaking with GMs who can fix some problems, in reality their communication leads to improvements, happy customers, etc. and communications between GOA staff and players leads to closed accounts. If communications doesn't result in more and more happy players and less and less problems, then it isn't good.
 

ford prefect

Can't get enough of FH
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I recently rerolled on Gareth (US classic server) and closed my euro account. I have met dozens of people that have done exactly the same.

So far I have asked Mythic two questions, one about realm bonus adjustment and one about CD keys and both recieved replies in under an hour, and they weren't written by some emailing autoresponding chatbot either, a real live person actually emailed me back!

My experiences with GoA's customer service over the past five years have been appalling, but now I am on a very busy server (guild I joined has 325 active members, and by active I mean played in the last 10 days), where all playstyles are acceptable, people seem friendly, XP bonuses are nice and you have all the latest expnasions and patches.

The news site for Mythic (Camelot herald) is far more informative with several updates per week quite often.

In short, you couldn't drag me back to a GoA server. The US servers are DAoC as it should be.

Even the server message on US servers says a lot, unless something important is going on the default server message says "Thank you for playing Dark Ages of Camelot".
 

Esselinithia

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 23, 2003
Messages
1,110
Official boards work well for some companies, in other companies some official agreement with a 3rd party forum providers are good. Just using a fan page sometime is clearly a big problem.

Lamp: I think if they don't listen to paying customers and say "they just whine" many players will leave and you get a declining population. An MMORPG is a service you pay for, and it isn't cheaper than many other services, so it shouldn't have more issues.
 

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