The letter I'm air-mailing to Mythic tomorrow

S

svartmetall

Guest
Today was the last straw...since hard copy makes a far bigger impression than email or a phone call, I just printed this out and will be emailing it to Mythic HQ tomorrow morning.


"Dear Mythic

I am writing to you as a dedicated Dark Age Of Camelot player from England, to complain in the strongest possible terms about GOA, the company entrusted with the game in Europe.

Last night, the Excalibur server crashed. Again. It is now nearly 24 hours later and there has been no progress in getting the server back up, no news on the GOA official site, no posts from GOA staff on the semi-official European DAOC forums…nothing. No evidence that GOA are even aware of the problem, let alone trying to work on it.

This crash by itself would not be so significant but it is, sadly, symptomatic of the greater problems faced all the time by those of us lumbered with GOA as providers of the game, and many of us have simply gotten to the point where we cannot bear the way the game we love is being (mis)treated any more…here follows a brief resumé of Life With GOA.


1: Frequent server outages with no news or announcements to us, the paying customers.

2: No customer service in-game. We in Europe always find it deeply amusing to see U.S. players complaining about having to wait all of 12 hours - gasp! – for a CSR to get back to them. They live in a land of milk and honey compared to European DAOC players, who have no chance of such support at all, while paying the same amount of money in subscriptions.

3: No customer service at all, in fact – GOA fob us off with something called ‘RightNow’, which generally involves using an online form to outline your problem and then never hearing from them again. Ever. A brief skim of any European DAOC forum will at almost any time find numerous posts by irate players infuriated by a continuing silence from GOA’s so-called ‘customer support’ tool. Those lucky enough to get any response at all receive, as often as not, a copy/pasted form response with no evidence of attention to the problem cited in the original enquiry.

4: Subscription server problems are endemic here in Europe.

5: Frequently poor translation of the game into English by GOA in each new patch. This is inexcusable, given that the game was written in English in the first place. Also the delay in getting new patches and expansions here in Europe is huge, and a source of constant frustration to players here.

6: Servers are lag-ridden at all times, almost unbearably so in any densely-populated areas (housing zones and capital towns are appalling), and link-deaths/mass link-deaths are a common occurrence even after GOA assure us the servers are fine and have been upgraded. Zone crashes are still a common occurrence here, too.

7: The infamous ‘hacking’ incident of August 2003, where somehow GM tools were appropriated and servers hacked. The way GOA handled this was atrocious, with no word at all to us, the paying customers, for weeks on end - no effort was made to communicate with the playerbase at all. We were left totally uninformed about what was happening, and with no way to contact the company who were still happy to take our money for a service we weren’t getting.

8: GOA’s official website is also deeply unsatisfactory – their XML goes without being updated for months at a time, their news is limited to a paragraph or two in often poor English once a week…compare this to the Camelot Herald and the regular flow of information updates (patches, hot fixes, grab-bags, server outages/upgrades and other announcements) on there.



The general feeling in Europe is one of extreme dissatisfaction with GOA and the very poor levels of service they continue to offer.

I would ask you seriously to consider stripping GOA of the Dark Age of Camelot licence in Europe and giving it to a company willing and able to provide consistent technical coverage and at least some customer support, also to communicate on a regular basis with their paying customers.

At the very least, please make GOA clearly aware of just how angry many of the people who pay them money on a regular basis are with their derisory customer service, deeply fallible hardware and general attitude of disdain for us, the players of Dark Age Of Camelot in Europe."


..I thought that pretty much summed it up.
 
R

Ravenbourne

Guest
spot on, nice work, lets hope it has some effect
 
F

firebirth

Guest
What do u think of hold a petition here on BW svart, with personal letters and a petition from European servers Mythic will have to take notice.

Not sure whether this breaks the CoC on this forum or not though ?
 
V

Vrisslar

Guest
Very nice letter m8, hope mythic can and will do something about GoA

Regards
Vriss
 
S

svartmetall

Guest
Originally posted by firebirth
What do u think of hold a petition here on BW svart, with personal letters and a petition from European servers Mythic will have to take notice.

Not sure whether this breaks the CoC on this forum or not though ?

Petitions are a good idea, although the way they would make the greatest impact is to be signed in person...i.e the letter would have to be sent round through every single person who wanted to sign it. Which would take 1,000 years...
 
H

horank@thebaron

Guest
svart nice work.
and 100% agree whit you
 
A

-ag-bometal

Guest
If the current player DB doesnt fade away it is fine by me...

Would be verry painfull to see all your chars thrown away tbh :p
 
S

syri

Guest
nicely put there :)
this is the action we need, not all the ranting and swearing, just a plain statement that this situation cannot be allowed to continue
 
O

old.Emma

Guest
If anyone wants to write a letter to GoA themselfs or even pay them a visit (with a baseball bat), here`s there address.

GOA 48, rue Camille Desmoulins 92130 Issy les Moulineaux cedex 9
 
O

old_saxo

Guest
Very very great letter , written from my own mind it seems. I wish it it all luck to change somthing in GoA's wood office :[
 
S

Stormm

Guest
well written, as you say hard copy will have much more effect - emails will be treated as spam i expect

btw Mythic HQ address:

4035 Ridge Top Road
8th Floor
Fairfax
VA 22030
 
H

Hatt

Guest
You forgot the most important.. GOA staff likes to eat snails
 
M

Moom

Guest
I really hope this has some sort of effect too, but tbh i can't see them caring really, aslong as we still pay our money, they don't care what happens. Imo the only way to make an impact would be to boycott the game and not pay for a subscription until something is sorted out in GOA. Obviously this would be hard to do and would probably never happen but it's something to think about if things get any worse :(
 
T

the_hermit

Guest
Letter to Mythic, check.
Letter to GOA, check.
RightNow complain made, check.

:D

Of course, this could go the other way. Mythic decide it's more hassle than it's worth, tell GOA to get lost, and THEN look around for someone new to take over, leaving us without DAOC for aaaaages.

I even washed up today :(
 
F

firebirth

Guest
Apparently in Everquest alot of players (and i mean alot) didnt like the changes made to the Warrior class and threaterned to spam the chat channels until SOE did somethnig to rebalance the class.



....SOE are currently reworking the combat system in Everquest... so it is possible to effect change, maybe we should try to crash the servers on purpose by piling into one zone and crashing the server until we see somethnig done.
 
T

the_hermit

Guest
Originally posted by firebirth
maybe we should try to crash the servers on purpose by piling into one zone and crashing the server until we see somethnig done.

You'd get banned, plain and simple and have even more DAoC Downtime... Tilda realised this earlier in his "Let's crash Broc" post and after it was pointed out, he edited it.

We cant even threaten spamming the official chat - we don't have one! We'd spam rightnow and it would crash (like today) and I am sure the mods at BW/FH would just tell you to FO...
 
F

finbahr

Guest
mythic>goa

i myself have contacted mythic over the terrible service we are recievibg at the moment....


waiting for a nice reply : pray :
 
O

old.Odysseus

Guest
Very good letter, very well worded.

However, GOA already made a bundle on its playerbase, and I sincerely doubt Mythic would do anything in response to whatever letter the european playerbase would send them.

There is but one solution:
Walk away, play another game.

(However that is unrealistic i guess, seing that most players are hopelessly addicted to the game). [The word addicted is meant to be taken literally].
 
W

WardyWonderland

Guest
Originally posted by the_hermit

Of course, this could go the other way. Mythic decide it's more hassle than it's worth, tell GOA to get lost, and THEN look around for someone new to take over, leaving us without DAOC for aaaaages.

I

Tbh i cannot see Mythic just stoping GOA overnight. You can be almost certain that they have some kind of contract and unless there is a clause in that that says if x amount of peoplr complain the contract is void then Mythic will have untill the end of then to find someone new. This though will mean that things will get worse before they get better. If mythic turn round to GOA and say we are not gonna renew your licence then GOA are gonna care even less. The ideal solution for me would be for Mythic themselves to take over the running of the english servers. This would then mean that we would get the support of The Cam Herald which compared to cam-europe is in a complete differnt league, plus we would also get patches the same time.

The only problem that i could forsee in this idea is that Mythic might be put off buy the VAT issues. Imagine a world where you are told when a server goes down...

1. Why it went down
2. When it is likely to be up again
3. What they are doing to stop it happing again
4. Being told all this the same day it happens not a few weeks later.
 
T

the_hermit

Guest
while we're dreaming, when i win the lottery i would a very nice car :D

not sure that mythic taking over would be much of a problem though - lots of UK servers play on the US servers - just gotta pay a dollar amount instead of pounds. would probably shoot the people that use Switch/Solo in the foot, but hey :D

Of course - would Mythic WANT to take over the Euro servers? They'd have to employ French-speaking people to do all the translations, deal with complaints and customer service.......:confused:
 
W

WardyWonderland

Guest
Originally posted by the_hermit

Of course - would Mythic WANT to take over the Euro servers? They'd have to employ French-speaking people to do all the translations, deal with complaints and customer service.......:confused:

Im only talking about them taking over the english servers, lets face it the french and to a certain degree german servers do not have 1/2 the trouble we do. Also Mythic could easily use a company that was able to accept payment by switch / solo the same as GOA do.
 
T

the_hermit

Guest
Lucky rabbits foot being rubbed matey :D Would be nice to even get a written apology from Mythic to be told they are looking at the situation or some such...
 
O

old.Emma

Guest
Originally posted by the_hermit
You'd get banned, plain and simple and have even more DAoC Downtime... Tilda realised this earlier in his "Let's crash Broc" post and after it was pointed out, he edited it.

We cant even threaten spamming the official chat - we don't have one! We'd spam rightnow and it would crash (like today) and I am sure the mods at BW/FH would just tell you to FO...

but if everyone from excal went on Broc and it crashed.

you think GoA would ban everyone.. thats like £250,000 a year income ;p
 
C

chosen

Guest
well written svartmetall agree with you 100% let's hope this letter change something :)
 
U

ukm_thorgrim

Guest
as of 21:00 04.01.04

my account will effectively stop on the 18:01.04

not gonna pay a single penny more been on the phone to goa only to be TOLD " Sorry dont Speak English" in some very stupid French voice.

Been good while its lasted But Fuck the french & Goa. they are crap and iam paying no more money for Shit Cust service & wasting my Money ..... Any reading this from Mythic OR Goa..


Thanks for the NONE Cust Service.. ikf gave the Amount ofService you give i would be Signing the Dotted Line every two weeks .....


Ade Collins Cust Service-IT Manager ( for a Tele Coms/internet Company in the UK )
 
Z

zoolis

Guest
Nice letter Svartmetall, hope Mythic will read it and understand the problem here in europe...
 
M

Mirhen Morkir

Guest
Bah, let GOA keep the French/German servers, the UK servers though should be taken over by Mythic.
 

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