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.
"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.