Faith and Trust

I didn’t quite like my previous post. Or rather, it stank of meandering around trying to rationalize why I would prefer one Skinner box over another.

Being all the time bitter just doesn’t work though. One wouldn’t ever have any fun. You’d sit around being critical of everything, griping that the glass is always half-empty, sorta like this Singaporean food blog I ran across – I read for around 10 pages, thinking to myself, “Geez, people, have you ever run into anything you DO like?” Western, Eastern, expensive, cheap, you name it, they didn’t like it. I sorta gathered from reading in between the lines that they liked Coffee Bean cheesecakes and had a good time at one pizza place but that was about it.

Watching the latest Eve Online news unleash from a distance (Eve Online’s Struggle and CCP’s redemption, the Day Eve Online Died)  suggested one of the root causes.

If a player leaves angry, if a player leaves with lost trust and shattered faith in the developers, it becomes a lot more unlikely that he is ever going to be mollified enough to come back.

SWG’s NGE, COH’s ED, WoW’s RealID are among a couple of the acronyms for events that shook a game’s playerbase enough to have some kind of impact.

There was an unspoken promise implicit in Eve’s subscription model and PLEX trade, that players were happy to pay for multiple accounts subscribed each month in order to play the game, etc. But trust was shattered when a (no-doubt) desirable monocle was cheerfully priced at the cost of 5 account subscriptions. Further rubbing CCP’s nose in deep doo-doo was the leakage of internal memos that suggested players were not respected as customers, and that their indignant reactions were hand-waved away as totally predictable, no need to worry about them.

To me, this has rather uncomfortable echoes with what happened to me personally with the Incarnate trials. I’d always sung the praises of COH as non-holy trinity reliant, and celebrating options and customisation as features, respecting the choice of the customer to play the way they want. To see the direction of the game swerve in such a 180 degree roundabout manner to becoming similar in style to traditional MMOs, well, it wouldn’t have been that bad had there been some respect for how customers may want to play. Except most of the vocal players’ concerns were hand-waved away.

(to be cont later)