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Turbine Responds To DDO Community Protest
Zarrot writes "Turbine has listened to the community and backed away from the partnership with SuperRewards that we discussed yesterday. Quoting: 'Based on your feedback, we're stepping away from the "Offer" category for now. We'll keep exploring alternate ways for players who want points to get them. We'll also continue to innovate in pricing and accessibility because that's who we are. As of today, the Offer Wall is coming down. We'll collect all the feedback we've received over the last few days and will use it to guide future decisions.'"
Thank-you Turbine, for bringing down the Wall so quickly in response to customer concerns, and for apologizing to DDO players. That helps immensely.
Apologies are few and far between these days, and it is refreshing whenever a corporation actually says they are sorry.
I enjoy playing DDO, and I hope that the apology will help mitigate the harm to the game caused by this incident, and I also hope that the game population will continue to grow.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
I'm curious what makes this company different or the protest different from other instances of the same wholesale of userbase information to any bidder. Is Facebook going to respond like this to user protests when they sell off their user information? Google? Is there anything we can learn form this circumstance that will allow a userbase to better deal with mischevious company practices?
FTFT:
A programmer is a machine for turning pizza into code.
Quit thinking you deserve one.
Oops. Looks like you forgot to check the anonymous coward box before submitting.
You are not a google customer just because you use their search or gmail. The advertisers are their customers. YOU are their product. They don't sell search, they sell eyeballs.
The same dynamics apply. If Google pisses off its "Product" base, and everyone goes over to Bing, Google will make less money because advertisers won't pay them as much.
What if he felt he didn't need to check it. The company decided to do something, the public didn't like it, so they changed it. For a free game. I repeat that. For a free game. Anyway, I'm glad they apologized, but you can't always think someone who doesn't go along with group think is a troll.
Yay, I have a sig.
Apology Accepted. I really did need to clear off a little space on my hard drive, but I'll probably reinstall DDO eventually.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Or, more accurately, if Google started serving up ad links to similar scam sites, people would start fleeing Google, too.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Learn to read then. From the DDO site, emphasis added:
Sure, I would have phrased it differently, but you can bet that the corporate drone who approved this debacle in the first place died a little inside even thinking about those words.
While not a perfect apology, it is good enough for me.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Search is promised for this year. Finally. There have been bug fixes with the monthly updates - mass heal was just fixed last week.
They appear to be trying and making progress. I would expect to see more this year, since the extra revenue from going Free to Play has only started to appear in the past 6 months, and it takes time to ramp up development.
Ideally, Turbine's goal should be to extract as much money from premium players like me as they obtain from VIPs. There are two ways to do this, but only one keeps me in the game.
So far, the Turbine store contains mostly perks that are not necessary to enjoy the game. If that changes, and I need to spend real-life money to buy items to play the game, I'm gone. However, if they release compelling new content like the best of the existing packs (Desert, etc), I'll keep spending.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
I think it was pretty fast, and an appropriate response. The wall came down. They said the words "we apologize".
I hope they don't make the same mistake twice, or allow any other major goof-ups like this to take place. I want to keep playing this game for a long time to come, and more mistakes like that could be fatal to the game.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
While DDO has some truly sad longstanding bugs, I've been very impressed that they occasionally fix some of them! It seems normal tha once the userbase gets used to any bug in an MMO, no matter how silly, the company stops caring about it. Turbine is at least making slow progress.
And IMO they've done an awesome job in their freemium model. I've played a variety of "free" Korean-style MMOs, and comparitively Turbine does a great job at putting items in the store that are very attractive, yet don't make you feel like you're getting screwed if you don't buy them. The guest passes for the pay-to-play content were a great idea. The "pay to rescue a failed quest" items mostly don't work in a raid, which again was well judged.
I end up giving Turbine most of my gaming budget, yet in months when I buy a couple games off Steam instead I never feel like I'm getting "less game", or that I need to buy something to progress or to enjoy the game, beyond the requirement to buy at least some of the high-end content or subscribe once you've been playing for a while. And I love the fact that if I've got a good group going and we want to hit some pay-to-play area that one guy doesn't have, any of us can cough up 50 cents (or so) to bring him along.
I'm glad they backed off from this recent madness - don't ruin a good thing Turbine!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
free game has nothing to do with it. Why do people focus on shit like that? It shows a lack of understanding of what they do.
Even a game which is for free, still has things which can be paid for. Also, all of that requires a userbase and/or customers. Screw those customers, and well, there goes your money too.
Simply, you don't understand the situation. They put a link to malware and scams on their site, and encouraged their customers to go there. They sent your user ID and email address of everybody who even looked at it to the scammers, even if the user accepted no offer.
If you have pre-cache turned on, your email and userid was sent even if you never left their site.
Actually using any of the offers, if you were so foolish, would result in malware installations.
You have to question either the competence or the ethics of any company that thought that was a good idea. I'm more prone to question their competence, in this case.
I love how he didn't reply to this. Somehow people think this is somehow more "ok" with a free game, even though it's blatantly unethical in any form.