EA discovers yet more ways to screw their customers
How to screw over your own customers in one simple step:
The Spore DRM debacle is a mess EA has created for itself.
Do not fuck over your paying customers. Especially do not fuck over your customers under the excuse that you're trying to stop piracy. You're not punishing the pirates, you're just giving piracy a wider margin by reducing your legit players.
As if we needed any more reasons to dislike EA. Sheesh. Do they not realize this actually affects player spending habits? There are several people in my guild where WAR was the first EA product they've begrudgingly bought in years. And they did so only after Mythic took the EA out of EA-Mythic.
There are piles of game boxes on my shelf and notably the majority are not EA games.
If there was any question over whether they might abuse their DRM-schemes, it's now been answered. You don't ban players from your game over their legit questions and complaints on your forums. You just don't. Especially when their complaints are specifically that you're holding too much power over a product they've purchased. /facepalm.
This kind of heavy-handed nonsense towards their customers has serious impact on their sales and brandname identity, don't they get that?
Dumbasses.
Spore had the potential to go huge and instead it's just gone big. It's no slouch, but with its pedigree, EA could be raking in a lot more dough. Shareholders, take note, because ultimately CEO John Riccitiello is responsible, hold him to it. Errors like this significantly reduce potential, plus the fodder he's handed the pirates: It's achieved the exact opposite of what EA was going for.
If anyone is wondering why the games industry isn't as bulletproof in the economy as it should be, it's nonsense like this. Consumers don't need another excuse NOT to buy a product right now.
Oh yeah, this post adds to my negative-parental filters I'm sure. =)
Ban them all
It looks like Mythic is staying on top of the gold farmers, or at least the gold spammers. Last night I received my 2nd in-game spam despite being 'hidden' in the options. Less than a minute later this noticed popped up:
Checking Marc Jacobs' (Mythic's top honcho) blog I see he's brought this up:
We don’t wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message.
Glad to see they're working on the problem. Although, to play devil's advocate I'm a bit concerned that WAR's game design and economy is even more susceptible to gold selling abuse than WoW is. =/
My deepest concern with gold sellers is what comes later with the hijacking of real player accounts via keyloggers, credit card and other related identity theft. Stopping that onslaught will take a lot more than just banning some accounts, in fact they may ban legit users who've had their accounts unknowingly piggybacked. While it's really nice to see Mythic taking a pro-active approach here, I'm worried they're being a bit naive at just how much these cockroaches dig in.
