A Plea to Goblinworks

[Mogloth]

I have one plea for GW while they make and run Pathfinder Online.

Do not treat the customers as if we are stupid, and do not act like we are nothing.

Let me clarify what I mean by this. I AM NOT insinuating you all have done this. At all. Ryan Dancey has been nothing but forthright and transparent. I look forward to the blog posts and his posts on the forum threads.

I come from LOTRO and most recently SWTOR. For the past few months I have been watching WB and Turbine destroy everything Turbine created with LOTRO. When they went free to play with LOTRO, they had a policy and a promise that they would never sell gear in the store that had actual stats on it.

Well, earlier this week, guess what hit the store? That's right, gear with stats. Any official response from the devs of Turbine has treated the customers like trash. They claim they are responding to a call for more gear options at lower levels. No one can ever remember seeing a forum thread calling for such things.

Also, by providing statted gear in the store they are destroying any niche for crafters.

The guy who runs Turbine, Fernando Paiz, said in his keynote speech to PAX East that you can push the customers past their comfort limit and they still will not leave the game. At this point he is saying you can poop on your players, so go for it.

So, why am I creating a thread in the PFO forums that is essentially blasting LOTRO? I do this because I am a founder/lifetimer there. I dropped a nice chunk of change on the game in the HOPE that it would sustain my interest for at least a couple of years.

It did. And now I no longer recognize the game I loved. So, to GW I say this: Remember we are customers, not dollar signs. By this I mean, when PFO comes out, treat us with respect. If you do that and provide us with a fantastic world then our word of mouth will do more for you than you can get by nickle and diming us to death.

I can no longer recommend LOTRO to anyone. I would love to be able to always talk up PFO to people.

Again, GW seems to be doing a good job right now. Keep it up.

ps - I hope my thoughts come through here. I am not trashing GW.

[Ryan Dancey]

I'm not here to defend or attack Turbine and/or LOTRO, but I will say that the error made was to promise anything of the sort in the first place. Making absolute statements about businesses that must continuously evolve is just dumb.

I wish there was a way for a business to tell its fans it had decided to change a formerly stated position without some folks then branding them "liars", which sucks especially if the people who made the original promise are not even working on the project anymore.

So in summary I'll just say that we're going to try to avoid making absolute statements and that its not only possible, it's a virtual certainty that some of the things we promise to do or not do will be reversed at some point. Not because we're liars, or stupid, or disrespectful, but just because it's the right decision to make when the time comes to make it.

RyanD

[Daniel Powell 318]

I'm going to counter your lack of progress with a paraphrased comment made by part of the SWG team: "The mistake we made was thinking that and radical change was possible after initial release. It wasn't about whether the game was better or worse after the changes, because it wasn't the game that subscribers were paying to play."

I won't ask for promises, nor hold you to promises that were made in conditions significantly different from the conditions in which they are broken. Look out for your business by making customers turn into repeat customers and keeping them in that state.