MMO Gaming

I had a long weekend this week. Like many, because of Thanksgiving being a Thursday I took today off as well. I planned on getting some time into Tabula Rasa with my days off since I haven’t had much time to devote to it outside of a few hours on the weekend.

Well, as it turns out, that is proving to be impossible. I can load up Tabula Rasa just fine, but, after I click login (after supplying my username and password) the game just freezes. Not normal game freezing so I have to shut it down, it actually completely stops my computer from doing anything so I have to manually power off.

That is frustrating. That being the case I don’t really have anything in particular to continue with the next chapter on so I figured I’d take a moment and look at some of the “Feedback Friday” notes from the past few weeks. And by “look at” I mean “make fun of.”

We’ll start with a few weeks ago, so we can see the progression.

If you look back to November 9 we see a fairly healthy bit of feedback on some simple questions. Not mind-blowing, but it answers some basic questions players may have. While a little lacking in “stuff I give a crap about” I won’t hold that against them and just move on, because there is so much other stuff to make fun of them for.

On to the week of November 16 we find some actual somewhat useful information. Of particular interest:

Q. Regarding Ethical Parables, do the decisions I make now affect me later in game?
A. There is a branch at the end of the game. The choice you make determines which part of the story you are exposed to for a long series of missions. What those missions are, and what the branch is, I will leave to the player to find out….

That about covers the highlights from that week. Now, is it just me, or are these the most soft, cushy questions a person could answer? Is this really all the more people are asking about? Maybe I should be sending in some questions of my own and see if they get answered.

The hardest question out of all those to answer was the one about PlayNC Support and how long a response should take. Which, of course, could have been easily answered with a “when we get around to it you idiotic little dipshit” but I understand their take on it too. (As an aside I have never had a problem, in any game, including TR, getting a response from PlayNC support, they are one of the best in terms of customer service responses.)

And finally we’ll move on to November 21, which is, obviously, not a real Friday, but like so many others they are probably taking a long weekend, and I won’t fault them for that. I will fault them for the complete lack of anything remotely interesting though. It is as if each progressive week becomes more and more lame.

Take the questions from the Feedback Form that were answered:

Q. What is up with the PvP Ranks? My clan is listed twice!

A. There is a known issue with several clans duplicating or updating incorrectly on the PvP Stats Page. We hope to have this resolved soon.

Q. Is there an option to copy characters from Live to (Public Test Server) PTS?

A. This is a feature that we would like to have the future. For the time being we are rotating the PTS seeding with database copies from the live servers. The name of the server that was copied onto PTS will be listed on the PTS Patch Notes.

Q. How do I contact the Development Team directly with my comments, suggestions, and PTS testing results?

A. Submit your comments, suggestions, and testing results using our Feedback Form. If you locate a bug during your testing, please use the /bug command and describe your issue in the pop-up menu.

Am I the only one who thinks these are not important enough to be told to us in a Community News posting that happens each week that should be more focused on getting feedback about the actual game. Those are the types of questions that could be answered privately in an e-mail to a person, or, better yet, set up in an FAQ page somewhere, but don’t waste space telling me all about non-game related issues, I don’t care what Jackass A, B, or C is having problems with I want to know about the game.

I’ll assume it was because of the short week that this week is so…how can I put this in a way that is only mildly insulting…”meh” but if this trend continues as one of the only real forms of community outreach well, I will be sorely disappointed.

(Note: To those of you who want to bring out that before those questions was some info on the Military Surplus, etc. yes, that is true, but basically all that info was already shown in the Public Test patch notes so I am wholly unimpressed by the blatant double-dipping.)

tabula rasa, ncsoft, plaync, destination games, customer service, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming