5 replies to this topic

[Zanathan]

Firstly I would like to congratulate you on hitting your internal milestone for launch. I know it takes a lot of work to stablise your environments and applications and have the backend capacity and redundancy to fulfill player demands and growth which most of the time are not evident to the end customer. Good work on getting to this milestone!

However I would like to offer some advice when it comes to making public announcements regarding your product (or any product for that matter). If you are going to make public announcements it needs to be about the customer and not an internal goal or at the very least highly visible to the end customer otherwise to them it is perceived as nothing more then smoke and mirrors. Obviously if you deem it necessary to make it a public statement then back it up with promotions that you can easily create to again make it customer centric. I won't go into what type of promotions you can do as there have been a number of good suggestions already (e.g. MC sale, all mech sale, invite a friend and get items/C-Bills/MC, etc) but you need something that makes the players feel like it's about them and entice them to spend money AND promote it via word of mouth.

Finally please do not continue stringing your previous players along with silence on important features or insubstantial replies such as coming soon. You will gain more respect, even if it is grudgingly, if you were just upfront with your customers. Remember, it's about the customer, I am sure you wouldn't want to be strung along nor do they! So if features such as CW, more game modes, etc are 6 months away, then please say so. I for one would be happy to know not to hold my breathe in the immediate term while you are working on these features. I was expecting major changes in Aug and then Sept and then Launch. I am now at a point where I don't want to be lead on anymore and hope we have clear and open communications moving forward. Perhaps the thinking is I am just one customer, even if I leave, there will be others but a successful business model that sustains any company is retaining existing customers as well as gaining new ones. Just food for thought.

In closing, I hope PGI takes this to heart and I wish them the best in their endevours.

[Jin Ma]

good points well written

treating the customer well is pretty vital in a F2P game

Edited by Jin Ma, 17 September 2013 - 05:33 PM.

[Deathsani]

This is exactly the right way to express disappointment, thank you for your civility.

[Zanathan]

Thanks. I just hope PGI listen.

[Major Letdown]

the 80/20 rule of business is that 80% of your business revenue comes from 20% of your LOYAL customer base. However, the way PGI has been doing business lately, is they have been upsetting their loyal 20% customer base. Bad business decision, that could cost them HUGE amounts of revenue if not corrected. Maybe they are unaware of general good business practices, so hopefully they will listen when the money level begins to drop. I am in total agreement with the OP, and I really want the game to succeed, but there will have to be a little more transparency on their end to get me to stay very much longer. See you all in Star Citizen...

[Rattazustra]

Anyone still LOYAL to this company needs his head examined.
Up till now they have been lying through their teeth more than Comical Ali did during the battle of Bagdad.

The progress this game has made over the course of months is lousy. Whole better games were made in the same time it took PGI to add 3 new meshes to the game and tweak a few weapons. Also the roar and thunder with which they announce new mechs is ridiculous. Those are no big deal in a game development sense. The models are not complex, the animations are exceptionally simple and they are all robots with nothing but the most basic non-distortive joints. Modelling and animating those is 3D artists child's play. Been there, seen that, made the movie.

By now they should habe ten times the mechs they have and if they had any idea what game balancing really means and how it is done, they'd have had everything balanced into detail tweaking stage months ago. But the problem is that they simply don't know what they are doing.

If you are stumbling in the dark, even sparks look like searchlights.