Forums are for QQ: Aftermath of v6

I am pretty much busy with finals and projects until mid next week... so I probably won't have time to really write anything long and meaningful like I have planned. I still do check up on the forums whenever I'm taking a break though. :D

The forums are a mess and I'm tired of going in there and trying to sort things out. I'm in no way affiliated to Gala-net, so any of my "defending" posts I make on the forums are my own thinking. I criticize when it needs to be done, but I defend when too many people are being unreasonable.. which, right now, too many people are. (I have been called a "suck up to the GMs" on the forums now, that's pretty cute - ad hominem attacks are always nice) Sometimes I wonder if I'm digging myself into a hole acting like this... I have been more or less rejected by the 2 big empire guilds on Tensess - but I'm going to wave that around like a trophy.

Quite frankly I am sick of how entitled a lot of people think they are. They are playing a *free* to play game, with the bought items not having a timer until you activate it... or some items like bags will stay with your character forever. Now if it was a subscription-based model, and the servers were crashing and glitchy for several days - I would probably join the masses of unhappy people.. because you know, you're actually wasting money the more days you go without playing. But this isn't the case with Allods. Why do people feel like not playing a game for 1 day is the end of the world? Some people should probably step away from their computers for awhile...

People who waste their items when they are fully aware of all the glitches only have themselves to blame. :P I will stand by this til the end of time, for whatever game I play. If it's broken, and you know its broken, don't try to use it like it's not broken! I can't tell if its because people are just dumb or if they are actually fishing for a way to complain more.

The immaturity is really high too. Is this because it is a free2play game? Aka more youngsters complaining because they don't need mom/dad's credit card to play? Or are they adults in disguise? With how long I've been on the internet, I could probably tell you it's both.

This isn't to say Gala-NET is free of blame. Because they retain so much information from the players, they really aren't helping the situation at all. While the forums exploded, I really couldn't help but wonder "where the heck are all the GMs?!" I think a lot of people still underestimate how important it is to keep things like that under check. Sure it might just be a lot of "chatter" as Chomp puts it, but that's not the point. The point is that the forums are one of the very few sources of information this game has, which means you'll probably have a lot of people reading them even if they aren't posting... who then can spread misinformation by word of mouth. I think anyone who has ever read anything about social media/marketing distribution will understand how devastating it can be if spread information is mostly negative.

I see that they made ingame announcements, and keep their facebook somewhat updated, but it's still no reason to ignore the forums. Actually I shouldn't say "ignore" because a lot of threads were locked and deleted... which raises even my own eyebrows. A few of the deleted/locked threads really weren't that bad, and it seems like some of the astral scholars are a bit delete-happy. I'm really not a big fan of deleting threads, because it usually shows one thing: that the company is afraid and/or can exercise their power. Now, obvious trolling threads should go out the window as fast as possible, but even negative threads can be turned around.

Typical GM responses have nothing to do with the patch, it's the generic "please be constructive" which really isn't what the majority of us want to hear. We just want to know is this intended or not? The worst thing to feel as a player is being ignored... which is what a lot of people probably feel (even if its not true). Allods doesn't have the convenience of running a PTR like WoW does, so this is probably the least they can do.

Basically, they need to think ahead and place damage-control measures before releasing something this glitchy. Even if its just 1 discussion thread where everyone posts the bugs they come across or 1 announcement that says "we're aware of these issues (include small list), and the ETA is....". It's really not up to the community to do these things for the game - everyone is pretty much left in the dark right now... I had to personally tweet at Chomp a few times to get some information to pass along to the forums about warden renew.

Now, I don't normally play F2P games because to me the customer support and development support has always felt sub-par, so my expectations from a F2P game are very very low. Not really sure what its like with other F2P games so... anyone can comment on their experiences with issues like this.