WoW has been down since I got home. So much for my relaxing break from the real world by sending my blue friend out to harass gnolls.
This is one of the more irritation aspects of MMORPGs. When there is some issue with their servers, you are without the game.
If you play many games, this is no big deal. But if you are trying to focus all your efforts on a single game to achieve some goal, well. . .
In the past, this sort of issue would elicit the bare minimums of information. That was when there were very few online games, and only a couple were MMORPGs. But tames are a changing.
People jump ship on a MMORPG for many reasons. Not challenging enough, too challenging, wrong genera and many more. A big one is poor customer service.
In a day and age when people regularly perceive poor customer service, they really don't want it in their play time.
Not all forms of being frustrated by an apparent inappropriate response truly are poor customer service. The customer is NOT always right, but the customer is rarely wrong. And when the issue is not being able to play the game that they pay for, and it is an unscheduled outage, then there is a real issue.
So how do companies address this?
Remember that today is the day of low margins. Sometimes the only way to increase profits is to cut costs. And one big cost is support.
More automated systems is one tool.
Another is using different information channels, like the message boards.
Are these devices where the need to be? I do not think so.
Issues are generally a bit slow in being reported. The level of information is generally low.
Do they know every facet of a problem when they see it? Of course not.
On the other hand, the server I play on in WoW would not let me on, and it was NOT in the list that Blizzard released.
Are things better?
Yes.
Do they need to get even better still?
Certainly.
Konrad
