Feldon UPDATE: We have renamed this article, as there has been conciliatory action taken on this issue.
So if you read our article today about EQ2 customers who have had more than 7 characters on their EQ2 accounts who woke up to found that additional “hidden” characters are inaccessible, you probably have little sympathy for these players.
However, this is a customer-oriented business, and given such a situation, advanced warning so players can “get their house in order” is always the recommended course of action. Handled properly, some players would upgrade to Station Access again (maybe for a month or two to sort things out), most players would shuffle things around and delete characters to come “into compliance”, and a small handful of players would ragequit.
However SOE is trying something different it seems. Tough love? Too bad, so sad? We’re not clear. But here’s your answer ladies and gentlemen…
Posted on the EQ2 Forums by Rothgar:
I apologize that this change didn’t make it into the update notes. It was not our intention to try to hide it. Obviously this would have been discovered within about 5 minutes of the update hitting live servers. We’ve already had the internal discussion of making sure that our changes are hitting the update notes to try to keep this type of thing from happening again in the future. Every update there are things that we miss in the update notes and we know we need to improve that.
We’ve known about this issue for as long as its been in the game and it was always something we saw as needing to be fixed. We never considered it a bannable exploit, but it was definitely something that was not intended. With the addition of the Extended service, we wanted to limit character slots for free accounts to provide another reason to encourage people to subscribe. This bug would have had a bigger impact in that environment, so it became a priority to fix it.
Unfortunately we have no plans to undo this fix as it was definitely something that should have been fixed a long time ago. The fact that you’ve been able to make use of those additional slots for so long shouldn’t take away from the fact that it was a bug.
It may be little consolation, but we’ve resurrected the discussion of selling additional character slots to give you more options. There have always been some hurdles with this which is why you haven’t already seen it. As soon as we have more information on this topic, we’ll let you know.
Again, I hope you’ll accept our apology for not giving more warning on this change.
Greg “Rothgar” Spence is one of the most motivated, determined, just plain awesome developers I’ve ever had the pleasure to talk to. He genuinely cares about customer experience and how changes are perceived by the players. So it is gut-wrenching to watch him be forced to implement more and more customer-hostile changes such as this one. I know I would personally be at the end of my rope at this point. Folks, the job market cannot bounce back fast enough!
I too think Rothgar is one of the best devs and I can only hope that he finds a more welcoming job at a competing MMO very soon.
It would be wise of them to sell the extra 5 slots a la carte like they used to do before they lumped everything into station access. I always found station access pointless, but an extra $2 a month for more slots was something I strongly considered, and think could net them a lot of money now.
I think Rothgar is awesome, probably one of the best devs they have imo, it’s sad that he’s forced to implement things in the way he’s having to do it. If they knew about this bug for so long someone should have said something “hey guys, we know about that bug and are going to fix it, so you may not want to do it”. Even if it was awhile ago, it would at least have been some warning. Surprise and ninja updates aren’t any fun for anyone, us or the developers.
I don’t see anything wrong with fixing the bug, but they should have
A) Warned in advance they were going to do so.
B) Created some new way to sell 5 extra slots for other players.
SOE have this reputation right now for trying hard to make more money, but they seem to be missing out on selling customers things they want, extra character slots is one.
Its in their interest though to get as many people on station access as possible since it gets them into other games when they get bored. So I’d see the 5 slot extra option being best for a long term sub pitched between the station 12 month sub and 12 months of station access.
Right now they’re missing out on a good money earner, and ironically its actually a money earner that players are asking for!
Rothgar is does care, he spent an hour with us on Butcherblock one night while we were raiding collecting data on lag situations so he could implement a fix.
I posted about this in the prior post you made, about how normally I wouldn’t have cared, but since I happened to (bad luck!) have logged in to all 12 of my toons they day prior to the GU and logged in to my least played characters last that now I was stuck with not having access to my mains nor my most-played alts.
In reading the forums and how they can’t change which toons “show” anymore, and since I’m not really playing much anymore anyway, that was enough for me to cancel my account. In the exit survey, I clearly stated that the lack of notice to allow me to put my ducks in a row was the reason for my cancellation.
I’ve skimmed over the post above this where they may find a way for us to select our “showing” characters after the fact, and if they do, I’ll consider coming back, but probably not right away.