Even if the players who were assaulted with patching problems or lag or anything else get into your game and have a good time, they're not going to focus on that good time. They're going to focus on the problems, and all of the good will you tried to generate was for naught.
Service! It's a service!
MMOs are a service, not a boxed product. This is a line we repeat very often in the industry, yet I don't think we know what it means. Part of offering a service is offering a stable, reliable system. This is where Cryptic has been failing recently, in my opinion, as much of the criticism leveled at Blood Moon was not for the update (which has been getting great feedback. The criticism is for the stability of the service.
This means double checking, triple checking, and quadruple checking your stuff before you put it out there. And this isn't just Cryptic I'm talking about. I'm talking about Funcom, NCsoft, and pretty much every other company out there. Stop trying to tell us that you "didn't expect the response" when you deliberately set up your events to attract a significant response. It's not that you didn't expect it, it's the fact that you didn't want to pay for it.And who would, right? Why spend all of that extra money for a response you may not even get?
It pays to be paranoid. When people come in and experience a game that installs smoothly, patches smoothly, runs smoothly, and offers no resistance, they'll be in a better mood to receive your game and grade it on the gameplay and not on how you conduct your servers. They may not thank you for it out loud, but they certainly won't start screaming on the forums and start causing havoc.
I'll say it again -- Champions Online isn't a bad game and the Blood Moon weekend wasn't a complete disaster. But I can say that line until the cows come home and it won't do any good. The damage is done, negative opinions have been formed, and what could have been a great opportunity to pick up subscriptions has turned into a PR backlash.
It pays to be paranoid.
Seraphina Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased who is always paranoid -- always. When she's not writing here for Massively, she's rambling on her personal blog, The Experience Curve. If you want to message her, send her an e-mail at seraphina AT massively DOT com. You can also follow her on Twitter through Massively, or through her personal feed, @sera_brennan.
