May 19, 2004

A little more on the EQ/Mac debacle

Now that the news about SOE freezing maintenance of the Mac EverQuest servers for eight months without making an official announcement has appeared on Slashdot, I've been doing a little more digging around in the user forums at eqmac.com and SOE's support board and discovered a few interesting tidbits in addition to what's already been reported here and elsewhere.

  • Unless I'm missing something really important, even SOE customer service representatives were unaware of this policy, continuing to assure players in the official forums that reported problems and bugs were being looked into when the decision had long before been taken to close down further development.
  • Posts on the official message boards complaining about the reported freeze are reported to have been routinely deleted by SOE.
  • As far as I can tell, there has still been no official announcement of the maintenance freeze. This needs to be emphasised - the only official, SOE-published announcements have been a couple of vague things about server status, and the EQ for Mac web pages make no mention of the fact that they're still selling a game which effectively has no support beyond the most basic.
  • There are zones which are simply not accessible to Mac users even though they should be, namely the Planes of Power zones above Tier 1.

It's obvious that many players who are still playing the game don't want to give up and don't want it to go away, so the worst thing SOE could do right now is to close down the server. That would probably make things worse rather than better from a PR point of view. What they could do to make things substantially better would be to demonstrate concern for their customers and for their public image by hiring a couple of people to fix these bugs. It would only be fair, really.

In the interest of fairness and full disclosure I'd be happy to post any rebuttals that anyone able to speak in an official capacity on SOE's behalf can provide, as I'm still happy to accept that there's just a terrible mistake somewhere and the explanation's perfectly simple. Please don't hesitate to mail me if you can help with this, or if you have any other interesting bits of information about this story.

Posted by mpk at May 19, 2004 11:45 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I don't see how SOE can really salvage this situation. I will continue to play EQ/Mac for a while, but mostly because they already have my money through September and I don't really have any other MMORPG options right now. But many of my in-game friends are already making plans to bolt as soon as WoW becomes available, if they haven't already abandoned the game.

The only thing that keeps many people still playing, I think, is that they can't get their money back for subscriptions (I renewed myself for six months shortly after an announcement that problems were being reviewed and fixes worked on).

It is also true that lower level content is certainly still available -- this is clearly a situation most frustrating for high-end players. For myself and others, we can continue to enjoy some aspects of the game, most particularly the cameraderie, for the time being.

I tend to believe that the fact that this information was "leaked" at this time and in this way is simply a precursor for pulling the plug on the Mac server altogether. SOE clearly has no interest in being open and forthright in its communications to its customers. By letting this information out in this way, they have stimulated at least a minor exodus, which will justify pulling the plug once and for all.

Posted by: Bukk at May 20, 2004 12:54 AM

Of all th'underhanded...

Do corporations get away with this EVERY DAY? Or is this simply as exceptionally evil as it appears? What a sociopathic corporation! It ought to be dismantled in the public interest purely on principle.

>:|

Posted by: Snee at May 20, 2004 3:29 PM
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