Can we have more clarification please on member status and help received

I’ll just leave this here
Also sorry for the language, we are all mature around here hopefully :smiley:

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Well, played.

And as far as the language, whether we’re all mature here or not, none of us can really complain since we voluntarily play a game that includes said language.

Empirical data would be how much money the game is bringing in and none of us have access to that. I mean, I imagine things are declining over time because that’s pretty much always going to be the case but it’s a bit much to say the game is “dying”.

Do you think if you make enough noise, Funcom will suddenly pull a big lever marked “make game successful” and the money will start rolling in? It’s probably safe to assume they’re just as invested in the game’s success as we are. :v:

Wow, that’s very big of you but I’ll pass.

I have my opinions of course but I don’t think anyone’s gonna have 100% of their wishes for SWL monetization granted, I already got one of the important ones to me done (make the cost of an entire wardrobe not on the order of 50 million MoF, but more like 2-3million. they just converted the vendor prices straight from pax to mof without considering you can earn about 20x less per day) but there are a lot of other things with real money equivalents that seem super high to me. Like $25 to max sprint, per character. I suppose their goal was to get $50-100 from people with alts but to me what they actually get is $0 cause I don’t want it that much on any character.

Sprints V & VI are definitely something where they overcompensated. The Franken Chopper mission may have been too cheap in TSW in hindsight, but despite my love of alts I’m not paying that kind of money for each character. My main has Sprint VI, my alts will have to make do with Sprint IV.

So, Funcom is perfectly justified in cutting customer support because the player-base isn’t supplying enough money, but the decline in player numbers is okay because maybe they’re still supplying enough money? Alright, you do whatever mental gymnastics you need to do to convince yourself that everything is just fine. Just remember to do your mental stretches first, so you don’t pull a mental hamstring.

Honestly, no, I don’t think Funcom will listen to any amount of complaining from us, whether here or on that petition WolfSpider started. This is mostly just cathartic venting. But in the off chance that Funcom does indeed care about the opinions of people playing their games, we have to make our opinions known in the first place.

The only “make game successful” lever they can pull is adding more content, not cutting customer support. I don’t know the exact amount I spent on TSW, but it was somewhere between $100 - $150. It would have been more, but I played less than a year before SWL was announced. I disliked the idea of the relaunch, so I didn’t try SWL for a year after it started. Then I saw that they finally releasd a new zone so I downloaded SWL and subbed for 3 months to show my support because it seemed they were actually making an effort to create new content. I haven’t given them any money since because progress is no longer being made. There’s no longer a roadmap, there’s just rumors of a Congo zone that may come out some time in the future. If it does get released, and if I feel the quality of it is sufficient, I’ll sub again for a while. Same if they brought back the other dungeons and raids. I’d definitely give them money if they did a good job on that.

Maybe I’m the only person who feels that way, but I doubt it. I’m just putting my opinion out there and maybe others will agree. And maybe if enough people speak up, Funcom will realize that there is money to be made off of listening to the player base and providing more content.

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GMs provide support for all 3 Funcom MMOs, so it’s pretty easy to see how they could get overwhelmed. As I’ve pointed out (and as is screamingly obvious to anyone who’s not being obtuse), customer support staff cost money and if the majority of tickets are for non-critical issues and coming from non-paying players, then it makes sense to limit support for those issues to paying customers only. The alternative is to spend whatever profit the games are making (which, according to you is little to none at all, right?) on more support staff. Doing that, even if it is sustainable, directly harms the future of the games because the one single thing that is guaranteed to kill the games is “they stop making any profit”.

Also I’ll once again point out that the player numbers data you have is largely worthless because I’m pretty sure they’d keep development going for a single player if that player was spending enough money. :v:

This is simplistic nonsense. There’s tons of room for improvement in the existing content that would probably make the game more successful, in the sense of “making more money to fund further development”. Besides which, there’s been a bunch of content added and yet the game is not, by your standards, a success.

This is such an absurdly simplistic view of how things work that it is truly staggering that you’d somehow assume they haven’t considered it already. :v:

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I never said customer support doesn’t cost money. If they want to cut funding to customer service, so be it. It’s their right as content producers to do so. Just like if they decided to make a subscription mandatory from now on. I wouldn’t support it, and it might do more harm than good in the long run, but they have a right to do it. And it’s my right as a customer to complain about it. Remember, the initial problem wasn’t the new policy it was the lack of transparency on the part of Funcom in regards to the policy. Personally, I also have a problem with the policy in general, but I do see the financial logic behind it. I don’t, however, see any sort of logic to not clarifying things. Maybe, since your mind seems to be more in-tune with Funcom, you can explain the reasoning behind that.

Oh I agree, the current stuff has plenty that could be improved. However, fixing current content may be nice and could stop some of the bleeding, but it isn’t going to bring people back or bring in new players on a large scale. Also, there’s issues that haven’t been fixed since the beta, so it’s not like they’re putting all their work in that area either. So it depends on what Funcoms vision for the game is. If they want a large-scale profitable game, they’re going about it the wrong way. If they do indeed want a small-scale game that caters to a select few whales, then it would be nice of them to come out and say it so the rest of us can just move on.

There really hasn’t been that much new content. After two years, we have one new zone (objectively the weakest zone in the game), one new scenario, one new lair, one new single-player glyph grind system, agents, and whatever the Rosenbrawl is. I hear there’s also a new tower mission, but since it’s locked behind rng, I haven’t been able to experience it yet. So yeah, there’s been some new stuff, but most of it was stuff that wasn’t asked for and isn’t necessarily wanted.

So no, they haven’t considered actually listening to the player base. When’s the last time they sent out a survey to current players asking what they’d like to see in the game? I’m not sure if that’s ever happened, but it sure hasn’t for a while. When’s the last time they shut down a poll about bringing dungeons back to the game? I’m fairly certain that has happened recently.

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What comes to cutting CS to provide more support for paying players is completely fine for me and for some reason I understand it. My main issue with this is that we have got no clarification at all what this means, mainly who is actually considered as paying player. Only someone who has active sub running? People who has spend X amount in past Y time? See, I’m GM from TSW and I personally assume that GM’s would not be counted as paying players and it’s fine for me. Back in TSW, despite me being GM, I spend around 40-60€/month to the game over 4+ years. To what exactly? Weeeell… I might have ejoyed raiding bit too much, and spamming scenarios tiny bit much. So I bought lot of CD removers, lots of cosmetics and well this and that cos I loved the game and wanted to support it monthly with my GM status. Now in SWL I havent spend a lot, I’d say total of 30€, for sprint 6. Why? I dont know to what I could spend on, I have most of the cosmetics I want, I dont want to buy caches (”buying” my gear doesnt fit to my style), there’s no group pve content that I could spend money on (example potion to allow doing DA twice a day or something). So yeah. I dont count myself as paying player since I dont have anything to spend on! Sure I could find ways to support the game (making alt account and have sub running for example) but do I want to support game that doesnt really provide content that I enjoy the most and which has been technically in the game before, in its earlier version.

I dont know, I’m trying to summarise my thoughts but I have feeling my whole post is a one huge mess which makes little to no sense :blush:

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They said “players that actively support our games monetarily” which is probably open to interpretation by design. I would guess that maybe, there’s no hard and fast rules because a) GMs are human and capable of making judgements for themselves and b) if they published a list of hard and fast rules tomorrow, we’d all be having this argument in the “Clarification of the Hard and Fast Rules Megathread” the day after. :v:

See, you keep saying that they’re all fools and simpletons who need to be led by the hand to even the most basic of design concepts but you’re a little light on concrete suggestions about what you would do better. “Add more content” and “listen to the players” are nice platitudes but they’re not plans, are they? Aside from anything else, both of those things have been tried already.

This sort of nonsense is exactly why they don’t answer player pleas for communication. “Have you failed to make this game a success or was your plan all along to ignore and discard your community?”

A new zone/continuation of the story, new scenario type, return of faction missions/scaling single player content, a way to get the missing museum items and group scenarios were all requested by players. It sounds like maybe your issue is that they listen to players who aren’t you. :v:

Nirvelle made a thread asking what people would like to see in the game when he took over and there’s long been a thread for feedback & suggestions but no, I don’t think they’ve ever actually sent out a literal survey. That would be a pretty terrible idea though - imagine the endless outrage over “port the game to the unreal engine got 56% of the vote why hasn’t it happened yet?” or whatever.

That thread is still open, though the original post was flagged by the community for some reason. Neither of those things equal “Funcom shut down a poll”.

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No, actually, that’s you putting words in somebody else’s mouth once again, because you’re clearly unwilling of actually showing anyone the respect you insist everyone must show Funcom.

Ok, so I’ve read a bunch of other threads and it’s pretty obvious that you’re just here to be the forum contrarian. That’s fine, a good discussion needs different viewpoints. Your tone could use some improvement, but at least you haven’t resorted to name-calling and political attacks.

Anyway, since we’ve veered off-topic, I’ll end the cycle. The original point still stands that we could use more clarification on this policy.

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Hi, I’m that person that bought 400 agent boosters that one time. If the definition of “actively support our [Funcom’s] games monetarily” ever excludes me in the lifetime of Secret World, I’m never giving Funcom money again.

This is why we need clear definitions of what that means.

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I mean, you could try to summarise their position as “it’s never occurred to these geniuses to add new content or listen to the players” but it just ends up sounding sarcastic :v:

Yeah, you tell yourself that. I couldn’t possibly be disagreeing just because you’re wrong about everything.

Define what you’d like it to be.

I hear a common sentiment frequently amongst the player-base. That they would further financially support the title, but have long since purchased everything of interest to them, currently available.

Although this announcement reads as enhanced service to paying customers, it instead feels like a retraction of investment by the developers to the three affected FTP games (Secret World Legends, Age of Conan, Anarchy Online) which could be viewed as a disincentive for others to also invest in the future.

I’d be interested in some new revenue raising initiatives in swl, but I see the request here for clarification as a reflection of the greater need for improved communication.

I’ll do my best to address these questions. Obviously this isn’t an exciting or happy topic to engage with, but I do think it’s important.

1. The Illusive, Comprehensive List
We will not be releasing any kind of comprehensive list or even elaborate further on top of what we’ve said. The fact is this is an all new situation and I don’t trust myself to compile and release a list like that. We do not have any way of assuring the permanence of a list. Instead of releasing a list and having to change it, update it, maintain it, we’re just going to do our best to be as flexible as possible while trying to help as many people as possible.

2. What is “Paid”?
Paid is paid in every condition. Membership, Aurum, Patron, Funcom Points, Steam DLC: all of these are things that contribute to a customer’s paid status. There is a consideration of how long and how significant a person’s support has been, but there are no concrete rules to govern this. We’d rather do our best to treat people fairly and meet them where they are.

3. What about Grand Masters?
Grand Masters and other “lifetime” accounts are considered paid.

4. Can I buy your Customer Service?
If you pay for membership or purchase Aurum, your account will be considered Paid. Previous restrictions are still in effect: we’re limited by how long our tools store information and what we’re able to verify in our tools.

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Thanks for the clarifications <3

Well this clarification doesn’t really help the two paying members i personally know who have had an item deleted by this apparent bug, one a fully maxxed weapon & the other an expensive talisman partially levelled .
The fact that they both waited over 3 weeks for a response from customer service meant that aparently there was no information stored to VERIFY that they actually owned that item.

So point 4 of your “clarification” does not give players in this circumstance any cover or satisfaction from their situation, even though you said

“we will provide a faster more comprehensive service to players who actively support our games monetarily”
Petition wise people are still waiting for their answers & those who have received a response are feeling cheated.
Maybe if you reconsider the initial refusal on the missing items by those players who are actively paying a subscription, then that may rectify & restore their consumer confidence in Funcom.

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Which apparent bug?

The one where an apparent a short lag cause the first item right clicked into the Upgrade window to go missing with the second being in the upgrading slot instead.
but the first item just seemly disappeared from the upgrade window and inventory.
this bug?

I have had that happened a few (too many) times
when it happened i moved everything out of the upgrade window and re-logged
hopping the missing item would re-appear upon login back in, so far that have been a 100% success.
But sadly this hindsight doesn’t help your friends now <.<;

But if there being no safety net… that is rather terrifying to know… x_x