Turbine: It is NOT Ok

It is not ok to charge a premium for the expansion if things are not working 100%. I have been trying more and more of the ED system as I have been leveling toons, and am finding more and more that things are not working properly. I do not accept this in other facets of my life, as I am sure others don't as well, so why should Turbine get a pass for releasing a broken, buggy expansion despite charging a premium for it? Here we are, 2 full updates later and several patches and we still are talking about thing from the expansion STILL not working. This is ridiculous and you should be embarrassed considering how you self-promote when those stupid developer voting contenst roll around. Maybe a magazine should start a worst development contest and see how many votes you get for that one?

I don't mind bugs when the content is free, but you decided to charge a premium for the expansion, now it is time to live up to your obligation to provide a working product for the money you charged and collected.

Entitlement much?

Seriously, I get "Bugs aren't ok" but WE don't see what happens in QA or Developer meetings.

There is a lot of factors to why something is changed or unchanged. Sometimes they have a deadline to meet, could be that it's not something they can easily replicate. Could be something they never even thought would interfere with that system. It could be anything.

I'm tired of seeing "There is too many bugs, wahhh". Most are small things that you can ignore. The main bugs I think right now are the biggest issue are the falling damage, and the mobs inside walls bug. Other than that, the rest are meh. If given the chance I'd like to see you do better. I know I wouldn't, so I respect that they do what they can.

With all due respect, I believe the product is working.

Yes there are some bugs, annoying (some of them) for sure, but the expansion pack contains a lot of good and enjoyable quests, a nice ED system that really boosts your character, new items, etc. It is well worth the cost in my opinion. It certainly is your right to complain and demand the best possible product, but it's not like they cheat you and don't deliver what they advertise. The expansion is in no way "half-finished". Again, this is just my personal opinion.

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Originally Posted by barecm

It is not ok to charge a premium for the expansion if things are not working 100%. I have been trying more and more of the ED system as I have been leveling toons, and am finding more and more that things are not working properly. I do not accept this in other facets of my life, as I am sure others don't as well, so why should Turbine get a pass for releasing a broken, buggy expansion despite charging a premium for it? Here we are, 2 full updates later and several patches and we still are talking about thing from the expansion STILL not working. This is ridiculous and you should be embarrassed considering how you self-promote when those stupid developer voting contenst roll around. Maybe a magazine should start a worst development contest and see how many votes you get for that one?

I don't mind bugs when the content is free, but you decided to charge a premium for the expansion, now it is time to live up to your obligation to provide a working product for the money you charged and collected.

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You know what, if you have such a huge issue with these things not working, why don't you fix them?

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Originally Posted by Kabaon

Entitlement much?

Seriously, I get "Bugs aren't ok" but WE don't see what happens in QA or Developer meetings.

There is a lot of factors to why something is changed or unchanged. Sometimes they have a deadline to meet, could be that it's not something they can easily replicate. Could be something they never even thought would interfere with that system. It could be anything.

I'm tired of seeing "There is too many bugs, wahhh". Most are small things that you can ignore. The main bugs I think right now are the biggest issue are the falling damage, and the mobs inside walls bug. Other than that, the rest are meh. If given the chance I'd like to see you do better. I know I wouldn't, so I respect that they do what they can.

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Entitlement? As in I am entitled to the product functioning because I paid for it? Well then, yes. If you are talking about the more commonly used definition of entitlement, I do not think because I was born into a wealthly family (which I was not) that I am entitled to anything more than the average peson. I guess my standards for what I pay for are just higher than the rest who simply bend over and take it. Gamers just seem to accept things because they love the game. My belief is that I expect exactly what I paid for; a product that is fully functional. Is it ok for us to make partial payments? Nope. And yes, I love the game too. The difference is that I am not blinded by that.

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Originally Posted by shadereaper33

You know what, if you have such a huge issue with these things not working, why don't you fix them?

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Lol, that's what I said XD

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Originally Posted by barecm

Entitlement? As in I am entitled to the product functioning because I paid for it? Well then, yes. If you are talking about the more commonly used definition of entitlement, I do not think because I was born into a wealthly family (which I was not) that I am entitled to anything more than the average peson. I guess my standards for what I pay for are just higher than the rest who simply bend over and take it. Gamers just seem to accept things because they love the game. My belief is that I expect exactly what I paid for; a product that is fully functional. Is it ok for us to make partial payments? Nope. And yes, I love the game too. The difference is that I am not blinded by that.

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You need to sit down and really read the End User License Agreement (EULA), not just for DDO but for any software.

Don't you think that if your view prevailed for this industry we would have seen court action sometime in the past 70 years or so, including the Eniac era forwards?

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Originally Posted by shadereaper33

You know what, if you have such a huge issue with these things not working, why don't you fix them?

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You know what, if Turbine had a clue, they would have recognized their poor rollout and tried to compensate. It costs them nothing to give all the folks who paid cash for the expanion an equal amount back as Turbine points. And to your point, as a real life PM on technical projects, if I were the PM on this, it would be a lot more on the customer satisfaction part. I am not saying to give back money because that is not what should or is going to happen, but certainly giving players something to offset the poor quality of the expansion would be smart.

This is why more successful (not necessarily better) gaming companies don't give hard release dates, and instead say "We'll release it when it's ready."

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Originally Posted by Hambo

You need to sit down and really read the End User License Agreement (EULA), not just for DDO but for any software.

Don't you think that if your view prevailed for this industry we would have seen court action sometime in the past 70 years or so, including the Eniac era forwards?

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Legally, the servers don't even have to be on for them to continue taking monthly fees. I understand it. I am not debating the EULA, I am saying it is not acting in good faith.

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Originally Posted by barecm

Entitlement? As in I am entitled to the product functioning because I paid for it? Well then, yes. If you are talking about the more commonly used definition of entitlement, I do not think because I was born into a wealthly family (which I was not) that I am entitled to anything more than the average peson. I guess my standards for what I pay for are just higher than the rest who simply bend over and take it. Gamers just seem to accept things because they love the game. My belief is that I expect exactly what I paid for; a product that is fully functional. Is it ok for us to make partial payments? Nope. And yes, I love the game too. The difference is that I am not blinded by that.

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Last I checked the game DOES indeed function. Like I said, bugs happen and not only do they happen, but there will always be a bug somewhere in the game these days. Why? Because games are more complex now than they were 25+ years ago. You want no bugs? Go play Pong.

The reason I used the word "entitlement" is that you sound like you "deserve" something. I use 'entitlement" because it's more common use these days isn't a word for ownership, but more as an attitude. When something isn't to your liking, you feel "entitled" to complain about it because it didn't meet your standards. And your intial comments lends to me to believe that's your attitude in life. Start shrugging off minor issues and move on. Enjoy what does work, and wait patiantly for the resolution. It will eventually happen.

No one reads it, but the EULA's of basically every product out there states, and I'm paraphrasing "You don't own this product, <Insert company name here> does. Anything you purchase still belongs to them". You gave them money to own something, and be entertained by it. You don't own DDO, you just get to use their product.

Like I said, if given the chance, I'd like to see you try fixing bugs. With NO knowledge of their systems, I doubt you'd even know where to start solving the problems for falling damage while standing in town or why PM's are hit by Judgement even though they are allies (I suspect though Pale Masters were somehow flagged as NPC Undead, but that's only an assumption)

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Originally Posted by barecm

You know what, if Turbine had a clue, they would have recognized their poor rollout and tried to compensate. It costs them nothing to give all the folks who paid cash for the expanion an equal amount back as Turbine points. And to your point, as a real life PM on technical projects, if I were the PM on this, it would be a lot more on the customer satisfaction part. I am not saying to give back money because that is not what should or is going to happen, but certainly giving players something to offset the poor quality of the expansion would be smart.

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Actually if they gave people the equivalent of what was paid in Turbine points, THEY have lost money. "Why?" You may ask, would they lose money. Well they lose money from future point sales, and because of that overall less profits for the company than what they did. Simple as that. You can rebuttal with "Well those customers would spent points as a future repeat customer" Maybe, maybe not.

Also poor quality? Given the size of their company they did just fine. They aren't "Activision Blizzard". The only reason Blizzard gets to do what it wants as far as game development is becuase they have the monthly resources to back it up. I doubt highly that off hand Turbine doesn't rake in 100-150 million a month across two or 3 games that Blizzard does with one. Not including expansions and vanilla game purchases over the years.

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Originally Posted by barecm

Entitlement? As in I am entitled to the product functioning because I paid for it?

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Try suing. You'll make a fortune off Microsoft.

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Originally Posted by Missing_Minds

Try suing. You'll make a fortune off Microsoft.

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Lol, if they win that whole "10 dollars" will make you a bajillionaire. In fact it'll cost you more to higher a lawyer for an hour of consultation then what you win from the court case.

Why do people accept persistent, consistent, and pervasive flaws in games when they would not accept that in other products? Some go beyond acceptance, and argue FOR the maker of the defective product, defending them!

Would you be defending your cell phone if, in the middle of calls, it just randomly locked up, and you had to restart it? What if this happened every time you entered a particular place, like your school, office, or home?

Would you be thrilled with the service at your favorite restaurant if they made you pay before you ate, delivered an empty plate to you, and when you complained simply told you that "empty plate is not a known issue, here's a piece of paper to file a bug report", and you knew you were never getting your money back?

Some of you may not have seen this joke before, since it is about 15 years old. I particularly direct your attention to point 3. Cell phones and cars ARE complicated devices, just like game software, yet some industries know they cannot get away with delivering buggy products month after month, year after year. In the case of cars, when they do, they have to recall them and fix the problem.

If Microsoft made Cars

1. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until AFTER that year, instead of before.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would just die for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, and reopen the windows before you could restart it. For some strange reason, you would just accept this.
4. You could only have one person at a time in your car, unless you bought a car '95 or a car NT, but then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car.
6. Sun Motorsystems would make a car that was solar powered, twice as reliable, 5 times as fast, but only ran on 5% of the roads.
7. The oil, alternator, gas, engine warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other brands for years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft Gas (tm).
10. Lee Iacocca would be hired-on as Bill G.'s chauffeur.
11. The US government would be GETTING subsidies from an automaker, instead of giving them.
12. New seats will force everyone to have the same size ass.
13. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler would all be complaining because Microsoft was putting a radio in all its models

Because not all products are to be judged with the same restrictions. You want to know why cars are meticulously crafted with very few "bugs" or defects. Because if they had lots of "bugs" peoples lives would be at risk. Hence the recall.

Cell phones/operating systems/video games really don't have the same rating of importance when it comes to bugs. Cell phones MAYBE if it was an emergency, but because it cut calls. Big whoop. Sometimes phone calls aren't that important. Makes me glad I don't own one.

There is a reason why patching exists, to resolve issues you don't have time to fix. When they will be fixed will be on how important those bugs are. If an ability doesn't work right in DDO, but something like falling damage happens at the same time, guess what. That ability gets the shaft over the more game breaking bug. It happens, move on.

Well obviously your second point about restaurants would never happen, so that's a pointless example

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Originally Posted by Barazon

Why do people accept persistent, consistent, and pervasive flaws in games when they would not accept that in other products? Some go beyond acceptance, and argue FOR the maker of the defective product, defending them!

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The people that defend them tend to be the ones that understand that in billions of lines of code mistakes are going to pop up that take a lot of time to hunt down.

They are the folks that were playing Warcraft (or watching from the sidelines laughing) during the Plague or recent City Nuke debacles and understand that if a game raking in 100s of millions of dollars a year can't be perfect then how can DDO?

Mostly we are folks that refuse to make perfect the enemy of good enough.

In my particular case, I have yet to run into a bug that ruins my gameplay. Closest was needing to use /stuck once last night in an explorer area.

I am not particularly thrilled at times but it works for me.

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Originally Posted by Dawnsfire

In my particular case, I have yet to run into a bug that ruins my gameplay. Closest was needing to use /tuck once last night in an explorer area.

I am not particularly thrilled at times but it works for me.

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I've had "game breaking bugs" affect me in the past. Remember the Pale Master Death Ward bug from a while back. Yeah that sucked, I adapted, moved on. Most people should have our attitude towards DDO. Adapt and move on. If it gets fixed, well woohoo. If not, you have a work around.

Rules and Eula are just useless justifications. I see ED system works good but some things are still broken: quality has not been the primary goal of Turbine (or Warner Bros) in the last updates.

I mostly agree with OP.

Since theres nothing specific in the OP, ima ask once, what specific things the OP is referring to. What thing(s) from the expansion are still not working that make the entire expansion not payable to play?

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Originally Posted by Barazon

Some of you may not have seen this joke before, since it is about 15 years old. I particularly direct your attention to point 3. Cell phones and cars ARE complicated devices, just like game software, yet some industries know they cannot get away with delivering buggy products month after month, year after year. In the case of cars, when they do, they have to recall them and fix the problem.

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Take the number of vehicles in the field, "a," multiply it by the probable rate of failure, "b," then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, "c." "a" times "b" times "c" equals "x." If "x" is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. - Tyler Durden

And that's kinda how it works in software, if they get it to a more or less working condition, they release it, then patch it later, and again and again and again. The really big patches are boxed and sold as the latest version.