Display MoreFrankly, this is getting silly. Gameforge, we understand it's open beta. We understand that you didn't have a closed beta or alpha, even if we don't necessarily agree with that. And yes, we understand that with no prior stress tests the servers are going to have issues. But everyone's patience is wearing thin. NA has consistently been running into problems (seems like we've had a maintenance every day and even some NA exclusive maintenances on to of that). At this point, you should realize NA probably contains a plurality if not nearly 50% of your players (going off the steam charts and how yesterday when NA went down the average player count was around half). Of course this server is going to have the most issues, since it has the largest number of possible errors.
I don't know if you're going to have a swift response today or not. But we already had yesterday, where the servers went down for approximately 6 hours before it worked momentarily again. In that time there wasn't a peep from any official, leaving NA to wonder what exactly was going on. I'm sure as a company, that you realize that goodwill is earned through actions rather than freely given. Coming into this game, I heard quick some questionable things about management, but wanted to reserve my judgement until some first-hand experience. It appeared that communication was making strides and there was movement in a positive direction. We were given approximate time frames for maintenances after people asked for it on forums. There were updates if maintenances needed to be extended. The foreboding and looming question of whether there would be a wipe was answered within a week. I was ready to write off whatever I'd heard before but now I'm not so sure.
Everybody knows that Gameforge is primarily an EU publisher. However, they are also publishing NA for Soul Worker, which is great for us consumers since we didn't have to wait for another publisher to pick it up and thus got the game faster. But if you're going to make the conscious decision to publish this game for a region, please publish this game responsibly. If you're intent is treat NA as just 1 server out of 7 rather than one that needs to special attention paid to it, you were better off leaving the NA licensing to another company. We understand that at these point in the day, you guys are past midnight and most likely are asleep. However, this server is your responsibility. At this point, there needs to be a reevaluation of what should be done to facilitate NA's success. Whether this be hiring more staff or diverting staff or whatever, this does not seem to be working out currently. If nobody can bother checking within a span of 6 hours right now, where problems are likely to happen, where's our guarantee this won't happen in the future?
I'm sure your staff has some marketing and management people, so you should definitely be familiar with customer loyalty and word of mouth. The loyal and repeating customers are generally thought to make up 80% of a company's purchases. They are also hard to retain but easy to lose. Bad news spreads by word of mouth 2-3 times as much a good news. How are you going to build that loyal customer base like this? If every time the server went down, we had a response within, let's say, 15 minutes, people would be more inclined to be forgiving than being instantly angry. Do you want somebody who plays the game to tell their friend "Soul Worker has some stability issues, but it's staff are always working on it and I'm sure it'll be a good game by launch" or "Frankly, I'm not sure when the servers are going to be up or down and I experience constant interruptions?"
If one has been paying attention to the forums recently, it can easily be seen that there has been many criticisms levied at Gameforge (some as a result of their actions and some not). There's always going to be people complaining about some aspect of the game. What makes or breaks it is whether or not there are also people who are understanding and okay with the current state of the game. If you have the majority of the statements negative as opposed to a mixture of comments in discussion, it will be difficult to retain new players simply from the lopsided exposure. I'd be inclined to believe that what people are saying is the truth if 80% of comments are negative as opposed to if there were both positive and negative. What people want from the staff is competency and confidence; if you're having issues with the servers, at least give us transparency.
Tl;dr Gameforge had a chance to have a relatively positive publishing, and it's up to them not to screw up any further.
tbh tl;dr, NA is probably the most populated and active out of the rest of the servers, and this is going off what people have been saying when commenting about server population, service speeds, etc. There is no special treatment that NA doesn't get. In fact, it is the server they are working hardest to resolve.
