boomervoncannon

Weird.

Yeah this is a tricky thing. To the extent that one eliminates challenge, especially in a survival game, one runs the risk of accelerating towards boredom. While I do think storms every time it rains was too much, they should definitely still be something you have to deal with. I think the recent changes are a step in the right direction. Less common but more damaging. I hope they will add in a greater variety of challenges and interactions at sea because lets face it, even unnerfed SOTD's and storms would eventually get boring too, even if they never made them any easier to deal with.

Interesting. I hope you are right. I would definitely like to see something like this at game launch.

Then we both agree that others can judge for themselves what has transpired here. You can proclaim yourself the bearer of truth til the cows come home. I am content to let others decide for themselves.

No I'm just going to let people read these statements for themselves and decide who they think is distorting what. You are quite clearly locked into a view of things that cannot be reasoned with and I grow tired of having to repeat the same logical statements to you and then having you not follow the logic and try to twist it.

I'd also love to see the full conversation. More information usually leads to a greater understanding of the truth. In the absence of evidence absolutely either way, you will have to forgive me if I remain skeptical given WildCard's poor track record of CS with Ark, and GrapeShot being run by the same decision makers.

You quoted the entire chain chronologicially, leaving your own responses out and then attempted to frame things that were my responses to things you initiated as reversals, backtracking or mental gymnastics on my part. THAT is distortion. You're further distorting here by mischaracterizing me here: "Well I’ll tell you what my acceptable level of CS doesn’t include: support members knowingly making factual misrepresentations in their communications to the playerbase. I don’t have any evidence in hand one way or the other, but the OP is saying clearly that Dollie’s post is not truthful and accurate" You reference this but deliberately omit the contingent third sentence: "If that turns out to be the case, I don’t think any reasonable person could call that great or amazing." IF If is the important contingent qualifier you conveniantly ignore. I am acknowledging no evidence in hand, which is fair minded, without ignoring a troubling accusation. The OP has not been throwing a temper tantrum as if his hair is on fire. Even when he calls Dollie out, he does so in clear measured tones, so no, I'm not inclined to dismiss his assertions out of hand as just baseless bs. Let me ask you this: IF his assertions prove to have merit, would you continue to assert that the CS provided is amazing? I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge good CS when it's provided, and as I've stated it's what I'd prefer to do. Are you willing to not support bad CS, if that proves to be the case?

Oh stop. This is a deliberate distortion. 1. I argued that CS is a reasonable expectation EA or not. YOU conflated response and resolution , and I clarified that quick response is not equal to quick resolution. This was clearly stated before and what you’re doing now is deliberate distortion of my statements. What that resolution might be is not something I ever specified and frankly isn’t getmaine to the point being made as long as the resolution meets generally acceptable standards.

Well I’ll tell you what my acceptable level of CS doesn’t include: support members knowingly making factual misrepresentations in their communications to the playerbase. I don’t have any evidence in hand one way or the other, but the OP is saying clearly that Dollie’s post is not truthful and accurate. If that turns out to be the case, I don’t think any reasonable person could call that great or amazing. I do think we have different ideas about what constitutes acceptable CS and whether EA puts CS on a sliding scale or not. EA for small indie developers just trying to get a product out will understandably grant them a lot of slack where having the resources to provide CS is concerned. This stopped being a category that Wildcard and by extension Grapeshot belonged to some time ago.

This is simple and I shouldn’t need to walk you through this. Dollie responding to say “a gm will address it” is a response but not resolution. You were splitting hairs over the word response when what matters is resolution. This was already covered. You were treating response as if it was resolution. It is not, and that is why I said “ I didn’t say give stuff back” I was addressing the difference between response and resolution that you conflated.

You wouldn’t know what I took apart because your ADD keeps you from reading a novel remember? And my original comment wasn’t about how their customer service is shit. It was about how paying customers have the right to expect CS regardless of whether the game is EA or not. That applies to all games, not just Atlas. If Atlas’s team is able to provide reasonable levels of CS I will applaud them for it and would prefer it since I’m one of their customers. If they do not and someone raises the issue I take exception to anyone trying dismiss the issue with the excuse of “it’s EA” Some folks whinge about things they should expect as part of the EA process. When they do so I call them out for whinging. But some things are legitimate complaints. CS for paying customers is one of them.

I have not and I am the cook for my company but we rarely transport seeds and water jugs in larders shipboard. Have you had it happen in storage besides larders or just there?

The larger the ship the deeper it’s anchor can go. Galleons can anchor in further depth than smaller ships. Sounds like you are working hard to make a spot for yourselves. Good luck with your new home. I bet you’ll make it something impressive from humble beginnings.

@Wh33ls Then take your ball and go home if you don’t have the attention span to hang with the big boys. Your ADD is not my problem and if I want to use more than a few short sentences to take your post apart piece by piece, that’s what I’ll do.

Which is you conceding by virtue of being unwilling to weigh the merits of the other sides arguments. You’ve been perfectly willing to read and post extensively in this thread to this point, so tldr is just you giving up without wanting to admit it.

And I still stand by the premise of the clear arguments I presented in the very post you were responding to when you said I had changed arguments. Reread that post. There is a very clear linear chain of logic that connects how poor customer service even in an EA product is not excusable to where the funding for said CS should come from. YOU my friend were the one who went down the rabbit hole of attempting to excuse GrapeShots lack of adequate support with arguments about funding and finance with a bunch of nonsense pretending that Grapeshot and Wildcard aren’t the same thing when it comes to where the money comes from. THAT was your argument, not mine. All I did was call it out for the hogwash it is when it comes to their responsibility to provide CS to customers, EA or no. Accusing the other party of doing the very things you are doing might be a popular tactic in public policy debate these days, but it’s not gonna fly here. My central points have been clearly stated in earlier posts, contrary to your own statements, none of them have been refuted, and at this point you are just clouding the issue by talking in circles. It’s funny how things we disagree with are rants while things we agree with are legitimate complaints. You state that adding GM’s will not fix long term problems as if this is inherently an either or proposition when the reality is Grapeshot should be doing both. Developers work on long term solutions while GM’s fix immediate problems created by the bugs in the first place. I know this might sound crazy but look into it and you might be shocked by how many successful games have BOTH devs and GM’s. Sometimes they even *gasp* budget for both. As for calling my analogies poor, we both know that’s just you @#$& talking them because you couldn’t actually offer a valid refutation. Anyone with a background in rhetoric knows that already. Oh and again I stand by my assumption because it is based on common business practices. Your assumptions otherwise run contrary to standard business practices ie people play shell games with company names and legal entities all the time, but the money all comes from the same place, so the burden of proof otherwise to support your assumption lies with you, not me. I’m the one assuming the sun will come up tommorrow. You’re the one assuming it won’t.

I didn’t miss it, I just disagree with its premise. The funding from Atlas is a direct result of Ark’s success. Companies are expected to fund new products from succcessful ones. Providing support to a new product in development is part of that product or game’s cost and this is doubly true when development is being tested by paying customers and not free. All of these are true and follow logically. Attempts by you to argue to the contrary have been quibbling over semantics, throwing out red herrings, and nitpicking over things like the validity of an analogy by degree. None of them refute these central points.

I’m going to feel free to make my assumption since it is based upon fairly standard business practices while your assumption goes against them. Not all assumptions are created equal.

Since every other company is expected to operate this way I’m not sure why you think they should be some sort of exception.

Yeah sorry, if you want to assert that Grapeshot and Wildcard have nothing to do with each other, you’re going to have to provide copies of GrapeShots balance sheets and prove that no capital funding came from Wildcard OR any of Wildcard’s venture capital backers AND prove that GrapeShots founders took no profits from Wildcard that weren’t then p,owed into Grapeshot. Since we both know you can’t do that, let’s just stick with the reality that no one outside knows for sure and the most reasonable assumption is to treat the two companies as one that is using a conversant legal fiction for business purposes. Trying to pretend otherwise is hogwash especially given the fact they still retain decision making authority for Ark.

There is no legitimate reason not to expect a company to use profits from successful products to fund development of new products.it is standard practice across the business world. Part of funding the development of an MMO IS providing proper support for testing and development. If you don’t think Blizzard used profits from Warcraft to fund WoW’s development AND that part of that development cost wasn’t providing support during alpha and beta trials, then you are living in a dream world. And that was long before anybody paid for EA.

Are you really claiming to be unaware that the developers of Atlas are the developers of Ark? Get real.

You could figure it out using Battlemetrics. For Ark the info was available at a glance, dunno if it is for Atlas. That aside, I don’t think arguing that Ark’s CS was crap so we shouldn’t expect Atlas’s to be any different is something I wholeheardly agree with, particularly not when they claimed “to have learned so many lessons from Ark” (for anyone keeping score at home, fully expect me to continue to beat GrapeCard over the head with that quote for as long as they continue to demonstrate it to be patently false.) For the record, this is my approach: I expect companies I do business with to maintain reasonable professional standards. If they fail to, I will call them on it and hope and expect them to improve. This does not meanI won’t also retain a healthy skepticism of the notion they might magically suddenly turn over a new leaf.

As I’ve already pointed out in prior posts in this very thread, while Wildshot resources are not unlimited, they are in fact sitting on 3 years of Top 10 steam level revenue, so claiming poverty when providing sub industry standard levels of active ingame support isn’t gonna fly, sorry.

You are splitting hairs by using the word response when what matters is not response but resolution. Acceptable levels of CS are 10% response time and 90% resolution time. It is nice that Dollie at least let him know they were aware of the issue in a timely manner, but only extraordinarily incompetent levels of CS fail to do this bare minimum. If you consider this a fully acceptable level of CS on its own I pray you’re never the CS rep I get stuck dealing with anywhere. So fine, you say the seriousness of the analogy invalidates it. *eyeroll* Personally I find that to be a load of hogwash, but for the sake of robbing you of such a lame excuse I’ll play ball. Let’s switch to a less life threatening analogy. You go to a factory outlet store (where retailers sell products which didn’t meet full factory QA inspection for discounted prices) You are fully aware that the shoes you buy there may not be perfect, but they are discounted and the store has a reasonable refund and exchange policy, so you buy a pair at a nice price, take it home, put it on the next day and the tongue on one shoe promptly falls off. The shoe is useless. Not to worry, you take it back to the store for an exchange, only the clerk informs you that despite rows of identical shoes that only the general manager can handle exchanges and he just left for two weeks vacation in Des Moines, you’ll have to come back in a fortnight. This would be piss poor CS, and given this companies track record, this is directly analogous to the concern being expressed by the Op, which you seem intent on dismissing on grounds I do not agree are acceptable.