most games have at least decent customer service, UO is one of the few that doesn't, and like i said the reason why WoW has so many subscriptions is because of the company that made it, a good majority of their players are life long blizzard followers because of how successful warcraft, starcraft and diablo were so they will play any blizzard game, if blizzard made my little pony online, those people would probably play it
Blizzard also has over 2,500 people devoted to customer service and community-related issues, just for WoW. 2,500 people. That's GMs, that's people who interact with customers on their forums and through email, etc., etc. and Blizzard has control over all aspects of it.
Other people downplay WoW, but EA is chasing Blizzard and they are betting the MMO group on it with a $300 million investment, and that investment does impact UO.
EA has become dangerously obsessed with WoW, while blindly ignoring the things that have made WoW so popular and that have caused so many people to come back to WoW after trying other MMOs.
UO and Camelot suffered because of EA's obsession with WoW, thanks to the massive layoffs that affected UO and Camelot directly and indirectly after Warhammer went through its spectacular implosion.
It tooko UO 5 years to lose 66% of its subscriptions. It took Warhammer three months to lose over 60% of its subscriptions. Within four months, it lost, percentage wise, more people than UO had lost in five years. And Warhammer, UO, and Camelot fans paid dearly for Warhammer's losses to help appease the stockholders.
EA's obsession with WoW wouldn't be so bad IF they had been studying and learning from WoW and applying those lessons to their MMOs. That's means better customer service from the GMs down to the websites. That means more people and multiple teams. JCtheBuilder had it right - we have one team that is doing the work of what should be 2-3 separate teams. People bash them and seem to forget that they are pulling triple duty. What Blizzard would do with 3-4 well-funded groups, UO is doing with a small group. Blizzard has people dedicated to squashing bugs within just the clients . UO has people who squash bugs within the clients when they aren't working on the servers or working on live events or future content.
It's very easy to say that all of EA's mistakes and recent lack of success in the MMO arena are due to it being a publicly traded company and being obsessed with keeping the stockholders happy. There is a lot of truth to that. EA loves to lay off people at the end of the year to make the stockholders happy - they've got a history of it.
The problem is that Activision Blizzard is publicly traded as well.
If Activision Blizzard as a whole lost money, but the WoW group turned out a profit, would they slash the hell out of the WoW group? Would they slash it to the bone and cripple it? No. The Activision Blizzard execs would be run out of the company by the stockholders if they did anything close to that.
But EA has done just that in the past with UO and Camelot. It's a great and easy way for EA to save a quick bit of money to make the stockholders happy, but every time it happens, it sets those games back a year or more. It cripples their ability to not only retain their existing customers, but to grow their customer base.
EA executives just do not have the ability to look ahead past the next couple of financial quarters. They want to shove a product out the door and then move on to the next product. That works great in the EA Sports division, it doesn't work so well elsewhere.
When a product implodes like Warhammer did, do EA executives say "well we have these other products that are still profitable and have a loyal fanbase, and they are diverse, can we grow those, can we invest in them, can we help them to grow their playerbases over the next few years?
No, they turn to this other project they have, this other basket with "Star Wars" written on the side, and they throw all of their eggs into that basket and bet everything on it.
I'll give them a little credit - it looks like Camelot has hired on a few people recently, but I wonder if they are new additions or replacements. And they are still on track to build BioWare a customer service center in Ireland. Plus they are allowing the UO team to bring us high resolution art and a much better new player experience.
The problem is that with these new things that the UO devs are doing, they should get more employees to help. They should not have to stop doing certain things to do these other things.
I still don't think they'll be able to handle Star Wars, whether it succeeds or fails. I'd like to think a success would lead to BioWare becoming like Blizzard and gaining a lot of autonomy, but even that would be in jeopardy if EA has a bad quarter or two - they'll won't take a hands-off approach to layoffs within BioWare if games outside of BioWare don't do as well as expected.
