Overly Positive

If there’s anything that sucks to say sometimes, no matter if you’re an individual or a company, it’s “my bad”. Whether it’s in everyday interaction as simple as bumping into someone and causing them to scald themselves with hot coffee, or as complex as a fender bender car accident, we’re all going to be put in the place to say “I’m sorry” at some point. Sometimes it helps (“oh, that’s ok, I was freezing and the coffee warmed me up”) and sometimes it doesn’t (“I’m gonna sue your ass for rear-ending my Mercedes, bitch”), but the key in any apology is how you go about doing it.

This is especially true for MMO developers, who have to handle being wrong while at the same time explaining what happened. In the waters of online forums, fansites, and blogs, posters and writers of a particular MMO are at times sharks, smelling blood in the water and attacking with ruthless ferocity. Such as it was with Mythic Entertainment, which experienced a billing snafu two weeks ago that had people charged a ton, some at least over 20 times, for their monthly subscription fee.

Mythic’s been raked over the coals (understandably so) by a number of folks for the messup.  I’ve got friends at Mythic, and it pained me to see the hardship they had to go through trying to fix the nonsense that had occurred because of payment processing craziness. It’s because of this personal interaction I’ve had with them that made me had faith. Faith that when the inevitable apology came, it would be a good one.

Today’s letter from Mythic’s Jeff Hickman about the payment issue comes through by explaining first, in detail, what exactly happened, second, what they are doing to fix it, and third, what the current status is. Normal stuff, right? But then comes the in-game compensation, which is as follows:

Over the past 15 years we have always strived to do what’s best for our players. We are truly sorry, and want to work to make things right and restore our relationship.  We hope you will accept this small token of our appreciation for your continued commitment to our games:

For starters all players will earn 100% bonus experience and renown when killing enemies and monsters for two weeks. As well, during this time we’ll be hard at work designing and implementing a special vendor. This vendor will only accept special tokens that will be sent to your mailbox, using these two tokens each of your characters will be able to receive two of the following items:

• Bottomless Chaos Black Dye
• Bottomless Skull White Dye
• Imperial Griffon Mount (Order)
• Enslaved Manticore Mount (Destruction)
• WAR Tract – earn a free level
• Choose from any of these pets – Order: Imperial Hunting Hound or Dwarf Keg Handler; Destruction: Warlord’s Fell Hound or the Goblin Bar-Back.
• Change your appearance with any of these illusion items: Skaven Skin Cloak (skaven), Kossar’s Helm (bear), or the Signet of the Cursed Company (skeleton)

Please accept this gesture as a step towards rebuilding our relationship. From all of us at Mythic, we thank you for your time, your commitment, and your trust that helps us to make great games year after year.

Bonus experience, and the choice of what appears to be an amazing set of items normally only preserved for contests and special events. The in-game benefits of said compensation will be huge for some players of WAR, that’s for sure.

Say what you will about WAR‘s struggles, and the fact that this doesn’t completely wipe out the inconvenience some people went through – the latter is especially true. This is pretty much what sets Mythic apart from other MMO companies. They have a deep connection to their community, and an understanding of their customers that makes their service top notch. Ever since DAoC, when I first started interacting with them on forums and fansites, Mythic has always gone above and beyond when it comes to talking to their players. This is basically their stock in trade, making the fact that their design has struggled to take hold in the MMO playerbase all the more unfortunate.

When you do something wrong, you’re never going to totally eliminate the fact that it happened, or make people forget. It’d be unrealistic to think as such. But the effort to apologize and make amends is always huge when you’re at fault – and Mythic understands that. WAR‘s been in the public eye a lot lately – both for good and bad reasons – and one can hope that with so many eyes on it currently, that this will go a long way towards making people believe they empathize with their players.