ItsTheSheppy

And to add:

I worked at Gamestop for two years, so I saw my fair share of game launches. Never, not ONCE, was a big game released on a Monday. Why? Because thats marketing SUICIDE.

Nobody wants to buy games on a Monday. Not a soul. Mondays are deadsville. Mondays are school nights and work nights. Go company in its right mind would release an entertainment product on a Monday. But thats niether here nor there.

The game is available for people who reserved it. Last I checked, reserve can also be interpreted as a "pre-order" because I'm ordering the game before it comes out and putting money down on it.

PlayNC was aware that the (hilariously ill-chosen) launch date was being broken. They have done what to save themselves the possible unhappy customers?

Because there's this industry called the "retail" industry, that allowed me to reserve the game even when it was first announced. I find it convenient to use, because unlike purchasing things online, I get to go out of my apartment and interact with actual human beings, who can answer questions and deal immediatly with any problems or issues that may arise.

So you're saying that its the retail industry's fault that they launched the game early, and not at all playNC's fault for locking the game out for anyone other than pre-order customers. Just sit back and imagine right now how many kids got this game on Friday from their local EB or GameStop or (fill in here) and got it home, only to find themselves locked out because they weren't a Super Special member? Think of the customers PlayNC is losing!

I consider myself a casual CoH gamer. I visit the boards maybe once a month to see what the devs are saying, but I mostly just trust in them to keep the game going and keep things happy. That, and these boards are miserable to navigate.

So anyway, I'm all excited Friday that I got CoV coming into GameStop. I reserved it over a year ago.(<---- important to this post). I buy it, get it home, call up all my friends and tell them not to bug me for the rest of the night and perhaps tomorrow, unless they wanna come over and play the game with me, and I crack open the box and start installing. I reserved the special edition, so I'm totally indulging in all the goodies.

Can you possibly imagine the enormity of my disappointment to learn that because I didn't pre-order the game USING THE CORRECT CHANNELS, that I couldn't play until MONDAY? (That, by the way, is AFTER the weekend). What madness is this? What stark, raving madness?

There's a couple things totally wrong with this. First of all, all the forum-frequenters (who represent perhaps 30% or less of the total playerbase, I'd imagine) knew about this, but I'm guessing few others. So we have a lot of people who, like me, went and picked up their copy retail here on launch day and found themselves totally boned.

Second, imagine all the casual gamers who are just picking it up because they saw it in the store, or heard from a friend of a friend that its gonna be kinda cool. I can tell you for certain that if I were a casual customer, and I picked this up and was told I couldn't play until Monday, this crap was getting returned POST-HASTE, and I'd never pick it back up.

I cannot fathom how many casual customers CoV is losing because of this monumentally stupid marketing desicion. WHAT GAMING COMPANY ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH HAS FORBIDDEN THEIR GAME TO BE USED ON LAUNCH DAY UNTIL THE MONDAY FOLLOWING THE LAUNCH WEEKEND?

Some of us DO work for a living!

I'm not sure if I'm mad at myself for not checking first, or more mad at the rediculously poor decision-making on behalf of the devs and their marketing guys. Fantastic way to go fellas. I could not think of a better way to alienate your casual playerbase.