Scarlet Shocker

Free server transfers would kill the EU servers quicker than a new upcoming superhero game offering 6 months free gameplay.

Any potential list merge would need to be handled way more sensitively than that.

Ouroboros:

Oroboi?

Oroborodes?

The only difference we should notice at this stage is an improvement in performance in the UK.

It may be different for French and German players but the connection between the UK & US is often better than the one we have to the servers now.

So far there has been no announcement regarding merging lists and I don't expect we'll be getting anything soon - so in effect we'll experience a few hours down time and then hopefully less lag.

if I'm honest I'm not totally sure what I just watched but it's a nice tribute to a friend Thanks for sharing

Well I'm less bothered about the referral credit but let's face it the whole system is borked and it becomes pointlessly over complex.

My friend is still ticked off because she's had so many problems buying 2 items, the game itself and then a booster.

I notice that the thread by The Ocho is like six weeks old now... and surely accepting money should be a business' first priority, so that's an exceedingly poor show that it's not been fixed. It tells me that NCSoft generally have a huge problem with their web process and procedure.

How's this for irony?


Some of you already know there's quite a healthy little City of Heroes community within other games. There's around 20 members in our little group and we cover both sides of the Atlantic – and that in itself is ironic enough, given that I have to use a different medium to communicate with a player of the same game because he or she happens to play on a different cluster.


So we often talk about the game and we've introduced a few new subscribers over time – I think there are about 4 confirmed continuing subs introduced via this group in the last 6 months or so. Nothing ground-breaking but a cool little community where we chat about our latest 50s, share the odd pic of costumes and discuss the merits of various builds, powers and A.T.'s


Obviously being in a wider environment we often get to chatting with people who haven't played the game. So one of our little group decides she'd like to play the game – she's in Las Vegas but decided she'd like to join my team, which meant she'd have to play on the EU servers. In and of itself not a problem, after all it's the internet and that's global. So I send her a trial code via the referral system.


She downloads the game, logs in and loves it. Has so much fun that she signs up for six months within a week of starting to play the game. It's here that the problems start. Firstly she has all kinds of trouble actually subscribing. Her card is denied a couple of times and she gets a suspected fraud warning when all she is trying to do is subscribe to the game.


She enlists some GM help and they are helpful and friendly and get her set up. She has no problem now. Except that she wants the Ninja Run Power – and she still hasn't been able to buy that booster – the GM's seem to be unable to help in this instance and at the time of writing it's still unresolved, but the bottom line is there's a customer wants to spend REAL MONEY and is being seriously thwarted.


I'm also noticing that I'm not getting the credit for the referral. I'm simply getting a GM response pointing me at the “refer a friend” link on the web site. So I've done what I'm meant to do, my friend did what they are meant to do, we have 2 customers trying very hard to pay money and have a fun experience and it's actually quite shocking at how difficult that is proving to be.


I have no doubt that were my friend in Vegas to have paid for a US version of the game she'd have had far fewer problems – but then she and I wouldn't be able to team together, which then defeats the object and diminishes the experience for both of us.


Now, clearly there's a few problems here. Normally I'd say “sign up to the forums and see if you can get any other player advice.” Except that frankly these forums are so borked both in terms of rules and regulations and technically I'm not going to tell my friend, who's already pretty ticked off with the broken websites of NCSoft to do something that's gonna piss her off even more.


Put it another way Paragon Studios: If you'd had the troubles my friend has had, and then got spontaneously logged out of a forum whilst trying to explain that, would you carry on with this game?


In closing I'll post one final thought: Over the last six months or so I've been watching the NCSoft Share Price. It goes from strength to strength with a line that moves up and to the right contunually. Not bad during a global recession. But I just wonder this; do the NCSoft shareholders know how bloody difficult it is for customers to buy their product?

The entire world should be on UTC

people would just get up and go to bed at different times but it'd save having to work out time zones.

Very cool.

Let's hope she makes a full recovery. Best wishes