Now... ANY time something goes wrong in a game, you get players demanding compensation. Downtime, bugs, game crashing, heck... NERFS... they want something back from the company for their lost time.

Now, if a game goes down for three hours in a month and people start whining about refunds, I can't generate a lot of sympathy.


However, let's look at this situation. If you just plunked down $50 for ANY product, you expect it to work, out of the box, right?

Right.

If your new electric shaver, cell phone, coffee machine, wii controller, or other $50 item does not work, YOU TAKE IT BACK, right? Of course right.

Not so with a new MMOG. We bring home something like Age of Conan, we install it, we patch it (for hours and hours at times), and then it fails.

BSOD. Crashing on login. Crashing after log in. Graphical polygons of doom. Crashing after thirty minutes of play. Sound like jackhammers. Sound... what sound?

Heck, sometimes people can't even install it.
Or patch it.

Do we take it back? No.

No, we sit there for hours and hours and hours trying to make it work. We uninstall and reinstall drivers, update Windows, remove firewalls, leaving our systems open to rampant invasion and disease, stand on our heads, pull out our hair, sob piteously, sacrifice chickens and PRAY.

Nothing works.

Do we take it back? No.

We start reading forums, and start trying all manner of highly technical maneuvers that we are not really qualified to do. Hell, the head of the Geek Squad at your local Best Buy would be scared to try half the stuff that people suggest as 'fixes'.

People. Maybe, just maybe, it's NOT you and your pretty reasonable, if not cutting edge, system which plays every other current game without a hitch.

Maybe.... just MAYBE... it's the game.

Aren't we all sick of paying $50 to play a beta?
I am. I talk to people who had the same issues as I am having while in beta. The problem is still there.

To those who say "well, it's only a vocal minority posting these problems on the forums", I say, no. For every person posting about their issues, there are several of us with the exact same problem, reading and hoping to see a solution, a real solution, from the game company, so that we can play too.

I am still playing my copy of AoC with shaders forced OFF. It looks like hell, but I've made it to level 32. Since launch, I have tried every reasonable (and some unreasonable) solutions; everything short of REFORMATTING MY HARD DRIVE.

No sir. Enough people had to do that after Anarchy Online ate their hard drives. Yeah, I remember that too, back when it first launched.

So a free additonal month of gameplay? Simply not economically feasible, given that FunCom has some massive cash recovery to make, and they probably need every cent right now, as this game has been in development for a long time.

But a moose hat?
I could go for a moose hat.
Something that signifies that I survived the AOC launch month.

You can deliver it to me on the Zug server.
I'll be waiting, in between crashes.

;-)#
Brasse

ps. Do any of you remember the great videos that used to circulate during the development of Anarchy Online? I think they were from E3. All the ones I saw were in Norwegian, but they used to start with a strongly accented English phrase, "Yo Gamers!" I loved that, and so had to pay tribute to it here.

pps. Thanks to RadarX who helped inspire this comic. I owe you a beer. No wait, you don't drink beer. I owe you some watered down froofy drink.