Why is it so hard for SoE to keep up their Web Site?Follow

You would think that a company like SoE would plan better? Like this morning's patch...not an emergency but this patch would be announced somewhere on their site? And the last station cash promotion with Best Buy was a "FAILURE". Majority of the the stores don't carry their SC card....but are well stocked with Xbox items. You would think that SoE's (lack of) Marketing team would say "Hey want to have all our customers come in your store to buy Xbox stuff...carry Our, don't cost you anything until purchased, Station Cash card.
Never been a fan of SoE's marketing team and with their monies they could of easily stole WoW's marketing team. By the way I am not a or ever played WoW fan.
With EverQuest Next coming out I feel sorry and disgust that this team will handle the roll out.
SoE Anti Marketing team rant & here too.

It's likely not the Devs, but the Suits that FAIL in this matter. Similar to putting the VERY BROKEN welcome screen back in. Simply arrogant stupidity and a total disregard for paying customers. Maybe a one month "boycott" by paying customers would open their eyes without the need of that AA.

Edited, Aug 22nd 2013 9:20am by KEC

Yeah right? The same thing goes through my mind when I see that screen. The advertising I can understand if the cost of advertising isn't bringing the returns necessary for profit, then you stop advertising because it's just losing you money- but this welcome window being broken so often? Maybe they're working in some kind of flash or some code I've never worked with, but all of my experience causes that to baffle me. I mean, this is your welcome window come on.

There's so many things these days that I look at and my mind asks, "Are they ruining this on purpose?" because things occur that only "on purpose" seems to adequately explain. Otherwise, got a bunch of people that can't make a pop up window function? Maybe there's some extraordinary code interaction going on here that I'm not aware of that if they said "Look" then I'd look at it and go "Oh okay wow yes I can see why this is so difficult to maintain" but in all of my years of coding I have never once had that occur. So I'm baffled.

I have a friend who is an avid gamer in these games, and he still rants to this day about how much he hates Sony and will never have anything to do with them again; which is why he refused to come over to EQ with me when I was just starting. It waas Star Wars Galaxies which soured him, and he said it was basically just complete disregard for the game and the players of the game.

Now, I don't have that experience; I've only ever played EQ and now for only about a couple of months, so I don't know if his judgment here is appropriate, but what I can say is that I've had a lot of fun playing the past two months and if they're burning down the proverbial bar for the insurance, I'm glad to have had a little space to roam around the planes of EQ.

my 2 cp on it is... take down the defective welcome screen while you figure it out in-house. Better to have no welcome screen than one that is broke for an extended period of time.

He's saying SOE should get rid of the welcome screen until they can fix it rather than displaying a screen that says "Hi, I'm broken!"

Yeah snailish you hit on it exactly, and this is always the case- if something is broken, you take it down immediately: especially the welcome window. This is their first impression for anyone logging into the game: "Hi! We're borked!" and if I did something like this (strong note: this would NEVER happen) it would be all of five minutes before the clients were emailing every 5 minutes: "welcome page is broken! fix or take down the broken welcome page please fast!"

Add to this that nothing ever goes live without being tested in a testing enivornment (probably they have an entire server set up for testing alone- but whatever it is, they definitely have a test area to test all of these things before they integrate them into the live server)- so how does this even happen to begin with? And after it happens, why is it not immediately being taken down until it's properly coded?

It's these things that force me to think it's on purpose- it's exactly like the 4 dudes in FV, if it's not on purpose then it's incompetence of such spectacular magnitude that it defies all reason. The only thing to be perfectly 100% sure of, is that at the end of the day it is all about the $$$

anyway it's mind-boggling

Kinda my take on it too. Yes, it's "bad" that when you log into EQ, you get this screen that pops up that says "this screen is broken", but those are two different groups of people. The screen just loads some kind of web app within the game (which connects you to a view to the station store IIRC). The screen isn't broken. The content within it is. Honestly, it's silly but somewhat irrelevant. What's the first thing you do when you log in a character anyway? You close that annoying screen. It's basically just an advertisement, so all it being broken does is make it load faster.

Funny? Yeah. Major problem? Not really.

That's because there is a problem with the welcome screen causing bad in-game lag. So they disabled it as a work around.

Agree with the lack of communicating that patch.

The Best Buy thing was to get cards moving from that store, so they'll have more incentive to carry them. I usually wait for the Wal Mart deals (or straight up double/triple SC times) personally. I like the extra 1000/1500 free.