Asheras wrote on Apr 22
nd, 2016 at 11:40am:
I don't agree with "contempt for their customers". I think that is more frustration talking.
Every business has a love/hate relationship with its customers to some degree, especially the ones with difficult personalities. (And gamer populations tend to be filled with a lot of people with poor social skills).
But to say that they have a systemic contempt that bleeds into their personal desire to do good work in their chosen profession and are actively sabotaging the product to spite the customers?
From here, it looks as though DDO's customers are seen by DDO's employees at best as a nuisance, but I don't think "contempt" is as far from the mark as you do.
Contempt: the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.I believe they do have a culture of contempt for their customers. This doesn't manifest as "active sabotage", but passive sabotage and dismissing suggestions of IT industry best practices as "inapplicable because we're
different. tut tut, player. You just don't understand" is still contemptuous.
Were it otherwise, things like
showhelmet /on|off would not still be broken. The preview server would be running on a copy of the live environment to reduce the number of bugs that appear because of this difference. They would not sneak last minute changes into update releases that haven't previously been deployed to preview. Systems would get finished. FUCKING VERSION CONTROL WOULD BE A THING.
This culture of "the customers are
beneath consideration" is further evidenced by the way Jerry releases news to gaming news websites before his own forum and the way he
still hasn't learned to prepare for the quests he will run during his streaming events. The way Jerry and Glin referred to the
Wayfinder Market bridge protest in their DDOCast was also pretty revealing.
DDO has shown that they
hold worthless the previous in-game efforts of their customers as well as the efforts of past employees. Raid loot from the previous pack is casually eclipsed by the next pack's lootgen. Class Passes blow up character builds so frequently that frequent players have become desensitized to it and infrequent players don't bother to invest effort into their characters. Old systems are ignored when new systems are deployed, and if the old system is broken by a new system, the old one is left to languish until it's forgotten.
If you need an example of "
scorn", try "Burden of Guilt", last year's Mabar, or the tenth anniversary event loot.
These examples are not outliers. They are Business as Usual for Turbine.
Asheras wrote on Apr 22
nd, 2016 at 11:40am:
That's a bit of a leap and one that I think people go to just because they are so upset with the decisions and can't fathom the rationale to the point that it just feels personal.
The solutions to most of DDO's problems are well documented and evident to most people who look at the environment from the outside. Turbine chooses to ignore them.
I'm not under the impression that DDO chooses to continue to suck because they want to irritate
me personally, but it does sicken me to see them continue thumb their nose at practices that would make things much less bad.
I started my IT career in '91. As an IT professional, what Turbine does embarrasses me because their actions are intentional and they take no ownership of outcomes that are results of their choices. I'm nauseated by the smug dismissiveness with which they brush off the value of Quality Control, version control, community relations, and on and on.
They have made clear that the rationale behind their choices is that they are the experts, their decisions are based on information that we as customers aren't capable of understanding, and they're frequently baffled by our reaction.
You're right that for me, there's a fair amount of frustration talking. It's remarkably similar to the frustration I feel when trying to teach a 2 year old to use the commode rather than defecate in his pants, having said 2 year old resolutely REFUSE to use the commode, load his pants, then smirk when I display exasperation.
Frustration or not, "Contempt" is probably a milder than appropriate adjective.