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#12136
Originally Posted by Scelerant
Please allow me to clear up a few things; those of us in Europe are not purely upset about our testing continuously being pushed for whatever reason Bioware decides to have the poor community managers give us. We are upset because we as customers generally get a much poorer level of service despite paying more for both the game box and in terms of subscription fees (PS $15 does not equal 15 euro). This does not only include testing, but also in-game support, content updates and so on. Thus the neglect Bioware is demonstrating here, by having US weekend invites go out regardless of their invite problem and by having U.S players in Beta for over a year where EU players figured that we had an equal chance to get in, only to recently find out that we did not, does not make us feel confident that we will be treated as equal customers.
With the fact that we pay as much as 1.5x the box cost and anything from 10 – 30% more per month of subscription (depending on the exchange rate) which should make us their most important customers, makes us a bit upset. In regards to testing, PandemicUK has already outlined the massive flaws in U.S only testing for WAR and while this is a lesser concern for me personally, it does concern me that for a game where one can assume about 50% of the playerbase and about 50% of projected revenue will come from European players, Europeans have had little to no say via feedback.
The cultural differences are quite massive and without going off on a political rant here, I think it is sufficient to say that by looking at the way Europeans have voted and what kind of states we want as opposed to what the American people wants, the differences are big enough to result in differences in feedback. With the launch target of “Holiday 2011” which would indicate sometime between October 15th and December 31st, we are between 40 days and 120 days away from initial launch and so far European players have had little to no impact on the development on a game for which they make up a large part of the market segment.
It also concerns me that if they are aiming for a launch only a few days apart that testing of both the game client and the European server structure has been put off to such a late date. Can those of us situated in Europe also expect “the smoothest launch ever” or are we relegated to a series of crashing servers both game and login, situated in Ireland that has connection capabilities far from what could be achieved by utilizing server centers in Holland, France or Germany that are placed along the backbone of European broadband structure?