Anyhow, EA on the other hand is not a great company. Yes, they have the financial backing to help Mythic, but their customer service is one of the worst. In fact, it’s probably worse than SOE’s. Speaking from experience, I pre-ordered 2 Collector’s Editions of Warhammer back in July 18th. I never received my open beta codes, despite sending them 3-4 emails. They insisted my order was taken care of and that beta codes ship 7-10 days after order is placed. Well, they never got emailed to me and I know I’m only one of a slew of EA customers who got that shaft.

Than we have my Fed Ex delivery of my 2 games becoming pointless because my order still shows a status of Submitted, instead of Shipped. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t CE headstart begin on Sunday? Well, Fed Ex doesn’t deliver on Sundays and I sincerely doubt EA has shipped my order.

It doesn’t really matter anyway, since I’m flying out to Ft. Bragg for EFMB competition. So I will miss the first 2 weeks of WAR. I’m still going to give EA a bunch of crap for tainting Mythic’s good reputation, which I give them credit for simply because of Sanya Thomas and the developers. Not to mention their continuing approach of honesty about the game. Funcom should learn a thing or two from Mythic about community management, lol.

… which is apparently the CEO of one company publicly chastising the workers of another company in another region for what they are doing with a central product.

Does IainC get right of reply? Can he blog about getting that phone call from Mark? Can he report the entire story? Probably not, if he wants to keep his job.

The point of CMs is to manage the community, which includes stuff like this, If Jacobs is going to blog a response every time something happens, being a CM is going to suck even more than it usually can because you will be left with no power. One minute you are reporting what you’ve been told by your management, the next Jacob’s has a blog post up that emasculates your entire role. Good luck in that job.

And again: WAR has no official forums. But apparently blogs are a great way to “listen” to the community. *boggle*

Mark Jacobs cut through the red tape, shared his personal opinion and said he thought it was out of line, echoing most of what sane people think too. That tells the average consumer that there’s a legitimate human being near the helm of Mythic and builds up stock and trust.

So it was at the cost of hanging out GOA’s CSM to dry. So what? He got himself into trouble in the first place. He needs to come out, apologize, and commit harakiri like a man.

By defending the right of CS and CM departments to close ranks among themselves and try to smooth things over by going “Oh, no one’s really at fault or to blame,” that’s just defending instutionalized processes that don’t actually make things better. Too often, we try and preserve company hierarchies and systems that don’t actually work out of respect for the traditional “it’s always been done this way.”

Forget that. Do whatever works.

Do you really need a community management or PR dept if they’re not doing their jobs properly? Apparently not, if Mark Jacobs can do it better. Better to replace them with people who can actually help the solution than create more problems.

Why so?

I still don’t understand that if the CM is not doing their job properly, why doesn’t management get on the horn to the CM and their manager to correct the situation through them, rather than around them?

Now run! Run as fast as those tree trunks can carry you.

Jason (resident drunken idiot of Channel Massive)