I've been playing ogame now for about 3 years, pretty much every day. I'm 42 years old with a wife and 2 kids and I used to buy a LOT of DM. Everyone in my alliance is also older, mostly with kids and also used to purchased DM regularly. In short, we're the money spending demographic that GameForge likes. Sure people come and people go, but most of the people I have gotten to know are hard core addicts, and when one of those people leaves, it's not because they were crashed or because of personal life. Those addicts always come back if those are the reasons. They leave permanently when the drain on real life becomes greater than the joy they get from this game. The problems I've seen in addition to those previously mentioned are:
1. GameForge simply does not listen to their customer and they continuously demonstrate they do not even care about their customer. Nor do they get involved when their customer has issues with staff. If I had an equity stake in GF, I would be pretty outraged that volunteers have the final say in regards to issues relating to my paying customers.
a. I was staff for a year, and I was pretty vocal about my dislike of the way many things were handled by a lot of the senior staff. It was always in a polite manner and done in open forum discussions rather than being critical, but even when I was backed up by other staff, nothing ever changed. I have seen countless paying customers leave permanently over an unjust perm ban on an account they spent years and hundreds of $$ on. To be fair though, It's not all the fault of staff either, they need better tools from GameForge and GF needs to be willing to be involved. COMA in my experience typically ignores anything escalated to that level beyond GA (even when I was staff and tried to get COMA's attention directly). When people lose years of work due to a bug, GF should be RIGHT THERE ready to do a personal restore and should be apologizing profusely instead of saying, sorry, you agreed to our ToC that we wouldn't be responsible. Yes I have seen them help out here from time to time, but they aren't consistent about it. I know of a GA who quit in disgust over the lack of GF's care about staff or customer. Over the years, I've written many in depth emails to GameForge, cc'ing many of the executives and to date, I've never received any sort of response from anyone.
b. The redesign! Oh... man...... this was the nail in the coffin for many who were on that edge of leaving. Everyone has heard everything about the RD already, I won't rehash anything here.
2. Lack of new players. Guess how many paying customers I dragged into playing ogame from 2007-2008? At least a couple of dozen. Guess how many I will recommend the game to now? Right. None. I'm still here over the hope of what might come with a merge... and because I don't have to fleetsave, so I'm free from this game already. I have my cake and can eat it too. It's not just lack of advertising, word of mouth is the most powerful advertising tool there is and the word of mouth about ogame and GameForge these days is not good.
3. GameForge looks at the income of each uni. New universes have more paying people, not just because there are more players, but also because people are paying in a new uni to try to gain an advantage over the non paying newcomers. Over time, the payments diminish, so they just open new unis to generate more money. These days, all of the paying customers in my alliance have basically stopped paying because there is no longer any point. I liked the RSS feed, but it's now broken (and as a software development manager, I'm pretty certain to fix it would likely take a GameForge junior developer no more than an afternoon). Just another thing that shows GameForge has other priorities than caring about customers if they don't want to spend 8 hours of developer + QA time to fix a PAID FOR feature. It's basically getting to the point that out of PURE SPITE, we won't give our money to GameForge.
The biggest things I think that will turn things around are that GameForge needs to change as a company. They need to listen to and respect their customers. They need to get involved directly with staff and customers, they need to communicate regularly, they need to ASSIGN DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES to ogame to fix bugs as soon as they are reported and confirmed. They need to write better tools for staff. Senior staff should not be volunteers, they should ALL be full time gameforge employees who's job is to do their best to GET IT RIGHT and have the best interests of GF at heart. In short, GF needs to make the players their champion again. Who wants to recommend a game when you hate the company that makes it? This isn't just my opinion, it's the opinion of almost everyone I've ever encountered who has had to deal with staff or GameForge. That is not good for GameForge and it's also why many won't try any of their other games. Take a look at how CCP does things and take a page from their book (no, I'm not an Eve player, I've just read a case study in gaming and customer service and those guys are the pinnacle of knowing how to listen to your customer).
And please GF, hire a user experience expert next time you are changing the UI, I can recommend some great ones I've worked with in the past.
1. GameForge simply does not listen to their customer and they continuously demonstrate they do not even care about their customer. Nor do they get involved when their customer has issues with staff. If I had an equity stake in GF, I would be pretty outraged that volunteers have the final say in regards to issues relating to my paying customers.
a. I was staff for a year, and I was pretty vocal about my dislike of the way many things were handled by a lot of the senior staff. It was always in a polite manner and done in open forum discussions rather than being critical, but even when I was backed up by other staff, nothing ever changed. I have seen countless paying customers leave permanently over an unjust perm ban on an account they spent years and hundreds of $$ on. To be fair though, It's not all the fault of staff either, they need better tools from GameForge and GF needs to be willing to be involved. COMA in my experience typically ignores anything escalated to that level beyond GA (even when I was staff and tried to get COMA's attention directly). When people lose years of work due to a bug, GF should be RIGHT THERE ready to do a personal restore and should be apologizing profusely instead of saying, sorry, you agreed to our ToC that we wouldn't be responsible. Yes I have seen them help out here from time to time, but they aren't consistent about it. I know of a GA who quit in disgust over the lack of GF's care about staff or customer. Over the years, I've written many in depth emails to GameForge, cc'ing many of the executives and to date, I've never received any sort of response from anyone.
b. The redesign! Oh... man...... this was the nail in the coffin for many who were on that edge of leaving. Everyone has heard everything about the RD already, I won't rehash anything here.
2. Lack of new players. Guess how many paying customers I dragged into playing ogame from 2007-2008? At least a couple of dozen. Guess how many I will recommend the game to now? Right. None. I'm still here over the hope of what might come with a merge... and because I don't have to fleetsave, so I'm free from this game already. I have my cake and can eat it too. It's not just lack of advertising, word of mouth is the most powerful advertising tool there is and the word of mouth about ogame and GameForge these days is not good.
3. GameForge looks at the income of each uni. New universes have more paying people, not just because there are more players, but also because people are paying in a new uni to try to gain an advantage over the non paying newcomers. Over time, the payments diminish, so they just open new unis to generate more money. These days, all of the paying customers in my alliance have basically stopped paying because there is no longer any point. I liked the RSS feed, but it's now broken (and as a software development manager, I'm pretty certain to fix it would likely take a GameForge junior developer no more than an afternoon). Just another thing that shows GameForge has other priorities than caring about customers if they don't want to spend 8 hours of developer + QA time to fix a PAID FOR feature. It's basically getting to the point that out of PURE SPITE, we won't give our money to GameForge.
The biggest things I think that will turn things around are that GameForge needs to change as a company. They need to listen to and respect their customers. They need to get involved directly with staff and customers, they need to communicate regularly, they need to ASSIGN DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES to ogame to fix bugs as soon as they are reported and confirmed. They need to write better tools for staff. Senior staff should not be volunteers, they should ALL be full time gameforge employees who's job is to do their best to GET IT RIGHT and have the best interests of GF at heart. In short, GF needs to make the players their champion again. Who wants to recommend a game when you hate the company that makes it? This isn't just my opinion, it's the opinion of almost everyone I've ever encountered who has had to deal with staff or GameForge. That is not good for GameForge and it's also why many won't try any of their other games. Take a look at how CCP does things and take a page from their book (no, I'm not an Eve player, I've just read a case study in gaming and customer service and those guys are the pinnacle of knowing how to listen to your customer).
And please GF, hire a user experience expert next time you are changing the UI, I can recommend some great ones I've worked with in the past.
