The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 14, 2011

Official News page 7


REAL LIFE NEWS: GAMERS ANGRY AT LOSS OF GAME STUFF

by Hazed

A small gaming company called Kabam, which has been doing extremely well despite being a minnow up against the whales of the big gaming companies, has managed to anger its players by its ham-fisted attempt to reverse the effects of a security problem.

Kingdoms of Camelot runs on Facebook and has 2 million active users. Last week, Kabam put out an update to the game code. Unfortunately, it contained a bug that allowed players to give each other virtual goods for free - when normally these items would cost real dollars. Tens of thousands of players took advantage of the bug and produced massive amounts of the free stuff.

Kabam realized the problem the next morning, and also realized that all this virtual stuff just appearing out of nowhere created a gigantic imbalance in the game world. So their programmers wrote a script to remove the illegitimate items.

Unfortunately, the script also zapped legitimate paid-for items from the accounts of about 70,000 players. Whoops! Cue hordes of angry customers.

Kabam admits they made a mistake and the company has been spending all their time since then restoring the items in question, as well as compensating those affected. But some players remain very disgruntled, as you will see if you click the source link below and read what they had to say.

The moral is that if you are going to charge your players for actual items (rather than just time playing) then you have to treat those items as if they were real money, because that's what they represent to the players. In Fed, the analogy would be if we suddenly removed everybody's slithy toves with no warning, because some people had figured out how to get them for free.

Kabam, and other companies like them, should remember that game players' loyalty only lasts so long and that there are plenty of other games out there that disgruntled customers can switch their allegiance to.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/11/kabam/


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