Please wait, your call IS important to us
We've all been there, your sitting with a sweaty phone pressed to your ear listening to Mozart or Handle if you're lucky but more likely a perpetually repeated collection of synthesizer chords where, every so often, just to prevent you falling asleep or actually start to to enjoy the music, some bored operator pipes up to tell you how
much they value your custom, that they are really sorry to delay you and to encourage you to keep holding until they
finally get round to answering your call. Sound familliar? No? OK have you played Project Entropia?
Now, before I get started, this isn't your textbook,
"Wahh, MindArk don't care" rant more something that, as a player who is coming up on their third month of break from the game, recently occurred to me. Wistrel hasn't set foot on Calypso now for nearly two months; one, how is this possible? and two, why arn't MindArk doing anything about it?
The answer to the first question, I'm pleased to say, has little to do with MindArk. I originally left due to money, time and hardware constraints none of which are attributable to any dissatisfaction with Project Entropia. But, given I'm missing the game actually quite a lot, why then havn't I gone back? Answer: Lack of motivation.
There's no delusions as to the state of play here. Calypso,by its very nature is designed to have a high turnover of new colonists and, without knowing the exact statistics, it seems likely that most of these will fall by the way side. It's not only impractical for
MA to chase those who can't handle more than a few hours of sweat gathering but also probably undesirable. As those having witnessed the Gold Rush following the Treasure Island sale will testify, the game simply canot handle that much Orange! It is not the casual passers by though that worry me, more what happens when the regulars quit. I, for example, know that I will be back (or at least I
expect I will) but MindArk of course do not. Without attatching too much self worth to this argument, to MindArk I represent a statistic depicting an enthusiastic regular player who has made several deposits but has now, inexplicably quit. They've got my credit card, they know I'm capable of using it, I'm not... surely this isn't good?
Normally, I'm the first person to criticise someone who will state something is crap yet offer up no usefull suggestions or ideas on how it could be improved. It's easy to diss something, a lot harder to fix it and in this case, sadly, I am also guilty. I can see that MindArk are not doing enough to entice leaving players back onto the accounts sheets but I'm also at a loss as to what to suggest. This said, however, I feel the answer probably lies in communication or in essance, making the leaving player feel like they are missing out.
From the first of my previous breaks, I know that one thing
MA do do is send out an email after n months of player inactivity. I can't remember exactly what this said but the jist was along the lines of,
"we noticed you've gone, anything we can do to help? or maybe you could just let us know why you're off?". Although it is admirable that they don't simply let their bread and butter walk out the door this does smack a lot of,
"too little too late" syndrome and, in my opinion, something more needs to be done.
So, speaking from personal experience, the key to the problem lies in communication. The setup with community as it stands is that of,
"if you want to be a part of it, you can be, but don't think for minute we'll invite you in" ie there are forums you can be involved with but if you stop looking you won't have a clue what gives. MindArk therefore need to be more pro-active on informing their participants about whats going on in the world they inhabit. A while ago Marco started mailing regular updates on the things that had been happenning some of which, even as a forum reader, I was totally unaware of and likewise story arcs on the client loader were popping up more and more often. Of late it seems however that this spout of pro-active informativeness has died out, the last mailshot being utterly dreary, stale in content and unenthusiastic, doing little to contradict my decision to leave. Last time, what brought me back was a desire to explore the features of a new version update. This said, MindArk could still go a long way to keep their players feeling involved inbetween months even if they are not active. As stated before, I don't know what form this carrot could take but anything from weekly story arc updates, notification of interesting happennings in game or even a video window on the world or a live chat stream from Port Atlantis Market could go a long way toward making "walking away from Calypso" something thats much harder to do.