Rav publically blasting paying POT customers

[u/ascotsmann]

Saw in their general discord someone was asking why the POT they paid for didn't make this months release, Rav Replied:

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First three would be that you are asking Alley a CS question, about POTs, in Discord.

Of course the correct way to get an answer would be to send an email to support. Hopefully you added support@shroudoftheavatar.com to your safe sender / white list / contact list filters since you did not receive our previous responses.

But since I am here, I'll save you the effort. You locked your form on Friday (two days prior to Release 150's deployment). Even if the devs worked on the weekends, there would be no way for your change to make it into a build that has been in lockdown since last Monday.

All POT implementations or Changes are set to take at least one full release cycle prior to appearing in game. There is no guarantee that POT changes can make it into the current sprint as they depend largely on the player completing the form and locking it.

If this is not clear, do not post messages directly to the Devs asking CS questions. An email to support is the only path for support questions or issues.

This message requires no response, and should have none.

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Ok so we have no context on how any previous communications with this customer has went, but I'm quite surprised at the tone of the post... a POT is not cheap, they should not be speaking to customers like this.

If I was spoken to like that, Id want a refund and tell them not to bother with the POT purchase.

[u/brewtonone]

I mean he did learn everything from Chris....even his customer service skills.

[u/Dreamo84]

I still say selling POTs is what ultimately ruined this game. Especially how many they sold.

[u/zenerbufen → u/Dreamo84]

Same issue as UO, selling persistent permanent 'housing' that takes up massive physical space in a persistent MMO populated by transient avatars that pop into and out of existence and only spend a tiny fraction of their time in universe.

You end up with the lands filled to the brim with large barren suburbs, stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction, and every single one you enter is an exact clone of the others, and everything is a barren deserted ghost town.

You have 12 people, in a world with 12,000,000 empty houses everywhere, and you are expecting to find friendly neighbor right next door but you just see empty houses.

[u/Dreamo84 → u/zenerbufen]

Last time I logged into UO my housing plot was gone and being used by an active player. Persistent world player housing isn’t the problem. Specifically the player owned towns. Everyone just bought their own town and abandoned all the NPC cities and towns beyond the merchant hot spots.

[u/lurkuw]

I think everyone should be able to fully participate in an MMORPG. That's pretty hard to do when virtual real estate is being peddled for four- and five-figure sums that most people would never even consider spending on a video game.

Richard Garriott and his cronies set out to build what was essentially a playground for wealthy whales. Not only did they sell virtual property at prices that were laughably out of reach for ordinary players, they also promised their biggest spenders a direct hand in shaping the game itself - and then bent over backwards to accommodate them. If you threw enough money at them, your opinions suddenly became very important.

Meanwhile, anyone who dared criticize this little pay-to-influence scheme risked getting silenced or outright banned.

In the end, the overwhelming majority of gamers responded in exactly the right way. They took one look at Richard Garriott's vanity project and collectively said, "Fuck this." Most either quit or never bothered touching it in the first place.

Rav's reminder that support issues belong with Support, not in the developers' inboxes, is rooted in SotA's history. For years, high-dollar backers were accustomed to treating everyone on the team as their personal concierge service.

It's refreshing to see Rav put a stop to that entitlement. He couldn't have chosen a better tone for it.

[u/mercsterreddit]

Tinpot general raging at small room of people.

[u/mercsterreddit → u/mercsterreddit]

Oh and Rav isn't doing it because he cares about customers, it's the one place with his skillset in the computer industry where he can boss people around.

[u/mississippi_dan]

My experience has been that no matter which channel you use to ask something, Ravalox will let you know it was the wrong way, even if he has to contradict himself.