#i can't say i'm Officially done with mystic messenger | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

umazes · 7 years

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In the interest of having a civil discussion, I wanted to clear up the concerns I have about The Arcana. I think many of the people who have been raising concerns probably feel the same way and I don't want to be misunderstood as trying to attack the devs or kill the game, because this is emphatically not about that.

My concerns with how this is proceeding can be broken into 3 points

1. The pricing of the game.

I've said it before, but I don't mind paying for things. I've spent hundreds on merch and games. I've paid at least $50 to play mystic messenger, for optional content, and I haven't regretted it.

What bothers me about the pricing of this game is how absurdly different it is compared to other games, and how I have no idea why it's this expensive.

Most mobile dating sims (voltage and solmare, notably) tend to ask no more than $5 for a route. And that's not what I'm asking for, but it's a comparison worth noting, because I think of it every time I'm asked to pay the equivalent of $3 for a single choice in this game. Beyond that, it's costing $10 to buy a book, which ends up working out (as others have calculated) to somewhere in the vicinity of $500 if you want to play the full game.

I've never been asked for that much money for any game, ever, unless they also offer me an art book and something like a 3 foot tall statue. Even other dating sims priced in the hundreds offer posters or voicing or badges. Asking $500 per customer for just the game itself is ridiculous.

Here's where the "It's optional" argument comes in. It's optional, in the same sense that I can eat raw potatoes and cooking them with seasoning is optional. I can play the free game, but it's just not as good or coherent without the coin choices, and lacks all of the scenes that make the game what I want it to be.

The problem associated with just not buying premium content if you don't like the pricing is that from a statistical point of view, unless we explain WHY we don't want to pay so much for it, it can be misinterpreted. What if the executives think we don't want the content because it's bad? They can interpret it as mobile visual novels just not being profitable. "Don't like, don't buy" with no additional complaints can ensure the content just stops being available rather than altered to be affordable.

I want to pay for this game! God, I want to. If I could even buy a route for $50. If there was a discount the more coins you buy.

(There isn't. You save something like 81 cents if you buy the highest bulk tier as opposed to the same amount in small increments.)

I just can't afford to pay half a months rent to play one game that I have no guarantee of receiving the full content for, and I imagine that's true for many of us. And if it has to be this price, I'd just like to know why. It's been extremely unclear to me why it's priced so high.

2. The treatment of kickstarter backers.

I'll be brief here, because I'm not a backer myself.

It's very upsetting to me first and foremost that all backers were promised a free version of the game that is no longer available and can receive, at most, a $10 compensation or just suck it up.

"But they're refunding most of the kickstarter money and killing their game!" is an argument I have heard. And, well, yes. But the backers who bought tiers specifically for the promise of a full pc version have all lost out, unless the pledged $10 or less and did not buy anything in the mobile game.

I understand that a free mobile version was never a reward, and that makes sense. But for the people who pledged maybe $50 for the pc game, they've lost $40 and in addition will have to pay the $10 per book in order to still receive the content they were promised. It's absurd. At the very least, higher tier backers should be offered coin compensation. And the gall of allowing people to select neither refund nor waiting for the PC version indefinitely, of offering for people to just give their money away after this, is shocking.

The draw of kickstarters that I fund is that I pay for a product that isn't complete in order to receive it for a reduced price when it is complete, because that compensates what was essentially an uncertain loss to me at the time of pledging. This is a loss with no equivalent gain in sight and no overt plans for them to do anything much about it.

3. The response and treatment of feedback.

This one really gets me. Let me start off by saying that I am very, very much aware that they have no dedicated PR staff.

I had a recent interaction with the arcana Twitter after they found another user's untagged complaint. As has been standard to this point, they kindly advised us that paid content is optional, to which I have the response I gave above. Upon being asked again why they think the price is justified, this response was offered.

Ha ha! Funny joke! Apparently whoever was manning this Twitter account thought so. Except it wasn't a funny joke at all. Making a very callous and inappropriate joke of a real concern that has already negatively impacted users, after barging into an untagged complaint on a personal account, is about one of the worst responses I can think of. And nobody even asked for one at all, at the time.

But upon receiving that response, boy did I want a response. I've been seeing that response from them everywhere. "Send us an email". So I passed this along to some friends who do similar work and who have feedback concerns as well.

Firstly, I was told by pretty much everyone who had sent them an email that no response had been received. I brought this up in the Twitter thread, to which I received the answer that the team is small and can't respond to every email.

Well, okay, that's reasonable. Except that you DO have time to respond to every tweet, apparently.

Then send them! Throwing my feedback into some kind of void with no indication of how, if, and when they are being received is not an encouraging way to deal with customers.

Apparently, tweets are harder to pass along. Except that when I pointed out tweets can be linked and indexed in a variety of ways (it is a thought sharing platform, after all), I received the response that tweets are screenshotted and passed along as well.

Then why are we supposed to email??????

I was complaining about this confused response privately when another friend who works in customer service pointed out to me that companies tend to prefer social media over email communication anyway, because email can be treated as a legal document. This entire inability to respond to my questions promptly and honestly is making me really irritated in trying to resolve what amounts to a singular complaint that I would like to freely offer money to this game, and want to know why it's so hard.

And to be clear, I don't expect it to be resolved in a day. I don't expect the devs to work day and night to change their game. But if you are using official accounts to interact with your audience, I expect a prompt and professional reponse. I handle CSR duties daily in my job too. A simple "We will get back to you in a few days" or "This problem can't currently be resolved but we'll provide an update on how the discussion is going in a week" would suffice. Do a public update instead of responding to every email if it's too much. Walk away and respond to my tweet in twenty minutes after coming up with a better response.

If you're interacting with customers in a professional capacity, then be professional. I expect to be treated with respect and I expect to know where my feedback is going and what's being done with it, because as 85 stands the interactions I've had have been extremely underwhelming.

I'm not contacting these devs on their personal accounts and I don't want to be accused of bullying. I just don't think it's unreasonable that if I'm having a bad time trying to support this good game that I enjoy playing, I should know why.

#the arcana #i just wanted to get this off my chest

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