Moogum wrote:
bgryph wrote:
I suspect Neopets would be a lot more motivated to fix glitches and provide better customer service if failure to do so impacted them -- in terms of risk to potential sponsor support -- then when failure to do so only impacts users.
Sure, glitches happen. But they don't have to happen like they happen on Neopets. Your bank glitched away any of your money recently, then refused to return it to you? I didn't think so.
First, you can't say "they'd be a lot more motivated to fix glitches" because, well, the FIX the glitches. It's not like there's a glitch and they're like "hmm... well, we'll get to that in a bit let's go make a deal with Disney first". They see a glitch, and the programmers fix it, thats just how it works.
On the contrary, there are a wide variety of ongoing glitches on the site. People lose items moving them on an ongoing basis -- when de-equipping them, when moving them out of their SDB, when putting them in their shops to sell them, when buying from user shops, etc. Although the recent major auction and TP glitches seem to have been fixed, people still lose items and NP when selling items here, as well.
Morevoer, the glitches that
are fixed are not often well-handled while occuring. The recent big TP glitch was ongoing for hours and hours, and yet TNT didn't take the TP down or even warn users not to try to make trades until it was fixed. They just merrily let users lose their items and then made a brief mention in the news after everything was fixed. An earlier warning could have saved their players a lot of grief, but for some reason they didn't give one.
Likewise, in the big password glitch, rather than posting a general warning to users all over the site to change their password, TNT confined themselves to mentioning it on the BD chat board. If I hadn't happened to read PPT that afternoon, I never would have known it was happening. Again, a lot of users were probably hacked who wouldn't have been if they had better warning, and again, only a brief mention was made after the fact.
Heck, when the Baby Lupe plushie was released at the Limited Too, TNT bestired itself to email every single over-13 user on the site. But when all our passwords are given out, they can't be bothered?!? Presumably this is because they have a financial incentive in selling Baby Lupe plushies, but don't feel the same incentive to protect the security of their accounts.
Even when glitches are well-handeled overall, TNT can fall down on the communications aspect. Consider the Lab Map glitch. Although they have a general idea what's happening, no one at TNT knows why it happens. No blame to them, everyone with programming experience knows that tracking rare, hard-to-replicate bugs is well-nigh impossible. They even instituted a system to track who had the Lab Map so that it could be returned if it were glitched away. Again, kudos, the best thing to do in the circumstances. I think we're all pleased and grateful that it was done.
So here's a case in which TNT pretty much did everything we might possibly have wanted them to do, glitchwise. Yet until one of the programmers posted about it on Neocolours, no one really had any idea what was happening, whether it was still happening, and whether they could get their Lab Maps back if they were glitched away. Months and months after the problem was discovered and fixed to the best of TNTs ability, we were still in the dark.
Note I don't blame the programmers for this: communicating with users isn't their job. (Yay for them for answering questions on a fan site, in fact!) But I think there should be someone at Neopets who makes it their responsibility to keep users updated on what's happening on the site. I don't mean just the newest TCG expansion, the latest offerings at the Bakery, or mentioning that Chias can now be painted Watermelon, I mean the REAL stuff that's happening: glitches, scams, what's being done about them, that sort of thing.
I for one say it's not just the glitches that are getting to people, it's the perception that TNT doesn't care about the glitches. This perception may not be accurate, but TNT nevertheless often does a darned good imitation of not caring. I think better communication on TNTs part would improve the situation a lot.
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And about giving back items, do you REALLY think it's that easy? Can you just think of how many e-mails they already get, how many more they'll get of people wanting money back, how many they will get from people who wnat to take advantage and say their items were lost. Then they have to go through records to make sure that the people aren't lying, and then give them their items back. Can you imagine how much time and work that would take? It would distract them from their regular job of keeping the site up, and even more glitches would happen.
I don't think it's easy at all. I suspect that many of the day-to-day site glitches aren't programming errors per se. Rather, I suspect that the system Neopets uses to move items about simply isn't very robust to interruption and tends to delete (or sometimes duplicate) items if something happens mid-transfer. So to get rid of the constant glitching, they'd need to switch to a more robust transaction system. (For example, something that checked to make sure that the H4000 helmet you're de-equipping actually made it to your inventory before deleting the record of it in your equipment.) They might instead be able to use some sort of system that tracks items over a certain value and makes sure they don't just vanish. Neither would be particularly trivial to implement. Which is why I think TNT needs a little extra motivation before they'd consder it.
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Oh and be realistic: comparing a bank to Neopets that way is a little out there.
Why? It's not like banks use special "bank computers" that only banks can own, or have special "bank customer service" that is far more efficent than customer service representatives available to Neopets. They use the same equipment and probably the same servers that Neopets does, they just have a much more robust system for moving money about (and, one hopes, better records as well -- though from my dealings with my bank I'm inclined to doubt it). And they undoubtedly hire the same customer service people -- only more of them.
My point is that shuffling mass quantities of numbers about online without glitching them up in the process isn't as impossible as some people here have suggested. Nor is having customer service people on hand to answer email queries -- sometimes stupid ones -- from a large customer base. Banks do it every day. So does just about any large online business that deals in real-life financial transactions. You just have to care enough about avoiding errors to take the necessary precautions, and of course have the necessary resources. By all accounts Neopets is doing pretty well financially, so that leaves motivation. :shrug: