Former subscribers to Funcom’s Age of Conan are reporting that the company has changed its recruiting tactics. Instead of luring former players back with higher XP, in-game items and other bonuses, Funcom has relegated itself to straight up blackmail.
Don’t resubscribe, then your characters below level 20 will be wiped from existence. From the e-mail:
“Dear customer,
Thank you for playing Age of Conan.
As part of our maintenance your account is now flagged to have your characters below level 20 deleted as part of maintenance. Please re-activate your account now to ensure that your characters progress and names stay intact.
As a welcome back offer we would like to give you a time-limited offer for 7 days of additional play time if you choose to re-subscribe now. Please click this link to use this special offer!”
Funcom’s marketing department, which I can only imagine is also Satan’s marketing department, has crossed the line with this. The company is not only willing to blackmail its players into resubscribing, but then turns around and pretends that it’s a perk. You’ll get 7 days of play time if you bite on the “special offer!”
Honestly Funcom, do you believe your subscribers are so stupid that they won’t see past this scheme? It costs the company approximately nothing to keep our characters archived on the database, or it should if Funcom is doing it correctly, and yet we are threaten with deletion. I know some people will resub to save their toons, but in the end the company has damned itself in my, and many other player’s eyes.
I don’t care if this is a technical decision because servers or databases are being merged. It’s a horrible move, period. End of story.
Thanks for making the decision to check out Age of Conan again an easy one.
/uninstall
I’ve done a bit of research about this and here’s what I found based on the official announcement:
Qualifications for Character Deletion Process:
* NO characters will be deleted from an account that has a valid, running subscription.
* If an account’s subscription ran out 7 or more months ago, and the account is not reactivated until the character deletion process starts, characters below level 21 will be deleted. Characters of level 21 and up remain untouched and are NOT deleted.
http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?p=1511529#post1511529
And because the first 20 levels in Age Of Conans are now F2P (as in you don’t need to pay to level up to 20, not affected by multiple characters) you can re-activate the account for Free (from what I’ve read around the forum but I have not verified it myself).
I don’t understand why this really matters much… It does not take long to level a toon to 20, so the only reason to feel threatened by this email is if the name of the toon is something special. Just my thoughts. And it is a stupid way for Funcom to attempt to “market” their product.
Desperate times must be calling for desperate measures. An evil ploy none the less…
At least there will be no more incentive to ever return, after the ultimatum is carried out. Funcom needs to replace their marketing team.
Wow, I can’t quite decide if this is bad or funny. A bit of both, I think.
FunCom have lurched from one bad decision to another with this game, and this is just the latest in a long line of them. Next week it’ll be something along the lines of ‘reactivate or we’ll sell your email address to Nigerian Spammers’.
taking about idiot taking it out of proportions, it takes less than a day to hit lvl 20(tutorial levels) who cares? They are not wiping all the characters, just low level crap.
To the Author, please check the terms and conditions of most major Pay to play mmorpg’s out there and you will find the same stipulations.
@Avery
Of course they all reserve the right to do it (so they can shutdown the game at some point), but few actually do when it’s live.
It’s the principal of the issue that rubs me the wrong way (blackmail/special offer), not the fact that my lowbies are going to die.
I have summed your post into 2 sentences.
“WHAAA! They want to delete my level 10 because I haven’t played for 7 months. Funcom is teh evil!!”
A level 20 character is nothing. No one would cry if they did the same to level 20s in WoW. Stop pretending things are a big deal just so you can have an interesting title.
What a pitiful and transparent bit of extortion on Funcom’s part.
You should have listened to myself and others during the beta, Funcom. How does it feel to have stupidly painted yourselves into a corner..?
Anyway, none of this will matter soon. By the end of this year, I expect that AoC will completely die. Good riddance… and an excellent lesson in what NOT to do when you construct an MMO.
@Tessera
I definitely like and agree with the term “Pitiful and transparent bit of extortion” in describing this marketing ploy, however I do not believe AoC to completely die by the end of the year. Although their marketing ploys are a bit shady, the game is not a horrible game in and of it self and it was recently awarded most improved game of 2009 @ mmorpg.com.
I recently went back and played the game and while it is coming along, their is still a TON left to improve.
But all in all, i think the game is improving.
None of you understand the world of business.
Not that I like AoC: I think as a game it si quite bad and while I enjoy reading some good AoC bashing this is too much.
The online world requires servers and servers cost money. If you are going to reduce costs you need to thin out server space and delete some things.
This may also increase DB performance for the players who stayed in the game.
I think that if this is the case Funcom actions are valid an by no means constitute as blackmail.
The reason they send out the mail is that for those who just took a long break from the game to be aware of this move.
The author of this entry is just trying too hard have a go at Funcom
LOL. Judging by the reactions it got people to discuss the game so looked like it worked. I’m all for freeing up some more names that are just taking up space.
We can confirm they have handled several marketing campaigns for us .
@Capiright and Marcos
I definitely understand where you guys are coming from. Each of those characters cost money, and they have to pay for servers, and there are ALOT of sub 20 characters that have picked up the game and never played again.
I just believe that this is a poor way to treat customers/potential customers/previous customers. In business customer service is INTEGRAL, it is much harder to get a customer who feels wronged to come back, than it is to keep one.
I think this could potentially hurt them because although they may not have done anything “legally” wrong, they could have caused some customers(like the author) to feel wronged, and this is something that is potentially more expensive than a few bits of character on a server.
Not only that, with the deletion maintenance they also clear up a lot of names that have been locked down and are just lying idle on dead accounts.
And we’re talking level 20. You can play the unlimited trial (fully free of charge), at your own pace up somewhat past level 20 (on the tortage island, including pvp).
So they delete those that are X amounts old and not passed level 20.
And hey, if you do want to play past 20 there’s a good 33% off for a month.
I think Funcom are cracking the Balrog-whip as they should. They must be the devil, giving away free gametime and deleteing old lowbie characters.
Cheers and smiles
This isnt Blackmail, it’s good business. I would think that freeing up system resources would be considered a benifit to the active player base. But this article is obviously written by a WOW fanboy. If people are so attached to there level 20 toon that they never play, then maybe they should get the free week re-trial and get there toon to 22. Trust me it isnt hard to do. Leaving now to defrag my computer! OHH NO!!!!!