Going to New York Comic Con has become a thing with me and my friends each year. As of right now though, this year it doesn't seem very likely that pretty much any of us will be going. This is the second time in as many months I've had the... experience? Yeah, let's put it that way... To witness what a big company really thinks of its customers.
The first instance was OGPlanet, the longtime publisher of Rumble Fighter, as well as quite a few other MMORPGs, basically reacting in the most spiteful, negative way to losing Rumble Fighter. It was pretty much a given that OGPlanet had a terribly low player satisfaction rating with Rumble Fighter, but even before that, they had troubles with Lost Saga. Lost Saga's developer simply cut their contract off and went to a new publisher, pretty much out of nowhere. This did not really spur OGPlanet in the right direction when it came to taking care of their customer/fanbase though. Instead they decided they would sit on their laurels with the rest of their games as well. If you've never played a game that is published by OGPlanet, when I say "resting on their laurels," I really am not insinuating anything good.
They rarely patch games that are desperately in need of a patch, and when they do patch the game, they obviously don't actually test anything out in the patch, so it causes a TON more problems. Not to mention the servers are spotty, at absolute best. In any case, when it came time for Nimonix to renew their contract with OGPlanet this year for Rumble Fighter, they just, well, opted out, and all of us as players got to witness exactly how they would handle knowing they were going to lose a game beforehand. The very first thing they did was erase all posts that Nimonix had made regarding the transfer and what we could do about it, and then they went on a spree of deleting information and negative posts from actual players. While there is something inherently wrong with all of that, what's funny about it is that THIS IS THE INTERNET, someone out there probably has proof you screwed up and that's going to come back to bite you in the ass.
It's true that Rumble Fighter was OGPlanet's cash cow, but the way that they dealt with the situation really does not help their reputation at all. I understand that they were angry about it, but to lash out at the community itself, which they are supposed to be fostering by basically making it impossible for us to transfer to the new publishers, was definitely not in their best interest.
The NYCC thing is not exactly the same, since naturally ReedPop isn't changing publishers or anything like that. Tickets are always staggered for NYCC, and this year, when 3-Day and Single Day tickets were supposed to be sold, the site IMMEDIATELY crashed. I realize that there are probably more and more people interested in NYCC each year, but you should probably do a load test before you release something to the public. After the page came back, they instated a virtual queue for all of us to wait in, with no real indication of where you were or how long you would be waiting. They then told us officially that it was totally okay to refresh the queue because nothing would happen. About an hour later they told us that refreshing the queue page probably would drop you down waaaay to the end of the queue.
To make matters worse, while all of this was happening, instead of updating their frequently used Facebook page, they spent about an hour trying to delete all of the negative feedback people were leaving as comments. ON TOP OF THAT, after basically lying to us all about whether or not the tickets were sold out, they deleted their post telling us what we should be doing if we wanted our tickets. While the 'right' thing to do would probably be to own up and apologize, they've done basically the worst thing they could possibly do, by pretending it never happened at all. I could understand if this was some small, start up con, but with something as big as this, plenty of people will be bound to notice that you made a mistake, and that the way that you dealt with said mistake was not really the best way to go.
Kenbei brought up a valid point to me, that "reputation>sales" but I think in this case, their reaction was actually very hurtful to their reputation. They made sure we all sat and bought as many tickets as possible, and if they weren't the tickets that we actually wanted because we were lied to, then "oh well." I see a lot of people complaining that there are so many tickets being sold by scalpers right now, and while I see how upsetting and obnoxious of a practice that is, there were literally thousands of us that didn't get the tickets we wanted.
Almost every kind of ticket sold out within 24 hours of its release, and that means that there was a TON of people trying to attend the event. The place was packed last year, and tickets were out for ~a month or so before they sold out. I can't even imagine how many people are going to be packed like sardines into the event. Either that, or they released exponentially fewer tickets to the masses. Which is very strange to me, since NYCC takes up more of the Javits Center each and every year, which means more floor space, which translates into more attendees.
In any case... If this is the way businesses want to treat their customers, I'm pretty scared for the future. Seems like the average Joe's like us are just going to get shit on every single day. I'm pretty much happy with not getting a ticket at this point, as I don't really think with the way they handled the situation they deserve support from me this year. If you're still looking for a ticket though, I hear some retailers are gonna be selling tickets at some point.
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