Category Archives: Business

The problem of being asked questions that no one wants an answer to

Business, Education, , ,

Last week, I received an email from two separate sources at the school where I teach. The first one was informing me that I would be charged for parking, and it would be coming out of my bi-weekly pay. It also stated to inform them if I was no longer working on campus, as that didn’t require a charge for parking. The same day, I received an email from another entity asking me pretty much the same thing.

So, I responded to both of them at separate times, indicating that I was teaching ON campus, BUT I didn’t utilize their parking because I worked down the street from school, which meant that I was walking there every day and haven’t used parking since I started working there years ago. In other words, each year they’ve been charging me for parking that I don’t actually use. And never will.

Their response: None. Last week, I was charged for parking.

Does anyone else find this a little annoying?

This falls into what I like to call false communication, meaning that someone addresses you with a conversation but isn’t really interested in the response. What was really going on here was that the administrators of my school were informing me that they were going to be charging me for parking, and it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that they were going to do it regardless of what I said or did.

This is one of the problems a lot of businesses have. A great example of this was the debacle that Netflix went through a few years ago when they tried to raise their prices but did it as if they were offering a “service”. The service they were offering was one that no one wanted, so when people responded that this was a bad idea, they went ahead and did it any way. So, the result was that a lot of people left Netflix and never came back. No amount of cajoling or explaining “this is what we meant to say or do” made a difference. Because they lost their customers by basically telling them one thing, being adamant about it, and then going ahead and doing regardless of the feedback from customers.

And that’s the problem right there. When you ask for feedback from customers, you acctually need to do something about responding to it. If you say, I want to hear from people about our services, don’t be surprised when they respond with negative information. If your goal is to get only good responses, you’re basically wasting the opportunity of asking for information in the first place.

I’ve worked at a few places that have this faulty philosophy where they basically only want to put forth a positive image, so they suppress anything that sounds negative. An example is a human resources department I worked for that used to constantly say “Our company is the number one company in our area and people want to work here.” They say this even though their turn-over is massive, and they basically can’t hire people to remain even in the industry in which they are a pominent player. What has happened is that they kept telling this lie to themselves to the point of where actual employees used to joke with each other by insulting the company and stating “Yeah, this is the place where employees really want to work.” When your boast becomes a sarcastic retort, you’re obviously doing something wrong.

I once worked for a company that kept being hit by national scores on bad customer service. Therefore, management decided that it would educate staff on customer service so they could raise these scores. As I listened to executives explain how they would begin training the staff in customer service, the one thought going through my mind was “you know, if the customer service of the staff teaching customer service is atrocious, how do you expect to raise those scores?” And that was a huge concern. I’d listen to one supervisor talk about how staff was going to work hard to increase those customer service scores, and I’d look around the room at people who weren’t happy to be there in the meeting in the first place. And you’d wonder, do they even realize there’s a problem much bigger than customer service ratings on forms from people outside the organization?

And that’s the other problem. As long as people are short sighted enough to not realize the problems are inherent within the system itself, they’re never going to solve the problem.

I go back to my school and think, if they only knew that their lack of communication is hurting them, they might actually do something about improving it. But even if I said something, they’d most likely see me as an outlier and continue doing what they do, because up until now, nothing has caused them to think they’re doing anything wrong. Until people are affected and their illusions of security are threatened, they have no reason to make changes.

And thus, we get charged for parking even when we don’t need…or want…it.

Jelly Bellies are for eating, so please just shut the hell up

Business, News, Politics, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

One of the few givens in today’s society is that either some pop star is going to try to push the envelope by participating in some semblance of outrageous behavior (like saying the wrong thing, or forgetting to wear her clothes in public, or just having sex with strangers in church) or that some corporate executive is going to overstep his or her authority and say things that probably should have been sent anonymously to the racist message board where it belonged. Today, the owner of Jelly Belly decided to come out against transgendered rights in California, somehow thinking that his ability to make candy filled with high-fructose corn syrup somehow makes him an advocate for anyone who advocates hating people who are just trying to live their lives without discrimination and problems that most of us generally don’t have to deal with because we’re part of mainstream society.

A few weeks ago, it was Abercrombie & Fitch. Before that, Chik-Fil-something or other (honestly, just didn’t feel like looking up their name to spell it right as their company isn’t that important to me that I’d waste that much time putting their name into a Google search engine. And before that, it was Martha Stewart doing whatever it is that rich white women do when they’re not doing what rich white women do normally.

The point is: I’m getting really tired of hearing about corporate CEOs acting badly in public. It was fine when I was dealing with Paris Hilton, who was kind of an acting-badly CEO, even though she’s not actually the Hilton CEO. At least she was attractive and said lots of dumb things that made me laugh, even if that wasn’t her main intention. She at least provided entertainment, and I never felt that behind her ridiculousness was someone who was actually out there hating other people for being different.

But that’s what these CEOs are doing. They’ve made a shit load of money off of the rest of us, and for some reason they think that somehow now gives them the platform to spout some really racist, homophobic bullshit that somehow is relevant to the rest of us. If anyone of us have a problem with what they have to say, they chalk it up as irrelevant because what’s relevant is that we paid them money to become very wealthy and now that somehow their wealth and power makes them think that their opinions are somehow more significant than the opinions of the rest of us.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Those CEOs are not smarter, more lived, or even cognizant of facts that the rest of us don’t know. They don’t have more education than the rest of us; some of them have tons less. The only thing they have that the rest of us don’t have is money and gobs of it. That money opens doors for them so that when they have something “important” to say, people listen, which is why we’re hearing their racist, homophobic rants instead of just eating their candy.

What really seems to be happening is that our media pays dire attention to these Neanderthals because of the money factor. This is why when one of them farts on national television, we all have to smell it for the next couple of days. So, if we want to make this problem go away, we need to write to our media sources and say to stop telling us whenever a millionaire/billionaire sneezes. We don’t care.

Sure, the usual response is to start the infamous boycott of Jelly Belly products, or whatever product a company makes when one of these morons starts spouting his or her nonsense, but most often these products are things we like; we just don’t like the owners of these companies who make them. Why should we lose the things we like because they’re made by morons we hate?

The simple fact is that these CEOs are nothing more than people who were lucky at getting their product to the market and made a killing doing it. What they’re good at is business, so if they want to tell me how to run a bookstore, then the media should pipe that discussion to me. But I don’t go to a guy who makes candies in order to find out how I should feel about social issues in America. For that, I usually go to social figures who have knowledge in those areas of information. By the same token, I don’t turn to LGBT folk to find out the best way to reinvest my 401K; that’s not their expertise. Sure, one of them might know something about it, but you generally don’t just randomly go out into a crowd and start trying to get knowledge by hoping that maybe one of them might know something about the issue you’re dealing with. At least I don’t, any more than I have a tendency to avoid bringing my back pain issue to my dentist, who might feel bad about it but can’t really do anything to make me better.

So, with that said, can you CEOs please kindly shut the fuck up and get back to selling us things we don’t need?

There’s a difference between giving information and asking for money

Business, Education, , , , , , ,
Now, if SHE emailed and asked for my phone number....
Now, if SHE emailed and asked for my phone number….

I received an email from the place where I received one of my bachelor’s degrees. Apparently, according to the email, students from that school have been trying to get a hold of me to tell me about campus activities, important events and to inform me of all the great things that other alumni are doing to support the institution. Having received numerous contacts from this university over the years, what they’re really telling me is that students from this school have been trying to get in touch with me to beg me for money for the university. Simple as that.

So, this alumni organization would really appreciate it if I would update their records with my new phone number so they can get right on that “informing me of things I’m missing out on”.

Look, I don’t mind that a university needs lots of money to pay its professors and cultural studies programs to explain why fish fall in love, but I’m not a spigot of revenue that a university can rely upon to help pay its Board of Directors, or to provide fuel to their limousines they use to drive to their private hanger at the airport.

If I was extremely interested in continuing to provide kickbacks to the executives from my university, I would have contacted them personally so that they would not have had to hunt me down with some undergraduate (or graduate) on a stipend or grant-writing scholarship.

I think what bothers me the most is the dishonesty in the email, in that they’re pretending to be doing me service that somehow gets provided by me giving them my phone number. The reality of the situation is that any emails they send me completely keeps me up to date on what’s going on with the alumni of that university, meaning that a phone call from some undergraduate isn’t going to provide me with more information than I already have. But what I have learned (from a graduate school, not from that school itself) is that foot in the door processes allow you to gain so much more if you can get someone to give up just an inch on ground. In other words, if I am willing to give my phone number, I’m more likely to donate money the next time someone calls because I already “agreed” to provide my phone number first.

So, I’ll pass on this “great” opportunity.

Martha Stewart loses it on Twitter and CNBC thinks it’s a big enough story to do an entire story on it

Business, News, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , , , , ,
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets

The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.

You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.

I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.

I’m just saying….

We Now Live in an Era of Institutionally Required Paranoia–And there’s no solution

Business, News, Technology, , , , , , ,
They found me, even though I live next door to the Unabomber
They found me, even though I live next door to the Unabomber

It was recently announced that hackers broke into three of the largest data brokers out there and stole millions of social security numbers, plus all sorts of other identification characteristics on people they track. Basically, what this means is that companies that track your information without your permission, or even without your knowledge, have had that information stolen from them, so all of your information is now in the hands of some very bad people who will use it to steal from you, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. So, have a nice day and please buy more products from random companies.

In case you were unaware of it, this sort of thing is happening more and more often. Even if you choose to remain completely off line and never even do anything that can cause anyone to try to steal from you, there are companies out there making it so that you’re already online and everything of yours online is pretty much open to someone breaking into it, EVEN IF IT’S NOT YOU THEY BREAK INTO. That’s the real scary thing because the way our capitalistic system works means that companies we’ve never done business with can now use your information, collect your information, trade with each other based on your information and pretty much put you into the poor farm by using your information.

A couple of months back, someone used my bank credit card to buy train tickets in France. I have no idea how they got a hold of my information, but I can tell you that when I dealt with my bank, I was very much put on the defensive, almost as if something I had done caused this sort of thing to happen. There was never any statement along the lines of “you know, maybe it was our fault.” Shortly after this, it was leaked that this bank suffered a huge data loss that resulted in accounts being compromised. Not once was a single comment made about that, although when it looked like maybe the mistake was on my part, the conversation was sure a lot different.

And that’s kind of the future that we have to look forward to. Credit monitoring companies maintain databases of massive volumes of information on each and every one of us. But if they lose some of that information, they MIGHT (usually if the government steps in and shames them) inform you. And they just might offer a free credit report to see how screwed you really are. If you were screwed because of their action, expect years of having to explain yourself as no one will ever believe you didn’t actually try to buy 10,000 units of widgets from St. Petersburg in the middle of the night while using your credit card to buy a bail bond for some criminal in Florida.

The real issue here is that so much information is available about people and no one seems to care that we’ve become products rather than the owners of this information. Just think about Facebook and LInkedIn. Both “services” are actually data brokers who believe they actually own your information and that your contribution is that you’re allowed to organize it for them so it’s easier to access. If you quit Facebook, your information stays there pretty much forever, no matter how much they say it won’t be. And if you never joined Facebook, your information somehow made it there any way, and they’re just basically waiting for you to acknowledge you’re who you are so they can start tracking you better and send you notices of things you should buy.

We’ve all become products who think we’re actually in control of ourselves, and that’s the real tragic thing. We haven’t been the owners of our own identities for a very long time now, and even now people don’t recognize that. Or when they do, they just sort of shrug and figure it’s too much of a hassle to bother with anyway. But when their identities are stolen, it’s usually too late, so we all play a reverse lottery game here in which we hope that nothing bad ever happens to us while we cast discerning eyes at thoese who do get their identities stolen. We’re good until it happens to us.

And then, like I said, it’s generally too late. But that’s okay. We have much more important things to pay attention to. Who has time for this sort of thing?

Just because I paid my bill online doesn’t mean I want to stop receiving paper copies of my bill!

Business, , , ,

This is one of those things with the “green” movement that has been driving me freaking crazy ever since it started. I’ll give you an example. Consumers Energy handles my electricity needs. I’m okay with that. They send me a paper copy of my bill. I’m okay with that. They let me pay my bill either through the mail or online. Sounds great so far. But whenever I make an online payment of my bill, they automatically switch me from a paper bill receiving customer to an online only bill receiving customer. I never asked for that. I never approved that. They just do it every freaking time I try to make an online payment.

Here. I’ll let you in on a little secret. If I don’t receive a paper copy of a bill, I’m probably not going to pay it. I don’t pay attention to email crap that gets sent to me because my email is filled with so much spam (yes, obviously from all of the porn mail lists I’m on…whatever), but regardless of why I receive so much spam, there’s no rule, written or unwritten that states that I’m somehow supposed to be a diligent payer of attention to crap that gets sent to me that way. But I do look at EVERY piece of physical mail that gets sent to me.

Yet, EVERY month, Consumers Energy attempts to push me off physical mail and make me one of its email bitches. I’m not interested, and I wish companies would stop trying to make that happen.

Recently, I wrote an article about how some company’s “green” policy is not MY green policy, which means that I don’t give a frack that they’re now going green. It’s not part of my business relationship with them, so they need to stop trying to force it on me.

I get so damn upset at Consumers Energy every time they do this to me that if they were any other company where I could turn to some other company to replace them, I’d have done it years ago. That is probably the worst customer service response a company should ever desire, yet I get the impression they don’t give a crap whatsoever. But sure enough, in a few days when I go to make that payment,I’m going to have to go through tons of extra screens of paperwork in order to get myself back on the mailing list again because they’ll automatically try to dislodge me from it yet again, without my permission, desire or intention.

And that’s a horrible business model for any company whenever your customer leaves your interaction fuming at your company after having just paid for your services.

I’m just saying.

Amazon’s Business Practices Discriminate Against the “Out of Money” Class

Business, Economics, , , , ,
Often, us poor people have to live in places like this, such as my Summer resort, where cable isn't fee!
Often, us poor people have to live in places like this, such as my Summer retreat, where cable isn’t fee!

Today, I was thinking of buying a book that I don’t really need, but for some reason felt I had to have it right then and there. So, I went onto Amazon’s site, put in the information for the book and found out that I could purchase it used for $7.54. I went through the full process of buying, but when it came to the last stage (well, the stage before I give my address to send it to), I was halted by a statement indicating that my credit card could not process the transaction. So I immediately checked my checking account and discovered that my balance was 32 cents. So I then went back to Amazon, realizing that my bank had no more funds in my account and tried to figure out how they could accommodate me.

It turns out that Amazon has no contingency plan for those who do not have enough money to afford their products. In other words, I was proverbially screwed.

This immediately inflamed me because all companies should have resources in place to assist those of us who are “financially challenged”, which, according to an Internet search I just did that brought up lots of lesbian pornography, I discovered that the financially challenged are quite often the most overlooked disenfranchised class of people in American society. It’s almost as if businesses think that people need to “work” for the things they wish to buy and aren’t too proud to not say so.

So, I contacted several loser friends of mine to inquire whether or not they have ever been discriminated like this before, and four of those five friends indicated they had (the fifth could not answer as he was suffering from a severe case of “Cheetos-overimbibing”). I was shocked to discover this was not just an isolated incident.

This has inflamed me to no end, and I decided that I would send out the word to everyone that these practices must be stopped immediately, or we would use our financial clout in massive protest and show them that without our inability to pay for goods backing up their company, they’d…um…um, you know maybe I haven’t thought this through enough.

Let me get back to you, and when I do, boy am I going to have something for you to rally behind!

Companies that seem intent on selling you stuff you know you don’t need…and RIGHT NOW

Business, Technology, Television, , , , , , ,

A few weeks ago, I read the circular for Best Buy, and they were announcing they were selling “back to school” stuff. For some reason, a big screen tv seemed to be one of the important things they felt people would need as part of back to school. The ad on the back page advertised Best Buy as the “techfitter” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and that this was important for back to school. All I kept thinking was “I have never been in a school where I needed a big screen tv for any rhyme or reason”.

Fast forward to the next few weeks, and the ads have been advertising nothing but the need for a big screen television for the “big game”. Two weeks in a row. And it shows football players on the screen doing whatever it is that football players do. And all I could think to myself was, “well, if I bought a big screen television because I needed it to go back to school” why the hell are you advertising one for me to watch the big game? Am I only allowed to watch the back to school big screen TV when I’m working on school stuff, but if I’m planning to watch “the big game”, I have to get a specially bought big screen TV from Best Buy that just lets me watch “the big game”? Next week, will there be a big screen television set for me to watch old episodes of Rosanne, and then the week after that a new set to watch the “new” season of television that will be airing for the new fall season? Do you kind of get my point here?

I’m a huge advocate of discontinuing the hype of advertisement that so many companies do. I used to love it when a company sent me a flyer advertising good prices. But that was before those companies started adding “buy this now before this price is gone” to the wording. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but everything seems like it’s a crisis when it comes to sales and prices. You don’t have a discount sale any more. You have a “blow out sale!”. Offers are going to disappear if you don’t act now, and I mean FREAKING NOW!!!!!!! Because there’s no way in the world that that discounted television that they dropped ten dollars off the price will EVER POSSIBLY comes down ten dollars again, and you will completely missed out on the one chance of your freaking lifetime!

It’s to the point where every time I go to a store, I’m expecting to have a stroke because the pressure is on to make sure that I act right then and there, because if I don’t, Jack Bauer isn’t going to be there in time to diffuse the bomb from going off. I was playing an online game the other day, and an ad came over the interface, telling me that if I didn’t upgrade my account right then and there, I would lose the opportunity to play the great content that was obviously right there in front of me if I only acted fast enough. I signed out of the game, deleted it from my hard drive and will probably never take advantage of that game again. I mean, honestly, the pressure is too heavy on me to have to do the right thing at the right time, and if I don’t play it, and maybe read a book, that pressure seems to be a lot less pressing.

As I started to pay closer attention to this stuff, I started to realize that there were a lot of products I’ve bought over the years that I don’t need to buy again, or don’t need to upgrade. I’ll be honest. When the Best Buy ads started playing into my subconscious, I actually started thinking that my 32 inch television wasn’t big enough, that I might need to upgrade to a 55 or 60 inch television. And then it dawned on me. I never watch my television. Like ever. I’ll play a Blu-ray on it, and I might watch Netflix stuff on it every now and then, but mostly I tend to watch shows on my computer, which has a 27 inch screen, and I’ve never had a reason to complain that it was too small. I don’t ever watch “the game”, so I don’t care one iota for seeing “the game” when it comes across the screen. I don’t even know when it airs, other than a faint memory of Monday because of the old reference of Monday Night Football. I can’t even tell you if that’s still the night, or even what station that used to represent.

What I have started doing, and I wish more people would do it as well, is to stop buying things from companies that try to convince me there’s a hurry for me to purchase their junk. Purchasing should be a well thought out course where you’ve considered all of the alternatives and whether or not you need the item. We’ve come a long way from those days, and I feel that way too many of us do most of our shopping in the quick lane aisle, buying things placed in that aisle for us to foolishly think how convenient it might be to buy that.

 

Why Barnes & Noble’s Nook Failed

Books, Business, Technology, , , , , , , ,
"I read all of Duane Gundrum's books because he's so dreamy...."
“I read all of Duane Gundrum’s books because he’s so dreamy….”

Unfortunately, it’s been predicted for some time that Barnes & Noble was going to distance itself from the Nook, and thus, the e-book market. So, it seems that moment is coming to pass. Speculators assume that Barnes & Noble will attempt to continue on as a brick and mortar (physical presence only) store and sell off all of its e-book stuff. Well, in case it’s not readily apparent, the problem with that is that without an actual device to continue to hype the market of products, the Nook is going to die out as people are going to see the Kindle as a continuing vehicle and the Nook as dead in the water. Sure, they can survive on apps for awhile, but eventually people are going to see the writing on the wall and choose to go with a platform that looks like it is going to survive the next wave of changes.

But the point of this post isn’t to talk about the future of Barnes & Noble, because to be honest, I have no idea what is going to happen to that company. However, what I can do is talk about what happened to the company, specifically as to why the Nook didn’t become the all-winning vehicle they were hoping it would be. To understand this, we have to use our little go back in time feature and see what was happening when the Nook launched with all intentions of challenging the new kid on the block, the Kindle.

Back then, Barnes & Noble was the big kid on the block. He’d already beat up every brick and mortar store that existed before him, and he was rearing to go after the next challenge. Only, the next challenge wasn’t another physical store, but an online one that promised to lower prices and produce a better shopping experience. Now, I wish to harp on the latter of those intentions because Barnes & Noble stupidly focused only on the first: Lower prices. And unfortunately, Barnes & Noble didn’t handle that one well either.

The Kindle offered books at lower prices than you could buy them at retail stores. This was huge. When the Nook launched, it attempted to “discount” prices as well, but if you held up both side by side (and I used to do this a lot), what you discovered was that most of the time the Kindle price was exactly the same as, or cheaper, than the Nook price for a book. And then you started to see more and more choices being offered on the Kindle, which made having a Nook kind of a stupid purchase because if you couldn’t find everything, and couldn’t find it cheaper, you bought a pretty stupid device.

But the second point is the one I want to talk about the most because that’s where I truly feel that Barnes & Noble failed with its Nook. What Amazon offered with its Kindle was not only lower prices, but it offered a better customer experience, meaning that if you were looking for something, the Kindle actually cared about helping you find it. This meant that as you bought more books, the algorithms that worked within Amazon served to make recommendations to help you find things that you might want in the future. The more you bought and searched, the more likely the device was going to serve to help you find exactly what you might want, even if you didn’t realize you wanted it.

The Nook, on the other hand, basically offered you whatever the publishers were selling, and it put its placement completely determined by the legacy model of the highest bidder (or largest publisher with more prestige). After a few purchases on a Nook, if you were looking for a new book, every new search was like starting out from the very beginning again. In other words, you were screwed. If you didn’t want only the most popular book out there, you had to figure out what you wanted on your own.

The problem B&N made was that it assumed that cheaper prices (less than you’d pay for the hard copy of the book) was more than enough to produce decent profit. But they didn’t take into account that they had to be cheaper than the competition, not just cheaper than their own posted price for the retail version of the hard copy. And then they made the customer experience as bad as an Internet search could be back before Google was invented. You basically had to do a search with the intention of hoping to get lucky in order to find the thing you were looking for. This was great if you were looking for a copy of 50 Shades of Gray, but it wasn’t so great if you were looking for new, independent writers who might be making a splash in an obscure genre, but a genre of which you often spent a lot of money. The Kindle, however, did this extraordinarily well.

So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise which device, and which company, won the battle. The war isn’t over, but quite a few of the initial battles were quite decisive, so the outcome seems somewhat conclusive.

Why Free to Play MMOs Still Have a Ways To Go

Business, Computer Games, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The protest is getting out of hand
The payments are getting out of control

One of the new trends in online computer gaming is the free to play model, which shouldn’t be confused with the Buy to Play model. Let me explain the differences in where computer gaming is today.

Buy to Play: The Buy to Play model is where you buy the game, and then you get to play it forever for free. Usually, the game is expensive, like $59.99 for both Diablo III and the same price for Defiance. The upside to it is that you continue to play the MMO forever, but you had to pay the full price for the game beforehand. How the company makes money is both from the initial sale and from any purchases you make in the game after that. Also, if they create an expansion pack, they’ll charge you for that. Almost every Buy to Play MMO I’ve bought has been a waste of money. Diablo III was the first of the lot, and it sucked badly. It was fun in the very beginning, but after a short while you started to realize that the whole game was designed around Blizzard’s desire to get you to spend money in their auction house. There was little value, and the game got stale really, really fast.

Defiance was a bit more fun, in my opinion, but it was mainly an unfinished game that kept promising to be so much more. I paid extra money for the downloaded content that they were going to be providing, but they’ve been really slow at doing that, so basically I stopped playing and lost the money I spent for downloaded content that they never got around to providing. They keep promising it, but promises are nice fantasies that don’t generally pan out.

The third of the buy to play games out there was Sim City, which was the latest version of a very popular franchise. The beginning of the game was a lot of fun, almost like playing Sim City 3000 again for the first time. And then the game sort of collapsed on itself because it was designed badly so that once your city hit a certain size, it basically just imploded on itself and became a nightmare to fix (translation: not fun). They keep putting out fixes for the game, trying to win back the very pissed off customer base, but as I was very pissed off with the game, all I noticed them doing was trying to port the bugged game over to Mac while ignoring addressing any of the issues that were wrong with the game, almost as if not admitting it would make the problems go away. I have no intentions of going back to the game any time soon.

Another version of the Buy to Play model was Guild Wars 2, which was a lot of fun going from Level 1 to about 30, and then the game just became tedious (at least for me). Others are still playing it and having a great time, but it never did much for me after a certain time. The game relies on other people playing with you, and as the game becomes less and less populated, the game becomes that much more difficult.

But Guild Wars 2 falls into the main reason I decided to make this post. You see, now that the game has been bought, the developers rely on the player base to continue making purchases to keep the game afloat. I’ll talk about that in a second. This can work if you offer something of value to the customer playing the game, but what I’m seeing is that game companies are becoming very greedy, wanting to charge you for all sorts of stupid stuff, which makes paying for it that much more tedious. An example: in Neverwinter, the latest of the free to play games, if you want to buy a bag to carry things in, you can’t ever make one but have to actually buy one from the “Zen” store, which basically has translated to $10 for a bag to carry around 24 items. A bit expansive for something that should have some way in the game to create, which it basically doesn’t. You might be able to buy a bag from another player through the auction house, but essentially, that player bought the bag through the Zen store first, so Neverwinter always gets its money. All mounts cost money, as do most companions (your partner in the game) that’s decent enough to rise above Level 15 (a purpose companion can rise to Level 30).

Some of the MMOs that used to be pay to play have become free to play, or buy to play after having failed as a pay to play type of game. These are games like City of Heroes (which closed its doors a short while ago), Star Wars The Old Republic, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World, Rift, Star Trek Online, and several others that used to be regular pay to play games. A few have remained dirhards, refusing to change to a free model, like World of Warcraft and I think Everquest (although I haven’t checked on that game in years, so who knows what happened).

The moral of the story is that these games exist mainly because there are players like me who are willing to pay for incidentals in the game. Now, before I go any further, I just wanted to say that I’m quite willing to pay for items in a game, if that keeps it going. I paid for a lifetime membership to Star Trek Online, mainly because I felt I wanted to support what was a very entertaining project. But when I feel like I’m being targeted for crappy sales tactics, I start to get annoyed. Guild Wars 2 did that to me, and it’s why I finally left the game. I had bought a hundred or so dollars worth of items, and mainly got annoyed at how crappy the items were in lines of cost. Star Trek Online and Neverwinter, both owned by the same company, have one of the most annoying pay items in the game, which are boxes you open with keys you have to buy, and the hope is that you might one day get a great item (a cool ship in Star Trek or a Nightmare mount in Neverwinter). Having opened several dozen boxes in Star Trek Online and about 30 boxes in Neverwinter, I”ve gotten nothing but junk, which means I’ve spent $30 on each game getting absolutely nothing of value. The fact is: You can’t buy a nightmare mount on the Zen Store, so you have to play their rigged lottery in order to actually try to get something decent. It’s the sort of thing that keeps me from wanting to spend money on a game, especially when I’m exactly the kind of player they want: Someone willing to spend money in a game.

That, to me is why the free to play model is not working. As long as you give crappy value to your products that people have to pay to get, your game is going to fail. City of Heroes suffered this way. I spent money in that game, sometimes just wanting to support a game I really enjoyed. But the value for the things I paid for were atrociously one sided (leaning towards them, not me). While the failure of that game had more to do with NCSoft being a shitty company than the game failing, their market could have probably gone a great deal of distance to have done better.

Some of the pay features of these games are really bad. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Star Wars The Old Republic, in which they didn’t add any value by the pay store, but actually took value away from processes already in the game and then charged you for them if you wanted to get them back. That’s a crappy model for a pay store in a game. I used to play the game back when it was pay to play, and the game’s failure, to me, was that it had nothing to do at the higher levels. My understanding from others is that they haven’t done a great job of fixing that, figuring they’ll get a whole bunch of new players to run through the levels before getting bored (ignoring the players who left due to lack of content).

So what’s the solution? Start producing goods in the game that are both interesting and have value. Star Trek Online does get a bit of this right by creating new ships you can buy. Unfortunately, they don’t do enough to distinguish those new ships from the ones that used to be in the game. But it’s the right track. Neverwinter can do better by discontinuing the stupid drop boxes or by making the items that come in those drop boxes be worth a lot more value to the player. Right now, it’s like gambling at a casino where the slot machines are stuck on losing readouts each time you play them. No one wants to pay for that.

Unfortunately, like City of Heroes, I doubt the developers even care, or they may care but aren’t willing to put forth the effort to make the changes needed, convinced people will keep paying long enough to get them what they need as a payout. Defiance is an interesting variable to watch as the game was a lot of fun, but needed so much more. People tell the developers this on the game’s message boards, but you get the immediate thought that the devs just don’t care. Or they care but it’s too much work to implement change. It probably doesn’t help that Trion fired a great deal of the staff to “save money”, but that’s a subject for another post..