January 2020: Devs acknowledge Bug in Guild Wars (Switch), but refuse to compensate players.
Players started reporting that points were missing in GW, and that victories were displayed as losses: they also expressed their frustration at not receiving the 50 seals & XP boost victory rewards, which they look forward to during GW week. The lack of rewards clearly evidenced that this was not just a display bug.
Within a day, a Dev posted acknowledging the issue, claiming that “We take any issues in Guild Wars quite seriously.”, and then proceeding to assert that “I suspect this is a visual issue only” despite the players clearly reporting that they had not received their rewards. (an indicator of the company’s ability to listen to its customers)
The Dev then proceeded to mention that “This is affecting every Guild in Guild Wars” and that “the rankings have been fixed, if anyone could confirm they received their Daily Reward Victory mail after daily reset today that would be great”: by then numerous additional players had been reporting the same issue, and proceeded to confirm that no rewards were being received (an indicator of the company’s ability to manage their game coding).
The problem continued in subsequent days, with players asking about plans for compensation for missing rewards (seemingly every Guild in GW was recording a loss, so nobody was getting any rewards), with the usual radio silence taking place during the weekend, because even though Devs “take any issues in Guild Wars quite seriously”, the fine-print is known to be ‘during office hours’. They know something is broken with their product, that their customers will have to continue deal with it during the weekend, and their response is basically ‘TGIF! see you on Monday!’.
On Monday, the Dev linked to an article on the subject for any relevant updates ( https://gemsofwar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001328036-SWITCH-Guild-Wars-scoring-issue ), and the last entry from that Dev on the topic states that “Because everyone on Switch was affected equally and because the system isn’t set up to compensate XP bonuses, we’ve decided not to compensate those 4 days Victory Reward Mails” ( (Switch) GW compensation denied by the devs - #61 by Kafka ).
Of course a barrage of discontent by players ensued, which was met with Radio Silence™ by the company, which is a very common response (or lack thereof) on their side.
A simple middle ground such as splitting the difference (e.g. all guilds participating in GW could have received 50% of the rewards, so the company didn’t give out any additional resources even though it was their own mistake, and players would not have been left feeling completely cheated), coupled with an honest apology by a company representative whose apologies may still be considered as sincere (the standard “[…] we are very sorry for these issues […] and we’ll continue reviewing and improving our processes to help prevent issues like this in future” rehashed by the same couple of Devs has lost all meaning), would have shown the players that there is effort in mitigating and owning up to programming shortcomings.
As it stands, if the company makes a mistake, it is ok for the customers to pay for it.
Sources:
https://gemsofwar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001328036-SWITCH-Guild-Wars-scoring-issue