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The Core Values @EME Upper Management
The Core Values
Things are pretty crazy at the moment with all the backlash from the community regarding recent events. EME needs to take a step back and take a look at the basics - the core values we, the customers expect. This is an open letter to EME upper Management.
Respect
Having fun with jokes and trolling can be entertaining, however like with all things in life, there are times when this is outright inappropriate and unprofessional. What I refer to is a statement by an EME employee regarding "not providing instance reset scrolls if certain donation limits are not hit for Extra Life." Please remember that just because you say something is a joke afterwords, doesn't mean it is any less impactful. In a time like this, what people expect is empathy. Empathizing with someone, earns their respect.
"Feel what they feel"
[video]
Accountability
It is very easy to point your finger and say "its BHS' fault". However by doing so, zero accountability is taken. EME is owned by BHS, and with this in mind, EME also represent BHS. We are all human, and we all make mistakes. However by blaming others which we have no communication with, makes us feel even more helpless. If BHS are messing you about, man up and put your foot down. TELL them you need more info, ASK more questions to them. Do not leave any stone unturned. And after all this, if you still make mistakes, then please take accountability for it. Stop blaming others.
Transparency
When we receive information, we want it complete and whole regardless of it being bad news or not. We would much rather hear direct from EME and in advance rather than finding out the hard way once content has already come. Now that the truth of the reset scrolls has been released, this is 20x worse than what it would have been if EME were transparent and honest with us BEFORE the patch hit. Yes we understand that it is bad for business to deliver bad news to your customers, however it is WORSE for business for your customers to lose faith in your honesty to us.
Committment
Commitment from our friends, family and loved ones is what makes this world such a beautiful place. EME seems to bring out all these flashy new features, which is great, however it seems like EME is walking down a path which collapses after each step. Features such as the Rewards Emporium, and Buddy Up system have all been left to rot, and there are many of us who feel like we simply got scammed. One would think the people who have financially supported this game so much would at least get something back in return, right? Commit to us, and your customers will commit back to you.
Reliability
When you call up a company and receive different information from different employees, it makes you question the integrity of this company. What we essentially saw recently is a clear mis-communication between EME employees. One employee was stating that the reset scrolls not working was a bug, and the other said it was intended. When we see a message from a person with a white and blue EME logo next to their name, we EXPECT 100% accurate information. If you do not know the answer, then do NOT guess or pull stuff out of your behind. If you do not know the answer, advise us that you will investigate it for us, and do it in a TIMELY manner. If you still cannot get answers in a timely manner, keep us UPDATED on the progress to let us know you are still trying your best. This is common courtesy and will prove that EME and its employees are reliable.
Thank you for reading and just remember that the most important part of business, are its people and customers. A successful business is one that is often extended by word of mouth from positive critics. Treat us with respect and we will do the selling for you.
Much love,
Pomchi
PS: Do the right thing with reset scrolls.
Things are pretty crazy at the moment with all the backlash from the community regarding recent events. EME needs to take a step back and take a look at the basics - the core values we, the customers expect. This is an open letter to EME upper Management.
Respect
Having fun with jokes and trolling can be entertaining, however like with all things in life, there are times when this is outright inappropriate and unprofessional. What I refer to is a statement by an EME employee regarding "not providing instance reset scrolls if certain donation limits are not hit for Extra Life." Please remember that just because you say something is a joke afterwords, doesn't mean it is any less impactful. In a time like this, what people expect is empathy. Empathizing with someone, earns their respect.
"Feel what they feel"
[video]
Accountability
It is very easy to point your finger and say "its BHS' fault". However by doing so, zero accountability is taken. EME is owned by BHS, and with this in mind, EME also represent BHS. We are all human, and we all make mistakes. However by blaming others which we have no communication with, makes us feel even more helpless. If BHS are messing you about, man up and put your foot down. TELL them you need more info, ASK more questions to them. Do not leave any stone unturned. And after all this, if you still make mistakes, then please take accountability for it. Stop blaming others.
Transparency
When we receive information, we want it complete and whole regardless of it being bad news or not. We would much rather hear direct from EME and in advance rather than finding out the hard way once content has already come. Now that the truth of the reset scrolls has been released, this is 20x worse than what it would have been if EME were transparent and honest with us BEFORE the patch hit. Yes we understand that it is bad for business to deliver bad news to your customers, however it is WORSE for business for your customers to lose faith in your honesty to us.
Committment
Commitment from our friends, family and loved ones is what makes this world such a beautiful place. EME seems to bring out all these flashy new features, which is great, however it seems like EME is walking down a path which collapses after each step. Features such as the Rewards Emporium, and Buddy Up system have all been left to rot, and there are many of us who feel like we simply got scammed. One would think the people who have financially supported this game so much would at least get something back in return, right? Commit to us, and your customers will commit back to you.
Reliability
When you call up a company and receive different information from different employees, it makes you question the integrity of this company. What we essentially saw recently is a clear mis-communication between EME employees. One employee was stating that the reset scrolls not working was a bug, and the other said it was intended. When we see a message from a person with a white and blue EME logo next to their name, we EXPECT 100% accurate information. If you do not know the answer, then do NOT guess or pull stuff out of your behind. If you do not know the answer, advise us that you will investigate it for us, and do it in a TIMELY manner. If you still cannot get answers in a timely manner, keep us UPDATED on the progress to let us know you are still trying your best. This is common courtesy and will prove that EME and its employees are reliable.
Thank you for reading and just remember that the most important part of business, are its people and customers. A successful business is one that is often extended by word of mouth from positive critics. Treat us with respect and we will do the selling for you.
Much love,
Pomchi
PS: Do the right thing with reset scrolls.
28
Comments
Honestly speaking, I felt SO MUCH BETTER the moment I quit. I've been around almost two years now and with every new update most of the playerbase, along with myself, has to go through the truly painful proces of just turning the patch that that is an obvious BETA in normal, responsible games, into a playable one. That process often requires a few weeks of time and more often than not total flame wars on the forums leading to hoards of downvotes.
Now that I don't feel anything anymore for this game, I feel so happy, honestly, so [filtered] happy that I don't have to bother myself with this dragons stuff, reset scroll stuff and CU:V, along with any shtstorm that may arise in the future.
Try to look at it from a perspective of a new player.
Just try.
You don't like what you see, eh?
I'd of just liked to have seen this issue addressed sooner as it was mentioned as a problem on the first day and only took two days to get a reply to. At which point only now does it seem they know that reset scrolls aren't even working as intended as older dungeons are meant to be resetable.
For the dragon mounts, the fact that a 2.0 crit damage mount is only obtainable if someone actually spends money in the store is more or less the greatest sin you can commit in an MMO. There were legitimate issues in the past with things like innerwear, but at the very least you could argue that you could obtain a statistically equivalent item without spending real money. But the 2.0 mount being store-only is a clear breach of the boundary between play to win and pay to win. And no, being able to buy it on the broker off of another player is not an acceptable band-aid. Money is being spent regardless. Those mounts will not exist on the brokerage without someone buying them.
On top of this issue comes the fact that Enmasse released a plan for them that would allow players to get it without spending money, but it was delayed with no word on any changes coming to the system, and just before the patch hits it's sprung on everyone. A complete and utter failure of communication. And people were and rightfully are upset. They were led to believe something was coming and there was a lack in honesty over the changes that were made to the system on top of the system itself being legitimately terrible.
The FWC changes are completely baffling. We've had equalized FWC several times before, but it's popularity doesn't last long. I know there are some people who don't pvp saying it's a good thing because now people can't get gear carried in pvp, but it's proven to have just led to the battleground straight up dying. On top of a reward nerf there is legitimately no reason to run FWC at all. Equalized gear isn't fun and despite what some people say, it's not fair. The benefit of unequalized gear is that you can roll it to your needs. With equalized gear some classes get shafted stats that are important to their function in pvp than others such as aspeed. Now all those people who actually put in effort into crafting pvp gear suddenly lose out on it's primary use. And a lot of people rightfully feel as though they wasted their time, and are intent on not wasting it again which you can see with how dead the FWC queue is now. And no, it wasn't dead before the patch. It was actually quite lively. PVP players had no idea this was coming until just before the patch. This shouldn't be acceptable.
Lastly the instance reset scrolls. This decision is absolutely baffling and seems to me to be something introduced solely to stall player progression, and it's probably one of the worst ways to do it. With this change there is actually a serious consequence to helping out with things like learning runs, especially when they're someone who only really focuses on one character. And just telling these people to "gear up alts" isn't a particularly good solution, especially when the universally reviled +15 system still exists. This particular issue was in "known issues" from day one of the patch and very little was said on it until recently. And even then conflicting information was sent out by different enmasse employees, only to find out that in the end it was intentional except for the part of it that was a bug. So it's being fixed, but only part of it is. And a lot of players are rightfully upset not just at this awful change, but at the absurdly bad communication on EME's part over what exactly the issue was.
Also: I'd like to note that IRS being removed was an old change that was several content cycles ago in ktera, where they switched over to solely single instance resets. This is a change that EME has not implemented for quite some time now so suddenly changing it on us without actually telling us why reflects pretty poorly. And yeah I know "BHS intended for it to be like this", but they also intended it last content cycle too, but resets were fixed then anyways. So what gives?
This "man up and put your foot down" sounds really good on paper. Have you actually tried this approach with your boss? How far did that get you and for how long? There are times you can be forceful on certain issues, but you have to pick your battles and you won't always win. Expecting them to always be like "that's not good enough! I demand answers! I won't rest until you tell me!" on every issue isn't going to work.
And besides, what does it benefit us for EME to personally "man up" to every single decision that was completely out of their hands? I mean at the end of the day, they suffer the perception anyway. But if you want them to be "transparent," then they have to help people understand how the power structure works and that there are things they can do, and things they can't do. It doesn't change the fact that, ultimately, they are responsible for the games they publish anyway, but explaining what decisions are BHS decisions isn't "passing the buck," it's honesty. By understanding the decision makers and the power structure, it can help us provide more actionable suggestions. You've twisted honesty as if it's deception, and I can pretty much guarantee that isn't the case (or at least, the people you're ostensibly trying to talk to won't see it that way).
On what basis do you assume that they even knew this before? You're making it sound like they actually knew the truth all along, decided to not tell anyone, lead everyone along for a while thinking it was a bug, and then all of a sudden decided to be like "actually, we'll admit it's on purpose" and decided to throw BHS under the bus in some sort of lie to deflect the blame. That is just beyond twisted, and there's no evidence to support that whatsoever. Why would they do that? There is absolutely no benefit to them in this sort of scheme. (Reminds me of the crazy dragon conspiracies people came up with that made no sense.)
The much more logical interpretation is that they simply did not know why it was broken, they asked, they found out, and now they let us know. If they had known beforehand, they could have said so if not beforehand at least as soon as the issue was pointed out. Again, you've twisted the fact they didn't know something as a lack of transparency, and it'll estrange you from your target audience.
What are you referring to specifically here?
The fact that the reset scrolls were on the known issue list was not "miscommunication between EME employees". As part of the Player Council, I personally added it to the list of known issues because it is an issue; it clearly says in that thread that it would be updated by Player Council members. We now now that it was by design and not a bug, but this doesn't change the fact that it was a development EME did not expect, and thus it was/is an issue. Issues are not necessarily bugs, just things that aren't working as people expected them to be.
If you're referring to the fact that there's a fix but it's as intended, it's because there are actually two issues together and people are confusing them. There's the fact that instance reset scrolls do not work at all on any dungeon; this is a bug that will be fixed next Tuesday. Then, secondly, there's the fact that the instance reset scrolls do not work on the two new dungeons; this is not a bug but working as intended. So there's no reliability issue here either, just potential confusion because of there being two issues. (I updated the Known Issues thread earlier today to try to help clarify the misunderstanding and be clear on what they've said is going on.)
Anyway, I know very well that by posting this people will think "oh here he goes; defending EME again." That is actually not my intention at all. However, I think we need to try to avoid innuendos and conspiracies in framing these sorts of things, particularly if you're hoping to get this to management. I guess perhaps it's valid to say that the way you described the issues is the way you perceived/assumed it happened, and perhaps that does point to more fundamental issues with communication and trust. But under the guise of trying to provide a (perhaps condescending) pep-talk about good corporate values, you've twisted some situations in the worst possible light without sufficient supporting evidence. Because of that, rather than "because you did <x>, it demonstrates a lack of <y>" it's better to stick to "when <x> happened, it seemed like <y> because <z>". Then it provides the other side with an opening to explain the misunderstanding, rather than having to get immediately on the defensive about statements that aren't true (and thus not be able to send the letter along to management). Better not to undermine a good message with veiled accusations.
Obviously you don't have to do anything, but if you wanted my recommendation on how to make this letter actually presentable to management, I would clean it up significantly to talk more about your disappointment and the concrete problems from your point of view, rather than you lecturing them on corporate values.
For Transparency, I am completely convinced that some EME employees were aware of what's going on with the reset scrolls long ago. One such example is how EME are planning to make dragon tokens bankable soon. This has been set in motion in the player council forums as I am sure you are aware, yet the community is still left in the dark.
For reliability, again this refers back to accountability. EME pointing their fingers at BHS does NOTHING. Nobody goes, "oh its BHS fault, its fine then". We just want action taken, and we want it in a timely manner.
As for the player council itself, I don't expect it to last much longer. I have several insiders who have repeatedly claimed they have raised issues, most of which have been completely ignored.
Players do NOT care in the slightest about resetting older content. We NEED resets for the new dungeons. If BHS are intending to artificially prolong content, this is the incorrect way of doing it. Tweak a few numbers, add a few mechanics, and make the content far more challenging would be the correct way.
Look at how long it took to clear WoW content compared to Tera. THIS is how you do it.
[video]
Its hard when people can't take jokes. It isn't just on the casual level. If people get butthurt on the simplest of jokes EME would really lose its fun factor that Spacecats and the rest have been trying to bring out.
IIRC, EME isn't directly owned by BHS. Just because a BHS representative is holding onto the higher positions doesn't mean that they have a 100% answer to everything. For all you know the developers and the respective committees could already be on a long debate with each other right as I am typing this comment.
As for the Dragon issue. I will give anyone of concern this question: Should you be the publisher and you propose this plan, and are already about to implement it. The developer's decision overrides you, saying "No, this will affect sales and this was meant to be a p2w item etc etc etc." The first thing you want to do isn't to tell players that, because it is directly against what you yourself want. Furthermore, by directly saying right before the patch "BHS informs us that we can't carry on our suited plan and we have to use their plan etc etc etc." EME will still get the biggest of the hits, because there will be idiotic players like you who couldn't shut up and accept that fact. As such, they still had to go back to the drawing board, make it such that there is still someway you can get stuff for free, so that you can shut BOTH BHS and the players up. Trust me you will lose regardless.
I choose to believe that EME chose the best possible choice to tackle this problem, by first delaying the whole dragons issue, although tbh they should've rushed that statement earlier than patch day. The risk for people making conspiracy theories will always be there regardless of the choice they make, so they choose to take it.
I am pretty sure that was a lack of communication, from BHS's build representative to the EME content committee. If you notice, the patch notes in EU didn't say anything about the instance scrolls as well, and considering they actually have the same build (because BHS is lazy as hell), they would have the same complaints.
It is not the first time I am commenting against whiners (I have personally black-knighted quite a bit on a few game forums and official facebook pages against both the publisher and the players). But I understand where the players are coming from and what they like about the Tera it used to be. I am still questioning why KTera has done so many stupid decisions to their own build to break everyone's ideas.
That is absolutely not what "man up and put your foot down" means.
"They knew reset scrolls were intentional because they've been working on changing dragon tokans in a way that'll please the community but didn't want to tell the players before they were sure it'll work." You logic good, so very good.
And if they can't do that they are supposed to say..."We can do it but choose not to because reasons."
Shocking.
Because everyone just looooves 1 hour dungeons. Must be why people keep trying to skip parts of dungeons by glitching walls. And I'm sure everyone also loves wiping for 12h straight.
it baffles me to see someones still religiously defending eme after all the [filtered] that has happened.
EME is either incompetent or too lazy to ask questions about new builds. You realize EME gets new builds weeks in advance before they release it to us? They say they do "tests for bugs" and "localization for our region" and such before they release the build, but now i doubt they do anything with it. Look at CU:V, Dragons, FWC, and now Instance Reset. They are pretty HUGE fkin things to miss.
EME should give us a Public Test Server(PTS). We can do your jobs for you and find all these stuff out beforehand. I Know you guys can do this. Done it before in the past during the Extra Life stream as a way of rewarding players who donated.
Moderator edit - Removed namecalling. Please be more respectful of others!
The instance reset scroll is completely different. There is absolutely no benefit whatsoever to hide it from anyone, and every benefit imaginable to just explain it upfront so everyone knows and there's no surprise (even if it won't be popular). It's infinitely less beneficial to withhold it and then reveal it later after people get mad; that approach never works. In addition to aggravation on the forums, these kinds of issues also result in countless support tickets that directly cost them money to process. So there's no benefit to them to hide information that could prevent misunderstandings like this, particularly once it starts. In the past, when they've known about issues that will inconvenience people, they've listed it as Known Issues in the patch notes precisely so that they don't get as many support tickets about it. If they knew, I see no reason to believe they would not have shared the details about this in advance to prevent tickets, or at least upon release of the patch once it came up. It would have been in their unarguable best interest to do so.
The point is not to say that it's fine that it's BHS's fault at all. I always try to take the attitude that BHS decisions are constraints and solutions have to consider the constraints to be actionable. Before you take on a challenge, you have to know what you're up against. This is more constructive than pretending like constraints don't matter and "all that matters is results!" Because then you'll only have unrealistic expectations that will never be fulfilled. (Like comparing BHS to Blizzard in the scope of what they can accomplish.)
Anyway, it's not like I don't understand your frustration about the instance reset scrolls, but I don't think this is a selling strategy for top management any more than just making a clear, constructive argument about the issue itself and why it's clearly bad for players with constructive suggestions on how to fix it.
But here is what is really happening. Nexon have recently become KTeras publisher and they want to show big sales numbers in the first year to the share holders. Everything that has happened as of late, is a ploy to earn as much cash as possible, in the shortest period of time. That's all fine and dandy, its business, I get that. However one important thing to factor in, is that all of these changes are thinking short term. So unless Nexon have originally came in with short term goals to high tail it out of there soon, the long term plan is gonna screw them over in the long run.
Players are NOT happy, that is very evident by whats happening in these forums and EU forums. http://board.tera.gameforge.com/board2-tera-en/board58-general/board76-discussions-about-tera/228317-when-are-u-planning-to-fix-instance-reset-scrolls/
For my part, why do you even think I spend so much time on the forums in the first place? It's not to provide "mildly sarcastic comments and criticism." I try to understand the important elements of people's arguments after you work past the bluster and pass along actionable suggestions to EME that reflect as many points of view as possible. I feel like it's the only hope to get anything done. Lecturing them isn't going to do it, even if it may be tempting. I've already provided suggestions and am constantly working to refine them.
Although what you perceive as lecturing, is what I perceive as constructive and civil feedback.
In terms of the suggestions posted which I assume is on the Council Forums, again I re-iterate, my insiders tell me most of the player council threads have been ignored.
My feedback is integral for EME to understand that the problems that are occurring right now are a lot deeper than just reset scrolls and dragons. But rather relates to the core values listed above.
It's also easy to sit on the sideline and tell people how they should be doing things that you yourself aren't doing. Everyone's an expert when they sit in front of the TV and offer they opinions to football players. It's literally a 0 effort, 0 result activity so I don't see it as a better use of my time. Mildly sarcastic comments in response to stupid things people say at least keep me entertained.
Love you too.