Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.
Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.
I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control.
That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.
If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.
#1 by Dr Toerag at March 20th, 2009
The big problem from this comes in 2 parts, as I see it:
1) It was STUPID.
2) The response to the problem when it was uncovered was crass.
#2 by Shadowe at March 20th, 2009
I’m outraged! Aghast! Inflamed! Infuriated!
…
Or I just think it was rude. That’s all, really. Of *course* Cryptic were going to try and persuade CoX players to beta test CO. Only an idiot would presume they wouldn’t. It’s the method used. If they were going to do this, they should have used external means of contact, not in-game or official forum PMs. Doing it that way says, quite strongly, “we don’t think your players’ privacy is important, and we think you should help us get beta testers for our game, and we’re not going to ask you first”… and that’s rude. It’s not worth a holy war, though.
Oops, they screwed up. They admited it. Apologise to NC, have done, and learn from it, Cryptic.
#3 by Dr Toerag at March 20th, 2009
“If a line was crossed, it was totally inadvertent and no harm was intended.”
No apology, more of a weasly, weasly wording. No “We’re sorry”, just, “If we crossed a line (and we’re not admitting such) we meant no harm.”
#4 by Extremus at March 20th, 2009
Lets be honest though, PR spin’s not the CO teams greatest strength.
I mean, who the fuck cares about LAN?
#5 by Gangrel at March 20th, 2009
When i heard about this, my immediate reaction was “What a stupid stupid STUPID* move”.
Looking back on it, after they published the “apology” i still think the same thing.
Me thinks that Cryptic somehow managed to lose a few more brownie points amongst the gaming community…
Granted, that is my own opinion but hell, its *generally* considered “a bad thing” when you resort to using a competitors own message boards to recruit players/testers when you could quite just as easily start hitting the fan sites/ fan site admins[1] and get players that way.
It would also be considered a LOT better. Its like going working for Macdonalds and going into a branch of Burger King to hand out free samples. Do it OUTSIDE the Burger King branch though, and its just not as “wrong”.
[1]Fan site = Anything not run by NCsoft/NCNC
#6 by Dr Toerag at March 21st, 2009
QUOTE: “We’ve received a comment from Mr. Ivan Sulic with an apology and felt it should be reflected here, “So, to the point then… I am sorry. Cryptic is sorry. This should not have happened. It was inappropriate and it will not happen again. Please understand that we truly did not intend any offense, though. The people involved are very sorry about it, believe me. This has been a big headache when it should have been as simple as, ‘Hey, any MMO guild folks want to play Champions?’” It’s great to have this cleared up, as nobody at Massively wanted any of this to remain unclear to either ourselves or to you, our readers.”
Update on Massively.
#7 by Rockjaw at March 21st, 2009
That would be a textbook example of “too little, too late”.
That was the tone they should have adopted when the news first broke. They misjudged media and player reaction, and I think they’ll pay for it in the long run. (It’s not as if Cryptic has the best rep with the hardcore COH playerbase anyway….)
#8 by Shadowe at March 23rd, 2009
I think that’s got something to do with…
Several key failures to communicate effectively (ED being one that springs immediately to mind).
The CoH devs admitting that they were pretty much ignored by the rest of Cryptic just before the IP purchase by NC.
To be honest, I have nothing against Cryptic, as such. They certainly haven’t proven themselves as a company that listens, and there’s a certain attitude among the CoH playerbase that Jack Emmert’s idea of ‘fun’ contradicts that of many people, but he’s not willing to believe that he might be wrong.
I don’t, for one second, believe that anyone said “let’s get CoH accounts and offer beta tests for CO on the forums and in-game”. I strongly suspect that if anyone at a management level heard a suggestion like that, they’d have come down like a tonne of rectangular building thingies.
But, this is just another nail in the coffin. It shows a remarkable lack of respect, and their apology, while undoubtedly sincere, should not have been necessary in the first place. People remember the bad things, and Cryptic *will* be remembered as “the company that tries to recruit players in other companies’ games”.