^ But the point is you can't win the 1987 superbowl. It's over.

I don't see anyone here suggesting that game features be changed in any way, or asking that the achievements be made relevant in some form.

Really? I can see it.

If you're suggesting another NPC or use for minerals, that's changing or creating another hook, another feature in the game. Changing their visibility isn't a big deal since it doesn't change the reality of anything, but doing something like that has actual impact on the game (see: Mineral rarity with battle sprite food).

Gyre said he kind of just did it on the side, meaning hiding the achievements wasn't a time-taking task. Fixing the broken level 10 achievement is a matter of putting the achievement hook to the right event.

But reworking mineral use for achievements gracefully in a way that makes sense requires designer thought and then some programmer time to put the hooks in the right place.

"Also, Gyre-of-Guile is not a customer service rep, nor a community manager. He's an engineer in the game (and not a new one, either)."

Doesn't matter. Anytime you deal with a customer, you become a representative of your company to that customer.

By responding directly as an employee of OOO, his response became the response of OOO itself.

just to address a point from earlier:

This is some of the most (urine*) poor customer service I have seen in a long time!

We players are your customers! When any business treats their customers poorly, they leave! If enough people leave then it doesn't matter how you plan to drive your game features. A game without players ceases to exist. And there are plenty of other games available online.

when you start devaluing your opinions by labeling yourself as a customer as opposed to someone who shares in the same passion for the game that many of the developers do, you're kind of doing yourself a greater disservice than anything they could do to you. your opinion as a player of the content they put out - and by proxy, someone who shares in the same passion they have for the game - probably means a lot more to them than someone who takes the concept of "putting your money where your mouth is" entirely too literally, which is what i can assume is the case here since you made the active comparison of relabeling yourself from "player" to "customer" in the first few sentences of your tirade. so by applying these labels yourself, i can only imagine this may have crossed the minds of one or two people up the ladder.

let's also not forget the fact that you found it entirely necessary to highlight that there's other games online that you could be playing, which kind of detracts from your point even further by solidifying the idea that you only see this as a "game" while the people behind the scenes more than likely envision it as something much more.

so sit down, stop getting so worked up over a few tongue-in-cheek comments, and let them address the things that need to be addressed - either that, or show yourself the door. like you said, you're just a customer, and there's plenty more games out there for you to play.

any business that wants to stay in business for long needs to be aware of the opinions of it's customers, whether it asks for those opinions or not.

No! Politics disagrees!

that's my point though.

you're so busy comparing spiral knights to a business model that you have next to nothing to say about the direction it's going in. you also seem to forget that for every one person with a wallet, there's ten people who play the game without - all of whom, by the free-to-play model, are as equally valued as you are. sure, you bring a few bucks to the table, but the other ten people bring the traffic in that the game ultimately desires to achieve. let me know which one's more represented in the pie-charts at your next business meeting.

now i could spend all night going into your post and dissecting it, but i think you presented your own post well enough to where i can essentially assume you have some deluded sense of entitlement because you dropped a few bucks in the game - that you are, in essence, a stock holder in terms of how the game should operate, and ultimately the kind of person that no one, from the lowest customer service representative up to the CFO/CEO/CIO of said company, wants to deal with, primarily because of the fact that you're so focused on the small details that you fail to recognize the big picture. the concept of "the customer is always right" only goes so far, and i'm sorry but in this case, taking offense to a sternly-worded response from a developer (i.e. someone not paid to dress up posts to suit the needs of the few) is probably one of those things that would be filed under "small details" in terms of, i dunno, a few updates they might be working on.

if anything, i think my pizza "meme" is all the more appropriate here, because i don't think he was asking for your opinion on how the achievements were being handled, nor do i think he was particularly worried about how you or anyone else would take his response. but i can also see why developers are so reluctant to respond to things directly if this is the sort of audience they end up pandering to in a variety of scenarios. at the end of the day, the most leverage you have is asking that the community manager (a.k.a. eurydice) be the one to relay messages from developers from here on out to prevent this sort of issue, but all that does is cut the developers off from the community - which is something that a lot of players have been skeptical about in terms of "how much do they actually see us posting". i can safely say that i feel a bit better knowing that there's things that do get read. i also feel a bit better knowing that the developers have a personality about it as well, and that they care enough about the community's input to not let business rhetoric rule over all else.

hell, if you're that offended over it, file a support request against him. i'm sure that'll smooth everything out.

I don't want developers to use copy+paste apologies and other boring templates. It makes the developers and Game Masters seem like robots. It's a lot more personal when they've got pizazz in their comments. Imagine if Eurydice and Hyperion went back to a "We apologize for the inconvenience. We are working to fix the issue. Have a nice day" answering machine most customer service systems are?

Honestly, all that needed to be said was that the miner achievements were obsolete and would not be coming back

He already said that. You're the one who ignored that and insisted on arguing your point, so a developer came along and gave his exact reasoning for the change in a fashion you could not ignore. (Don't complain about the stove being hot after we warned you not to touch it)

I merely gave a simple suggestion how the achievements in question could be implemented. I did not argue my point nor even respond again

Then the comment wasn't even aimed at you and you shouldn't have even gotten so worked up about it.

This is why we can't have nice things (explanations of patches)

Crimson-Cat, please stop. The second hand embarrassment is becoming too much.

This thread actually got a reply from a Dev, which is something rare to see. He gave his explanation as to why they solved the achievement issue the way they did, and he did so with a decently polite response. People kept derping around and trying to convince Gyre (and probably other devs) to put the achievements in again in some way or another and Gyre gave a snarkier response. He's a Developer not a a Community Manager. He's paid to actually work on the game, not sugar-coat his replies so the few special little snowflakes don't have their feelings hurt if their emotions get the best of them when the players are being obnoxious.

After his snarky reply you made a weewee storm in a toilet bowl. Despite the fact that most people found his reply funny/amusing and blunt instead of insulting (note: being blunt is different than being insulting), he came up a third time and actually apologized for his tone. He wasn't under the obligation of doing it, yet he did so. He also added some more info on the achievement deal. Still, you keep going on how he was so unprofessional and insulting. If you actually feel so insulted for a reply that wasn't even directed at you, especially after your reaction to it got an apology out of him, then by all means, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Like you said, there's a lot of other games around for you to play, and I bet that the people staying behind can easily keep the game afloat without your help.

On a random note: are people actually influenced to play or not play a game based on the achievements (which aren't even broken, just hidden/obsolete)? That's like not playing a good game because its graphics aren't that great. :T

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between a staff member and a forumer is that the staff members get snazzier avatars and cool purple posts. Otherwise, I treat them exactly the same. If, say, a random bloke called Generic-Name made that comment, you'd get a chuckle out of it, as it seems you only complain because he's a staff member.

What can be done is to award new artifacts for each obsolete achievement to players who accomplished those goals when they were able to be accomplished. Once the artifacts are given, you can erase the achievements entirely. This way, there's still a record, and the game can be properly updated achievement wise.

Yeah, cut Whirl-Of-Inteligence some slack, he's not a robot.

...Or is he?

He? She?...It?

I don't even know anymore...

Never!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

"^ But the point is you can't win the 1987 superbowl. It's over."
You guys can keep repeating that all you like, wont make the comparison any less silly.

"Really? I can see it.
If you're suggesting another NPC or use for minerals, that's changing or creating another hook, another feature in the game. "

Sorry, but I don't count those suggestions as changing 'game features', they are small, and have no gameplay impact.
To me a game feature is something that helps define a game, and what it is, and how one would play it.
Those suggestions along with others in this topic would not change anything about the game, hardly a blemish.

And bringing minerals for use in pet food into this discussion is also irrelevant, because there are already tons of players who don't make pet food or even care about minerals in general, allowing them to sell to an NPC for a small handful of cr would change nothing and would probably net them less cr than if they did make pet food.