From gold to free, thanks to GREE ... France was the last straw

[Softie]

I'm curious as to how many people had this issue using iOS. For me, both my android accounts had their leaderboards frozen for at least half an hour but my leaderboard on iOS was working perfectly fine. So perhaps we're seeing another android discrimination?

[K.Illin]

I'm curious as to how many people had this issue using iOS. For me, both my android accounts had their leaderboards frozen for at least half an hour but my leaderboard on iOS was working perfectly fine. So perhaps we're seeing another android discrimination?

In our faction, we are probably 65/35 in favor of iOS, and I'm positive that it was picked up by a few of the iOS users. I guess we were one of the lucky ones, as the freeze up was picked up right away, when we we're at 148, and we continued pounding away to try and insure the top 150 win. As it turned out we placed 127, to our surprise, but I now suspect the freeze up had a hand in the increased ranking. Can't say it was android discrimination, but it was defnitely a good way to increase gold sales, for those who may have freaked out at the end.

[warrends]

Hi warrend, and thanks for your commentary. I agree with your sentiments, but I also believe that there is more to GREE's perceived screw-ups, than just improper software development.

I don't know if any of you follow financial markets, but the link below is to an article published in July of this year. Basically, it outlines the current state of GREE's managemement, or mismanagement of their company and their finances, and the path they have decided to take as a means of trying to correct, and secure their foothold back in the marketplace.

Do yourself a favor and read it, I think it will enlighten you, as to what is driving gree to do what they have been doing, which is essentially coming up with new, and creative ways to separate MW players from their money. Follow the link below:

http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/07/08/j...estern-market/

Interesting. Thanks for the link K.Illin. But this, to me, doesn't answer the questions about poor coding, unless they are laying off their dev and testing teams (if they have a testing team).

Customer service to me is the NUMBER ONE thing that keeps me going back to a company non-stop. USAA (insurance). T. Rowe Price (investments). Amazon.com (we all know what that is). And a very few others keep me as a customer and will forever. Why? Because any time they screw up (and in their cases it is all very few and far between screw ups), they not only make me whole again, but they go above and beyond. I've been ordering things from Amazon for 15 years. Hundreds of orders, maybe thousands (literally). And in the maybe 4-5 times they have messed up in some way, they not only said I'm sorry (and responded very quickly) but they, say, gave me a full refund simply for the inconvenience. That is how to treat customers.

Writing software is not easy, but as I said earlier it is NOT rocket science either. You write, you test, you break, you fix, you test, you break, you fix, and you repeat until you DON'T break it anymore. Again, that is how my SW dev team works. We do not put out broken software. Period.

GREE on the other hand just doesn't see this. They put out buggy code. They do sneaky things behind our backs. They have glitches on top of their glitches. And their customer service from what I read does more bad than good. To make money you need customers. To have customers you have to have a good product. To have a good product you have to have money to pay the people to make the product. It's a vicious circle, and their circle is busted at ... well, it's actually busted everywhere: bad product, bad customer service, etc.

Fixing this is not difficult. They need to slow down their enhancements and fix the current bugs first. Make sure that everything in-game NOW works correctly. That's the number one complaint I see in the forums and that's the way to develop software. Then add more. And they need a human customer service staff. Not computers that spit out the standard "We'll get to you when we get to you if we get to you" response.

Anyway ... that's my perception. Correct or not, that's how I see it. And I will continue to play this game for free because it is fun and because I found a fantastic faction that I plan to call home for a very long time to come. And my wallet shall remain closed to this company for most likely quite a while.

[BoilerPaulie]

I agree 100% on the customer service piece. I am an Amazon Prime user and probably will be forever, and a USAA member and probably will be forever. Their competitive rates are only a small part of that loyalty. Their customer service is what has earned my loyalty time and time again. They don't mess up often, but when they do, they make it right.

My guess is that GREE can't afford to excel in customer service because they can't manage the number of mistakes they would have to compensate for. That's a systemic problem that they would have to fix in order to have anything resembling customer service. It's a simple part of the "6 Sigma" concept - if you have a low defect rate (like 0.00034%), that can be handled pretty well without large losses in profit. But with a higher defect rate, you can't sustainably correct errors. GREE's problem is exactly that, if you ask me.

[General Gamble]

Same thing happened with my faction. We saw we were in Top 1000 (we are only 13 strong) and we were inside of Top 1000 by over 40K points with less than 10 minutes to go. We stopped but checked back regularly and saw we were still in Top 1000 so I stopped bleeding gold. Then we find out we finished 1459th! Talk about hoodwinked!

[britton]

26th twice I feel your pain.

[HExXxENBEAST@SUP1]

I'm free too. I spent $750 two wars ago with Ferr, then my account was taken over and HACKED AGAIN. This, after Gree told me that they changed my UDID to keep my game secure after a previous issue.
So, $750 pissed away, no refund and no reply except to tell me that my account had like 50 of the top faction prize and some other obvious BS units inserted into a game that only the dumbest hacker in the world would insert, especially being in a high end faction.
Utter BULLSH!T.

[HExXxENBEAST@SUP1]

I agree 100% on the customer service piece. I am an Amazon Prime user and probably will be forever, and a USAA member and probably will be forever. Their competitive rates are only a small part of that loyalty. Their customer service is what has earned my loyalty time and time again. They don't mess up often, but when they do, they make it right.

My guess is that GREE can't afford to excel in customer service because they can't manage the number of mistakes they would have to compensate for. That's a systemic problem that they would have to fix in order to have anything resembling customer service. It's a simple part of the "6 Sigma" concept - if you have a low defect rate (like 0.00034%), that can be handled pretty well without large losses in profit. But with a higher defect rate, you can't sustainably correct errors. GREE's problem is exactly that, if you ask me.

-10 Sigma. They'll never make it to even green belt operational savvy. Clear belt if they're lucky.

[whitepath23]

Wareneds I believe you have spelled it out perfectl6...idont know if gree cares or not...but I have event tickets that are not fixed...or fixed with a generic reponse that doesnt fitthe problem.....so it has lead me to consult an attorney and I am moving forward here in my local district...if the problemis large enough and more people want to join the suit could be come class action. Even when you call grees office you get no reponse...so I figured getting an attorney and a process server was the way to go...the plan is to file on or about october one...so I willlet you know

Figured I'd start with a rhyme. Why not?

I've been playing MW for well over a year. Got a terrible start because I did what the game told me to do: LEVEL UP!! (GREE games are the only games in the world in which they tell you what you specifically should NOT do ... every other game actually helps you level up appropriately; how stupid is that??). I've since rectified that situation by ignoring bad events, doing good ones, and getting into great factions.

In that time I've spent for a vault or so every 2-3 months. NO MORE!

I'm now a free player. In all 3 games: MW, KA and CC. Why?

The France leaderboard screw up was the last straw. They supposedly froze the leaderboard in-game in the last 30 minutes or so. I checked many, many times in the last few minutes to make sure that we were in the top 150. We were --- by a good 100K WD point margin easily. Then we finish outside of 150. By a measly 13K WD points. That's 10 seconds of hits for us. But we didn't. Why? Because GREE told us that we were in the top 150 and so we stopped firing. So this is the last straw. I've yet to complain about any of the multitude of GREE's software screw-ups. So this is my first. And they get no more money. Yeah I'm only one guy, but I'm ONE MORE customer who is fed up. Glitch after screw up after bad decision after ... the list is endless.

Interesting that GREE screwed up the KA war standings 2 weeks ago. Screwed up CC war standings last week. And now screwed up MW war standings this week. Anyone see a pattern?

For info: I am not doing this blindly. I love this game (though I'm not sure why ... I think it's my faction .. the social aspect is fantastic). But I also understand software development. I run a team of SW developers and we design and develop SW that is a helluva lot more complex than these games are. And our screw ups are few, and minor. Why? BECAUSE WE TEST! And do you know what we do after we test? WE TEST SOME MORE!!! This is not rocket science. But GREE clearly just dumps random crap code together and throws it out there for us, its customers, to use and get angry at least once a week. Another pattern. GREE uses its customer base as its Beta testers. Seriously. That is how bad these software issues are. Constant. Consistent. Very bad. All of these should be ironed out well before they go to production. In one of the games a month or so ago they got everyone to begin a quest before it started. Why? Because their art department posted the quest dates a day early. So everyone began them, got tons of useless XP, all a day before the event began. I cannot say how terribly stupid that is. Words just won't do it justice.

So agree or disagree. I don't care. I'm done spending money. I will tap like crazy for Tapjoy gold and gems in all three games. I'll have my credit score checked and I'll have my windows estimated and I'll watch Nokia phone commercials 100 times (not really ...). But my credit card will no longer touch the iTunes store for any GREE games until I see a good constant pattern of consistently good coding and bug-free gaming. And I have a feeling that this won't happen for a very long time. They appear to just be that bad. Other companies learn. GREE doesn't. And doesn't seem to care.

End of rant. And end of money. Respond or don't. I don't care. I've made my statement. This will do little to GREE's bottom line, but will do a lot to make me a much happier player. And since GREE can't do that, I'll do it myself.

[warrends]

Wareneds I believe you have spelled it out perfectl6...idont know if gree cares or not...but I have event tickets that are not fixed...or fixed with a generic reponse that doesnt fitthe problem.....so it has lead me to consult an attorney and I am moving forward here in my local district...if the problemis large enough and more people want to join the suit could be come class action. Even when you call grees office you get no reponse...so I figured getting an attorney and a process server was the way to go...the plan is to file on or about october one...so I willlet you know

Fly (part of his in-game name, for those that don't know him), I wish you luck with that. Personally I won't bother. This is the norm in the gaming industry. Some companies learn. Most don't. Those that learn succeed. The others fail. Happens every day, and moreso now because all of these small 1-2 person companies pop up out of nowhere, make a few simple phone apps, call themselves a "company", and then either intentionally or unintentionally fail.

Maybe you'll get some others who are angry enough to join you. Good luck.

[Blade of 3]

Same thing happened to my faction. We were out of 150 by 9k points. It's ridiculous.

[Commander C]

Preach it Warren! We missed top 400 by one hit... one measly hit... we thought we had a 50k cushion and still scored over 60k in last match for good measure. Now it shows we are 350 points out of top 400!

I didnt miss the k... just 350 points. That equals one hit away... the leaderboard screwup was our final straw also. I have 50 members, of those 40 spent light gold ($20 each)... that is $4000 gree will not see next time.

Sirius... are you there? Is there any way for gree to fix this huge screwup? I dont want free gold or easier LTQs... i want the units that we should have earned!

800$, not 4,000$

[Drakhoan]

I noticed that math too, but figured there was something i was missing.