How Not To Do Customer Service

News & General Discussion
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Ars Technica Article

A few fundamental problems:

  1. DRM. I’m not being entirely facetious; while Nintendo is concerned about piracy, and for good reasons, this is (another) case where DRM is more restrictive to users than it is beneficial to Nintendo

  2. Players with gaming libraries of nearly any size are being bitten on the rump by the DRM process, costing them money to move games that they have already bought (I call major foul on that one), and:

  3. Nintendo is making two faux-pas about how they’re responding. There are numerous reports of support calls being strung out for weeks, first. I’ve worked in customer service, and as a result I learned one thing: customers want their issues fixed now. Not two calls and a week in the future. Secondly? No public announcements about how they’re going to streamline this issue for their existing userbase.

Thoughts? I love Nintendo, but I think they’re providing a great example of A) how DRM is not a positive method of protecting IP, and B) how not to do customer service.

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Although it wont happen , id like nintendo to go 3d party . I have no desire to pay 150$ for a 3ds just for Fire Emblem , I think IOS and Android are the future .

It wont happen , but I can dream .

And i’ve read about how nintendo wont let you transfer games between systems , and I think fine I’m gaming on Android anyway .

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I haven’t heard any positive reaction about DRM. From my point of view, the only protection you can have against piracy is to move parts of the game online. Things like authentication, leaderboards, player status&progress, achievements, inventory and so on, can easily fit into a website like structure.
With such an approach you can stay ahead of pirates, silently modifying the game structure when they break in.
Also, for indies this is probably the best way to protect, because the effort of recreating the server side of the game might be too much work for the cracker. You can say that people re engineered the WOW server, but even so the quality of the game is far worse than the official game. Not to mention that they are not able to update the pirated version as fast as they want with new releases. By the time they have a functional server for a new expansion, the official game have already moved ahead.