Return to Britannia is Live through October 5, but Still Has a few Issues. Soapbox Time.

For once, I’m posting most of a UO story on the main Ultima Codex – see here.

Here you are going to get the soapbox part that was not posted there.

First, some important links:
– Account Help/FAQ/Support
– EA Account Management

And EA is aware of your pain:

We have discovered an issue that is causing some accounts not able to log in with the Return to Britannia. We are working to resolve this issue and should have a fix by tomorrow. We will update you as soon as we have additional information.

Soapbox Mode
There are rumors that this was delayed at the last minute because they wanted to turn off the 15th Anniversary gifts for the free/Return to Britannia accounts, or that they knew there were problems that still existed from last year’s account migration fiasco and they were still working on them.

It doesn’t matter why it was delayed, the bigger problem is that Mythic still can’t figure this communication thing out. Did they really only realize on August 31, 2012 that they meant September 5 – October 5, 2012? I don’t think so. No, it’s just another example of bad communication, just like they waited until it was nearly evening to publicly tell people who were having problems that they were aware of those problems.

One More Thing. Even though we were told last year that they would improve the Accounts.EAMythic.com account management site after the horrible account migration where people were having to rely on fansites for tutorials in using the new account management system, none of that has changed. Almost a year later and the support link takes you to https://help.ea.com/en/warhammer. Yep. That’s the Warhammer Online support site. Thankfully the UO team did mention the UO support page in the email, assuming you received the email, but many people are naturally going to click on the support link on the account management page.

Almost a year after an account migration fiasco, and the promised links to proper UO support are still missing, and help takes would-be UO players to Warhammer Online support.

Think about that for a moment. These are people who might potentially give EA money to play UO. It’s not the UO team’s fault either – account management and support are all out of their hands, as I was told last year by somebody on the team. The UO team can certainly help with individual issues – the UO Producer, Bonnie Armstrong, is known for helping players get things resolved, but a year later and the account management is just as crappy now as it was then?

I wish our franchise producer would escalate this kind of crap and get it fixed, because UO needs more players, and there are a lot that want to try things out this month as UO heads into its 15th Anniversary. This kind of stuff really makes Mythic and EA look like it’s run by amateurs or they are just waiting for UO to lose enough players to cancel it, and that’s not an impression you want to make on people that might give you money.

Following up on why I complained about the UO website, what’s sad (besides the fact that Mythic did a damn fine job of destroying UO’s online identity with the UO Herald garbage) is that nobody thought to clean it up and make it really useful after the person(s) responsible for screwing UO players over with that monstrosity left the employment of EA. That site has been around 5 years, and it’s only been recently that somebody felt like it was worth trying to clean up.