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Cage posted:Lululemon Athletica recently brought a store to a mall in Buffalo, NY. To give the store a local spin they put two text references to pretty major buffalo sports controversies: It's not the end of the world, but it was a goddamn stupid move. I'm not even sure what their original plan was. "Hey, city that's known for being rather fanatic about sports! Remember that time that you lost a Super Bowl in the final seconds that people still make fun of you about twenty years later? And the time you lost the Stanley Cup on a call so bad that the guy who made the shot even said it was wrong? BUY OUR PANTS!" That's like setting up a luggage store in Atlanta called Carpetbagger's.
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Jan 8, 2015 23:10
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The line between 'dumb' and 'brilliant' is a thin one. And full of crazy. Let me introduce you to Jim 'THE HAMMER' Shapiro, a personal injury lawyer in the upstate New York area in the early 90s. He was an aggressive ambulance chaser and he had the best/worst commericals. Which were notable as you could see as he went more and more insane, and in that you could literally not live in the area and avoid seeing them because of how prolific they were. We start with this one which isn't really so bad. Then he got more aggressive, as seen here. At some point, he turned the dial up to eleven. As seen here. It was around this time he started selling t-shirts that proclaimed the wearer was "Protected by vicious SOB Jim THE HAMMER Shapiro". Things later fell apart, after during a bar investigation found that Shapiro 1) had not resided in New York for at least seven years at the time, and 2) had never actually tried a case to conclusion. His upstate NY office was being run by a single junior lawyer who had only ever taken four cases to trial ever. He was suspended, though he stated he didn't care because he was busy writing books instead. His works include Sue The Bastards, Victims Rights To Maximum Cash and Million Dollar Lungs. He has since sold all of his law offices.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:58
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Zaphod42 posted:So I just got this flyer from Chic-fil-a You haven't heard of the phrase 'purity ball' before? Because if you haven't, you are in for a treat of creepy poo poo.
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Sep 10, 2015 20:10
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Zaphod42 posted:Oh god, I just googled. No, no, I wouldn't give up on your first instincts there too quickly.
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Sep 10, 2015 20:25
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C.M. Kruger posted:It's kinda amazing how they've bungled it. They could have probably waited until the end, or right after, and then announced it and I think people wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as mad about it. You're even managing to short-change how badly they handled this. Taking it back a step: The game is at the tail end of what most games would consider their lifespan - it's doing fairly well in spite of that, which is great for them. Two years is a solid run. So they chose to introduce a new monitzation scheme, which isn't a huge shock for an older product that's probably trying to squeeze out a little extra income. Problems with how they did it: 1) It was a 'community reward' for the customer base's support on the game's second anniversary. Literally, it was a "Thank you for two years of support! As a reward, we are now instituting an additional method for you to give us more money!". This was what they chose to headline ten days of content - stuff that would normally build up good will and enthusiasm. 2) They chose very weirdly to give the cosmetics stat boosts - which infuriated the pay to win crusaders. However, only some of the cosmetics have stats, only certain boosts are available for certain weapons, and nearly all the boosts are either in undesirable areas or are so small as to be insignificant - meaning all but the most extreme min-maxers don't give a poo poo. So they created a problem for nearly zero benefit. 3) It was chosen to launch this on the same day as a game-wide rebalance pass that not only altered how nearly every weapon in the game performed, but changed the scales that measured that performance so it took days to even figure out what the changes meant, let alone how it affected balance. 3a) Oh, and at the same time they managed to break 90% of the game's mods, including the HUD program that they outright branded as company-endorsed. It took them three days to state that it had been by accident and at this point none of it works again yet. 4) In a stroke of brilliance, you can have a cosmetic drop for a weapon that is DLC that you don't even own. Making something that's of already dubious value absolutely worthless. 5) Their pricing structure is completely off. For $2.50, you get one random cosmetic item that not only might be something you don't like, but could be for a weapon that you don't use or that you don't even have access to. Meanwhile, the game's DLC packs cost $5 (before sales, and this is a product that is 75% off on a quarterly basis) and include vastly more content (the most recent one included seven weapons, four masks and eight cosmetic customizations for said masks). Even if you like playing Pretty Princess Dress-Up, the value ratio there is incredibly skewed. 5a) Keep in mind, as well, that this is a product that normally racks in at $20 for the entry cost, plus has thirty $5 DLC packs and now wants an additional $2.50 for a single random cosmetic. 6) To this point, now five days later, they have remained utterly silent on the subject. Not even a "We are aware of the complaints" statement. Again, this is their big second anniversary event which is coming out after multiple weeks of build-up and coincides with a major sale and a player-grabbing free week. And they have been almost entirely silent. To cap it all off, this was chosen to be done right alongside a major up-tick in the game's compeition as several major releases within the same sub-genre have just come out or are about to come out. I'm hard pressed to come up with a way they didn't mis-handle what should have been a fairly reasonable microtransaction launch.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:11
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C.M. Kruger posted:Thanks for expanding on this. I was tired and getting more and more Hell, I had most of that already pre-prepared. I was going to be bringing it to this thread after Crimefest finished just to see what other developments came up. It's really stunning how much they screwed the pooch. (Then again, the players are being goddamn retards about it too, but you expect players to be goddamn retards.) John Murdoch posted:To be fair, they did make a statement. It was pretty much "wow, you guys seem kinda mad, but we have 10 days of patches to push, so let's talk later maybe?". On the one hand, I can absolutely understand that they don't want to derail the entire event in order to run damage control (or literally can't in a all-hands-on-deck kind of way), but on the other hand the studio seems to pretty consistently lack contingency plans and has brushed things off before by promising to re-examine them in the nebulous "later" so people's expectations are already low. Did they give a statement? I'm guessing Twitter? (Should really get one some day.) Still, that's not much of a response. And this is a situation where they should be running damage control. They've at minimum had weeks to prepare, even best-case scenarios for introducing new monetization schemes are rough, and... just wow. And yeah, the bugginess has been an issue. And the rebalance is... wonky and nonsensical, yeah. (Then again, I'm barely playing because GoonMod is down. Holding down interact and turning my gadgets back on all the time is disorienting. So I can't speak as strongly on those.) I'm hearing about other changes that've been slipped in as well that aren't exactly smart - like vehicle breakdowns. It's fascinating to see what should have been a well-planned anniversary celebration turn into a clusterfuck.
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Oct 20, 2015 14:56
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about it as I was writing my post.
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John Murdoch posted:Not clear if it was planned or just hastily pulled together, but they at least had a cute little animation of Wolf to go along with the announcement, which may be what the whole bindle thing was about. Pretty obviously hastily pulled together. Otherwise you have to accept that Overkill purposely made their customer base angry, undermined the good will generated from an anniversary celebration, damaged future sales and their overall reputation for the purpose of going "LOL trolled u". While it's possible they're that dumb, damage control is the far more likely situation. Mescal posted:This is so boring I can't talk myself into the sentences. I have no idea what this is about. Looks like it's written by an economist? Or a general-purpose ideas person? I don't know. Game company introduces copies new way to make money (from other companies) into old product in a dumb way at a bad time and simultaniously with several other major unpopular changes. Reddit gets upset and does dumb poo poo like trying to call the FTC on them. Goon attempts to phrase situation with using as few game-specific terms as possible so others don't need a translator, does so poorly. Company later does damage control, Reddit is proud of itself for being sperglords. End of tale.
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Oct 21, 2015 14:44
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