Yesterday’s revelation that Trion was handing out significant gifts to former ArcheAge players to entice them to return to the game — gifts in some cases worth $100 — didn’t sit well with current subscribers; some of them even started a petition to demand that Trion grant them the same gifts. Last night, Trion admitted that it “missed the mark” with this promotion and is currently discussing how best to rectify the situation now and in the future. Producer Khrolan penned this explanation on the official forums:
I’d like to be transparent about what’s happening with our recent win-back program to encourage returning players and what we’re doing for our active ArcheAge community.
It’s our job to continually evaluate what we can do to stimulate the health of ArcheAge. Part of this process is to bring new folks into the game and also find ways to re-engage players who contributed to the game in the past and may be interested in playing again. We’ve seen success with folks coming back to the game with the release of Secrets of Ayanad and wanted to reinforce this trend.
One piece of this plan was to issue a targeted, limited time giveaway to encourage inactive players to try the game again. I’m sure you’ve seen other companies do this before as it’s a common strategy. You may have received a similar email in the past offering game time, items and even things like level advancement to bring you back into the fold.
More people playing ArcheAge is a benefit to everyone and from what we’ve seen most people are accepting of win-back promotions. The important part is to make sure the giveaway is compelling enough to give recipients a reason to come back without it being perceived as too generous to the point that it offends existing, active players.
Plain and simple, we missed the mark and overestimated. Instead of moving through the right approval paths the folks involved in this promotion drew assumptions about what would and wouldn’t be acceptable to include. Some of our reasoning for including items like the dolphin or glider skins are that they’re largely cosmetic with limited actual game functionality. The bottom line is we ran forward at full speed with the best intentions and the packages were just plain too generous. We’ve corrected this process internally and have measures in place now to identify and review appropriate rewards.
We need to ensure our existing loyal patrons and players never feel slighted when we implement programs like this. It’s important for us to treat our community fairly and to do this we are designing a giveaway for all active ArcheAge players. We will have more details tomorrow after internal discussions occur around development of the program.
We’ll keep you posted when the full decision is in.
[Source: Official forums. Thanks to Kinya and Clay.]
