This is a tale of two MMO studios and how they handled recent fiascos competently. Happy Friday!
First, ArenaNet announced last night that it is compensating Guild Wars 2 players who’d been affected by a Steam bug that effectively flagged their paid accounts as free-to-play accounts. It was a problem for only 10 hours before ArenaNet had it completely fixed, and everyone’s account has been completely restored now with nothing lost. However, the studio issued an apology anyway and dropped a nice stack of gems on affected players.
“We understand how frustrating and concerning this was for those affected, and we sincerely apologize. To thank you for your patience, we are applying 800 gems to all impacted accounts. No action is needed—your gems will be automatically applied later today and will be available for use the next time you log in.”
That many gems is worth around $10 plus tax, so not too shabby at all.
Meanwhile, Blizzard drew criticism when Overwatch 2 began selling a sweet “Cyber DJ” skin for hero Lucio and then shortly afterward announced that the same skin would be free through Twitch drops. We’re pretty sure different teams just had some cross-comms issues here, not that Blizzard did it specifically to swindle Lucio fans, but obviously, people who bought it were disgruntled, so Blizzard is refunding everyone.
“We’ve refunded anyone who has purchased this skin. We will also be including a second all new skin, Flirty Flare Baptiste along with Cyber DJ Lucio as exclusive drops for Overwatch Spotlight. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate our community for alerting us of this.”
We always expect modern ArenaNet to do the right thing, but 800 gems seemed like a lot to us. And it’s particularly nice to see Blizzard do the right thing for Overwatch 2 gamers after utterly failing World of Warcraft players affected by the studio’s data loss situation last fall – an egregiously awful situation that prompted a whole discussion about compensation in the MMO and multiplayer industry.
