Sorry guys, but any customer-centered business must care about what causes customers to quit buying (or playing) their product. Anet does care when a player posts that he/she is quitting because each player that posts represents roughly TEN THOUSAND players that do not take the time and effort required to post.
You may poke fun at him/her, ask for his/her stuff (thinking its funny), but in the end every player that quits hurts the game and the company’s bottom-line. I know because business retention is my line of work (and I’m good at it).
Finding NEW customers is a thousand times harder than retaining present customers. Any business that “beats” people for leaving will see an ever increasing exodus.
Social media (like forums) are becoming increasingly important. Comments that ridicule players for leaving only exacerbate the problem and hurt the company. If I worked at Anet, you can be sure I would be watching the forum for negative comments made by employees (I do it every day for a much larger corporation). Believe me, they never do it again.
Comments like “Can I have your stuff?” should be deleted, and candid discussion should be had both on and off line.
Where I work, we keep track of every type of posting. We record positive and negative feedback. We tabulate the results and are therefore able to estimate monthly customer satisfaction levels, population movements, and future trends. We never punish customers that complain, but listen to them. While we can’t retain every customer, our retention rate is constantly improving, and that’s why we’re making money, hiring more people, and giving salary increases.
Of course, this post opens me up for an onslaught of criticism and “Quit if you don’t like the game” kinds of postings. It’s juvenile, but probably inevitable. So, as a fellow GW2 player, I’d like to say,
“Thank you Yoh, for caring about the game and having the integrity and desire to help point Anet in the direction you think will improve the game. We do want you to stay and hope to run into you somewhere in Tyria some day soon.”
Sincerely,
Stevizard
I was scrolling this thread (ignoring the GIMME STUFFS peoples x3) and was about to just explode at the amount of people telling him he should’ve left WITHOUT saying anything. I will be the first to say this but everything he said is very constructive and should be appreciated from those who work down at ArenaNet. Honestly I personally believe that a few of the classes are boring simply because the way the skills work… I mean your skills go off of your weapon… and then you only get at max 5 of those? I realize some classes have weapon swapping and I also haven’t played it for that long so perhaps those leveling skills do help. But I personally can understand exactly where he is coming from (without the previous experience from Guild Wars). Thank you “Yoh” for posting this and I do hope that ArenaNet takes a look at this post and takes it into consideration upon further development of the game!!