Every game has a support contact. With every video game, whether on PC, console, mobile, or whatever, there will be a certain number of people who have problems getting it to work. Those people either have someone to talk to or begin to get exceedingly disgruntled, and with valid reason if their game becomes unplayable. Just look at the recent fuss over Darkspore being called “abandoned” by one of its official forum moderators for an example of how seriously players take such claims.
Similarly, when people get the wrong contact information for support, they can get frustrated. In a recent example courtesy of Zynga, however, the frustration was at least mutual. At first.
Eric Mueller noticed fairly quickly after Zynga had inadvertently listed his email for people having issues with Coasterville. He did what most of us would under the circumstances. He told Zynga. Zynga, however, did nothing to correct the issue. Most of us would have gotten angry and likely complained more fervently.
Not Eric
He started having fun with it, giving all sorts of absurd advice to people, including telling a Canadian to try placing a hockey jersey over their keyboard. Kotaku has a long list of comments and ‘helpful’ advice from Mr. Mueller to frustrated Coasterville players, and some of them are pure gold.
Even more positively, Zynga has now corrected the error, possibly in response to Kotaku asking them for a comment. I prefer to think they had people asking them why they would wrap their server in a Canadian flag, though.
So please, various companies of all sorts that may be out there: If you take a lesson from this entirely ridiculous situation, let it be this; never ever leave your customers in the hands of random people on the internet who have no legal connection to your company. Zynga is fortunate Eric was more playful than offensive.
Published: Jul 5, 2013 06:39 am