Going on a bit of a “rant” here, I promise, it’ll be short. Little bit of a public shaming for THQ’s support organization who from what I can see are trying to do the best they can with not enough resources.
THQ Support is known to send people to the Relicnews.com forums to get support for Relic’s games. We’re a privately run forums staffed by volunteers. Perfectly reasonable for THQ support to spot a new problem on a community forum, identify a fix from it and document it in their database. But to send people to our forums to ask for help? That tells me that either THQ needs more support staffers, or they’re lazy.
Support for games often requires patches. The game companies provide them. Often games, like Relic games, require you to download patches as you log in. That means they’re already hosted on the publisher’s servers.
Now when it comes to patches, sometimes fans mirror patches as well, and post them publically. Sometimes even posting them in fan run support forums. Moe had his server also resolve to dowpatch.com and had the DoW Patches listed.
So what does THQ Support do? In a public support article, they use the list of DoW patch downloads from Moe’s server. Lazy THQ, Lazy. In all honesty I expect that someone there thought DoWpatch.com was a THQ hosted URL. Still doesn’t excuse it though. The bad part is, that Moe’s server’s been down for the last couple of weeks, so guess what, no one using that article has been able to download patches!
Edit: Just noticed this. I was wondering why people would MSN me asking about that error. THQ Support needs to add this info to the article so people can fix that themselves if the forums go down.
Update: Added “- Sometimes” to the Article title. I’ve been taken to task for suggesting the THQ support team is lazy for sending people to our forums for support as it is not THQ’s Support’s policy to send users to our forums for official support. As a support person, I know how hard it is to keep up when your corporation has you doing to much with too little resources (time and staff). I don’t know what the internal situation is at THQ’s various support organizations, so anything you read above is speculation on my part based on the few issues that have come to light on the Relic forums.
11 comments on this post. Add your own. Comments feed?
Posted by ÜberJumper at September 5th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I could go on about why PC Gaming support suffers in general in another article, but I won’t in this one.
Posted by newrelicfan at September 5th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Man that really sucks. Why cant they just host the patches them self ?
Posted by Moe at September 5th, 2008 at 10:49 am
In their defense, they do host the patches for CoH on both THQ.com and on Relic.com, even if Mukkel shamelessly stole my awesome name for the CoH Patch site. And they’re not half as bad as Asus, who apparently sold notebooks with CoH preinstalled on them and deep-linked to the .exe files on my server, essentially stealing my bandwidth while overlaying it with their ads. THQ at least had the decency to link to the .html files.
Oh and my server is back up again. :)
Posted by Thunder at September 5th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
…still, linking to files hosted by someone else is not so cool.
Posted by newrelicfan at September 5th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
i didnt know that about asus notebooks.
Posted by Astrocrab at September 5th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Worst of all is that you are paying ($$$) for bandwidth that THQ doesn’t care to.
Posted by ÜberJumper at September 5th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
It was a mistake on THQ’s part, and they’ve admitted it and removed the support article linking Moe’s server.
Instead, they’re sending people to filefront now. They have the patches on their server, I’m not sure what the problem is.
Posted by Moe at September 6th, 2008 at 3:49 am
I don’t mind them linking to my server. They’re linking to the html files, so my google ads are being shown to whoever comes to download the files, and that’s all fine and dandy. I provided this resource free of charge and anyone is welcome to link to it. It’s when people cough Asus cough start deep-linking to files that I get in trouble, because that only serves to increase traffic without increasing page views.
Posted by Forhekset at September 8th, 2008 at 8:26 am
THQ shouldn’t divert people here regardless of any reasoning, they should cover support for their own damn games.
But I guess it’s kind of a compliment. You have no problem hosting Relic community managers or developers so why not support :P
Posted by ÜberJumper at September 8th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
It’s concerning when a support organization APPEARS to have to lean so heavily on volunteers. There’s more reports from outside North America, from the UK, from Australia, from Europe. This has been going on for a while.
They’re of course free to use the publically available information to craft their support articles and increase their knowledge. Heck I don’t even mind them sending people to forums for help with router issues (as playing games behind a router is not supported… that’s a discussion for another article). But the impression that I, and a large portion of the RN forum staff has, is that THQ support sends people to the forums for help far too often. Even as recently as the middle of August this year we have a well documented (including emails from THQ to the user) case of THQ support sending someone to the forums for help.
Part of the confusion lies in that Relicnews used to host the official Relic forums, so I suspect that when an analyst tells a customer to come to the forums they’re meaning to contact Relic. But even then, THQ support is the official means of support for THQ products. THQ should be the ONLY contact point for customers needing support for their product. If the customer needs something done by Relic, THQ should facilitate that.
The THQ North American support organization seems to “get” this, so hopefully they can propagate that to the rest of the THQ support infrastructure.
Posted by Pyros at September 8th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Interesting, THQ has also directed users to one of my websites (Planet Frontlines) to act as tech support for their Frontlines title. It seems this isn’t just limited to Company of Heroes but all of THQ’s titles.