Turbine made a curious statement yesterday, to the effect that details of next weeks LOTRO stores sales were not being posted on the official webpage. If you want to know what items are being discounted then you have to log in to the game and manually go to the store. At first glance this is a somewhat innocuous change but so far the post on the official forums has already attracted four pages of replies. It would seem that this move has not been well received. Some players with multiple alts will have to make multiple searches because class specific items will only be displayed to that class. Others have simply criticized the poor loading and performance of the web store app itself. I will leave it to readers to decide if these complaints are legitimate.
Now fan-site Casual Stroll to Mordor regularly covers LOTRO store sales, so when the information wasn’t forthcoming as usual, Goldenstar and Ketani decided to research the matter themselves and post a list of discounted items. As usual the community was suitably grateful as a respected third party took up the slack. However, both the initial decision by Turbine to pursue this course of action and CSTM’s subsequent “good deed” both raise some interesting questions.
Turbine may have tried this experiment to simply get more people to visit the store. They see it as an increased chance of a potential purchase. It’s a standard ploy used in most retail industries. Make the customer come inside the store, or ask a member of staff for information and the odds of a sale go up. However, by publishing a list of items that are on special, CSTM is in some respects working against that policy. An informed customer has less requirement to log into the store and the chance of a impromptu purchase is therefore reduced.
The situation is a curious one. First of all, I see what CSTM is doing as a public service and they are under no obligation to do otherwise. Yet they are theoretically invalidating what Turbine is trying to achieve but that is not their problem in any way, shape or form. I also think that this is one of many store based experiments that we can expect to see from Turbine this year. It should be noted that they have not categorically stated that all future store sales will not be advertised on the official website. The statement merely said “For the week of January 11th – January 17th we’re formatting our Store Sales page differently than normal” and nothing more.
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I like our phrase – store based experiments. It is so very true, and has been one of the main reasons I left Lotro – I had the feeling the whole f2p was a grand experiment, conducted on more or less willing subjects to see how far they could be pushed, manipulated….
I see this as effectively a requirement to view advertising – i.e. the full list of items that Turbine has on offer – just to see whether there are any good sales. Turbine can run their business however they choose to, but this certainly isn’t a customer-friendly approach.
The other issue with having the most authoritative listing generated by a third party fansite is the very real possibility that they won’t get it right. With all the items that are filtered by class, subscriber status, etc, it’s possible that they will miss items and thereby cost Turbine item purchases. Likewise, it’s possible that they will see a bunch of horses on sale and post to the effect that all horses are discounted, only to leave customers mad at Turbine when it turns out that only some subset of mounts were actually discounted.
And it’s been walked back, continuing the recent proud trend in Turbine PR brinksmanship.
I think the term “brinksmanship” is far too generous and not one I would associate with Turbine
Ineptitude on the other hand…
Ineptitude is far too non-generous. Remember how they got players to argue that mannequins should only be in places of commerce, and thus we ended up with a “compromise” in which we went from no mannequins to mannequins in major settlements? The game is much more aggressively monetized than it was a year ago, and they seem to have accepted that the monthly community blowout is just the cost of doing business.
Yet another phenomenally bad marketing idea.
The bimbo responsible for this newest eff up should really start looking for a new job.
Probably the typical corporate dumbo failing “up the ladder”.