WARGAMING APOLOGIZED! AGAIN... SORT OF...

Wargaming apologized! Again... Sort of...

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 06-09-2021
Online Games Bay

If you missed the sh*tstorm that just keeps on giving, the Community Contributors walkout in World of Warships, don’t worry, nothing particularly interesting happened. Except Wargaming apologized again. Well, sort of...

On September 2nd, in lengthy message two high level people from Wargaming, Victor Bardovsky (Publishing Director) and Andrey Lisak (Development Director) issued another take of apologizing, this time to everyone. It was fifth or sixth time they tried to apologize, as a company, but so far all of them were half-hearted to say the least.

While this time, even if it was done under pressure from media, it was accepted as move in right direction, the rest of the post was a mixed bag. Wargaming was blaming translation (again), the vast number of people involved in production (some of which are English native speakers, which undercuts the translation argument), poor internal and external communication (again) and general misunderstanding (again).

Again they promised to do better in the future (something they promised pretty much every year so far), they promised to have more transparent decision making process (but not taking feedback into consideration), they promised publishing what chance there is to win particular lootbox (which is not what users were asking for) and add some new stuff.

However if you take a better look at some of the details you can spot some discrepancies between the tone and the content of the post. For example, they blamed translation for some of the misunderstandings, like people expecting items available on Summer Sale to be actually cheaper, while Summer Sale is just a name. They blamed that a lot of people are involved in development (about 500 according to Wargaming), but at the same time those are people that work in a structure of whole company, and some of them are responsible for communication with players should know better what they are doing.

And there is one more detail that was curious - they promised to add new map (something they did not managed to do in about 15 months), but they gonna achieve that goal... next year. They gonna bring back additional game modes... next year. They gonna publish the chance of winning a lootbox... next year. They gonna improve communication... some time in the future. They gonna re-balance the aircraft carriers and submarines debacle... when they will find a way to do it. How many people are involved in development again? Just checking, because it sounds like CD Projekt Red fixing Cyberpunk 2077 saga.

In a way, this time Wargaming has actually apologized, some will say weeks too late, some will say years too late, but in general the message was "move along, nothing to see here, let’s not talk about past, but concentrate on the bright future". So on one hand it was an apology, but on the other just another element of PR covering the real problems of the game.

07-01-2022