Before anyone asks, I am not talking about Gachapon or Reforging rates or whatever. I am talking about the information provided by Nexon, which is insufficient to minimize confusion and misunderstanding.
Just some background: I am a CPA and internal auditor. I'm not saying this to brag or anything (I know it can come off as snobby), but because my job very seriously drives my opinion on this matter. One of the biggest roles of my job is to make sure that the business language used by businesses provide good and reasonable support for the customers and/or clients. In other words, I am the guy who checks whether or not things are stated clearly. (side note - I never care about my own grammar or whatever in social media or forums, too depressing to be in work-mindset during leisure. so yes I will have grammar mistakes here despite my job.)
The recent language for two consecutive events have been very confusing and can easily mislead you. Specifically:
1. During Fynni Sync, you will sacrifice 1 pet permanently. The text states that the pet will disappear, but it does not specify that the pet will disappear permanently. It is perfectly reasonable to assume the pet will disappear while Sync is active, but it is not always known that you cannot "un-Sync" a pet.
2. The Reforging Tools are made available as of 7/23/2020, but the Reforging event does not start until Friday 7/24/2020 at 11AM PDT.
So yeah, as stated above, these two situations have the potential for people to quite literally lose money they shouldn't have lost. The first thing you might ask is well, the text is there, it says it clearly, anyone who doesn't read it... that's their fault.
That mindset is NOT best practice, and it is NOT sensible. For my job, I would perform an extensive test. What percentage of people will misunderstand? What percent failure is there? In this case, the "failure" condition would be if someone loses a pet they did not want to lose to Fynni Sync, or if someone uses a Reforging tool assuming that the increased Reforging rates are applied.
Usually, a very low failure rate is expected, or it is considered a control failure. At least in my job, a customer-facing communication would require a 1% or less failure rate. Just looking through the various guild discords, community discords, forums, in-game chat, etc., I am seeing that people are confused. I have seen many people talk about how they lost a good pet or used reforges without knowing the event is inactive. While I'm not getting a clear representation of the overall failure rate and it's impossible for me to test it, seeing multiple occurrences in a short time frame is pretty much also indication of a high failure rate.
To me, I don't care that people are failing because they are not reading carefully. It's not about that. It's about how many people are messing up. Doesn't matter how you do it - if it works for 99% of people, then it works. If it works for 85% of people, then it does not work, and 15% (a quite large portion) would be upset.
SO TL;DR. The language that is used in these events makes it so that people have the potential to waste money. Saying that they should have read it or interpreted it a bit closer is the wrong approach, because more than an acceptable number of people have made the mistake. The goal is not to clarify for the majority, the goal is to clarify for everyone, at least to reasonability standards (which currently it is not). Everyone who is looking at the actual methodology of communication should be looking at actual failure rates instead. Yes you can blame them on being lazy or dumb for not reading, but it is entirely, quite literally both legally, ethically, and responsibly, the company's responsibility to fix it, not the person to become "more smart."
Thanks for reading, sorry for ranting.
EDIT: a bit more background - I did not lose a pet to Fynni Sync. I also did not suffer from the reforging tool situation. I'm just looking at this from my perspective.






Comments
Even with the discount its still too expensive and a waste of money for RNG your highly more likely to lose in.
I would encourage players to save your money so you don't hurt yourselves during this Covid-19 pandemic because you'll never know when something displeasing were to happen that you would have to make do with what money you have left to go through with it.
The corgis are a prime example of waiting, better pets will come out, always will be
Reforges on the otherhand, event or not, the chance of getting anything good reforge-wise is gonna be slim no matter what Nexon throws at us, least until they let us blooming pick the reforge (Which would never happen, money-loss)
With Nexon there is an additional complication of needing to translate content from the original Korean-language into the English-language, and I do speak a number of languages, and I can say as a fact and from experience that being able to speak fluently & write in perfect grammar in more than one language is actually a very rare skill-set, and I do not necessarily default into any one language's grammar-rules but might mix a few different language-grammars into one sentence just because it is my preference/signature.
You can see other examples of unclear and insufficient information/wording in other areas, too. For example, the messages on the loading screens in game (perhaps partly due to lack of space):
--> "Stop worrying about repairs, NPCs have 100% repair rate"
--> "You can feed your Partner, which alleviates their hunger, by right-clicking them"
--> "You'll level faster when you rebirth"
In each statement, there's a piece of the puzzle missing in order for it to be true. You're only given part of the story and left to make sense of it on your own.
Granted, these examples don't necessarily cause players to spend too much/lose money. However they can still be misinterpreted and cause confusion, which is still a problem that clarity/improvement would help to mitigate.
Might have to blame Korea for that.
Nexon NA literally can't do a thing without KR's permission. which might also explain why they can't explain crap correctly: Korea doesn't want them to. Otherwise, we'd have a competent team dealing with this game.
So, in this case, the legal, ethical, e.t.c action is for Nexon NA to hire people who can understand Korean, along with making educated guesses when something isn't explained?
Note : ...because what I mention next not only potentially goes off on some tangents, due to some or possibly more than just some of its content also being potentially super-ultra-sensitive (for reasons that are not very well-known except by those who are part of the Supreme-Court or High-Court systems and above [yes, above, believe it or not]), I have decided to nest the rest within spoilers within spoilers for now.
↓Spoiler #2 : Rant about Gill Bates (intentionally mis-spelled) and how his unethical financial-practices seem to «magically» increase his net-worth when he «donates to charity» through his own so-called «philanthropic» organisations (I don't go into much detail about it other than describing how I know about it from my studies of the court-systems & their administration over «[Cestui Que Vie] Trust» accounts; few people seem to yet know that every «case» that goes through the court-systems, world-wide, yes, world-wide, are connected to the «bonds» [all of which are connected to «Birth Certificates» which is literally an «international "franchise" system»] which are essentially like «stocks» that are literally traded & sold on Wall Street & other such stock-markets [such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Standard & Poor's, etc.], but it's also so very highly compartmentalised & hidden behind loads of Legalese such that even your CPA wouldn't be able to track down or uncover the fraud without first learning the «Lawyer language» double-speak/legalese/jargon/euphemisms/etc., and I'm sure they'd much rather do other things with their time ).↓
At least, I hope it isn't.I'm sure the entirety of Mabinogi's community understands what it means for something to disappear. In the hypothetical scenario where pets would temporarily disappear instead, that would be stated plainly in the multitude of warnings given. The real issue is that people are power hungry and impatient. They don't care about what the dialogue says, or the instructions, or anything else that might be important. They just want that brand new shiny power that came out, and they want to get it before anyone else- Or at least as soon as they possibly can.
I don't care what kind of company it is, I personally don't think a business should ever make itself a total slave to its customers. With that said, customers in this case should be expected to employ at least a little bit of common sense and patience. Nexon made the warning very clear and stated it multiple times in multiple places. They're only having to put in the extra work to restore people's pets now because people are too impatient to spend a few minutes of their time reading a few paragraphs of text.
I'm not against the word being added to the warnings and I applaud Kyrios for taking the time to address something despite it being unnecessary, OP, but quite frankly, I think you're making a big deal out of nothing with the first accusation.
Its posts like this that worry me: that the team has to ASK if they can relay certain information/clarify things.
The request for clarification shouldn't require approval.