It has been a while since my last addition. With the worldwide economic recession crashing down on us and being in-between jobs myself I have other things to worry about that Tony Hilliam and his cronies.
Today however I noticed another one of those decisions that makes you scream out loud: "WHY!"
It is because of this announcement by Spiffy, the auranite who was one of Tony's accomplishes when he managed to destroy Fury and a decent amount of Dollars ... millions!
The announcement:
"Auran IRC server shutting down
Due to recent changes in our network infrastructure and with the upcoming release of TS2009 with in built chat, the decision has been made to shut down the existing IRC server. This server has not officially been supported by us for several months now, and it has been decided to place our efforts and resources to improve the upcoming title and website community features.
I realize that there will be strong feelings over this decision but there will be new community features added to the Auran & Trainz Websites over the coming months as well as the release of TS2009 which contains an in game chat system where you can talk to all the other players in real-time.
The server will officially be taken offline at 9am EST(Australian Time) on the 17th October.
We would like to thank those that have supported the Trainz IRC and we look forward to chatting with you in-game in Trainz 2009."
The above message has a distinct Fury feel doesn't it. Als the Fury servers were shut-down within 48 hours after Tony pulled the plug. Bye-bye Fury community, bye-bye game. ( Two days ago I was at my local Mediamarkt and to my utter surprise I found they still have a copy of Fury for sale ... )
This message and the disappointment for the numerous chatters within the community made me realize that the last few years Auran has been very thorough in alienating a large number of customers ... and they continue to do so.
Let's have a look at some recent customer unfriendly decisions by Auran:
* shutting down IRC chat servers
* No SP1 support for foreign language versions of TRS2006
* Abandoning TC route building competition
* Abandoning support gmax content creation
* Rushing out version after version after version of badly developed, badly tested badly supported of the Trainz franchise ( TRS2006, TC1+2, TC3 )
These were just five things I can name from the top of my mind. I have no doubt others can come up with plenty more and when TS2009 is released it will be no problem to add that version to the list of rushed products.
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
