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How Best Buy Services Their Customers Right Out The Door |
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Written by neildittmar
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Thursday, 23 February 2012 11:25 |
Despite the incessant groaning that has continuously flowed from my tech savvy friends and acquaintances, I have openly admitted to being a loyal Best Buy customer for many, many years. Since the first store within geographical striking distance opened in the mid-late 90's, I've found myself visiting often and buying all sorts of products over a fairly long stretch of time. To be clear, I've purchased console systems and games, countless CDs and DVDs, home theater equipment, televisions, computers, PC components, software, and far too many other items and gadgets to list individually. Conservatively speaking, I'd say that at least 90% of my technology purchases have come from a Best Buy store over the last 15+ years.
So despite having such a large purchase history with the company, why have I decided that now is the time to heed others advice and steer clear of Best Buy? It's certainly not because of more tempting online alternatives that offer a wider selection at cheaper prices. I've been shopping online almost as long as I've been shopping at Best Buy, with both purchase avenues co-existing quite nicely. It has nothing to do with return policy complaints, as these have always gone smoothly for me. The ability to go to a local store for exchanges is actually one of the primary reasons I've been a regular customer for so long. It isn't even the fact that their employees typically represent the lowest common denominator, with product knowledge far below that of an average high school student, let alone a bona fide technology professional with some kind of formal education and experience.
Quite simply, it's the service that has become increasingly substandard. I'm not speaking about a lack of service, though I don't ever recall receiving assistance from a Best Buy employee that was notable, let alone exceptional. It's the approach to service and how customer relations are conducted... that stark difference between what the head-honchos at Best Buy corporate think it means to serve customers and the actual definition. For me personally, the underlying mantra of a good retail experience is the curt yet direct let me shop, please don't bother me. Quite easy to adhere to, yet Best Buy has continually refused and even become more vocal about the subject during recent visits. For the life of me, I simply can't understand why they won't let me just buy stuff anymore. They always insist on providing their warped version of customer service, hoping to transform my shopping trip into an experience. Well, lately their approach has left me experiencing abhorrent disgust and vowing never to shop there again.
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Concerning id software: Why all the RAGE? |
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Written by neildittmar
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Monday, 10 October 2011 14:20 |
In past years when id software launched a new game developed in-house, it has typically been regarded as an important milestone in both critical and commercial circles. It's well known fact that their releases often fall victim to extended development schedules in which years of delay are the end result. Usually though, the final package that patient gamers receive is well worth the wait. When the company goes so far as to launch an entirely new intellectual property though, it does nothing short of magnifying the significance exponentially. To put the matter into perspective, an entirely new IP from id hasn't been seen since the original Quake debuted in the mid 1990's. That's a lull of over a decade and a half between the premiere title in id software’s last perennial franchise and RAGE, its recently released labor of love.
Given id software’s perceived position in the industry, it’s almost needless to say that expectations for RAGE ran quite high during the titles gestation period. The length of development and the amount of time between new game/ip releases is only part of the story though. id software and its technical guru John Carmack have an established track record of advancing the industry with each new release. For the original Doom, it was the introduction of a fast-moving, pseudo 3D world where violence and gore were the central focus. Quake took those concepts further, rendering both the environment and its inhabitants entirely in 3D. Quake 2 upped the ante by fully exploiting 3D hardware acceleration and making it the standard going forward. Quake 3 completely rewrote the blueprint for online multiplayer. Even despite being slightly less regarded, Doom 3 brought the concepts of fully dynamic lights and shadows into a real consumer product, creating an entirely new level of immersion and atmosphere. It's commonplace that a new release from id often doubles as a showpiece for an emerging technology that drives gaming forward in some tangible way.
Despite id's stellar resume of successes, the potential for a let down upon the release of RAGE also remained quite possible. To complicate matters, id was acquired and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Zenimax Media during the games development. Despite the promise that the company would remain an independent entity, Corporate Takeover 101 dictates that there are no so-called "mergers of equals" and to the contrary, there are always clear-cut winners and losers. For a long time id were the rock stars of game development, doing whatever they pleased and releasing whenever they felt like it to an adoring, clamoring public. Conversely, id as an owned extension of a much larger corporate entity had me severely doubting that their past spirit of independence would be left intact.
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Release Now, Patch Later: When Technology Hurts The Experience |
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Written by neildittmar
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Thursday, 17 November 2011 10:55 |
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Back in my day, before broadband Internet was for all intents and purposes ubiquitous, developers had exactly one chance to get their games right before sending them out the door to retail. Anything less than the best it can possibly be could (and often times did) lead to nothing short of negative critical reception and likewise, poor sales. Much like today, word on the street was pretty powerful back then too. In some cases it's all we had.
Fast forward to 2011 and we see a very different scenario consistently play out in the gaming industry. The number of new releases with "Day 1 patches" are quite staggering and paint the respective companies as a group that simply can't get their games right on the first try. Even after these often times mandatory updates are applied, things may still not be quite right until several months after release, if ever. Sure, games are infinitely more complex now than they were 10 or 15 years ago. However, the number of people working on them and the amount of money invested has also increased exponentially. Though I understand that it's not really possible for any release to be entirely bug-free, the resources are certainly there to insure that glaring things like memory leaks, installation problems, broken textures, and outright game-breaking issues are resolved before titles hit the shelves.
But the underlying problem is that the industry simply doesn't care for the most part. In fact, technologies like high-speed Internet and seamless content delivery systems have made it so that they don't have to.
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F3AR (PC) |
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Written by Quebus
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Friday, 15 July 2011 10:54 |
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I have to be honest. After the second instalment of the FEAR series, I wasn’t even following the development of this game let alone planning to play it. In my review of FEAR 2, I documented my disdain for what I saw as the “genericization” of the intellectual property and the “console-ization” of a PC shooter. The distinctive “pure bred” style of FEAR became a cross bred “mutt” through the heavy influence of games like Crysis and other tactical shooters. The resulting mix was not a success in my view. Yet a friend with similar leanings and opinions started playing FEAR 3... and continued playing it. As with “Mikey” from the Life cereal ads, he seemed to like it. My curiosity was piqued.
In terms of technical data, there’s almost no point in mentioning it these days unless there are glaring issues (cough *Duke Nukem* cough). These games are made “cross platform” from the ground up and for the most part, the XBOX and PS3 priorities have basically caused PC hardware requirements to flatten out considerably. That said, FEAR 3 runs just fine on my Q6600 Core 2 Quad and ATI 6870.
Beyond the irksome “console first” menus and controls, despite the near mandatory (shudder) cover system, the constant hover help and “click me” glow on every object and beyond the “you can never go back” realities of what’s hip and happening, the fact is FEAR 3 is a pretty solid and entertaining game.
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