SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Editorial: It's Supposed to Be a Two-way Street

"Chunx" and Tom "WKLINK" Cofield recently wrote some thought provoking and fine editorials concerning the symbiotic relationship between developers and our sim community. One point made is that we, as an fan-base community, should be realistic and careful not to be too obsessive and nit-pick excessively about sim issues/problems in the forums. Exaggerating minor problems and lambasting the product and the developer is not giving constructive feedback and may not be taken seriously.

On the other hand, as consumers we have paid money for a product and deserve some basic customer support—being informed that the developer or publisher publicly acknowledges that this or that bug or problem is recognized or being looked into, and that they are working on finding a solution.

The review I did recently on GTR resulted in feedback from some of our readers who pointed out that a number of customers were having some serious problems with GTR. So I collected the details and sent them to the publisher 10Tacle for comment.

The most disheartening thing about this whole business is that I wrote what would be the essence of this editorial on the same day, i.e. Friday, August 12th. I felt I knew what would be the outcome and—I wonder why I'm not at all surprised.

Letter to 10Tacle, sent Friday, August 8, 2005 at 12:17 PM:

Hello Marcel,
SimHQ has finalized it's review of FIA GTR (http://www.simhq.com/_motorsports2/motorsports_055a.html)
I hope that you can take some time away from GT Legends and comment on the remarks we have received from readers who own FIA GTR.
One poster writes on the SimHQ forums:
"Can someone at SimHQ please do another interview with 10tacle/Simbin? Simbin's become extremely reclusive and there has been no word yes or no for future updates and fixing of dreadful bugs like the 1FPS bug that basically kills any form of decent league racing. There has been some reference to 10tacle not allowing Simbin to communicate with the GTR community but it has been several months since the 1.4 patch. I'm hoping someone at SimHQ can contact Marcel Jung or Martijn Pantlin of 10tacle to comment on the fate of GTR. If you cannot do so, please at least reply at let me know."
Other posters comment:
"RaceMore, the online racing component of GTR FIA is nonexistent for >90% of the customers. You can find more information on this major problem at the GTR FIA official site."
"Simbin and 10tacle after sales customer service has been nonexistent at the Official GTR FIA forum/website. For instance, Racemore problem has been an issue for >2 months, but there has been no feedback from the company at all. With regards to various GTR FIA bugs again the company has done nothing to communicate with the customers. About one week ago the developers have finally taken a step forward to fix this lack of communication, but only with a "communication suggestion" thread. I'm sorry, but the developer is failing in after-sales service!"
"I think it would be just be nice of Simbin/10tcle to post a couple of lines of what they are doing/thinking with GTR FIA, such as, "We are working on a patch for GTR FIA" or "We are too busy with the imminent release of GTL that we are not working on GTR FIA at this time" or "We are no longer supporting GTR FIA and hope you will join us in GTL."
...just a couple of sentences!"
Checking through the most recent posts on the official FIA GTR website and forum, I notice that some issues keep reappearing, namely;

1FPS bug,
RaceMore difficulties
Online racing still not there in terms of technical quality
A general sense from some posters of their complaints not being acknowledged
People who have not received any kind of response to their request for support
Support for GTR stopping as GT Legends will take over, killing GTR.
I realize that getting ready to launch GT Legends is taking up a lot of Simbin's and 10Tacle's current time and resources, but I would really appreciate it if you could take the time to address these questions and issues raised by part of your customer base so SimHQ readers might know a bit more of what to expect in the future for GTR.
Kind regards,
Jens C. Lindblad,
SimHQ Motorsports

This was the letter, in its entirety, sent high priority to the email addys provided by 10Tacle in their press releases, as well as directly to M. Jung.

As they were getting ready to leave for the Leipzig expo at the time, we agreed that I should remind 10Tacle of the matter two weeks later. On Aug. 25th I sent that reminder, requesting an indication for when I should expect to receive the comments. No reply.

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