I was not a customer of ExileBuddy before. But, now I am. 15/month is something I am used to and is reasonable for developers to flesh out a bot. I expect this bot to keep developing and improving features with this monthly income they are now receiving, however. If you can do this, I am sure you will even see an increase in subscribers.
I really wish you guys had thought this out a bit more before announcing you were closing the bot. Due to the large hardware purchases I made I was forced to find alternatives which I just dropped over 300 bucks on. That makes picking up this bot not possible. Also a major concern I have with monthly subscriptions is how are these major down times handled? Are we going to have weeks of down time and have to repay once its working again? Or will the subscription pause while there isn't a release? I've always been very partial to Buddybots. I just don't see any way I can rely on this particular product with the way things have been. Need to see some stability before I can even consider this as an alternative, especially with a monthly fee attached when the competition offers lifetime. Too risky for now.
I understand what you mean. The community was "begging" for a monthly suscription (which is somehow "ok") - but here we are now: few hours after this the next update hits PoE and all the sh*t continues... when will the bot be working again? when will plugins be updated? what happens to the monthly suscription while bot is off? questions questions questions I know that Buddy Team isn't responsible for the crazy things that GGG develops, but they have to give customers the feeling of security. I hope this happens soon.
I'm only mad about what happened to my keys.... I have keys bought in January and February so they were used for 1 and 2 months before the bot stopped working. One worked for 3 weeks. Now I can't even get a partial refund for them but switch the keys to bots I'm never going to use... So the keys are literally useless for me and I just wasted my money. I've asked the support but got simple no as an answer. I have an mail ready to send full of anger because of that situation but I'm stopping myself from sending it because I would be banned. Anyway, I'm forced to take a break from developing the StashBuddy and CommunityLib for now until we'll figure something out. Peace.
i got exactly the same situation. Has there ever been a company selling a piece of software "lifetime" and few weeks later everything is closed/offline/deactivated... and not a single penny refund. How crazy is that?? but this question has to be answered by paypal's buyer protection and later by my legal protection insurance.
Close the keys without compensation sucks. I spent money on a bot competitor, and now just can't pay for the bot! P.S Sorry for bad English
I can empathize but you don't need to change the keys to some existing bot, they stated they can be changed in the future for any new bots, so that option might suit you more. As for the refund the keys are not that expensive the thing that bothers me is that they did this over night and they wouldn't give users 2-4 weeks before suspending the keys, or at least let people turn the keys into a month of subscription or something like that. Also not sure if it matters but tormias is a very nice person and has done community work as well, so perhaps you should consider refunding him if that is what he really wishes. And you might have more to win in the future (and so will everyone else) from him sticking around rather than not give him a refund because of 1 month outside the refund range.
I am exactly in the same situation as Tormiasz. Lifeimte bot with only 22 days in ise, then deactivating it .. you can guass my feelings. Also for the exchange, i think Hawker mentioned that you wont be able to switch to any new bots. Meaning if they make a Blade and Soul bot, you cant exchange for it only, that are available now ...
Hawker already stated that you can exchange the keys to bots that are already there, no future ones. I don't really want to be treated differently from the others for what I did or what I didn't here.
Well I'm against preferential treatment across the board as well however I don't see it as such here. For example we are in this situation partly because the people who couldn't code, weren't treated differently and were told, if you want the bot to do what you want, learn to code, which is dismissive and stupid and a lot of people opted for other things where coding skills are not required. However I don't see it as preferential treatment giving some leniency for community devs who use their own free time, for no profit, to satisfy the user base and bring money to bossland, it's not preferential treatment it's courtesy, and it's good for business, to throw a bone to those who selflessly tend to your customers.
Okay, I'm this 40 year old stoner. I am not the smartest guy in the room, or the richest; nor do I pretend to be. I am however a fan of limitless. It being 4/20 I took some stoner NZT. During my experience, I remembered something about game-theory and psych 101. The tactic the buddy management used is often used by politicians . The first step: Present the worst case scenario. I think you can see where I'm going with this. Step 2: Without having any intention of shutting it down have the user base begs us to stay on. And as a bonus, lets make them think that it was their idea. People make bad decisions under stress. Step 3: Get feedback to appear to make amends and move forward with the base of people think we didn't just play them. Step 4: Make Bossland account (the deliverer of the message) disappear and have Hawker deliver the wonderful news. Total good cop/bad cop. Step 5: Profit I know this will probably get deleted but I am convinced this whole thing was orchestrated and they did it beautifully. Thank you for giving us the illusion of being in control of this. Bravo, sorry for not seeing it sooner. Don't get me wrong I have no doubt they needed the money but a look behind the curtain would probably look like this. You guys are way smarter than me. I'll give you that.
@Puff I think majority of us was thinking about it at least once, but noone wanted to say it loud. Or not... but I personally was thinking about various cases.
I've certainly thought this could be the case, because the fact that they didn't attempt raising the price for product and removing lifetime keys BEFORE all of this just seemed unreal to me from a business standpoint. But in the end I don't think all this shitstorm was really in their interest. They've definitely lost some business over this to competitors and I am not sure that it would be worse if they just outright did what they did from the get-go. I think at this point it's not worth it to look to deep into this matter. All that happened - happened. Just make your own conclusion according to the facts and move on =)
@Puff: i don't think it's worth the additional money to prepare such a show. it's just like many other companies: too much success for some time too fast growth too many negative unforeseen things happened too many hungry mouths to feed but hey, i am sorry: i ALSO got 2 hungry mouths to feed at home. i am no hippie, throwing my money out of the window and running around naked, happy singing "we all live on a better world without money and EB licences" I want my money back ffs
That's the point, from a psychological standpoint it makes total sense. Imagine if they came out and said screw you lifetime licenses and pay up... imagine that shitstorm.
sorry for my bad English.. my story with this bot : I'm not smart guy and didn't know how to run this bot took me 1 month to know how to make it run my character and start killing " not leveling or grinding just killing mobs around" and there for i stopped using it even when i have lifetime key ... what i want to say here if you make a bot try to make it simple for noob user's like me . honorbuddy demonbuddy rebornbuddy all of these are friendly user bots but not exile buddy so i really wish that you work more on the bot functions and make it easy to use before selling keys and then thinking of shutdown the bot. dont get me wrong i love bossland and all the team hard work is great its just this bot where i dont thing the team give it all they can to give us a great bot ill still support you Bossland .. Peace
Nah, that's what I'm saying: from my personal point of view they lost more (reputation/customers/goodwill) from all these shenanigans than they would've lost from just outwright saying what's need to be done and why.
