Not a rant, just a farewell post, with some notes for the forum mods/owners on why at least my stockpiles/activity moved away from Arkadia. Forum Moderation? I came to update an existing thread I had for some time after some inventory rearrangements, for my large shop on Arkadia that regularly sold this planets own goods. Perhaps the forum owners may consider the risk of having shop owners moderate and close threads of other shop owners without warning and false assumptions. The shop is now sold with the 1st PM I got tonight, I had other plans for the shop and the contents still in my inventory and on the closed thread for ....customers to see my inventory that didn't disapear.... but why bother with moderation like this? Why it matters here is...its one of the only places to actually advertise services for the planet. I also used the ingame ads regularly, (not many others even do that much)...thankfully those ads were not closed just because the staff was bored and disgruntled. I think that most posters are adults and are able to update and manage their own threads. Ive been playing now for 7 years.......This was the first post out of thousands over many sites for EU that was closed by a mod, and it was a service in progress thread. Support... Support has been unable, slow to respond to a number of other issues over time. I am sure you have the copies. Though I am not sure if many of it is MA mechanics to blame either so no blame game there. Slow and not very helpful in my experience. The dev team is promising, but still didn't do its job to retain this contributing customer. Upgrades? why post about it? Shops can have upgrades I guess....there is a big thread about how the devs can do all kinds of stuff for 5,000 ped. Its too bad that when you have the 5k ped and ask a few questions, no one is able answer. I will never understand the logic. I have over the years supported Arkadia with vast amounts of recycled peds (100k +), crafted arkadian goods (some of which noone else can make) , even fostered a number of disciples on Arkadia at great time and effort. I have no bad issues with it, met and helped and been helped by alot of players. Just saying I made a genuine effort to help here, Arkadia Team did not seem to make much of an effort to help me stay. 450 in 3239 in Hunting (mostly arkadia) 73 out of 1275 in Crafting (havn't crafted much since success rates dropped to boot) Holding almost every full arkadian book with many of the more rare prints from ark....... leaving. My apologies to those who relied on my regular and heavy purchases, as well as those who will no longer have gear you obviously relied on from my always 100% restocked shop/Auction. Between whatever it is forum behavior, lack of support, and crafting success drops I just cant stay parked on Arkadia. I will obviously still return from time to time for warp requests, some materials and such, just not residing here, moved it all back to Calypso again, which makes most of the items nearly impossible to craft on Arkadia without the massive stockpile of calypso/rare goods in storage, that just don't get listed on Ark. I do love the planet, the mobs are decent, devs seem promising, ect ect but I just cant justify the effort for some of the barricades in place. Its just a shame for any business to lose someone over such avoidable frustrations. Especially someone with the ability to put more PED than Arkadia on the card. There is no ill will or hate toward anyone here, just an unfortunate result from actions and inactions. Hopefully someone can take some pause and reflect upon why at least a customer left and turn it into a good thing for the company in the end. We arent often given such opportunities from the disenfranchised. Good luck.
You've made a total of 16 posts here on the Ark forum, so I'm assuming you don't visit the forum here regularly. As Jenny's reply in your shop thread said, the thread was closed since you stated the shop was for sale in auction. That is standard practice here, to close threads for items that have been placed in game auction. She also said to PM her if you want to re-open the thread. What's the problem? Good luck getting better support from Caly... all support is Mindark even though it says "Arkadia Support" or "Calypso Support" at the bottom of the support case. The A-team may get to see copies of support cases, but I think it would depend whether it was an issue for MA or the A-team. David Dobson responded to the questions in your post. Did you read his response? None of the reasons you gave make a whole lot of sense to me, so I suspect that the A-team will be just as baffled as I am.
Indeed, as Neil has pointed out here, this is standard practice and is covered in the Forum Rules under 5a. I read the thread myself and the impression I got was that you had stopped the service and were selling off the shop on auction. So IMO the action taken to close the thread appeared to be correct at the time. Plus, Jenny did place the caveat that it could easily be reopened at any time by a simple PM. It has nothing to do with the moderator being a shop owner themselves, after all, I'm a site admin and co-run 4 shops myself. I'm not sure if you are trying to imply anything with that statement and I don't understand your issue with a mod also being a shop owner but I'm interested to find out if you are willing to grant the time to explain. I've also recently made some substantial changes to the way the Business area of the forum was laid out and structured. As part of that, I requested people bump their still active threads for both shops and services and as a reward for doing so, I made those same threads sticky so that potential customers would have a better chance to find these business that were making an effort. The option for a Sponsored Business Section is being built (most people will note SFE already has this setup) and once I finish my current run of nights again, I will be working on this further and writing the thread up to release this option to everyone else too. So I think its clear that we are very supportive of businesses here at the forum, though I not sure if that was part of your point or not. I cannot speak for MA Support (nor would I want to) but I can emphatically say that the Staff here at the forum try their damnedest to cover and support all serious business people here and the general community as a whole. We can't always please everyone, but I think we do a pretty good job given the circumstances....Running this forum, at the best of times, is akin to herding cats! I also won't speak for Dave or the Ark Staff, but there have been some changes recently with Cyrus's departure, so obviously things are going to be a bit unsettled till people get to grips with new rolls etc. On the whole, they have the best reputation around for a reason; I challenge anyone to show conclusive evidence of better direct developer support from any of the other PP's. I'm also happy to help facilitate communication with the Ark guys too if you find that certain avenues such as PMing here at the forum aren't working well for you. Finally, I for one will be disappointed to see you go, as I think you are a huge credit to the entire Ark community. I appreciate your feedback and ask that if you have more to give please feel free to contact me directly (strict confidence assured). I wish you all the best for the future and success in whatever endeavours you follow in EU or beyond. I'll certainly stay in contact with you regardless of where you decide to reside within this universe of ours, so don't be a stranger.
