Thursday 6 December 2001

Pic of the day: EverQuest is today's topic, and other seemingly everlasting and frustrating quests to get online things to work at all.

Failed quests online

Bought the online computer game EverQuest today. It does look kinda cute, and several friends have warned me against it. I have also read on the Net about how addicting it is: Students drop out of school, marriages dissolve, and singles run off to marry someone they know from an online game.

Of course, we've heard this before, about IRC (chat) and MUDs (online text-based games). Then again, I liked both of the above somewhat.

Anyway, if this is highly addictive to the very social, or even to normal people, there is a faint chance that I might at least like it and become a little more social. It does not bode well so far, though.

***

For most of the evening, I have tried in vain to get far enough to actually play the game. After I have installed, but before I can create an account, the game insists on downloading a great quantity of patches. This is nice and all, but it works like this: It downloads them in packed form, and does not unpack them until it has downloaded them all. And if the connection is broken before it has downloaded them all, it downloads them all over again from the start. Now consider that it may take an hour or two to download all patches over my dial-up modem (connected at 45K). Consider that the connection randomly breaks down once an hour or so. See the problem? And it is fully compatible with stupidity 1.0: You could easily have avoided it in several ways. Packing up one patch file at a time as they are downloaded, for instance. Or noticing that the files you download are already on the target location.

Eventually, when my connection remains stable for more than an hour, the download stalls at about 85%, as if realizing that it runs the risk of actually finishing. Either a higher power is watching over me and has a strong dislike of this whole project, or these guys are seriously clumsy. Or both of the above.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the newest add-on expects you to have 512 MB of RAM. (I am not likely to buy that add-on for a few years.) I also read on their website that the game requires DirectX 8.1, and then you must re-install video and sound drivers after you have upgraded DirectX. Uh-uh. I may be more than fed up with it long before I get as far as to the billing information screen.

Addendum: On fourth (or is it fifth?) re-run of the patcher, it seems that some of the original file names are not repeating. And the progress bar seems to be filling slightly faster.

***

On a vaguely related note, a European study shows that e-shopping is not so easy after all. Only 1 in 3 managed to complete the shopping on their first attempt at any one common e-trade site. The volunteers, many of whom had shopped online before, were given a modest amount of credit to shop books, CD's, stuff like that. They were then left to their own devices, but monitored. While an astounding 60% of Norwegians managed to get through the maze, the average for all of the countries was little over half that. That is to say, most did not make it at first try on a new site.

It is anybody's guess who many customers come back to a site where they have not been able to place an order even when they tried. I don't think masochism is quite that common in our population. So I think some people, if they were able to create a truly simple sales site, could REALLY GET RICH QUICK!

One peculiarity that was pointed out was that the shops asked personal questions that would not normally be asked in a shop, and this also turned off some customers. I mean, you need to know the delivery address, and whatever information is relevant to the payment. But that is pretty much it, unless you are selling some rather unusual goods. You certainly don't need to know people's gender or year of birth. If they can pay, none of that should matter to a normal merchant.

And people wonder what happened to the dot-coms.

On a related note, I have found that most professional sales sites accept my credit card without questions, but PayPal and iBill (spelling uncertain) don't ... the micropayment providers of choice for small almost-no-profit sites such as LiveJournal and Crosswinds.net. Their clients probably never get to know that customers are being turned away for no obvious reason, and may wonder why so few people want to pay for their services.

If I ever am involved in setting up an e-business, one of my primary demands will be a full report of all customers that have failed to get through the shopping process, and at what stage they left. I think this would be highly instructive. If a shopkeeper in the physical world discovered that people ran away at a particular spot in his shop, he would most certainly take an interest in it. I guess cyberspace still does not have the same reality to people. Except, evidently, to some of us.