Planetside last night, mostly to keep my hand in, and also an opportunity to catch up with an old friend whom I've shared quite a few online adventures with. He's off doing World of Warcraft at the moment, like just about everyone else with a PC at the moment, but also, and more interestingly for me, The Matrix Online, an MMO I'd been quite curious to learn more about, since to be honest, anything without Orcs tends to pique my interest lately.
Full-on armoured column tank manuvers is not really the best time to be discussing MMO gameplay features, but during the lulls, he managed to sketch out some basics to the 'MXO' experience, and it really does sound like I...heh-heh...dodged a bullet there. He reports on a game that sounds essentially broken in many places, unfinished in others and those bits of it that are complete, while initially cool and interesting, jade faster than is customary in games of this type.
I asked if there were many 'movie moments', which is the least you could expect from such a gratuitous franchise tie-in and he said that there were, but they get very annoying very quickly.
Then I said not to worry, and to just cancel the account and move on, and he replied that you can't!
I've seen a lot of idiocy in my time in the Virtual Realm, but this was new. Apparently, unlike EVERY OTHER ONLINE GAME, Matrix Online has no account cancellation web-page. I've no idea if this is to increase the 'Matrix' feel, but I've always found that no matter how bad, broken, flawed or just plain crap an online game is, the one feature that redeems it all, is the ability to open a browser, rant 'Your game sucks!' into a textbox, click a button and just walk away and get on with your life and/or the next game.
Matrix Online Forums: Announcement
My understandably rather incensed friend tried calling this European billing support line several times to cancel and found it permanently busy, which speaks volumes right there. In the end, he had to deal with it at the Credit Card end, by getting his expiry date changed, thus (presumably) making the MXO billing fail next cycle, which is a bit drastic. All in all, not very professional - if your game sucks, the least you can do is let people stop playing it if they like. As it stands, it would seem you're not allowed to leave unless you can tell them a very good reason why, in person.
The game itself might be the best thing ever, but frankly, as far as I'm concerned, this one issue alone is severe enough for me to advise people not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Danger, Will Robinson! It's a Traaaaaaaaap!
In the words of the immortal Eagles: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..."