MMO Development Lesson #26
Make cancellation easy. Seriously, don’t make it difficult in the least. The worst thing you can possibly do is make someone call to cancel their subscription. It may yield you an extra month of their subscription money since people are generally lazy, but it will leave such a horrible taste in their mouth that they will NEVER come back. Ever. Feel free to ask for brief (key word #1), voluntary (key word #2) feedback, maybe a series of check boxes that they can select for why they quit. But, make it a simple, easy to understand, quick, painless process. If you do, the player will be infinitely more likely to come back if and when they get the itch.
Excellent Lesson.
I’d like to add that if I’ve paid for a month and cancelled midway through let me at least play out the month. Everquest II does this, I have cancelled and resubbed to EQ2.
Lotro, on the other hand, I cancelled recently mid way through the month, forgot I hadn’t mailed my gold to my partner so tried to log back in to send her my belongings - sorry, no can do, “you’ve cancelled - we don’t want you near us anymore”
Leaves a bad taste in the mouth…
This should apply to EVERYTHING you can subscribe to on-line. Free Credit Report.com, Rhapsody both have no problems letting you sign up to use their service online but come time you want to cancel it you have to call an 800 number, be harrassed by phone reps offering you special deals to stay. You are correct, I will never use those services again, EVER.
Sulakor has a good point. Your subscription buys you x number of days. Cutting that short just because you decide to not continue when your x days are up doesn’t mean the company should revoke the remaining days without compensation.
I’ve purposely made a point to not do repeat business with at least three game or entertainment companies, that I would otherwise have probably come back to at some point, for that exact reason. Canceling by phone is maddening, especially when they put you on hold forever and then waste another 10 minutes to trying to talk you out of it.
[...] it easy to come back. If someone has quit your game (See: Lesson #26), make it so easy to come back they can’t believe they quit in the first place. I’ll [...]