Got accepted to Nexon focus group 2/21 <-- Note This Is In The Past

While it's true that you can't voice specific in-game concerns such as SSS or Dark Metamorphosis and expect them to understand or forward them, you can voice the major issues that are driving players away:

- The game appears to be running unattended. No visible GM presence. Hackers doing whatever they want in broad daylight. When a new issue or exploit breaks out, especially if it's the weekend, there appears to be no way to bring it to Nexon's attention. Consequently, their reaction time is intolerably high, allowing massive damage to be done to the game, often only partially fixable by extremely painful measures.

- Account safety. People are being hacked on a large scale since last summer. Nexon occasionally puts out a notice admonishing us to keep our accounts safe, but even people who do everything written there are getting hacked, daily. Obviously the vulnerability is on Nexon's side, but they don't acknowledge it, don't appear to be doing anything about it, and won't give us even the minimum help - free item locks - not to mention anything that actually takes effort to implement, such as authenticators or using IP information to identify legit login attempts.

- Unresponsiveness. A player who has any kind of concern, from a bug in-game to getting his account hacked and NX stolen, is usually stranded. Tickets don't get replied to ("Unfortunately, we are still experiencing high ticket volume at this time" - "this time" lasting years) or get responses that are obviously generated by a machine looking for keywords instead of a human being who is actually able to understand the issue. Nexon's forum representatives respond to maybe one in 100 threads. There is no phone number or e-mail address to contact, and in-game broadcasting ("smega") is never seen (takes us back to point 1).

- Game instability. The game crashes often, and we are never told why. Just now we had a long run of absolutly horrible instability, which we were told was due to "hardware malfunction", but then we see Min Kim's letter and the quarterly report saying it was malicious attacks by hackers. Which is true? Nexon takes down the game at apparent random, often with no advance notice and nothing but a cryptic "server stability issue" by way of explanation. And sometimes, because of the extremely delayed response time (see first point above, again), the only solution is to "roll back", undoing people's hard work of days, making them feel extremely unsafe and unwilling to make any more efforts. What's the point of playing when your hard work can either be "rolled back" or stolen by hackers (see "account safety", above) at any time?

Should the OP even have the chance to speak outside of the focus group's pre-determined format, the Marketing rep's repsonse would be:

*jots down info* Thank you very much for your input. I will pass your feedback along to the appropriate departments. *throws paper in recycling bin*

You simply cannot (and should not) expect a minimum-wage employee to go above and beyond their job duties, because:

1) It would be difficult for them to do so (ex. they cannot actually get in touch with the Dev and/or live gaming departments)
2) Their job duties/instructions are clear. Run the focus group (pre-determined questions), collect the info, type it up on the computer, go home.
3) Once again - they have a very limited knowledge of what Nexon's business runs like. They are often temporary employees that are mostly there for data collection/entry. They are basically robots.

As an aside... I hope you all realize that Nexon is *fully* aware of their flaws. They are not dumb. They know they do not have enough Customer Service Reps to handle the volume of tickets, nor do they have enough GMs to handle the amount of hackers/reports. They knowingly choose to continue operating this way, mainly because it does not seem to hurt their bottom line profit (or so they think). In reality, this is how *most* businesses run. The difference is that major companies usually do put more value in customer service, because it has been proven to create additional revenue (at least in the North American market).

Without going into too much detail here, I will say that Nexon is not exactly the typical North American service business, and this is mainly because it originated in (and still mainly operates from) Asia.

Do not expect Nexon to change.