Hellgate: Plunder

Poor old Hellgate: London hasn't been off to a splendid start. One Wednesday it was revealed that customers were having their credit cards billed repeatedly, then to rub salt in that financial wound, even after paying people still weren't getting access to the members' benefits.

In the early hours of this morning, Hellgate developers Flagship posted this to their forum (I link to the unofficial forum, as the official site requires a login to even read it - sigh).

Tact doesn't appear to have been at the forefront of their approach, informing those who had been charged three or four times in the space of a couple of days, "We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, although it impacted just 3% of people that requested to become subscribing members." That presumably doesn't provide much comfort to the 3% it's aimed at. However, Flagship assure players that the problem is now fixed, and they are reimbursing players now.

Senior Community Manager Kaiser Hwang put up a second post to attempt to reassure players who were still unhappy, not only with billing issues, but also other gaming issues. Most of these fall into the category of "to be expected" for an MMO launch, and it's refreshing to see the developers stating the issues, rather than staying tight-lipped until a patch appears.

It reads:

Dear Customers,

We realize many of you are experiencing a variety of problems. We at Flagship and Ping0 are working hard to address these issues.

Our current top priorities are:

* Resolving any remaining problems related to billing and subscriptions.
* Fixing two known bugs which cause players to sometimes lose items (one related to dual focus/dual melee, and one related to loading issues).
* Making improvements to memory usage in order to reduce "Memory Exhausted" crashes.
* Fixing a known issue with the user interface which causes the application to lock up intermittently.* An issue which occasionally prevents characters from being able to load or switch instances.
* General chat interface improvements. (Many improvements are in the works).
* Random disconnects and lag.
* Allowing higher resolution textures and models for other players.
* Various known problems with being able to continue interrupted side quests.
* Remnant quest items not getting destroyed and "clogging" up inventory.
* Continued problems with saving / loading Engineer Drone items.
* Invisible party members.
* The nanoforge not correctly improving rare and better armors.
* Getting stuck on collision.

Some of these are issues which will be fixed as soon as possible and go live in upcoming patches, some will be in our upcoming content patch, and others are issues on which we will make gradual improvements to on a continuous basis.

Of course we also have a more extensive bug list as well as lot of general improvements and new content in the works. Everyone here is working full-time to support Hellgate. We appreciate your patience.

-The Hellgate: London team