One of these articles is due on Monday. Which is stressful, because I have other work-related things to do over the weekend, as well. And the thing with being self-employed is that you don't just go to an office and do your work. You sit at home, surrounded by games, Facebook, gaming websites... well, gaming is part of the job. The tricky bit is to stop the gaming and start the writing at some point before you run out of time. It feels like homework. I have to write an essay about a part of the game. Incredibly well-paid, but incredibly tedious and difficult, too. To me, anyway.
See, I love writing reviews. Especially about really awful games. I get to make fun of them, I get money and sometimes the bad game disappears a few weeks after the review. Life is good. I can be creative, silly, play around a bit, add some dick jokes and stupid puns. With in-depth guides, well... that's more like a manual, isn't it? Almost scientific. Serious business. And you have to deliver a massive page count about one particular subject. Incredibly difficult to focus, to keep track of the character count, additional text boxes, screenshots, headlines, paragraphs... And you have to be an expert with the subject at hand. You can't just guess or throw around wild suggestions or the readers will call you out on your bullshit and that harms everyone involved. Stress.
Not horrible stress, mind. Not the kind of stress that keeps me awake at night or gives me stomach pains or anything. Just... oof, so much work, can't play and have fun today, can't molest random people in pvp or watch cat videos for the next 20 hours. Gotta work. Can't stop till it's done. That kinda stress. It's awful at first, seems impossible, overwhelming, then you get going, one paragraph at a time until you're surprised at how much you've already written and when you look at the finished product, all formatted and with screenshots and nice graphics and all them bells and whistles... man, makes me fucking proud to look at that stuff! Creating something. Quality. Getting a result to look at when you put whole days and nights into something like that. Makes me happy.
What also makes me happy is the pay I get for all this stuff. I haven't worked so much in my life. In any job. Sometimes I work from 4 till 5 in the morning, so I can prepare a few news posts for the more humane morning hours for people to read while I get my six or so hours of sleep. On many occasions I get to scan news feeds and post stuff on gaming websites during the day. Sometimes I delegate some of that stuff to our interns, then proof-read their stuff, point out mistakes, that kinda thing. The last ten pages I had to finish earlier this week took me about 12 consecutive hours, because they required research, translations, screenshots and by the time I was finally done it was 4am again. By Monday, one of the publishers wants to know what articles I can contribute to their next magazine issue. I didn't even have the time to look at anything I could do and I don't know when I'll find a minute.
Funny thing is, I'm doing this by choice. I'm the laziest fucker on earth, I hate working, but even with all of this stuff going on I'm not losing any sleep or growing grey hair. I don't think I'd want this kind of work load for the next 20something years, but right now it keeps me busy 'round the clock and, holy fuck, does it pay. At long last. Things had been looking up sometimes last year and the situation had been getting better ever since. And with all the work I get to do, when I feel that somebody wants to rip me off or an offer is just really shit, I can simply turn them down. It's a bit sad when somebody offers you 35-50% of the usual price and the next day after you refuse that kind of stuff, you see one of your fellow freelancers doing it. I know, we all have to start somewhere and we need to do all the work we can get, but if people are willing to do slave labour for shit pay, well... I dunno if this is sending a good message.
Speaking of extra money - the cash is actually rolling in faster than we can spend it. This is gonna be the end of our lives as benefit whores. Thing is, we didn't really change anything, more money or not. No new hardware, no massive tv, no luxury food and drinks or anything. Just business as usual. Because, call me boring and all, but... it feels nice to have something on the side. It feels nice to know you can afford to pay the rent for the next few months no matter what will happen. We did one thing, though. Something we've been wanting to do for a while. We took the family out for epic steak night.
So yeah. 32oz steak. With bacon and mozzarella on top. Fuck. That thing was so amazing, I could go for one of those every week. Probably not the healthiest thing to do. What was worse, though, was the monstrosity we had for dessert:
 |
| Legend has it, if you eat the whole thing, the diabetes fairy will visit you the same night. |
Meanwhile, TESO is still a mixed bag, somewhere between insanely fun and unbelievably broken and frustrating. There's the fun part, which is pvp. I had a killing spree of 93 today. You know, killing 93 people without dying. Okay, "killing"... I think at least half of these kills were typical MMO kills, the kind that any action game would rate an "assist". But still... not bad at all. I liked the little message thingie at the 50 kills mark:
This is not just a display bug on my end. Note the guy in group chat commenting on that wolf on a horse.
It's the most fun I ever had in pvp. In any MMO. The battles are incredibly large and fast-paced and... well, they're not exactly lag-free, but compared to what I'm used to from Guild Wars 2, it's pretty forgivable, especially for such a new game.
Unfortunately, one can't say the same about their customer "support". On the 12th of April, exactly two weeks ago, I've received a bunch of emails looking like this:
And I figured, well, what can they possibly do? Because TESO is supposed to generate an authentication code, which you will have to enter correctly prior to accessing a game account with a yet unknown IP address. Except, this guy didn't have to do any of that, so he just brute-forced my fucking password. By the time I finally made it in there, all my gold, my inventory and half the shit in my bank had disappeared. So I sent a ticket the same day.
Just a few hours later, I got a response, telling me: "We're going to take care of this, immediately." Their words, not mine. Nothing happend for a day, another day, a week, ten days.... ELEVEN DAYS LATER, customer support got back to me. Did they fix my problem? HA!
They responded to my ticket with a question. "I have noticed that this ticket is over ten days old. Does your problem still persist?"
What a brilliant thing to ask somebody, who got their account hacked and all their shit stolen. In what possible scenario could my problem have fixed itself? The hacker felt guilty and returned all my shit? Possibly with interest? OF COURSE the damn problem still persists! Which is what I told them.
So they immediately responded and fixed my problem.
Just kidding. They sent me a customer satisfaction survey.
Two whole weeks now. Heck, I don't believe they'll restore any of my lost shit and I'm over it now. But asking, "Oh hey, we didn't fix anything, but did the problem go away by itself?" followed by, "So, how do you think we're doing so far?" is adding insult to injury. Really.
I've reached a point where I'd accept something among the lines of, "Sorry, your own fault you got hacked. Happened such a long time ago, we cannot possibly retrace what happened." But nobody is even looking into the matter.
You know, Guild Wars 2 customer support was shit at launch, too. Difference being, they didn't charge anyone 9 Quid, 13 Euro or 15 Dollars a month. Zenimax do that, because they "deliver quality". Their words, not mine.
One day I'll probably log on, only to find out that customer support will have rolled back my character to a state before the hack. You know, two weeks ago. Which would be fucking hilarious, considering that doing so would caue more harm than the hacker ever had. We'll see. Chances are, I'll have grandchildren by the time this ticket finally gets responded to.
-Cat
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen