Professor Phobos said:
You're ascribing malice when foolishness fits the facts much better.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" Hanlon's Razor.
For those interested in the exact quote
Without having read the exact text myself, it's difficult to determine whether or not this is in fact merely stupidity or fraudulent. What is true is that the term "Web enchancement" and "web bonus" is generally interpreted by the gaming community as meaing free, and this interpretation has been reinforced not only on the WW site in the past, but almost every other publisher site. Therefore, to use the term "web enchancement' to reference fee-based product is at best flawed, and at worst potentially a bait-and-switch.
A certain major department store had some problems a few years ago when they use to do a lot of special packages that said "Buy One, Get One Free." You've seen the shirk-wrapped special packages of soup, cereal, and such. Well one day someone looked at the price of a single item, looked at the price of the BOGO, and realized it wasn't technically getting one free. The BOGO was a lot cheaper than buying two, but when you actually stopped and did the math, it was NOT getting one free.
The store argued that the BOGO was based off of the retail price the products were generally sold for at
other stores. However, since they don't actually sell most products at the
retail price, that the consumer was simply confused.
(to clarify--If an item retailed for $5, the BOGO was priced at $5. But if this particular store actually sold the item in question for $4.50, the BOGO was actually Buy one at $4.50, get the other for .50.).
The court ruled that since the customer could make a reasonable assumption that the buy one/get one free price should be based off of the price the item sold for and not the listed retail price. The department store lost. Today, when you visit said store, you will not find products listed as "Buy One/Get One Free." They are listed as "Bonus Packs".
The moral of the story is that the courts often rule as to "what a reasonable person" would assume in cases where the intent is not entirely clear. As WW did not explicitly say these specific web enchancements were fee based, and as most such enchancements are in fact free, a reasonable person would assume this specific enchancement would be free. At least, if one was so inclined, one could make the arguement.
But legalities aside, the Court of Public Opinion is more of a threat to a company than the Court of Law. WW has already had a host of poor PR incidents over the years, and this only adds fuel to the fire. None of which I think were deliberately malicious, but merely poorly executed ideas. When you have too many of these incidents, people are less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
First there was the whole fiction contest incident, when they had five or ten "anonymous" winners, even though the guidelines clearly stated that by participating you granted WW the right to post your name and such on the winner's list. They later claimed that they were protecting people's privacy, but because their own guidelines had said otherwise, people assumed they just reneged on awarding 100 prizes. Then the whole Camarilla fiasco. The theory was fine, that it you wanted to profit off the LARP you should license the material. But the execution was such that it appeared that they were trying to charge people to play the game. Then the
Pimp situation, in which they seemed to forget that they have a huge female gamer base and even many male players found the whole thing over-the-top. So then along comes what might otherwise be a nuisance of a fee-based web enhancement. Were it not for all of the other screw ups, the general response might have been "Man, I should have read that better" and left it at that. But because of WW's history, the immediate feeling is that people were screwed over on purpose in order to milk a few extra dollars. The truth becomes unimportant.
"The customer is always right" is not just a motto. It is a statement of truth. However, what many companies fail to understand is what that sentence actually means. It is not that the customer cannot be wrong. It means that if the customer IS wrong, it is because you failed to properly inform the customer of the facts. The customer is always right, because the customer's view of the matter is shaped by the way you present the information. If you use language that the typical customer would assume refers to free products, then the customer is RIGHT to assume they should get something for free. In this case, WW failed to properly communicate exactly what they were offering, and as such the customer is right to be upset about it.
