Not too long ago, I received a message from a player regarding some community relations faux pas Starbucks (and other companies) had encountered with residents and expatriates of Taiwan. Over a year ago when PMOG went live with a huge amount of fanfare and international press, many residents of Taiwan politely wrote in to inform me that the designation of “Taiwan, Province of China” was offensive and outdated. I quickly filed a ticket, requesting the name be changed to a more politically correct designation, merely “Taiwan.”
However, after three separate developers looked into it, I was told it could not be done and the ticket was closed. About 6 months later, after I had been given a little more freedom to edit and update code, I did a simple search and replace and noticed that it took little to no effort to change the designation and did and received many thanks from our Taiwanese players.
It turns out each of the developers were looking for a permanent solution, as any successive update to Rails would revert any basic text updates/changes. (Note that the default Rails application uses a list of countries that includes “Taiwan, Province of China.”) Considering we have yet to update our Rails code since I made the change, the fix was both easy and meant a lot to a group of players, albeit a very small portion of our game’s overall population.
These types of player feedback can easily fall on deaf ears to a development team. I encourage any community manager to research and strongly lobby their company to pay attention to these small requests. 30 seconds and a “search and replace” action is well worth avoiding negative press.
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