Ubisoft's latest fail is on user support

Ubisoft has quite the list of failures under it's umbrella, but a relatively recent one actually has nothing to do with creating games.

Instead they failed in one of the most critical ways they could: They moved their support to Discord.

Discord can be good in some ways; it allows for niche communities to talk, share, and more together. It's also relatively easy to deploy.

What it isn't good for is two-fold: Usability for the widest base, and content discoverability.

I'm going to focus on the second one here: Content discoverability is an absolutely critical part of providing support. There is a reason why forums still are the absolute king for user support, and it should be pretty obvious: People can find solutions to their problems with a quick search on their preferred search engine.

Discord? Yeah, that's not possible, because Discord content can't be indexed by search engines. Folks can't share links to solutions on Discord easily.. And the process for actually getting connected on Discord and finding the solution to your issue within Discord's user interface?

That's more work than an average user who really needs help is ready to accept, and it's just going to piss them off to the point of asking for a refund.

Discord requires too much investment to be an effective tool for support for a AAA studio, and here's the kicker: Ubisoft may not realize it without enough complaints.

Have you ever heard the phrase "Management by spreadsheet"? It's the idea that some asshole with an MBA thinks he can efficiently manage some (or all) of a business by looking at collated data (typically in spreadsheet format).

In this case, the misanthropic managerial masturbator will see total support requests go down, and think "Success! I deserve a bonus. Bring me your finest donuts and a secretary to harass!" without realizing that support requests are down because users are unable to figure out how to fucking ask for help in any efficient manner, so they then request a goddamned refund.

Yeah, Ubisoft done fucked up, bad.