Longtime readers of the I, Lamont blog may remember an episode from a few years back, involving the Ganz Corporation's poorly planned and executed foray into virtual worlds. Our issues were eventually resolved, but many webkinz users were ripping mad over the technical problems.
But tonight we got another taste of Webkinz frustration, after attempting to log on following an interval of about 3 months. First, my child was greeted by a EULA about the length of the Constitution and equally impenetrable. Then, we watched the system get hung up on the "loading" screen. We waited for 10 minutes before I put her to bed, but I left it on longer, thinking it might need to reconfigure her "world" based on the long break since her last logon, or some other new introduced variable relating to the EULA, expired pets, or something else. I gave up another 20 minutes later.
I don't know if we will bother anymore. There are other online worlds for kids, or we can do something else -- board games or books.
I've gotten a spike in traffic over the last week or so to this blog, caused by hundreds of people searching for help for their Webkinz accounts. They enter phrases like "webkinz problems," "webkinz still not loading," etc. into Google and Yahoo, and my blog shows up on the first page of results.
Why? About 10-11 months ago -- right around Christmas 2007 -- I documented a huge failure in the kids-oriented virtual world that prevented many Webkinz owners from logging on and accessing their rooms. Scores of other readers also had the same problem. My blog became a makeshift community for the people who had been locked out. We commiserated and shared tips, and railed at the Ganz Corporation, which obviously didn't design a system that could scale to handle the Christmas rush. It was like the early days of Second Life or Twitter, except the people most impacted by the outage were small children. Ganz' terrible customer service compounded the problem. Eventually the problem went away -- or frustrated customers (including my daughthter) just drifted away.
But something is once again driving readers to my blog. It could be that Google's algorithm has been tweaked and more people searching for those terms are being sent my way. Or, it could be another scaling issue, which is once again locking thousands of kids out of their rooms. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you. Other readers offered Webkinz tips earlier this year that seemed to help, but I don't know if they'll work now. Post here if you have found any solution to the current (October 2008) outage.
