CO: They’re BAAAAAAAACK … CO reinstates special offers (for a few days)

Apparently Cryptic read up on customer service and public relations and why pissing off your potential client base before you’ve even opened the doors is a bad business and marketing strategy. So they’re bringing back the discounted subscriptions:

UPDATE: Due to the overwhelming response to this update, we’ve been experiencing some issues with our account server. We’re going to be working on the server throughout the night, and we plan to have everything solved by tomorrow. We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Earlier this week, we gave notice that we were running out of special Lifetime and 6-month promotional subscriptions. Within a day, the rest of our supply had been sold out, leaving a number of you confused and upset. The response to this promotion has been overwhelming and we want to thank everyone who posted on our forums, called customer service and sent e-mails over these past few days.

After further consideration, and to meet the needs of our community, we have decided to reinstate the Lifetime and 6-month subscription promotional programs with no supply limit until 11:59 p.m. (Pacific time) on August 31st.

At Cryptic, we are dedicated to our community. We look forward to seeing you when Champions Online launches this September!

Certainly better late than never, and the right move to make. Better than what I expected, to be honest.

Cryptic had already said that the discounts would come back later, though not with some of the bennies. The discounted packages here have all the extras that were originally offered … and the expiry date to finish them off is shown very prominently on the page. 

Now, will some folks continue to take pot shots? I, for one, am now willing to cut Cryptic a lot more slack on this, as they are making good on their error.

(Reading the comments at Massively, it seems there are still the “Oh, the game is broken, this was a publicity stunt in the first place, CO sux” folks around. Of whom there is no satisfying.)