Hey All, this is tomnovint, Novint's ceo. I was looking over the boards, and saw a negative experience from someone. I thought it would be good to give my two cents on it. Part of the reason I get on the boards is to understand problems and fix them.
One thing I want to point out, is that I appreciate how EGO runs things. I've never seen such a clean board, and a more respectful group of gamers. Pretty awesome really. It's a very unique and admirable community. Even this thread wasn't overly rude - just showed frustration. I saw the thread was moved, but I actually think it would be worthwhile for me to point out a few things, that I think people would generally appreciate understanding about Novint and the Falcon. Here are my thoughts...
Recently EGO members were offered a Novint falcon for the price of $100. Many members ran out and bought the falcon because of the low price. After using the falcon, and talking to other ego members who bought a falcon, we have all come to the same conclusion:
It does not work very well.
** - This is news to me, and definitely not the norm of what I hear back from people inside or outside of EGO. For reference, we have had only a couple Falcon return requests (this one, and one other who changed his mind after talking to us). I have heard of some problems getting started, which I'll explain below (partly in the hopes that people don't hit those problems). I hear many positive experiences, so if people aren't having a good experience, I'd definitely like to hear about it. As I say, I'm here to fix problems and get involved with the community.
It works on 5 games, barely. I had to reformat my hard drive to make it work. And it dumps all of its calculations on your cpu, I went from 60-100 fps on TF2 to 10 fps!
** - In terms of game support, we are close to releasing our F-Gen drivers, which will make the Falcon work on all games. Also, we have 5 Valve games, but over 50 supported titles overall (many are smaller titles, but they are a lot of fun) and a number of new AAA titles on the way. In terms of dropping fps, this is not a common problem. I personally read through all of our support emails, and a drop in fps is not common at all. Needing to reformat the hard drive, I've not heard of before. I'm not putting the problems aside, but want to put them in perspective.
Novints customer service is horrid! I called the number and no one ever is there, even during business hours.
** - again, not to minimize these problems, but I have literally pages I've collected saying how wonderful our customer support is. The effort starts from the top, and you all might see how much I personally get involved in things. Like I said, I read every customer support problem myself to make sure things are going smoothly. One thing we admittedly don't do, is take phone calls right off the bat, which is where I think this frustration is coming from. We're too small to handle calls like that, as they don't provide a good time to customer ratio, but we do take calls when needed. For reference on this post, the person writing it sent me an email from these boards asking to contact someone. I responded with my cell number. I think getting the CEO of a company's cell number is pretty good support lol. That also points out how rare in the scheme of things this level of problem is. I didn't hear back, so I'm guessing that the email got lost in spam, which probably added to the frustration.
There contact info is different in the manual then on the website.
** - that's true. reprinting and repackaging manuals after we made some changes would be very expensive and time consuming.
Don't waste your money! I wish I never bought it, and so does everyone I have talked to.
** - I'm sorry for the experiences, but the series of problems are outliers. I'm not minimizing the issues, but the two computer issues coupled with the bad customer support experience are individually rare, let alone all 3. Not sure why you didn't get my email as well, with my mobile.
Also they wont tell me were to send my falcon for a refund.
** - I was blind copied on an email today that said where to return it.
To tell you the truth, I feel that they are just trying to get rid of there inventory of failed products, by dumping them on us.
** - this definitely isn't the case lol. I'm only doing this because I passionately believe in what we're doing, and love seeing customer after customer (for the vast majority of what I've seen) say that they love the Falcon and don't want to play any other way. It's fulfilling growing the company, and seeing how much people really like the Falcon
Dont get me wrong, I like the idea of the falcon, but it just does not work well!
** - again, sorry for the troubles. If you see this post commander, we can pay for shipping for the return (or can reimburse you). I'm sorry you had a bad experience, and hopefully that will at least help, so that it's clean in the end, and nothing was lost except for some time.
Here are a couple other tips to help people with some initial common problems (cut and paste from a document we are now packaging with the Falcon. I think this will help with the majority of issues people might be having)...
thanks
tomnovint
GETTING THE BEST EXPERIENCE WITH YOUR NOVINT FALCON
Congratulations on the purchase of your new Novint Falcon! We?ve compiled a few tips to get the most out of the Falcon. The majority of our customer support issues fall within these categories, so this is not the usual list that you just glance at, and decide not to read. Please follow these tips and tricks:
? Do not use the Falcon drivers in the enclosed CD. Instead, please download the latest drivers from our website. They can be found from
www.novint.com under the support tab pulldown, and the ?downloads? selection. This takes you to
http://home.novint.com/support/download.php
A number of games will not work without these new drivers, such as the Orange Box from Valve.
? Install the Falcon drivers before you plug in the Falcon to the USB port!!!
? If the computer is having a hard time connecting to or finding the Falcon, make sure to use a USB port directly on the back of the computer and make sure that you are not connected to a USB hub. USB hubs typically do not work with the Falcon.
? If the light on the front of the Falcon is red, pull all 3 arms all the way out of the base and then push them back in, to calibrate the Falcon so that it is ready to play.
? The Pistol grip is shipped separately from the Falcon, if you ordered one.
? Start with the Falcon Tutorial. It is an awesome experience.
? When you are learning to play First Person Shooter games, we highly recommend that people use the default settings for controlling aiming and turning while learning the Falcon?s control scheme, especially in online competitive play. After you have about 10 hours under your belt, then you can start tuning settings for more performance. We?ve found that most users are comfortable with navigation within an hour, and as proficient as they were with the mouse after about 20 hours of play. After that, most of our users report that they can actually surpass their mouse based skills in FPS games.
? Do Not try to use the native 2D mouse support in N VeNT to play games. It won?t be a good experience, as it wasn?t designed for that use. It is for simple windows navigation.
? There is a known issue with the current version of N VeNT in which it can cause a slowdown when playing games. Do not use N VeNT when playing the Orange Box or any other Steam games from Valve. If your computer is running games slowly, you can typically find the executables to run the games directly in the ?C
rogram FilesNovintGames? folders, if needed.
? Please email
[email protected] if you have any further questions
Also, please check out our new referral program at ?
http://home.novint.com/novint/referral.php?. In it, you can sign up for your own referral code, and give it out to your friends, or just generally give it out to anyone/everyone to get the word out about the Falcon. Anyone who uses your code when purchasing will get a great discount, and we?ll pay you cash for each sale you referred!!! Finally, I?m personally at your disposal to make sure your Falcon experience is a great one. I personally answer all of our message board posts, so ask me anything, anytime on our boards. Thx, Tom Anderson, CEO (tomnovint, on the boards).
