Costumer Support: Epic Fail.

Forgive the title, but I figured it would get some ones attention, and /petition just wont do for this.

Why? Because /petition is useless at the moment. Which is why Im posting here. Most of the wigs in charge of the forums play, like, and enjoy the game. Also, the folks at Paragon don’t handle Costumer Support, that’s the parent corporation. And the folks at Paragon need to know that the boys in Support are doing a craptastic job.

So to the point, shall we?

As of late, a number of whacky bugs have been cheating my SG out of quite abit. Costumer Support refuses to help. This has enraged one of our number (from the first event) from his talk with Costumer Support over the phone, that he has deactivated his account (He reactivated it, and then got slapped by event number two, and re-deactivated his account)

Im only going to post about three such events, all of them Task Forces. There have been a number of other problems, but these are just the ones I can remember at the moment.
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First lets talk about the Task Force for Nothing fiasco.
This was the fist one that slapped us in the face. This was a TF about a week ago. They kill the AV and then got mapserverd. Issue16 had just come out, so there were the usual server stability issues. Then every one was dc’ed from the game.

The mission (and said task force) completed. Without giving them credit (and reward) for killing the AV. Or the End of TF reward. In short, the team was boned.

This lead to a petition that wasn’t answered. Which lead to a member of the team calling in to Costumer Support.

Costumer Support said that after the mapserver and subsequent disconnect, that the memory had rolled back about 5 seconds and that there was no record of the team completing the task force. And that even though the team was still there, still on, and still staring at the “Return to Contact” text on their navbar, there was nothing that could be done about it.

In short, the team was boned.

Next is the Meritless Manticore.
Task Force went off without a hitch. At the end, a couple of team members merely received No Merits What So Ever.

We where told through emails with Costumer Support that they would do nothing about it.

Last but not least, last nights Temporal Lock Task Force.
The Stop Romulus mission on the ITF decided Not to complete for us. We killed all of our targets. The 5 Generals, the Phalanx, the 100 Cimeroran Traitors and Romulus all went down the hole. And then nothing. All the objectives in the navbar registered as having been met, but the “Stop Romulus” mission title didn’t want to leave, and the mission, as you can imagen, did Not complete.

Two team members sent in petitions. Both were answered by a GM. Great, we were getting some where. We told the second GM thanks, but some one was already looking at our problem. He said have a nice night, and we waited on our first GM. About 20 minutes later, she tells up shes bumping us up to the next tier of support, some one would be with us shortly. So about an hour and 45 minutes later, as 4 am , we decided it was time to log off our characters, and try to get some sleep.

And so, this morning we were told that sense we didn’t wait for some one to come see what was wrong, there was nothing they could do for us.
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So, if any one besides us (We’re a large super group, but we cant be the only ones dealing with these problems and getting told to go sit in a corner and drool while nothing gets done) has been hit with an issue and been told “Sorry, but we wont do anything about it” please respond and let the big wigs know that there IS a problem that needs to be addressed.

Thanks for reading my wall of text, and have a nice whatever phase of day you happen to be in.

Perhaps you had bad costumer support because customer support doesn't deal with the costume designer.

/bad joke

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I've actually been running most TFs just fine. The ones that haven't been running just fine are those that force me to team with dinguses who want to be Tankfenders and Conscrappers

So your team's disconnects are "customer support issues" now?

Last I heard, they were "your connection sucks" issues. There is nothing that any GM can do about a tf that's not giving rewards if your team mate has dc'd, or the whole team, or whatever. That's completely out of their control.

Face it dude: if you know there are "stability issues" *don't start a darn tf*. DUH. If your mission is bugged, there's not much that anyone can do. Sorry. It's not their fault you chose to do things during an unstable moment in time, or that your team mates dc'd. It's not the game's issue. Bug things that are actually bugged, move on.

It's a game, dude. If you've got a large supergroup, there must be other things you CAN do with folks.

The first one, yes, you can write off as "connection issues, everyone DCs, sucks to be you." However, I too have completed Task Forces and not received merits, along with several of my teammates, even though no one DCd and we all got the badge. If a task is supposed to give certain rewards, it should give those rewards every time, and if you don't get some of those rewards even though the game acknowledges you completed the task, you have a valid complaint.

Also I have never had a GM show up to help with a Task Force that could not be completed due to a bug until long after we'd gotten tired of waiting and either disbanded or logged out to reset the mission, or in one case of Dr Todd in the Moonfire TF (who was refusing to follow the team out) after she'd died of boredom, failing the mission but letting us continue with the TF.

You know, the name The_Ackmage would be pretty good too. Do a whole Bill the Cat theme. Go around using magic with a bunch of ack ack phhiippttttt binds.

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Currently listening to Love Hina O.S.T. Hinata Girls Song Best Vol. 2 by Ritsuko Okazaki

The whole team disconnect after a TF should have been patched by now.
That was a TF bug not a connection thing.

Some people who got hit did get badges post report some did not.

There's more then just this, here's a little diddy about the multiple petitions that I've sent that involved missions not completing when everything's dead or being trapped in a TF because a leader went afk... FOR AN HOUR...

So far, in the last year and a half, any petition I have sent has been ignored. I wait for hours and don't hear a peep. I was part of Arckmage's ITF the other night. I was also the first one that had to go to bed because I work in the mornings.

I waited with the team for an hour before a GM even responded to the first petition. After that, I hear from the member of the team who was getting tells from the GM that they want us to be patient, and to be honest, sitting for 30 minutes WITH THE GM THERE, I'd say we were pretty patient.

Total time waiting for a responce for from a GM= 1 hour
Total time waiting for an answer from GM for issue= 1 hour 45 minutes
Total time waiting for resilution for our issue= How long has it been since we sent the petition?

Customer service has gotten pretty shoddy to the point that I don't even get GM responce to important issues and when I get the little survey they give you, I can't even list a blasted GM name because no one responded 90% of the time...

Odd; the last half dozen times I've needed a GM for stuck mobs on TF's or bugged repairmen in STF the wait time has been 20 minutes or less. Maybe they just don't like you? :0

Yes I also have had a number of very unsatisfactory encounters with customer support.

I think because this game has so many excellent qualities, when something is as bad as their support network it stands out even more.

To begin to go into the detail of my specific issues would be too tedious but I will mention their accounts department (so bad that last time I asked a very helpful forum mod to intervene and it got sorted), the prospect of jumping through this departments pointless hoops fills me with dread.

My other favourite would be where you encounter a bugged mission/Task Force and request the help of a GM. When the most of the team falls asleep at the keyboard waiting and you log into your PC the next day to find the obligatory e-mail saying as you were no longer available nothing could be done. You check the time on the e-mail and for sure it will be 10 minutes after you left the game.

Now we are all one forum and I see the Dev's coming in here and interacting with the player base, issue's being adressed, help being given, people being listened to, I do wonder how the poor service from customer support is allowed to continue. If the perception of customer support was as good as the regard the Dev's are held in by the players then threads like this would not exist.

Suggesting peoples perceptions are wrong because of xyz reason will not solve the impression that it is a second rate customer support service in comparison to the rest of the company. A shake up of current practises, response times and a new list of standard replies because the old ones are being used even when not relevant, might help.

My initial encounters with the EU GM's were great, fast and friendly, but the last few encounters have been well below par. We had the issue on Hess with the computers inside the geometry of the map and despite petitions we got no replys except for an email a day later saying it was being escalated. Aditionally when I petitioned the lack of 'ding' when leveling while exemplared under the new SSK I exchanged multiple emails with support clearly demonstrating they didn't know anything about SSK, and pointing me to the old SK page on the wiki.

Not for nothing, but I've been reading more and more posts lately about bad GM service. I wonder are GMs assigned to specific servers?

If it's really an important issue to you, maybe you can start on off board collection of data based on GM experiences?

You know, my main customer support complaints are mainly that they at times seem massively ignorant of the way the game works. I've never had a gm fail to solve the problem that I called him for, but I've had them ask if I tried dropping the mission on a task force, who the contact/mission giver is for the Statesman/Positron/Manticore/etc task force, and a few other similar questions.

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Currently listening to High and Mighty Color's Swamp Man

Typically, when I deal with Customer Support for a problem that requires GM intervention, I have to wait half an hour to 45 minutes, which to me is actually what I'd expect. Sometimes they show up sooner, but usually it's around the half hour mark. I'd say that's acceptable.

That said, I haven't needed GM support for a LONG time now, especially since they added the mission drop feature. Any mission that ends up bugged, I drop it, and I haven't had problems aside from that. The last time I had a problem was a missing glowie, but when I was teleported to it, it turned out I just missed it. Missing glowie, indeed.

I really can't complain. Hell, I even managed to get a GM try to help me use the Microsoft Language Bar in-game (via e-mail this time) even though he said it wasn't really supported. To me, that kind of support is admirable, even if it ultimately didn't work. But, hey, a couple of months and a few patches later, and the Microsoft Language Bar no longer crashes the game, so I got my wish anyway

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I can say that I've never had a bad experience with either an in-game GM, or through support tickets, the last one taking 5 days and 7 different CS Reps, each one having been escalated.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the times in which /petitions are being sent? My play times are generally 9pm-1am PST.

I feel for you in having difficulty with Customer Support. I've had several experiences lately with CS while playing the game, and while every encounter I've had was resolved satisfactorily (in most cases very quickly) it was still frustrating. A portion of my frustration may be because my play time is so limited that spending time waiting for Customer Support is like nails on a chalkboard, but that is a personal issue.

There are a few things I try to remember however, every time that I am dealing with customer support that makes the whole experience much more easy to deal with.

1) CS is incredibly busy, especially if you play during peak hours. I can take a break and check my market bids every so often throughout the day as long as I'm not super busy, they can't.

2) The standard list of questions is there because it works. While it may not be necessary for many interactions, it's been tried and true to significantly address a large portion of issues that arise. I have to answer the same questions when I interact with CS as you folks do, and most of the time (although not all) I know exactly whats going on.

3) Communication in written format is difficult, especially when there is a heavy use of jargon and slang. The language used is changing and heavily relies on somewhat obscure acronyms. Make sure to explain things as clearly and concisely as possible, and always try to explain things as if you were doing so to someone who has never played the game before. While our GM's are familiar with our game, MoSTF is not necessarily how we refer to it internally.

4) Lower tiers of support do not have the same latitude in addressing issues that higher tiers of support have. That means that getting issues addressed that are more complicated or difficult to resolve takes longer. Always ask yourself if the fix of the situation is worth your time.

5) When you have to contact support, and then wait for a while, you are probably not happy. The GM you have contacted may be finishing an 8 hour shift after dealing with dozens of people who have been a little peeved. And by a little peeved, I'm slightly understating things, similar to calling the invasion of Normandy a minor fracas.

6) If you do have a negative interaction, it is important for our feedback process for us to understand why (and correct the issue if appropriate and possible). Escalating the matter to a higher level of support or contacting support through email for a more full examination of the interaction is appropriate. Identifying trouble areas is key to any improvement in process.

Hope this advice helps a bit,
-Mod08-