Is it just my customer service that's bad, or is it everyone elses too?

I am not sure if this is the right place for this, as we seem to have lost a general discussion section of the boards.

I am an EU player and I'm wondering if it's just the EU players that have to put up with the terrible level of ingame support.

I got aflicted with the bug in this link over the weekend. I was on a long Flash Back arc solo on my scrapper, and didn't want to have to restart the entire FB as I was near the end. I sent of a petition, and then set about chatting to friends, looking stuff up onlilne, watching a film and generally killing time. It wasn't until over 24 hours later, 1 bug report and 2 more petitions that I finally got a GM come to help me. I was not logged on to the same toon for this entire period, or even in game, but I was logged on to that toon for about 3 to4 hours after the initial bug report, and after the second another 2 to 3.

It then took the first GM that showed up quite some time to realise that the mission was obviously impossible for me to complete, and finally he asked me if I would like it completed. A second GM messaged me about 20 mins later, and while a lot more courteous and apologetic, was obviously too late to fix the problem. Later when I finally finished the arc, the timer read over 35 hours to complete the arc.

This is a bug that has been posted on these forums since July, and has obviously been an issue since before then.

So I would like to know if the Devs and general community think that over 24 hours for a GM response ingame is acceptable, even during a busy time such as 2xp weekend. If you know you are going to be very busy, you get more people in to maintain a good coverage of service, something that seemed to be lacking this weekend.

It also seems that you have to actually be logged onto the toon with a problem to recieve any kind of help in the game. Sadly, I am not patient enough to have the time to stay logged onto the same toon not doing anything, for what could be several hours, if not longer. On another toon, not this weekend, I had to wait over 4 hours before a bugged mission could be sorted, by which time I had redone the mission and leveled up a few more times.

I think this level of service is poor at best, and would like to know if its just us EU players that get treated so poorly. Also, other members of the community should use this thread to post about how long they have had to wait for GM help, their opinions of the service and other tales of woe at the hands of GMs.

I agree that if that was me I would not be impressed. I have played COX for a few years now and yet I only used the petition feature myself for the first time last week. I had not been given the midnight visage temp power after a mission completion and was therefore unable to enter the midnight club. I sent a petition and within 45 mins a GM was online apologising for the inconvenience and promptly reset my mish.

Lucky for me my first time I needed customer service it was 10/10.

So it's not all bad but then again I have less experience dealing with the customer service part of the game than others.

I've only contacted Billing support recently and that was a painful experience. Took them about a week to respond, and then a few days over that to actually tell me what the issue was.

At least we have access to the same forums these days, but it still feels like being a second-class citizen in City of.

I play mainly on virtue in USA. The last couple of petitions I have sent I have been amazed at the speed of responce. 1/2 hour or less. Been use to waiting hours,though have learned if not there in hour,either resend or give up. I have never had a problem with rude conduct from a gm. They have always been polite,if you were/are treated badly,report it. My own experance with them indicates that they are polite whether by inclination and /or policy.
(They have been polite even when I have been irritated. Which after a couple hours waiting can happen.)

To be fair I16 has introduced a family sized bucket of bugs both old and new so at the moment they're probably snowed under with wierd mob levels, mission doors that aren't doors, off map glowies and all the other stuff on top of the "normal" bugs during an iron out phase.

I'd imagine (hope) things will pick up again once they get a new build in place and iron out some of the ones that are taking up all their GM/customer support time.

Not to excuse what is a very bug heavy issue, but it might go some way to explaining why support is seemingly a little thin on the ground atm.

This weekend was also 2XP weekend... I'm sure they were all quite busy. During less busy times, GMs can usually get there a lot sooner.

Not to mention providing support for Aion now.

I was on Freedom and had the "base power not working" problem from being logged off for too many days. In the past they has it fixed from 30 min to 1 hour. It was finally fixed after 27 hours and me updating question.

When I first put in the petition, I decided to switch to Guardian to see if base had same problem there (it didn't). So I did a mission which was a kill all Nemisis in Office. It had a counter that showed 2 left after all were dead. I filed a petition and a GM showed up in 5 minutes and completed mission for me.

So 2 easy problems to fix on 2x weekend on 2 different servers filed within 10 minutes of each other. Both using Stuck option and "need GM" in title.

Freedom - 27.6 hours
Guardian - 5 minutes

Overall I have had excellent response from Support. But sometimes.....

I have always used the stuck option and they fixed it quickly because it is an easy fix. They finally emailed me back and apologized for it taking so long.

I figured not having my base during most of the 2x weekend in which I was trying out the game again was equal to "stuck" for me.

According to the classifications in the emails that they send both problems are listed equally:

Product Level 1: City of Heroes
Product Level 2: Freedom
Category Level 1: Game Play
Category Level 2: General

Product Level 1: City of Heroes
Product Level 2: Guardian
Category Level 1: Game Play
Category Level 2: General

They just messed up or were swamped. I don't think they punished me for lying.

I did end up resubscribing though.

It's not just EU servers. I play on Liberty, a North American server, and had a problem with a level pacted elect/elect scrapper having the same mission complete bonus for prestige regardless of difficulty setting. My level pact partner was getting the correct prestige amount but I was not. When I sent the petition, they escalated it. I then got a response via email stating that my rewards will be different because I am in a level pact. I questioned the logic of that and they escalated it again. I then got another response telling me that leveling pacts cause influence and XP to be split. I said "duh" but not prestige (paraphrasing there) and they escalated it again. The last GM told me that my level pacted character was not always online at the same time as my level pacted partner, so it was possible for the two different characters to have different prestige amounts on the SG roster.

I less than politely asked them to re-read the original /petition regarding mission complete rewards for prestige being the same amount regardless of the difficulty setting. I got a response stating that they did testing and a lvl 33 character gets 275 prestige, so for me to get 344 at lvl 35 "sounds about right since they are in the same ballpark." I had to explain to the GM how prestige amounts are not based on level. I then explained the difficulty settings and how they affect mission complete rewards. I then decided that the whole level pacted thing was obviously confusing them so I switched to an equal level character and even included a screen shot showing the difficulty setting at +4 (x8 players) only granting 344 prestige.

I got the standard "this is a bug" response and no further support. Once the toon broke past level 40, the prestige amounts for mission complete rewards was back to being scaled for difficulty settings.

I did not originally send the /petition as a bug as I was the only person affected. I will never contact NCSupport again based on this experience.

It is bad and always has been .

I have been in teams who all filed bug reports and in solo missions etc and i have never seen a gm appear , ever !!!! ok i may be exaggerating i did see 1 once but that was years ago when the game was still looked after...........

In fact we just use auto complete for a bugged mission these days as we know it is a waste of time even posting a report.

I think this largely depends on the time of day and how close to an issue/patch it is.

I've had both excellent experience and face palming "wat?" moments too with support. Having worked in support myself I know a lot of this is also on the user as well. Vague/nondescript or seriously confusing requests or questions, or just being snowed under.

So I try myself to be a bit more understanding when I petition and it takes a hour or longer sometimes the next day before I get a response. But really this shouldn't be here, if you have a real issue or complaint the best way to handle it would probably be a PM directly to Niviene or Ghost Falcon.

Everyone always has something to complain about, and this just generally isn't constructive other then giving people a place to flame.

It does seem however they are trying to make some changes to how things are done so its more even for the EU players. So they do recognize there is an issue. Whether related to that or not I don't know.

Nope, not just you. I rate CoX's customer support right up there with the service desk of Kmart.

While I never needed a GM ingame(Now I jinxed it of course) I always found the response time of the customer service quite good.

But like I said, that's not ingame and my problems had to do with a code that didn't work and a certain pet name...

Hmmmmmmm...I have had to have ingame help a few times, but never had to wait more than 15 minutes. My probs were taken care of quickly and with much courtesy. (It made me laugh to see a police drone show up with a name like 'GM Harry' above it..LOL) The only time I dealt with a person by phone (regarding my account) I got a very nice person who answered my questions and resolved a mixup. I am sure that someday I will have a bad experience. After all, we are dealing with humam beings here. So far so good.