Do you feel Appreciated as a customer?

[Marianka]

Of course you love the game. You wouldn't be on the forum if you didn't.


/start rant
Lately though, after I have taken a few breaks to play other games I do seem to miss something. It's not another update, no whining about how they nerfed this job or that, no complaints about skillups after Abyssea.

I recently did a survey for the said game and the last question was:

"Do you feel appreciated as customer"

And though I love ffxi and the people onhere I have to say "No" to the question when it's about service. It's Tuesday and yet another big "Emergency" maintenance (5 hours) is planned for today. And again apparently the only time emergencies get fixed are during EU prime time hours. And again I am affraid that this maintenance will lead to more maintenance to fix the little thing that hasn;t been tested quite the way that is should have been.

On the other hand, if I consult about a problem with 2 GMs not only was everything as it should be, but the stuff happening to me was a very rare occurence (which happened 6 times in row, Las Vegas odds) but no, they couldn;t tell me why because finishing my magian trial would make ffxi collapse because Europeans can't be trusted with the inner workings of the game.

Recently SE also decided to remove the option to pay in us dollars with eu cc. Not something that happens a lot, but for some reason europeans are singled out (maybe because they pay MORE for LESS playtime then any other nation)

Phoning or chatting with playonline support is literally excruciating. Not only does it take ages to get an answer, most of the times the answer are incomplete, useless or even untrue.

All of this lead to a revolutionary plan: Hold the updates and fixes and fixes of fixes of fixes for a while and try to get the support of the game up to par. Maybe, just maybe people will actually call the playonline support and feel more satisfied in the end.

/end rant

[Kraggy]

As an EU customer I accept that non-EU companies will do maintenance to minimise inconvenience to their local customers, I may find it annoying at times but that's how it is. Given FFXI servers run usually for WEEKS without a second's down time, unlike most other MMOs it seems which have weekly downtime, then I don't find it over irksome.

The fact some EU customers COULD pay in dollars is an artifact of history, given SE have decided to use a different payment processing system them the fact they had to remove that option is unfortunate but you're being paranoid if you think it's some sort of anti-EU strategy on their part.

As for Customer Service, when I started playing (April 2005) I had to call a couple of times early on, then once more a couple of years later. I found them hlepful, timely and knowledgeable, maybe they've changed, clearly I wouldn't know.

I would agree though with you about GMs, way back on another toon I 'broke' the PLD unlock; I had two toons at the time, both started it but one went and did some other quest which the DRG unlock NPC is also involved in (IIRC he did the PLD unlock), after that he refused to progress the DRG quest.

The GMs claimed they asked the devs and it was "working as intended", it clearly wasn't but the GM refused to reset the quest so I could start it again: that sucked.

[Bumbeen]

Hell no hahahaha. SE customer service is the absolute worst I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with.

[Frost]

Only chiming in to state the obvious. The maintainable time is probably chosen as to affect the least amount of players based on traffic.

With other general complaints. This is unfortunately how business is done. One one side of the equation, companies are very limited nowadays due to limitless angles for lawsuits. They're all defaulting to "Do Nothing" strategies, or hiding behind plausible-deniability. For instance: those call centers in India for tech support, a company can offload tech support to another company and basically release themselves of liability, while the tech support company can point the finger at the one who hired them, making neither 'at fault'.

On the other side of the equation, you got the unhappy customer. The seemingly endless vocal minority that's trying to attain control in their own lives by making mountains out of mole hills... All the way to the supreme court in the worst cases. It may seem bad when the only thing you see are complaints, but out of the 10 folks complaining, what about the other 500,000 that are perfectly happy and don't feel the need to say anything?


And everyone loses sight. Maintenances are there for your overall benefit, that SHOULD go without saying. And added content and expansions etc change things. Be happy they're breaking stuff, it means they're still trying. They could have just left the game with sky as your only end-game... And stuff just breaks. The search/AH code could be on a computer that's physically damaged, that only recently broke. There's no amount of testing for random system failure on a physical level... (Just an example)

As for payment, countries have weird laws. Laws that are getting weirder as the days go by. When it comes to things like MMOs for instance that have fully functional economies and possible tangible value associated with them... Things get REALLY weird. I would assume all this stuff with the account migrations has to do with some kind of compliance with some laws in some country... (For instance the Moogle Bonanza top prize had to be changed I believe from 100M to the total marble 'take' divided by winners to coincide with some gambling laws in the US.)

Things always "Look" simple... But they rarely ever are...

[RAIST]

It used to not bother me so much... but it's getting worse each time I contact them on something. Just today, tried to get info from them on the pending billing maintenance, as I had to cancel a card and request a replacement that is supposed to come tomorrow. Their notices usually state the date when registration services will become unavailabel for the billing cycle--but not this last notice...zip, nada... just a reminder that billing is pending. All they would say is it usually happens the first of the month...which isn't correct because registration always stops beforehand, duing the last couple days of the month.

So, It's a craps shoot whether I will be able to attend any events that will be going on this weekend. We've been trying to get some missions done. Oh well. Will have to put the word out that I may not be able to do anything this weekend...whenever servers come back up.

Edit:
hehe...interesting... 6 minutes after posting this, and about 20 minutes after I chatted with support--they put up the maintenance schedule stating registration services will go donw on 6/30. Now....why couldn't they provide me that information when I contacted them directly....

SE REALLY needs to work on their internal communication channels as well as to the public.

[Marianka]

And of course I forgot the "new" way to announce changes with a reference to the forums but a non-working link. It's one step away from "Go google it yourself, GL!". About the communication: I noticed people from Playonline support being totally oblivious to maintenance dates myself.

@Frost
Of course some things get oversimplified in rants. But that doesn;t negate the validity of the points mentioned. Being minority or not, EVERY CUSTOMER IS A MINORITY OF 1

I also understand the social need SE has to fullfill in the home market. Regardless of that there is no valid reason to ignore customers, complaints and supply your clients with a lack of service. Obviously more people seem to get the feeling SE doesn;t value them as customer. This is actually on a pro-ffxi forum and still some people react within minutes.

Again, I have nothing against SE as a company, I like the game, but I do feel things could be run differently and with better results.

[bungiefan]

It's hard to feel appreciated as a customer when they keep making it harder to actually pay the fee to play the game.

[JackDaniels]

It's really not that bad after the first time..

[StingRay104]

For the short period I played WoW I got to experience the only enjoyable aspect of that game.........Customer service. I glitched and preceeded to fall into an endless pit of nothing sent out a call, 5 mins later I was warped back to where I needed to be. I had a question about something in game sent out a call 5 mins later I got a response. Something that was 100% drop didn't drop and I sent a call and they fixed it no prob. FF11 some one breaks alliance before all items drop an obvious accident (well stupidity on the breakers part as in this case) gm is called...........2 hours later gm shows up and says "I can't do nothing have a wonderful day," and leaves. Now I can post several other instances of customer service on here but it would be redundant at this point, SE you really need to hire more people to handle this and allow for GMs to have more authority to make decisions in the game, because lets face it we all do dumb things or have accidents at times and it would be nice to have at least some form of fix for when these things happen. Also I know GM's, Dev's, and anyone else that deals with this game is tired of us whining about this and that, but I would really love to hear more from you guys here on these forums, in fact I love seeing posts from you SE guys on here, for the most part it lets us know your all human and at the same time it makes us feel like your at least listening to us even if you wish we would all die horrible horrible deaths.

[Runespider]

"Do you feel appreciated as customer"

No and I never have.

I play FFXI because I love the game and in honestly they do look after it, in terms of updates/fixes. From a pure customer service stand point though, no. I fear having any problems I need to contact "customer support" for, on games like wow they really go out of their way to help you...on FFXI your lucky if they even talk to you at all, let alone help you with your account problems.

People freak out if anything happens with thier account because everyone knows just how horrible it is to get help with anything from them.