Received one heck of a baffling reply to my buy report...

So a few days ago, I was messing around with fish prints... and found a sideways one!(or at least, it seemed to be rotated compared to the rest of the ingame art for it)

I thought "hey, can't hurt to file a minor bug report on this"... and forgot about it until today when I got the following reply;
https://i.redd.it/exvu51wrajl41.png

So... uh... great job Square Enix? You made me laugh at least.
I'm not exactly sure why you're asking me to take such a roundabout series of steps to report a bug(as... harassment?:confused:), or what my internet explorer version(Chrome) has to do with anything, but this felt worth sharing.:p

...*bug report. Dang my spellcheck >_<

It's a very generic template.

They didn't look at your report and think "oh, we should find out what computer specs might have caused this image to turn sideways".

It's just "you have a report? Fill out this form."

The bug report forum here uses the same template, and I've just skipped filling out those bits when they're obviously not relevant. It hasn't stopped things from being accepted as bugs.

Square Enix can't even afford a proper game engine. How on Earth would this small indie company afford a staff for listening to bug reports? Please understand.

Hmm... is it because I removed the irrelevant parts of the provided template when first reporting it?

edit: none of this explains why it wants me to use "report harassment" over "report a bug" though. 0_o

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DumdogsWorld

Square Enix can't even afford a proper game engine. How on Earth would this small indie company afford a staff for listening to bug reports? Please understand.

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Actually chances are, the bigger the company the more likely you're going to find this sort of shortcutting to be common. Company I used to work for, templating was a thing, it's how we managed to keep on top of the large traffic of emails coming in.

Support jobs typically have a higher turnover, are understaffed (even if there's plenty of vacancies available) and training quality is low because it has to be quick, as the person might leave for another job. They then will have a higher volume of support queries to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Some do it better, but my usual assumption when dealing with a bigger company is that their support probably isn't that great. In truth, it's a job people hate doing and aren't there because they want to be there. So people often don't stick around if they can help it. It plays hell with training people too.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

...

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Being common and being acceptable are not the same thing. Lots of rather worrying trends have appeared in the video game industry in the last decade, and people are always quick to say "well, other companies do it!"

It doesn't change the fact that:

#1 - Bigger companies usually have more money.

and

#2 - They aren't putting the money to as good of use as smaller companies.


How am I supposed to do anything but call them incompetent in such a case?

If a company can't handle things the same way they did before AND do new things as well, then they have no business growing.

Unless you want Bethesda 2.0

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Meowva

Hmm... is it because I removed the irrelevant parts of the provided template when first reporting it?

edit: none of this explains why it wants me to use "report harassment" over "report a bug" though. 0_o

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They're not asking you to report harassment, they're asking you to submit it via the bug report submission within the menu primarily used to report harassment. It's not the same thing.

I know they aren't asking me to actually report harassment, but they are asking for me to use that function, rather than the "report a bug" function below it.

"Please respond to this message by opening the in-game support desk and selecting "contact us". From this menu, select "report harassment" and provide the requested information below with the title 'bug report follow-up'."

The "contact us" menu has four options, one of them just labeled "report a bug". Which seemed like a more logical place to be sent to than the "report harassment" button.

Also, there are a lot of sideways fish prints, esp for small canvases. I don't think they used much care when they did this, most likely due to the vast majority of fish and I would bet they just use a program that translates them to the canvas without any QC checking going on, so it gets all wonky.

The canvases are a big let down imo. Some prints fill them up nicely, others they have a small lil image with lots of negative space around it, others they are sideways and some lack definition and look more like an ink smear than a fish. But at this point, its about what you can expect.

Maaakes sense. In the end, I'm not too fussed about the situation. Just seemed like a weird reply from Customer Support.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DumdogsWorld

Being common and being acceptable are not the same thing. Lots of rather worrying trends have appeared in the video game industry in the last decade, and people are always quick to say "well, other companies do it!"

It doesn't change the fact that:

#1 - Bigger companies usually have more money.

and

#2 - They aren't putting the money to as good of use as smaller companies.


How am I supposed to do anything but call them incompetent in such a case?

If a company can't handle things the same way they did before AND do new things as well, then they have no business growing.

Unless you want Bethesda 2.0

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It really depends.

If they're just greedily hording money, sure or poorly budgeting or spending it, sure. But companies will generally assign budgets based on what they want to invest and what money they are making and thus make priorities, if service is not amazing but is still functional enough, they might see further investment less of a priority.

The company I worked for they had great RND, great and great quality products and they clearly put reasonable amount of money into their products and development.

Their products are also competitively priced for the tech you got. Meaning they keep the cost down. I own some of their products and I am very happy with them. But the customer service is poor and probably needed better investment and people doing the job wanted to give good service, however when you look at what people are paying versus some competitors, the question props up "what's been cut to make it cheaper?" and I'd rather put service lower than product functionality and quality.

As a user, I'd rather something affordable and good than get a great customer service, as long as the service still fulfills its purpose (here in the UK we have some laws and standards to that regard).

When I worked in complaints for that company, I'd get people saying that they get better service from Apple, but then at Apple you're paying a lot more.

For comparison, AAA games can be ridiculously expensive to make and comes with a risk that a game will tank it. I don't think stuff companies sometimes pull is out of greed. But of course, if they pull EA levels of stuff that kills consumer trust. Should SE fund stuff differently? Probably, though I'd much prefer more of that funding go to the devs as long as their service remains functional.

But bringing it back in perspective...receiving a templated form is not exactly terrible.

It is entirely possible it was just a cut and paste error. I wouldn't read anything into it.