game data recovery ticket worst customer service in the world

Ive been dealing with a game data recovery ticket for weeks now maybe a month with no replies nothing and have been calling customer support with my ticket number they keep telling me "we cant give you an estimated time we have no way of messaging them or telling them to do yours unfortunately" every customer service calls ends with no help i have been calling everyday for almost a month now with no help no nothing and in the meantime my paid Subscribed days will Not be refunded even though they are causing the delay . Im missing 20 million Gil and i know exactly which time it needs to be rolled back using game data recovery and have filled out the form with all details and information and yet still no replies only reply i get is "we will email you once its done" im losing my paid subscribed days and still no progress or updates on whats going on. In the meantime i have been with a police crime report and the police was able to finish a thorough investigation in my real life and gave me a full on report in less than 3 days while square enix takes longer than a pentagon FBI investigation... what are they even doing ? ive dealt with i would say 39 different gaming platforms customer support over the span of 13 years and have never ever experienced such a bad customer service and this is probably the only game that i pay for monthly all the other ones are major AAA big title games and with even bigger company and higher net revenue they have 40 times more players and still serve customers and players in a orderly and quick manner ..

square enix is probably so far have been the worst out of 39 different gaming / entertainment companies when it comes to customer service but i do give props for a good game. worst customer service in the world with a decent game.

still no replies no rollback after weeks and days and im losing my paid days of subscription which i was told i wont be reimbursed for.

Why do you need to do a data recovery anyway? Did you accidentally throw away a piece of gear? Unless it is a truly unique piece of gear from say version 1.0 that is now unatainable you're better off just getting a new one through the Calamity Salvager (such as previous tiers of relic weapons) or aquiring more tomes to buy it if it's end game stuff, and not wasting your one-time-only item restoration on something you can reattain normally in the game anyway.

If there is a bug or technical issue preventing you from accessing the game, then a data rollback will not help you (as that only affects your character data not how you access the game). Try reinstalling the game or upgrading your system. SE staff are, like the majority of the world's population, now working remotely from home, and they've stated that they have issues with access (trying to get it all set up is the reason why there was a significant delay in content last year). Try and have a little understanding on the situation on their side of the fence - that's not to say your issue is not important or deserving of resolution. It's just that there are a lot of complexities that can drag out resolving such issues. Keeping a cooler head is probably a better choice at this time.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

Why do you need to do a data recovery anyway? Did you accidentally throw away a piece of gear? Unless it is a truly unique piece of gear from say version 1.0 that is now unatainable you're better off just getting a new one through the Calamity Salvager (such as previous tiers of relic weapons) or aquiring more tomes to buy it if it's end game stuff, and not wasting your one-time-only item restoration on something you can reattain normally in the game anyway.

If there is a bug or technical issue preventing you from accessing the game, then a data rollback will not help you (as that only affects your character data not how you access the game). Try reinstalling the game or upgrading your system. SE staff are, like the majority of the world's population, now working remotely from home, and they've stated that they have issues with access (trying to get it all set up is the reason why there was a significant delay in content last year). Try and have a little understanding on the situation on their side of the fence - that's not to say your issue is not important or deserving of resolution. It's just that there are a lot of complexities that can drag out resolving such issues. Keeping a cooler head is probably a better choice at this time.

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newsflash : pandemic isnt only affecting square enix its affecting the entire planet as of right now so what that means :
1) every single company whether its gaming or other type of company are all affected by covid
2) every single other company in the world with more players in their games across all platforms have 150 to 380 times faster and quicker customer service with better resolution
3) other companies with 700 + Million players who play their game for free even have better service
4) square enix doesnt get a free pass cuz its covid because other companies affected by covid have better performance then them even in this situation
5) even a police investigation takes shorter time then their process
6) when you make people pay full price for a game and charge people a full premium monthly payment to play the game even after paying a FULL PRICE for the game and extra for EACH DLC you set your bar high so your customers expect better customer service . Certainly better service than any free to play game yet its opposite and free to play games customer service is apparently a few hundred times better.
7) the customer service phone line puts you on hold for 3+ hours and only keeps saying that "we cant see the status unfortunately you have to just wait" for weeks and months while im losing my paid subscription days
8) i had 39 different MAJOR gaming companies customer service and over few hundred other entertainment companies customer service experience and nothing was as bad this .

out of few Hundred companies Square Enix's customer service has to be the Worst in the world

maybe you shouldn't mess up next time, ur the real one to blame here..

...how do you even "lose" 20mil gil? And, like, why does that stopping you from playing?

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Originally Posted by Hatfright

...how do you even "lose" 20mil gil? And, like, why does that stopping you from playing?

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Falling for a phishing scam and giving away your login data so that they can take the Gil - which would be a problem entirely caused by the user.

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Originally Posted by RicaRuin

Falling for a phishing scam and giving away your login data so that they can take the Gil - which would be a problem entirely caused by the user.

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Didn't think about that. But again, why does it stoppin them from playing the game. Can't GMs just give them gil back without the need to roll whole character back?

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Originally Posted by Hatfright

Didn't think about that. But again, why does it stoppin them from playing the game. Can't GMs just give them gil back without the need to roll whole character back?

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because i am told when the data recovery does actually happen everything i do now doesnt count and doesnt stay in my inventory basically square enix told me anything i do wouldnt count because rollback would revert everything on my character or inventory

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Originally Posted by Hatfright

...how do you even "lose" 20mil gil? And, like, why does that stopping you from playing?

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because square enix told me not to play because when the rollback does happen everything i do will not count and will revert back.

Chill dude, you just got hit a worst time, CA got wrecked by covid past couple months and SE is stationed right next to LAX, its expected to take a long while with customers.

When I worked customer service jobs, people who behaved like you got pushed to the back of the queue every single time they nagged us.

I don't understand why you're spamming us with all of this though? SE Customer Support doesn't really read these forums outside of the Technical and Bug report areas and there's nothing we can do about it. How on earth did you even "lose" 20mil in the first place and how much of SE's fault do you think it is that they'd even do a rollback? Did your gil literally disappear or did you just spend it on the wrong thing or get yourself scammed? They aren't going to fix anything that they perceive comes down to carelessness or lax security. The "how" is very important in determining whether or not SE will even help you by the time they actually address your ticket.

I know from personal experience. A few months ago some mysterious person seemingly joined my FC of his own accord and instantaneously took millions of gil from the FC chest the moment a member deposited it (happened within less than a second, according to the logs). They appeared to be a gil seller or bot; they were a level 1 paladin, nothing else even unlocked and had the same exact name and character across multiple servers. A cursory search of their name online also produced a similar event with someone else on a different world with the gil being taken in exactly the same way.

Unfortunately SE wouldn't do anything because technically the FC permissions allowed the thief to access to the chest. They glossed over the fact or simply didn't care that this guy (seemingly) got himself into the FC and (according to the person whose gil was taken) "forced" the victim to deposit his gil into the chest when he went to interact with it before instantly robbing him blind. All of this again happening within about a second according to the FC and chest logs.

this is still not fixed even the supervisor on the call says they cant do anything and ill continue to lose weeks and weeks of paid subscription while they take months to investigate even the cia / fbi files take shorter

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

I don't understand why you're spamming us with all of this though? SE Customer Support doesn't really read these forums outside of the Technical and Bug report areas and there's nothing we can do about it. How on earth did you even "lose" 20mil in the first place and how much of SE's fault do you think it is that they'd even do a rollback? Did your gil literally disappear or did you just spend it on the wrong thing or get yourself scammed? They aren't going to fix anything that they perceive comes down to carelessness or lax security. The "how" is very important in determining whether or not SE will even help you by the time they actually address your ticket.

I know from personal experience. A few months ago some mysterious person seemingly joined my FC of his own accord and instantaneously took millions of gil from the FC chest the moment a member deposited it (happened within less than a second, according to the logs). They appeared to be a gil seller or bot; they were a level 1 paladin, nothing else even unlocked and had the same exact name and character across multiple servers. A cursory search of their name online also produced a similar event with someone else on a different world with the gil being taken in exactly the same way.

Unfortunately SE wouldn't do anything because technically the FC permissions allowed the thief to access to the chest. They glossed over the fact or simply didn't care that this guy (seemingly) got himself into the FC and (according to the person whose gil was taken) "forced" the victim to deposit his gil into the chest when he went to interact with it before instantly robbing him blind. All of this again happening within about a second according to the FC and chest logs.

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i didnt spend it on anything my account was compromised and yes my account always had a security token it was a data breach when i logged in i was in a different world with no gil left in my account they found out my account was compromised it was confirmed second ticket was to do game data recovery to get gil back because they have no other way of recovering 20 million

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

this is still not fixed even the supervisor on the call says they cant do anything and ill continue to lose weeks and weeks of paid subscription while they take months to investigate even the cia / fbi files take shorter

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Posting in the official forum wont do anything to get it fixed - I'm not quite sure why you expect this to help? No one here can wave a magic wand and make the people who are working on this kind of issue work faster.

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

i didnt spend it on anything my account was compromised and yes my account always had a security token it was a data breach when i logged in i was in a different world with no gil left in my account they found out my account was compromised it was confirmed second ticket was to do game data recovery to get gil back because they have no other way of recovering 20 million

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...that sounds a lot like you've fallen for one of those scams that have been going on for a while now (and have gotten so bad that they posted an official warning on the Lodestone). For those scams, they'll get you to put in your one-time-password aswell as your normal one, so they can log in to your account. If this is indeed what happend, its still on you - not SEs fault that you rendered your secury token useless by giving away the information.

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

this is still not fixed even the supervisor on the call says they cant do anything and ill continue to lose weeks and weeks of paid subscription while they take months to investigate even the cia / fbi files take shorter

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Isn't making a post for the sole reason to bump a thread against forum ToS?

Regardless, it seems like it was your fault this happened, and the more you pester and annoy them the more you're probably going to get pushed back. IDK about how SE's customer service tickets work but when I worked in customer service every time a customer would update or file a new ticket it would just auto-push them to the back of the line as it registered their ticket as a "new" complaint - any updates to the ticket were supposed to be made AFTER it had been received by a representative and able to be confirmed received.

The fact that you triple posted, means this is a troll post.

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

... ive dealt with i would say 39 different gaming platforms customer support over the span of 13 years and have never ever experienced such a bad customer service ...

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How is a person so needy? I could count how many times I've had to contact customer support for all games I've ever played on one hand in 30 years of gaming...

I have never had to talk to customer support for a singleplayer "major AAA big title game" , and out of all the MMO's I've played, I had to contact support one time in EverQuest in seven years of playing, once in WoW in 15 years of playing, and so far from two years in FF14 not at all...

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Originally Posted by Vidu

...that sounds a lot like you've fallen for one of those scams that have been going on for a while now (and have gotten so bad that they posted an official warning on the Lodestone). For those scams, they'll get you to put in your one-time-password aswell as your normal one, so they can log in to your account. If this is indeed what happend, its still on you - not SEs fault that you rendered your secury token useless by giving away the information.

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99.9999999999999999999999% chance(screw it, it's 100% chance) that this is what happened.

No official website for FF will EVER have anything between the .com and / It will ALWAYS be something like the two below.

Official Lodestone(the na at the start could be eu, or whatever regional abbreviation is used for your region):

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone

Official forums:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv


Note how there is nothing between the .com and /

Memorise that there is nothing between them...and if you see something with something in there...DO NOT CLICK! The person who sends you those tells is also a victim, who the culprit is hijacking their account to spread it while they steal the gil.


Edit: Also, for anyone not aware, if you hover your mouse over a link in an email, or on a webpage, it shows the web address in the bottom left of the screen. Make sure it actually goes to where it says it goes, otherwise...don't click it(you can test it with the two I put in this post if you want)

Oh yeah received one of those scam messages.
They basically send you to a mirror of the forums pretty well done btw, with fake GMs saying hey I want to participate in this raffle!
My luck I was logged on the forums already, so I was able to avoid this.

So moral of the story if some random dude invite you to some lottery stuff or whatever that requires you to log in at something. Avoid it at all costs.

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Originally Posted by Takamorisan

Oh yeah received one of those scam messages.
They basically send you to a mirror of the forums pretty well done btw, with fake GMs saying hey I want to participate in this raffle!
My luck I was logged on the forums already, so I was able to avoid this.

So moral of the story if some random dude invite you to some lottery stuff or whatever that requires you to log in at something. Avoid it at all costs.

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It's not convincing enough if you've had to enter the OTP on the official pages. They aren't even on the same page as the username and password after all.

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Originally Posted by Avatre

It's not convincing enough if you've had to enter the OTP on the official pages. They aren't even on the same page as the username and password after all.

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Like the mirror is the same as the forum UI, it show as you didn't log in yet to the forums and had that upper button in the top right telling you to log in, I didn't click it because I just had logged in the official forums, then I paid attention to the URL and I was like oh a f* scammer. I was really distracted, could had prevented by just not entering the link at all at least wasnt scammed, but still had to run Anti Virus, Spybot check registry alterations and so on. Changed my password and setup my one pass app finally...

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

I know from personal experience. A few months ago some mysterious person seemingly joined my FC of his own accord and instantaneously took millions of gil from the FC chest the moment a member deposited it (happened within less than a second, according to the logs). They appeared to be a gil seller or bot; they were a level 1 paladin, nothing else even unlocked and had the same exact name and character across multiple servers. A cursory search of their name online also produced a similar event with someone else on a different world with the gil being taken in exactly the same way.

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This is why I have 'member' and 'veteran member' as ranks in my FC; new 'members' dont have access to gil for this very reason. Veteran members are members I trust and have been in the FC for at least a month or so. I cant and wont trust new members I dont know ever. Period.

and I'm sorry you had to deal with that, too *^*. That must've sucked so freakin' bad.

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Originally Posted by Takamorisan

Like the mirror is the same as the forum UI, it show as you didn't log in yet to the forums and had that upper button in the top right telling you to log in, I didn't click it because I just had logged in the official forums, then I paid attention to the URL and I was like oh a f* scammer. I was really distracted, could had prevented by just not entering the link at all at least wasnt scammed, but still had to run Anti Virus, Spybot check registry alterations and so on. Changed my password and setup my one pass app finally...

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What Avatre means is that the scam pages put the login/password and OTP fields on the same page; the web real login flow has the login/password (which is validated) and then put the OTP entry on a second page after that login, and only do so if you have a security token registered to the account.

Since the scam pages can't do that first part of the login and present the OTP conditionally, they do it all on one page; when the user/password/OTP is entered, they can automatically log you in on game (thus booting you as a 'dead connection', like when you get disconnected and try to immediately reconnect) via what's basically a highway robbery bot. Since you can log back in quickly (and the OTP will expire so they can't get back into your account a second time without phishing the OTP from you again) they have to work very quickly to strip you of what resources they can in a seemingly wholly-automated manner. (As in, your gil can potentially be gone in under 20 seconds, sometimes even less.)

As a side note, this is an excellent reason to use password managers. Yes, you probably know your FFXIV login/password by heart from entering it in the launcher, but if you hit 'fill from password manager' when you go to the forum login page... on the real site, it'll fill the username/password. On a phishing site... well, the password manager just sees that it's a domain you don't have a password saved for, and will go "Nope, don't have a password for here." Which can be enough to make you look at the address bar more closely and see that oh, you aren't on the real site.

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Originally Posted by Coletergeist

This is why I have 'member' and 'veteran member' as ranks in my FC; new 'members' dont have access to gil for this very reason. Veteran members are members I trust and have been in the FC for at least a month or so. I cant and wont trust new members I dont know ever. Period.

and I'm sorry you had to deal with that, too *^*. That must've sucked so freakin' bad.

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Wow, you give players access to gil after a month? Even in my fc of people we've known for years. Pretty much all of us have met irl. Only 3 of us have access to gil, and only 2 of us have certain housing access.


2 of them are married, and only 1 and me have the access lol.

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

i didnt spend it on anything my account was compromised and yes my account always had a security token it was a data breach when i logged in i was in a different world with no gil left in my account

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Okay then. I still don't understand why you made this thread. We can't do anything besides tell you to wait on SE to do their thing and to not get phished again in the future. SE has always taken a long time to do the rollback process and complaining about it on the forums won't make it go any faster.

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Originally Posted by Coletergeist

This is why I have 'member' and 'veteran member' as ranks in my FC; new 'members' dont have access to gil for this very reason. Veteran members are members I trust and have been in the FC for at least a month or so. I cant and wont trust new members I dont know ever. Period.

and I'm sorry you had to deal with that, too *^*. That must've sucked so freakin' bad.

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Yes, lesson learned. I immediately adjusted the default rank to have practically zero permissions and demoted anyone who hadn't logged on in a while just to cover the chance of compromised accounts. I had never bothered to tighten permissions after I inherited leadership because I trust everyone in the FC just like the original leader and we never kept gil in the chest to begin with. By this point there were only three of us anyway, including the person who had their gil stolen (they had only been back a week too, but that's an entire story unto itself). I just never imagined that a gil seller would get into the FC and manage to take gil from the chest a literal second after it was deposited.

I asked a GM if they could restore a deleted character ( yes yes I know I was a doofus and should have just left it there ), amazingly they did it.

Ive had a few tickets and have been delighted with their responses and help.

Cant be happier TBH.

considering how many people fall to the scammers, even though SE has posted NOT to...

this is not a data issue, this is you voluntarily making a mistake. yeah, I imagine they have to investigate it fully. I am sure they are also making sure your account wasnt used for anything illegal since someone else now has all your information.

sorry you arent getting satisfaction, here or by CS, but really, who in their right mind clicks on or goes to a link from a rando player and enters information? was it the need to go for the millions of gil? as we all hear, if something seems to good to be true.. it often is. next I am sure we'll hear your bank account is empty because you were trying to help some african prince/diplomat/business person get their millions out of the country....

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

ive dealt with i would say 39 different gaming platforms customer support over the span of 13 years and have never ever experienced such a bad customer service

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I've been playing mmos for about 16 years, been gaming in general for far longer, and I can count on one hand the amount of times I have needed customer service to help me with something.

I'm not saying FFXIV's customer service can't improve, it certainly can and should...I'm just wondering what are you doing in games that has caused you to be in contact with 39 different customer service teams. That number is insanely high.

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Originally Posted by SilverSp

In the meantime i have been with a police crime report and the police was able to finish a thorough investigation in my real life and gave me a full on report in less than 3 days while square enix takes longer than a pentagon FBI investigation... what are they even doing ?

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And this part leads me to think you're either a troll or are very out of touch with reality. You're comparing customer service for a game with emergency and government services, and are somehow surprised the game service isn't as efficient.

I would explain to you why this is the case but considering the tremendously high number of times you have been in contact with game customer services, I think it's a safe bet to say that you won't accept any answer that isn't "you're absolutely correct sir". So I'm not going to waste my time.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

I've been playing mmos for about 16 years, been gaming in general for far longer, and I can count on one hand the amount of times I have needed customer service to help me with something.

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Almost 20 years for me and I've only had to contact customer support once for a different game. Even that wasn't for an in-game reason.

OP is fixated on this (or he's trolling as you suggested and I'm inclined to agree). In his place I'd have already cancelled the request and get on with my in-game life. In fact, I'd never have made a request in the first place; made a mistake, learn the lessons, move on. Coming to the forums to complain about this is rather pointless.