My Horrible experience with SE Support and why it's causing me to leave..

[Richard_Rahl]

First, let me start by saying that I have enjoyed every bit of time I have actually been able to play FF14 ARR. The problem is the horrible support SE has, and how they have treated me as a paying customer. This has been my experience with FF14.

1. I bought the original FF14 1.0 when it first came out. I (like many) thought the game was horrible/unplayable, and never got a character over lvl 10.

2. I stopped playing FF14.

3. I found out they were completely remaking FF14 and that ARR was supposed to be awesome.

4. I played the FF14ARR Beta and fell in love with the game. This is finally the game I expected FF14 1.0 to be.

5. FF14ARR launced in August and I was very happy playing with my friends on Midgard.

6. September 17th came around and it was time for me to pay my first monthly subscription fee.

7. I paid my Monthly subscription and continued to play FF14ARR happily.

8. On September 23rd I got a text message from a friend in my FC telling me that my account must have been hacked because I was in Limsa Spamming RMT messages.

9. I checked my e-mail to see if I got any notices about a suspicious IP trying to log in, but all I found was the e-mail saying that my account had been banned for violation of the terms of use. Specifically advertising RMT in game.

10. I then changed my password and called SE Support to report my account being hacked(Let's not get into details on how much of a pain it is to find SE Support's actual phone number).

11. I talked to a support agent (after waiting 2 hours on hold) and they told me that they knew this was frustrating, but he assured me that it would be fixed quickly as they have been having a lot of these hacks being reported and he was sure they would get to them all in a timely manner. He told me that the average waiting period was 3-5 days and then everything should be back to normal. I thanked him for his time and got off the phone.

12. I wasn't happy that it was going to take as long as 3-5 days(especially when other games have a history of getting compromised accounts back in a few hours), but I was ok with it because I felt it was my fault for not getting an authenticator for the account in the first place.

13. I promptly downloaded the authenticator app to my smartphone and hooked it up to my account.

14. I waited a full week and still heard nothing back from SE regarding my account.

15. I waited another week and still hadn't heard anything from SE regarding my still banned account.

16. I called SE support again(waiting another 2 hours on hold). This time the person I talked to was not supportive at all. He just told me that there was nothing he could do. He said that they have had a lot of compromised accounts and assured me that they would be fixed in the order in which they were reported, but he let me know that they only send out notifications to you IF they investigate and find that the account was compromised and then they will give it back. I asked him what SE would do about my play time, since I paid for a month on September 17th and only got 6 days of playing time in before they banned my account. He said that he didn't know what they would do for the people who's accounts got compromised, but that he was sure that they would do something to make it work out.

17. I waited another week and didn't hear anything back.

18. At this point, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get my account back, but I spent the next couple of weeks going back and forth with SE Support, either by phone or chat support, and every time I got the same canned answer of they don't know what's going on with my account and that I will be contacted when it is resolved. (Not very friendly at this point either).

19. On November 16th, I finally got an e-mail from SE saying that they finished the investigation and realized that the RMT advertisements were due to a compromised account and that they lifted the ban on my account.

20. I was happy to finally get my account back (after 54 days), so I tried to log into the game only to find that my subscription was no longer active because the last time I paid was on September 17th.

21. I was unhappy about my time not being carried over from the extended ban, but figured I would re-do my subscription and then contact support on Monday to try and get the payments situated.

22. Once I logged in, I found that my FC had transferred to a new server (Adamantoise) when SE was giving out the Free Character Transfer.

23. I logged out and went to see if I could move my character for free still, but they wanted to charge me $18 to transfer servers.

24. I waited for the server transfer so that I could contact SE Support today and see if there was anything they could do for me.

25. When I talked to support today, they said that they would not transfer my character for free, they said they would not be able to do anything for me regarding the only 6 days of service I got, and also that they were unwilling to give me a refund for the current month of service I just paid for.

So basically because they took 54 days to complete a simple account restore are they are completely unwilling to work with me at all, they have just lost a subscriber for good. I can't see myself ever buying another SE game after the way they've treated me.

I would love to see others post on this thread about the horrible experience they had with SE Customer support. Maybe if enough people share their experiences, they will fix it for their future customers.

Also just want to thank the people telling me to use EDIT...didn't know that was the way to bypass the 1000 character limit.