The worst customer support experience of my entire life

[Jojoya]

The quality of the customer service has been hit or miss all along.

When it comes to account compromises, it's always been a huge miss. The wait time before they do the rollback is excessive so the player either has to stop playing completely or have 2 weeks of progress wasted when it's lost in the rollback. That's rather insane considering most of the time all that is needed is for customer support to restore gil to the account.

The only thing that seems to be new in your case is that the AI is automatically assigning your account to rollback instead of asking for your consent. In the past, the customer was asked for consent.

Players have been telling SE for years that they would get a lot more customers if they would improve their accounts system and their customer service but like most companies they penny pinch on those things and hope their product will suffice to retain the customer. If FFXIV is truly what is keeping SE afloat right now, maybe they'll finally listen and spend a little bit more on quality to attract and retain more customers.

But probably not.

[1313]

Yeah they don't seem to handle these issues in a manner that makes me think they care at all about their customers. Like the guy who got hacked but couldn't even get a rollback because they wanted photo ID, something the person couldn't obtain since they got robbed irl and can't replace any of their ID at all. They offered the only photo ID they had, just to be told it's not valid. But with nobody else even attempting to reach SE support or trying to claim the account they could have very easily just asked some security questions to validate the owner. Nope. They don't need ID to make the account but can't get a rollback without it. Dude got treated like an alien by his own government and SE. Super sad times. So others reading this who haven't had this type of problem, get your 2fa enabled and make sure you keep your ID safe and up to date.

[Araxes]

I do not hope to fix anything with this post regarding my problem, but I feel obligated to bring my case to light due to how terrible the entire situation has been handled in hopes that no one else suffers the same fate as I did

So first things first my account got hacked, if that happened due to a virus or because some super hacker randomly got my password that does not anger me, after all it's just an accident and that is fine.
However, the day after that when I woke up and logged in to find a total of more than 70 million gil gone across my inventory+company chest
Fine I tough, I'm going to write a customer ticket to see if they can recover my gil
Not only did it take almost 2 full days to get an automated answer, but I also got a full rollback to DAYS BEFORE my Gil got stolen despite me writing down in the ticket the exact date of when the hacker logged in thanks to the mogstation log check system
I wasn't even asked if I was fine with the FULL ROLLBACK of my account before it got done, and I lost 2 entire weeks of savage progress rewards and tomestone rewards
I can't even farm them back because it already counts as done for this week, so basically more than 40 hours of m1s m2s and m3s are completely gone and thrown into the gutter
Well I guess that is a fine way to get my Gil back I suppose.
Well actually I did not even get a third of what was lost (Got back around 24 million Gil)
And even lost savage rewards from BEFORE the hacked logged in from another country which I SPECIFIED in the report the exact hour of the log in
Well I guess that's ok, I will take the loss and ask them to revert the rollback since the Gil is less important than the weekly rewards
Nope, automated response saying they can't do any more rollbacks or changes into my account and that I need to be ok with it
After contacting support, my account is now in a worse state than it was previously before asking
Never in my life have I feel so distended by a company I have been with for more than 4 years and paid hundreds of Eur just in monthly subs
I hope someone who reads this thinks twice before using support and how to contact them because this feels completly unaceptable on my part and it doesn't feel like it deserves a monthly sub just to be treated like this

When i transfered from a full to a empty World with applied Bonuses and no restrictions of how much Gil you can take with you, i lost over 90 million Gil due to a Transfer Error on THEIR side. Weeks of Ticket writing just to get the answer: Nope we won't help you.
(ofc they did not write it exactly like that but what they wrote had the same meaning). That was years ago but it destroyed any trust or confidence i had with the Companies support.

SE's support is just there so they can say they have one. Most of the times you will not get any help.
There is after all a reason SE's support is considered one of the worst in the entire industry.

[lolnotacat]

What is it with popular MMOs and having absolutely dog★★★★ support? I can almost sympathize with the fact that Blizzard pretty much completely automated theirs... almost.

I can shed some light on that. I've been in the game industry for about 10 years and got my start in CS. First, dogshit support isn't just a large MMO thing, there's plenty of smaller companies that have it too. But bad support stems from a lot of different things.

*Bad tools. A lot of companies won't give their support agents proper tools. Or they did give them proper tools when the game first came out, but they didn't scale with new features that were added. This forces CS to gaslight & deflect and regularly respond with "Sorry we can't do more." Because it's the truth.

*Bad Training. It's pretty common for companies to hire someone with little/no experience. Give them a very basic overview of the tools & policies and let them sink or swim. This isn't 100% the company's fault either. CS is a soul draining experience, even when you are properly supported by the development teams. There's a lot of turnover and some companies have learned that it's easier just to let the wheat and chaff sort themselves out.

*Bad developer support. Many companies pretty much leave CS on their own and out to dry, especially the large ones. It's probably worse with Squenix because CS and developers aren't from the same country, timezone, or even speak the same language. They probably can't directly contact the person who made a feature and ask for more explanation. This means that they probably have to rely on confluence, jira, or other means of communication to understand features, bugs, etc... And to top it all off, it's even slower and more cumbersome because of the communication barrier. If there's someone in charge of communicating with developers who's malicious, inept, or egotistical, they can easily mis-prioritize issues.

*Outsourcing and AI. Unlike a lot of people, I actually appreciate good outsourcing and AI in customer support, but the problem is, it's rarely ever "good". Outsourcing and AI should be for simple issues which can be automated with a low risk of harming the customer interaction, but in most cases management has determined that some players being unhappy is fine because of the cost savings expanded AI or an outsourced team with expanded responsibilities brings to the table. Of course, both AI and outsourcing compound the 3 previous problems.

*Value. Most companies do not see CS as a department which adds value to the company. They see CS purely as a cost and fail to understand how easy it is to lose (or save) a customer because of the support experience they received. This is even worse in gaming/entertainment in my experience.

[1313]

I sent in a ticket a few days ago regarding the problems surrounding data center travel problems, and the reply they sent me today asked me to fill out a bug report when I was trying to get help with a home world transfer. These people either cannot read, or they are 5 cent broken ass chatbots. I really hope i get ahold of a decent human being who will actually help.

[WantlessYoYo]

Doesn't help their pages for those are freaking archaic

The fact the best option I have in 2024 to contact them is an EMAIL is just laughable
The few times I've had to contact customer support it's been hell on earth and wouldn't want it to literally anyone

So sorry you had to go through this and your loss on items, but man, please can they update their 2008 pages already