Somewhere the Devs respond to Problems

[Kittra]

What the title says pretty much.

I wish we had an area of the forums we could post where we knew, without a doubt, that the Devs or moderators were listening and responding to us or offering suggestions to fix problems that people are having.

At present, the Technical Support forums, the In-Game Bugs forums, and Website Bugs forums have an almost 0% track record with responses from Devs or Moderators, while General discussion has received 100% of the responses to problems. There's absolutely no guarantee that we'll even have our thread seen by anyone in General Discussion, let alone the Forum Moderators or Game Developers because almost everyone posts there.

How are we supposed to report and get answers to problems like: Server Lag, Error 1014, Error 90000, Payment not being accepted with Errors 401 and 601, Payment being accepted but service days not being applied to accounts, Not being able to download patches with no alternatives in sight, and many MANY (I stress this to the extreme) more problems which have not been addressed or even been given a "we're actively looking into it" response?

The players are left with literally 0 customer support and customer service representatives (baring a few awesome individuals) who have absolutely no clue how to help people who have been waiting hours, sometimes DAYS or even WEEKS without a solution.

This leads to many things, most notably people dropping their support of the game, or worse, they have some influence within the larger community and actively campaign against the game which leads to bad press, reviews, and ultimately causes the game to fail again before it's even gotten a chance to breathe.


An analogy I would make is as if the game was a newborn and SE were it's mother.
This newborn has a stigma about it and it's mother has done everything up to this point to make sure it is allowed to live. But the stigma is powerful and others are unhappy and wish to see it destroyed before the stigma is removed.

SE is literally allowing unhappy villagers to come into it's house and slit the throat of this newborn, while sitting in the corner and doing nothing about it.

Why weren't the Villagers (customers) placated at the door to the house before they even had a chance to enter?



We seriously need responses to this game's problems (all of them) or it will die a slow and painful death. And by responses I literally mean RESPONSES!

You don't have to fix the issue right away as long as you tell your customers that you're WORKING on it! They will lose faith if you stay silent. Let us know that you care!


tl;dr version: We need a place on these forums where Developers and Moderators regularly respond to customer problems.


Sorry about the long post. I am able to play the game myself without the majority of the errors people are experiencing, but I really do not wish to see this game die a second time.

[Kittra]

I'd just like to add that a few others and I regularly view and respond to threads in the Technical Support forums and genuinely try to help them out if we feel we are able.

We also discuss the problems and actively look for solutions by trying to replicate the problems ourselves, but we are extremely limited to what we are able to accomplish due to different systems or setups.
(I literally spend more time in this section of the forums than I do in the actual game lately.)


Sometimes people just need to know someone else is trying to look out for them and solve their problem. In this respect, I ask that anyone (who genuinely enjoys helping people) would kindly lend their support to the Technical Support forums, the In-game Bugs forums, and the Website Bugs forums (we desperately need knowledgeable people to assist).


As a last note, I ask that the Developers or Forum Moderators or Customer Support to please respond to problems that their customers are facing.
Customer loyalty only runs as deep as it's customer support, and so far as we know, only the server issues are being looked into while the responses on much deeper issues are largely non-existent.

[ToraoKoga]

Um do you check dev tracker? They give us updates on their server fixes.

[Kittra]

Um do you check dev tracker? They give us updates on their server fixes.

I do use the dev tracker. I kind of figured someone would mention this, but I posted this thread with a sliiiiiiiightly different idea in mind.

I realize the devs keep us updated on their server fixes, and I appreciate that, but what good are server fixes if no-one can pay-to-play or get into the servers?
This is more along the lines of what I had in mind, along with some other things.

[Spectre]

You might be using the In-Game bugs forum wrong...

out of 2492 threads, only 303 haven't been sorted yet, which is about 88% rate of at least addressing.

Now I admit they might take longer then you would like, but it does seem to eventually work.

Post in there and your issue will be accepted as a bug, identified as a duplicate, or otherwise filed.

While it might not be the personal response you are looking for, filing of the report is a response.

Expecting Developers to respond to every problem is un-realistic though. They will respond to critical issues, but the Developers develop the game, they don't interact with the playerbase. We end up dealing with the Community team, and they are reliant on information and feedback that they get when communicating with the Dev team.

Expecting the community team to translate and deliver every individual issue is equally un-realistic. They have the task of sorting through the mass of threads ... many many more in the NA/EU forums than in other forums... and trying to find the critical issues and bring those to the attention of the Dev team. On top of that they have to mesh that with the feedback recieved from the 3 other language regions.

Not trying to make an excuse for them, but I realize they have a pretty daunting task when you look at what kind of feedback they have to gather.


However, you basic point I can only agree with. The part of the company that the customer runs into when they have a problem is ... painful. My own experiance was less then ideal.

I think they need a more personal touch with customers that have issues. I think they need better ticket tracking in-game. I would suggest that they take a page from some of the other MMO's out there as far as the GM services go and trouble tickets.

I don't expect to talk to a Dev when I have a problem.

An actual person would be nice. I don't think that's un reasonable, but as things are now, it's extremely difficult.

[Kittra]

*snip*

Sorry about the *snip* but I felt quoting all of that was a bit unrealistic (no offense intended).

I will say I agree with everything you said, including the part about using the In-Game bugs forum wrong (just noticed the "Resolved Issues" forums, which I assume is where they sort all the fixed issues to.).

I'll also agree that when I said "Developers and Forum Moderators" what I intended to say was "Developers and Community Management."
I do realize that both groups have a daunting task and that they can't always take the time to respond to every problem in detail, but simply saying that they will either "relay the information" or "look for a solution" is much better than the complete silence we've had to current issues.