|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:45 am
Before I begin my QQ for the day, I want to let everyone know the definition of service: "work done by one person or group that benefits another".
Okay, being my QQ/rant...
A few days ago, the Ruin Battlegroup all essentially had the same issue: the servers could not stay up. Sadly for me, I had been on Argent Dawn at the time where my two main characters reside. The daily heroic for that day was Mana Tombs and I had been running it with my guildmates plus a good former guildmate of mine on his alt. Overall the run was smooth and we got to the last boss and were able to kill him in one shot.
All was fine and dandy until we looted. A few things had dropped that were essentially useless to the team however, the plate shoulders (Pauldrons of Swift Retribution) dropped as well as our badge and the quest item (of course the latter two would drop). No one needed the nether so we do not care about it at this point. Just when we were going to take the items we wanted, the server crashed. A couple hours later, the server came up again, all five of us at the beginning of the instance with trash respawn. We didn't object to clearing trash again to loot the items, but when we were all prepared to start running again, the server crashed again! So, by the time the server would have come up again, the boss would have despawned, leaving us lootless. We would have lost out on three heroic badges as well as those shoulders for the paladin.
Before people go on to say "lol just wait for the daily again and run it once more and the shoulders drop again", hear me out. I had put a ticket in to see what could be done even if it be talking to a gm to let them know what had happened. I waited for about four hours that next night, all on my priest, before I finally fell asleep. I wake up to an email saying that the ticket was escalated. I didn't mind that, so I continued to stay on my priest, only switching to my alternate for Karazhan since she was needed more than my healer. I waited an additional day for a GM to respond until last night, my ticket finally stated that it would "be serviced soon". Again, after this message I waited two hours until 11pm PST (would have been 2am EST, the server time), then I went to bed.
I got an email this morning when I woke up and finished some chores around the house at 11am PST (2pm EST), saying that nothing could be done. It also said that the restore could not be done. We never had the items in the first place because before we could loot the items, the server crashed. Also, the time the email was sent was ten hours prior, which would have been 1am PST (4am EST). What bothers me is that both times the gm was on when most people playing on the United States would be asleep, and no one contacted me during the day. What is wrong with your GM department, logging in at insane hours. Or was it the easy way out to just say "we can't do anything" and sending a generic email instead of having someone real talk to me.
Considering the cheap automated responses most of us got for when the battlegroup went down consistently, this has left me in a crossroads. I can't just change servers since I would loose too many people I like working with for a server I don't know where the progression is or if I would be able to find a way for me to fit in as well as I do on Argent Dawn. All I just want to say is: what is up with the customer service department? It's sub-par and does not even attempt to HELP people.
There, I'm done with my QQ for the day.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:07 pm
Well, World of Warcraft was never that good when it came to costumer service. Overall in all MMORPGs, Blizzard's GM services are the worst in comparasion to the cost of the game.
The duty of the GM is to record what your problem is, then cycle it over to their superiors. Like a tally for the day, they count up the problems the people are having everyday, then they solve the problem later, most likely in the next patch or so, depending on the severity of the problem. In most cases, later on, because most GMs cannot deal with the issue at hand.
GMs follow a strict process which is basically step 1, then step 2, then step 3, etc. And it's not like they can magically make things better like Private server GMs can, since they aren't allowed to use those codes in the game.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 4:08 pm
Well, apparently when I had sent them an email...they contacted me quickly...geez louise it was faster for me to send an email and complain than wait for a ticket. We couldn't get everything, but I'm not complaining since our paladin is happy now. I was worrying more about my friends than anyone else.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 5:51 pm
i'll bet there were piles of complaints from a double-consecutive server crash. maybe that GM stayed up all night answering complaints while his family starved in the cold? did you even think of that? do you consider yourself a good person?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 6:32 pm
Kiloran i'll bet there were piles of complaints from a double-consecutive server crash. maybe that GM stayed up all night answering complaints while his family starved in the cold? did you even think of that? do you consider yourself a good person?
No, apparently that was his normal shift. Apparently I am very unlucky in getting the late night GMs to handle my tickets. The GMs have to be prepared for such a situation and they did handle it very well. However, it's the attitude like what you said as well as the people on the WoW forums that said it too that really ticked me off. Just shrugging it off saying that nothing could be done. However, something was done this time because I was being persistent and the items did get distributed.
Think about it from your frame of reference. Mine is that customer service is paramount over most things. Because, well, there are always other options. I can just as easily walk off and start playing another MMO. I have been recently looking into such a thing and have Beta'd Shaiya since it came out and really loved it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 6:44 pm
i was kidding.
customer service is nice but not needing it is nicer, i say. servers seldom have problems anymore (I can't speak for all of them, but a lot of them). GMs also run like 10 or 20+ servers at a time, so expecting fast service is unreasonable, and it will be like that on any large-scale mmo like WoW is (i doubt there's many others on the same scale, but WoW definitely opened up the industry).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 7:47 pm
Kiloran i was kidding. customer service is nice but not needing it is nicer, i say. servers seldom have problems anymore (I can't speak for all of them, but a lot of them). GMs also run like 10 or 20+ servers at a time, so expecting fast service is unreasonable, and it will be like that on any large-scale mmo like WoW is (i doubt there's many others on the same scale, but WoW definitely opened up the industry).
Yeah, that part I understand. The Ruin Battlegroup as a whole has been going through this phase again where it's crashing every weekend for a few hours. Enough for me to get a priest alt to 15 and a mage alt to 10 in the past two weeks on another server. It really does tick me off that we are going through this again.
On a side note: Argent Dawn goes down, we all go to Blackrock.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 10:39 pm
Given the amount of tickets these GMs have to go through at any given moment, talking with people, trying to figure out if they can do anything, listening to assholes complain endlessly about the game to the point where they want to quit, and all this s**t the GMs put up with, I can forgive the long, long wait times. However I agree, the attitude they take with you should always be friendly, helpful, and understanding. Theres no reason for them not to, unless you're being verbally abusive.
Its a tough job, but theres no reason they cant act with a little friendliness.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:26 am
GMs used to be pretty good. I was having some pretty extreme harassment issues over several months when an immature little girl kept making new characters to harass me which I kept immediately /ignoring and reporting each time she harassed me. Not only did she break pretty much every harassment policy, but she circumvented the /ignore system so many times that she SHOULD have gotten some type of ban, but she never did.
I kept going back and forth with GMs and was told it would simply be "investigated," but nothing ever happened. Had quite a few emails going back with them, I called on multiple occasions - it kept continuing. This girl's boyfriends (multiple) got in on it as well. What was she so upset about, you wonder? She wanted to use myself and my boyfriend as free therapists and didn't understand when we said we didn't want to hear about her problems. I think she had borderline personality disorder - that is, if she didn't get what she wanted or attention, she would make up drastically horrible stories to get attention and pity from people. Which is sad in itself, but claiming to be raped on a frequent basis and claiming to have continual miscarriages in order to get attention is pretty pathetic.
I had my life threatened, my boyfriend's life threatened, the lives of my friends... I was told how she wanted to kill me and how she would go about doing it, that I should be raped in all sorts of different methods... you name it. Apparently reporting all of this extreme behavior, which happened almost daily at several periods over a course of three months, was "not bad enough" to get the GMs to help me. Just that it would be "investigated" and that if I felt threatened, I should call the police.
Yeah, because you know how seriously the police take what happens in an online video game. It's BLIZZARD'S game, they should be the ones policing THEIR OWN policies!
It got so bad enough that my boyfriend and I transferred off the server... our friends followed. I can't help but feel this is what Blizzard wanted. I remember when I was harassed in the past prior to transfers being available, they always helped...
I have no faith in GMs anymore.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 9:16 am
I'm sure that everyone has seen that wall of text terms and conditions thingy that pops up after each patch requiring you to click "accept" before you can continue on. Basically all it boils down to is that you have to pay Blizzard 15 dollars a month to play their game and that they don't have to do anything they don't want to do. Yes, you pretty much click away all of your legal rights, so even though the OP has some valid complaints, there isn't anything that you can do about it.
The software industry in general always works like this because they know it is completely impossible to bulletproof their products. Every software on the market (including WoW) is riddled with bugs and the software producers/seller know it. Therefore they put all of this legal shielding up to protect themselves from unforeseen consequences resulting from software malfunctions. Unforeseen consequences exactly like the OP describes.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
