I'm honestly trying to be as constructive as I can here, but I'm wondering, what do GM's do these days? I've sent in several petitions, and aside from character transfers, every time I have an issue, I get "GMs are unable to help you with this, you'll have to /bug report or wait until this issue is resolved". I wouldn't care if this has always been the answer, but in the past GM's seemed to be much more helpful, and able to address issues that they are bafflingly unwilling to face today. Is this a resource issue? an attitude issue? I've been getting increasingly frustrated to the point where I don't see the point in doing even old (and still broken) content.
My brother was a GM for another game company. Their management generally wanted them to always say "NO" to everything, close as many tickets as possible, and only help people who cried extremely hard (generally the CS lead would do this once tickets were escalated enough). This keeps metrics up which is very important to the higher ups. Those with poor metrics (i.e. people who actually answered tickets) were fired. After Sony sold off EQ/Daybreak, they cut a lot of staff, including CS people. They seem to have embraced the "no" policy unfortunately. It keeps people from bothering to ask for help. I'm sure the TLP servers are a huge source of pita tickets as well. I do not think this is because of the GM(s) themselves but direction from management.
CSR w/ EQ has essentially become a self-service gas station, in which you are expected to handle your own issues. This is no one's fault, just a change in management after the changeover.
I will say I consider myself more fortunate than most in which I haven't ever really had a need to contact a GM but a few times; and even with the DBG takeover- I still have been assisted. I think it really depends on what the situation is, as I think there are certain scenarios that a GM is relatively powerless due to the new policies - there are other scenarios in which a GM can help.
Honestly unless it is a catastrophic issue or about the game H1Z1, Daybreak Games does not have time for you.
I'm not just trying to flame or complain here. I'd honestly and genuinely be interested to hear what the GMs are allowed to help with and what they can't. Even the raid race this expansion was marred with GMs "unable" to help with issues.
So I just tried to look up the relevant Knowledge Base article so I could link it here, and apparently it's been vaporized, along with most of the Knowledge Base. There's only a handful of articles left, none of them discussing petitions. So instead I dug up the original article, quoted elsewhere. The snarky last sentence was later ninja edited after people freaked out here on the forums. When you see people quoting that and the "reacquire" line, now you'll know why. Original article: "Updated 02/26/15 Game Masters will not be able to intervene with gameplay errors. Players should use in-game means to address gameplay errors. Some examples of situations where Game Masters will not intervene: Deleted items: Please reacquire any deleted items through gameplay. Accidentally sold items: Buy the item back from a vendor. If it cannot be bought back, reacquire the item through gameplay. Accidentally bought items: Sell the unintended item back to the vendor (not all items can be sold back unfortunately) and purchase the intended item. Misloots: The Game Masters will not move items that were looted by accident or sent/traded to an unintended character. Accidental item modification (transmutes, adornments, gems, etc): There are in-game means to correct this issue which the player should explore. Renaming: The Game Masters will not change a character's first name, surname, or guild name upon request. Name change potions are available on the marketplace. Guild Administration: The Game Masters will not administrate a guild or intervene in guild management affairs in any way. If your guild leader is absent, please create a new guild of your own or find another guild on the server that meets your needs. Deleted characters: Deleted characters will not be restored. Feel free to re-roll a new character."
Overall my CS experiences with GMs have been pretty positive. As for all the areas that can't help me if I screw up well... I just try not to screw up and if I do its my problem. It was nice when they had the CS staff to handle all that stuff but EQ hasn't gone up in price in a long time either and has a smaller player base which is something I think people forget. Just saying.
I've petitioned once since the transition to Daybreak and their new CS policy, and I did have a positive experience. Somehow or another one of my characters got bugged and couldn't complete the final part of an epic 2.0 quest. I petitioned around 1 or 2 AM and by 6 AM (EST) they had fixed my character. I don't bother with other petitions though at this point. I've been lucky enough to avoid deleting items accidentally and anything that's bugged I'll just do over again rather than going through the hassle for a predictable answer.
In general, the Customer Service went down the drain with the DBG take over. I had a petition right around the change time, I had accidentally combined one of the Cultural Raid augs wrong and ended up with an unequippable aug. I had said something about it to others in my guild, and one of my guildmates said just petition I did the same thing last week and they replaced the raid drop. So I went ahead and opened a petition and got a reply basically saying sorry we can't help you, get another raid drop and try again... So I escalated my petition and got the same reply. I replied back saying they had just done this the week before, the reply back was something along the lines of ya we prolly did but the new CS policy says we can't help with issues like that anymore, get another drop and try again. So basically any player error, even unintentional they won't help you fix.
I knew we would end up here when they started selling tokens to recover deleted items all those years ago. The devs at the time (some that are still here) said no way, that's not what they were introduced for . . . but what other motive could there be when they always reimbursed accidentally deleted items before that (and after . . . for a while).
