State of CS

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by Thorno, Sep 18, 2020.

  1. Thorno New Member

    As suggested by GM Serl in my ticket below, I wanted to open a discussion about the current state of customer support, or lack thereof. I understand that Everquest has been purchased by multiple different companies over the years and these companies want to maximize their return on investment. This ultimately leads to cutting costs, such as customer support.

    That being said, why would a customer service department fight multiple responses to a ticket of an obvious bug, with substantial proof of the bug, taking up these valuable resources to incite a customer rather than addressing the issue. My ticket could have been resolved more quickly by providing the item that should have dropped from *Faydedar as per my bug post, however, they insist they are unable to assist with this. I know of many examples where CS has assisted with similar epic bugs, so I know that this is not a true statement.

    So why would a GM work so hard at not keeping a customer happy, but exerting additional effort in ensuring the situation was not properly rectified and seems content to do so. Yes I sound salty, because I am. I cannot fathom the logic behind spending more resources to upset your customer, instead of quickly rectifying the situation.

    I miss the days of CS actually pretending to care. Right now its evident this has been lost on some of the staff. I know there are exceptions. That is my rant, flame away, I just cannot silently accept terrible customer service.

    Thorno


    Greetings Thorno,

    If you'd like to leave feedback on our policies and support, you're welcome to use the /feedback command or start a discussion on our official EQ forums. This is just not something we're able to assist you with and I do not have the reasons, behind the policies that are currently in place, available for you.
    Regards,
    Game Master Serl
    Daybreak Game Company, LLC
    [EQ] Official Forums
    https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php
    https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php
  2. Duder Augur

    1.) Did you ever figure out of the DZ was spawned with a loot lock out?
    2.) Do you understand how the loot lockouts work?
    3.) Who was group/raid leader when the DZ was requested. Have you gotten a screenshot of their DZ lockouts? (Alt-z).
    4.) 21 years of people lying, fenagling, omitting details, blaming others for their mistakes, insisting on faulty game mechanics when in reality it is their own error or they have not provided sufficient proof to show that it was a true bug along with limited resources makes the policy what it is.

    I support customer service being very shy to hand out quest rewards/items. Too much abuse has occurred in the past. Regardless, your burden of proof has yet to be seen.
    CatsPaws and Skuz like this.
  3. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    I have actually had nothing but good experiences with CS.

    YMMV, but I generally find that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
    CatsPaws and Skuz like this.
  4. Thorno New Member

    I started off with honey, and the lack of proper investigation into my ticket and multiple attempts to have it properly reviewed robbed me of my honey. Regardless, there is no point debating this here, its fruitless and I do not actually expect constructive action from this. Feel free to delete this thread, I am moving on.

    For those contrarians that would like to continue to pump up their personal CS encounters, have at it.
  5. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    If you can repeat the quest to get the item I don't see the point of getting upset with the CS reluctance to hand out items, they cannot & should not be required to fix mistakes made by players. So there will always be an element of suck it up buttercup crap happens & you can probably fix it yourself.

    If there was a genuine bug involved then there is a place to report that.

    There are occasions such as a mistaken purchase from the store which if you ask nicely they may refund & remove the wrong purchased item so that you can then purchase the correct one, but giving you something is really almost never needed.

    Unless you have gotten into a "bad state" which blocks your progress and there is no way to fix that bad state as a player there really isn't any onus on the GM to fix your problem, most of those types of problem have been fixed by changes to the design of quests to alleviate those things being able to happen.

    My own experiences with CS have not alwasy been great but where they couldn't help there was always a reasonable explanation. You were given one too, you simply didn't like the policy by which GM's must operate. You can debate whcih policy that is specifically in in greater detail if you wish but I suspect you will get very little sympathy from the players, most of whom fully understand that there is only so much a small team can reasonably be expected to do.

    As per Faydedar - you seem to think that an item "should" have dropped, I hope you understand that none of the items on its non-triggered version loot table are guaranteed drops, if it was the triggered version that you spawned then while it should have dropped an epic item for the class triggering it if it didn't then all you can do it bug petition it, GM are not allowed to give you the item, for all they know you triggered it, sold it & then wrote a ticket to try and claim another & yes that has happened in the past.
  6. CatsPaws No response to your post cause your on ignore

    Its not like this response is something new or something pointed just at you.

    Years ago I had a similar situation twice. Both times my petitions were answered almost exactly like yours but with the caveat that I could feel free to ask others for help or to redo the quest/raid.

    So the first time we just did another raid rotation and I again went for the item and it dropped properly. Now this was back when 20 or more guilds had to rotate epic raids so its not like we had a pick or got back to it any time soon. I think it was like 3 months later our turn came around again.

    The second time, I was really p'o'd at the response because I though I tried every conceivable step in the quest and it was still failing after numerous attempts. I was told there was no bug and to re do it.

    I carefully read it again, did the steps exactly the same (at least that is what I thought) and bingo! I got the item.

    So bottom line is I appreciate the patience of the GM's when I know 99% of the petitions are stuff the players can fix themselves. I agree with their decision.


    Consider this: yours is just 1 of hundreds if not thousands of petitions they get daily. You can fix it yourself. Just cause something can/was or could be given to you is no reason it should.
    Nennius, Corwyhn Lionheart and Skuz like this.
  7. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    I had a similar issue a few years back when they put the heros journey in, one of the achievments is to have both the augs from Hills of Shade. Needless to say I had better augs and had destoyed them

    Quests for these augs are or weren't at the time repeatable.

    Sent a very nice and polite petition and got back a similar responce to you that they could not give me the 2 augs because they had no record of me ever having them.

    Each part to make the aug (8 per aug) had an achievement which I had all ticked off. I replied to the petition asking for them to send me the 16 items instead the the achievments said I once had so I could recreate the 2 augs....needless to say when I next log in I had the 2 augs in my bag. :rolleyes:
    Corwyhn Lionheart and Skuz like this.
  8. KermittheFroglok Augur

    Pretty much just adding to the chorus to the OP that they tend to help less with user error or things like lockouts not working the way the player thinks etc.

    I've only had good experience with CS, worst case I've run into is an issue in Heroes Journey when part of a step in one of the Bixie farm's fetch quests wasn't flagging correctly. It was fixed weeks later in a patch and I was on my way.

    As others pointed out they often don't help with things related to progression because so many people have lied or gamed the system over the years and in some cases it's broken server economies. (e.g. fixing player's "accidental" transfers off Ragefire/Lockjaw to Live... The economies got screwed up for a bit when people brought plat. back with them...)

    To the OP, this isn't a new DBG policy either. SOE WOULD NOT HELP WITH PROGRESSION AS FAR BACK AS 2002. I was chatting about the old Legends service the other day with someone and came across similar complaints on old Zam posts from 2002 about how unfair/unhelpful CS was with quests and how it didn't seem fair for CS to help the Legends players that were paying more. (My $.02 was it was super fair because the Legends players were paying ~4x a month what other players were.)

    https://everquest.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=662

    If you want that level of tailored experience, EQ would probably need to charge the entire player base somewhere between $50 & $60 a month ($39.95 * (1+45%) , ~45% is roughly cumulative rate of inflation of the past 18years). That price/level of service wasn't sustainable even when EQ was more popular, so I doubt it would be today, especially given how common boxing became in modern EQ.


    The ZAM thread illustrates that CS really hasn't gotten worse, in my opinion people just feel more entitled today than they did ~20 years ago.
    Corwyhn Lionheart and Skuz like this.
  9. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer


    Contrarians indeed.

    I am not here to say I get my way every single time I petition. However, my petitions are constantly responded to in a professional and timely manner. My requests for assistance, although not always in my favor, have never gone unanswered. In fact, ANY quest-related assistance ( I have had 8 such requests since I started playing in 2000 ) has been denied. Whether bug or not, I was required to repeat the quest steps to get my item.

    Your disappointment is shared, Thorno. But your disappointment does not necessarily translate to a poor state of CS. It does translate to perhaps an outdated policy model preventing ANY assistance at all replacing lost quest items.

    In my view, if a petition to recover a lost quest item comes in, it only takes a simple review of server logs to determine what items were handed to which NPC. If the NPC and items are correct, then reward the item to the petitioner AND generate a ticket to the Dev team outlining a potential bug. If the NPC and/or items are incorrect - Sorry, Charlie. Do the quest over again.

    This may be what you were aiming for to begin with. However, it is not current policy. GMs and CS have very narrow parameters here. Even if they deemed your case legitimate, they are likely bound by the policies governing such cases - and summarily deny your request for assistance.
    Skuz and Corwyhn Lionheart like this.
  10. Thorno New Member

    Okay thanks for the feedback I_Love_My_Bandwidth, I concur with your sentiments. And I do know that most of the CS team has a passion for this game and does their best within their constrained resources / parameters.
    Duder and I_Love_My_Bandwidth like this.