Share your worst DB customer services stories

DB's August patch DELETED my house and 700+ items. Fought with them for a month with very poor communication. When they finally did something, I got some of the items back. (270 of 700). Raised a ticket for the balance of the items. They keep closing it claiming it is "fixed." I keep re-opening.

My second worst is I tried to go all access for 3 months. Wrote numerous messages. They finally after months discovered there was a problem with the billing currency and they fixed it.

I predict the next horror story will be fighting for a refund due to them not delivering on any ticket.

I’ll chime in. Originally started playing in 2000; stopped in 2006 to get life balance in order. The game was consuming me and destroying my relationships. Fast forward a decade, figured out my priorities and patched things up. I decided to come back - with limits.

So, I wanted to recover my account. Even though my toon was lower than a heroic, I had a lot of good memories. I had no idea about password but I did remember my account ID. I contacted customer service and they wanted original credit card number, email info, etc. it’s been a freaking decade and I don’t remember. “Ok”, they said, “answer a few security questions.”

I did and they restored my account. Friendly, helpful and bent a few rules for me.

Good service, so I guess that doesn’t fit the narrative, but hey, it’s my story.

There was some server instability back in Empires of Kunark when I was camping some named in Chardok for an aug. I managed to get the aug, but soon after, the servers crashed. When I could log back in, I had two bodies. I did not have the aug on in my inventory. One body I could res, the other I could not interact with. It couldn't be rezzed or dragged. It was just permanently stuck there until it would have expired.

I petitioned and got into contact with Woebot, I think that is who it was. I told him what happened and got the standard "I'm sorry but we can not reimburse items that are lost during connection issues." line. I replied back, asking "Listen, do you think you could check that bugged out corpse for me? I'm really desperate for that aug and don't want to lose it." The next reply I received was that Woebot found that I indeed had the aug at one point, and put it in my inventory. I was quite pleased and thanked him for not considering the issue closed immediately. It was a pretty positive experience for me.

I've only had one experience with CS staff and it was fine.

First experience, I went to camp the SMR in LGuk for the enchanter epic 1.0 and binded myself outside the AGM room. I thought it was a smart idea, but I fell asleep on my couch between spawn cycles and entered a death loop. Lost a ton of levels, but a GM laughed and rolled back my character, lol.

some people just do not understand the assignment =)

I've had about a half dozen cs issues, all handled professionally and zero issues with how they were resolved.

If those are their worst experiences with EQ CS folks, then they are completely fulfilling the terms of the assignment.

That having been said, the OP's problem is not trivial and should have already been fixed. I have had a lot of good experiences with the CS folks in EQ. About the only negative one I can think of happened in 2002 when a PoP zone crashed before I had the chance to hail and get a flag. The GM's weren't able to help with that. I waited about a week and got it done.

I agree, been playing for 21 years and I cant recall any bad CS issues ive had with them .. anything that I have ever had to petition or open a ticket they have handled quickly and efficiently .. even it didnt always go my way but mostly it did ..

Now the Dev's . =) thats a whole nother thread

Fixed now, but getting my toons/accounts swapped to a new country so I could continue to pay them money took over a week and way too much back and forth.
I remember replying with something along the lines of 'Please, I really just want to give you money. Let me give you money'

Why so negative as to "Share" Worst Customer Service Stories. Would it not be more reasonable to "Share any Customer Service Stories?

I've been dealing with customer service since we used to call them on the phone and vocalize our issues. In all that time my Customer Service Experience has been Great. {From that statement take out the early days of DBG when they tried to sub out customer service}.
There are some truly Great people who work hard and care deeply about the game and the players. Sometimes things will go array and you will get someone who is new and not only doesn't understand your question but has no clue as to the answer. This is very, very rare.
By in large I couldn't be happier with our Customer Service and applaud them their efforts and am sorry for the insults received by people that want to turn every issue Negative.

Only bad issue I ever had was one of my characters somehow vanished, I had made it heroic a few weeks prior then it vanished after some of the well-known problems on AB server with lag & crashing back in the 2014/2015 time-frame.

For about a week of back & forth I was getting nowhere & I was pretty fed up, but I persisted.

I sent logs from the character, sent them screenshots of the heroic character purchase transaction but no joy, then a breakthrough after they found the character - but it was on someone else's account - and they closed the ticket saying it was not my character.

Another week of emails where I was diplomatic but clearly frustrated and some more logs and account info was sent, they did eventually look at the purchase history & eventually confirmed that I had a heroic upgrade purchased for the character while it was on one of my accounts, I pushed harder explaining I had never transferred it to another account it had simply been moved through some bizarre circumstances to another account, an account it turns out that hadn't even been active in years while the character showed it had been active so the mis-match between the charcater & the "new" account it was on finally made them believe my story - it was pretty annoying to not be believed I was telling the truth. They really did not believe the character was mine to start off and refused to believe that a character could be moved by accident.

GM did apologise for how long it had taken to get to the bottom of it & the character was moved back to my account. I wasn't very happy with the level of service that I got through that overly arduous process but I did at least get a resolution.

To this day though I still have no idea how a character from one of my accounts wound up on someone else's account after a server crash.

i had 2 krono go poof, the gm kept telling me that it didn't happen ... i would not let him get away with that and finally, after a week or so of dealing with that loser, gm woebot got into it and found i was correct ... he returned my 2 krono
other than that one time i have not had any problems with them and they have helped me several times in my 20+ years here

Justin "Woebot" is the best of the best! He cares as much about the players and the game as we do and will go to any extent to make things right. AND, as you say, the Customer Service has also been a great help to me in my 19+ years.

why so negative?

I once had to deal with a bad customer service policy but can't really say I have ever had poor customer service.

Several years ago during server maintenance my guild got deleted. When I petitioned I was told to just reinvite everyone. Not happy I got in touch with Smedley, who was president of SOE at the time, and he copied me on an email where he said it had to be fixed. They created a guild undelete tool and three or so weeks after the deletion my guild was back short a dozen inactive folks.

Apparently prior to this guilds would get randomly deleted and forced to do manual reinvites. Since my experience and resolution all guilds have had to do is petition and it gets fixed.

So in the end the system worked I guess. But as others have pointed out it can pay to push for a fix when it is due but doing so politely and respectfully will get you much further.

Out of all my petitions/issues there has only been 1 that didn't get the Result I was hoping for.

It was shortly after the acquisition by Columbus Nova when they basically tied the CS teams hands for a while. I forget which expansion but it was one with Cultural Armor/Augs. I had won a raid piece for my Wizard alt and began making it, I was using the recipe from my Shaman's recipe list and I ended up making it with the Chain Armor Template instead of the Cloth since that's what I had been making for the Shaman. I ended up with an aug that only fit shm/rog/rng/zerker on my Wizard. Someone else in guild had made the same type of mistake like a week or 2 prior and said just petition, they'll give you back the raw materials.

After petitioning and begging and even bringing up that they just fixed this same issue a week or 2 ago, they basically told me they were previously able to fix this but not allowed to anymore. They didn't spell it out like that or confirm that they did it before but that's what it seemed like they were implying at the time. While I was disappointed they didn't help me it was basically my fault for not paying attention with the combine.

I've had a couple petitions since that incident and they all worked out for me, they've definitely rolled back some of the restrictions they implemented at the start.

Change the dates a bit and I have the same 'horror' story. Spent half an hour on the phone, unable to remember my old credit card, old phone number, and even my old house number took a while to dig up (I was in the military and moved a lot). Nevertheless they were patient with me. I was eventually able to answer enough questions and come close enough on the rest to get my little monk's account back.

Once I looted something on one character when I intended to do so on another. I petitioned to have it switched and was told:

"Looting an item is the responsibility of the player and due to policy we unfortunately are no longer swapping items which were looted due to error."

I thanked the customer service rep for their time, accepted it, and moved on.

Seriously, that's the worst experience I've had.

Good things:
I remember many good interactions. Like me making the wrong TS raid aug for the cultural armor and them fixing it.
Once I got a TS raid aug back when I deleted it (before recovery was a thing). It looked exactly like some garbage item so I deleted the aug, not the garbage item trying to free bag space.
(apparently they should not bring back TS raid augs or I will overload their customer service)
Many many years ago there was someone who was obviously playing automated and after reporting them they seemed to go away for a long time.

Bad things:
Now they could just have a GM wander through EW, GD, Sathirs tomb, and apparently somehow dead hills and ban a pile of cheaters, but that is not happening.

Back on ragefire, petitioning with video evidence to report blatant AFK botting in one particular spot in one particular zone and having nothing ever done about it. This seems to be their biggest weak spot in C.S. to this day.