In our case, this individual that had the ninja loot had not been a problem for us in the 227 days he's been with us. So we're supposed to now Suspect everyone, and have no recourse but to boot them from the guild, but that still doesn't correct the loot being on the wrong character.
I am in favor of CS still offering to change items if the problem requires it even when it is a mistake, just don't delay real problems for it. Ninja looting isn't a mistake and anytime CS has to get involved with such a case where someone ninja looted, after talking to the guild leaders and other witnesses and removing the item, that player should be given a three day vacation and a mark on their account and require the player to be booted from the guild while they witness it.
Thanks for reply. Its a hard job. I will say this though, like life, all things are a matter of degree. If CS was delayed (Rank1) Problem by an hour or two dealing allowing one of my accts to play VS CS fixing a mistake a player mistake/loot that impacts my chars items for a year or more (reasonably a year until replacing item next expansion) I'd chose Tiered 4. While first might be a bigger immediate issue, the smaller issue because of its potential far longer time period actually is more important to me.
CS operates on the basis of good faith by people petitioning these items. It's simply faster to believe players petition and then take action. Problem is the small number of players that exploit that assumption of good faith to con CS into taking actions, If CS removes assumption of good faith then overall quality of CS for the vast majority of player that don't try and scam CS will drop. In other words this is why we can't have nice things.
In the past where I have ever had this happen on a raid, the guild leader, the person that looted, and the person that should have looted all petitioned, with the guild leader referencing the other two petition numbers. They were always promptly fixed. Really rare occurence, but really stupid for them to not do it anymore. Its a basic customer service complaint. Oh, wait, customer service doesn't exist anymore for sony. Instead they just ignore your petitions for 3 days and then auto close it with a note saying you haven't responded in 72 hours. =P
If CS is really getting THAT volume of tickets for this kind of issue, at some point I think there should be a feature implemented to reduce/eliminate these tickets. E.G. a mechanic that allows you to put an item you just looted back on the corpse.
Various ideas have been floated about, but it's a question of priorities. What do we backburner to move something like this forward? Until we decide to make something like this happen I'd keep the loot confirmation on.
Piestro, Thank you for an answer and explanation, late as it is. I can only hope that the only reason why this decision was not announced to the player base as soon as it was made by SOE was that you were in the process of being bounced around SOE and that now that you have returned to EQ it will not happen again. And if you are moved around again, there will be a process in place to keep us informed during it. I disagree with this decision by SOE but it is much better to have things explained to us than to have SOE slip in a ninja nerf. I would have thought SOE learned this over a decade ago but better late than never.
We made every effort to help CS be able to verify quickly and easily that the complain was legit 1) A ticket from both people 2) Both ticket mention both people and that you should have a ticket form them 3) The names of 3 senior officers who participated in the raid that could be contacted. In the end we all do pay their salaries... people with gold memberships, buying new content, and using station cash. They have decided to reduce their level of service and charge us the same amount. As a consumer I have a choice and I have options. SOE has been cutting back and we know that. You can sit there and say this is a pain in the to handle correctly and loose players or you can explain to the higher ups EQ is a very social game and if we fail to do this we likely loose 2 players (often more then 2 accounts) directly. Indirectly we loose several of their friends/family when we loose them. Each legit event of this puts 2 to 10 accounts on the line that will drop the brand entirely and SOE. We will become the Time Warner Cable of MMOs. We can maintain the current policy and accelerate the demise of revenue. We could spend dev time to modernize the loot system. We could spend CS time to maintain player satisfaction. If we want to limit the cost of this in CS time and Dev time we could provide CS with a better tool or we can limit the number of these requests we are willing to process per account per year to prevent abuse. Ok, that Time Warner Cable was hitting below the belt... maybe just some random us airline would have been more fair.
Are you really going to bail on providing CS on ninja'ed items and restoration of accidental loots? C'mon Man!
If it's another Players Error (such as they looted MY loot) and I am going to be missing out on it forever (or till it loses value in a year) VS Your being able to play short term. And by short term I mean under a day. I go with the first. while the "Quality" of not logging in is bigger, the quantity in this case (perm loss of loot vs 1 day of sub) goes to Quantity. And while I get putting your "never" in if its self-error, I don't believe whether its another player messing with my game experience or Sony's error messing with your game experience that there is that large of a difference.
From my experience playing this game, there are a few potential things that cause problems that might have necessity to be dealt by customer service. As a guild officer for at least 5 plus years now I guess I have seen a little of what goes on in the game to maybe make an educated assessment here. 1.) Loot - Once loot is introduced to a game, with many players vying for it, it can only cause problems. In almost all cases this is directly solvable by customer service. 2.) Design problems - something doesn't work properly, that causes users interruptions, quests broken, geometry flawed are examples. In almost all cases customer service can only provide a temporary fix, and it has to passed off down the line to coders, etc. 3.) Monetary Problems - subscription issues, expansion issues, anything dealing with accounts paid and other services. Customer Service is directly able to solve these issues. 4.) People Problems - Any game that involves a mass of people with an insane amount of possible interactions taking place at any given time, is a melting pot for people problems. Customer service can only indirectly help here, because any customer service decision is only based on the here and now, and the moment the representative is gone, they can go back to being uncivil. So in my eyes you want to throw out the one area of customer service you can fix, because it takes time to verify what is a scam and what is not? And completely focus on 2 of the 3 areas where basically customer service can only have a temporary effect. That seems completely ridiculous to me, maybe I am just warped. If you wanted scam petitions to go away why not just charge for the service, clearly that makes the most petitions go away. Oh wait, don't we already pay a subscription that should include customer service, maybe I am warped.
I suggest a new item tag NO ZONE (item becomes no trade up zoning). Boom problem solved. They could very simply just convert the current no trade tag to work like this. Which would have some additional , IMO positive, effects. Or with some additional work add it as a new tag to just the most current and future raid drops.
Having worked in CS for retail and rental businesses; I have no qualms saying that CS is not doing there job here. It takes time to get to them fine. Send a note saying with saying it may take up to X days before we are able to review the logs/talk to the parties involved and address the loot issue. We pay for CS service. If you don't want to do the loot and other time consuming CS work but instead only focus on the ones that are one off fixes, then you should just make it free to everyone. After all everyone can have problems that prevent them from playing regardless of them being gold, silver, or f2p. Also as other's have said all players should be given an apology for the rude and offensive post. If any CS personnel that worked with or for me would be disciplined for making such a remark to a single customer; making it to ALL of them would get them fired, with everyone else apologizing for it.
I like the idea of a NO ZONE tag on items, this will prevent future issues, since we can through the raid tool designate only certain people able to loot from the corpse, that lock expires after about 5 minutes, but that's more than enough time for a "TRUSTED" looter to be able to get all the items and then hand them out to the appropriate winners. It doesn't, however, fix the main cause of our disgruntlement in that there is currently a very time sensitive item that has been ninja looted on the wrong character. And in all this Sony is refusing to help, with a form letter style rejection: The item was not looted by player error, it was looted in flagrant and ninja form, we have screenshots to show that the looting was intentional, that the player knew he was in the wrong for looting it, and still Sony refuses to help.
Yes. Not only that, but the rationale given regarding the time needed for attending such issues is moot, anyway. Logging in and seeing and being scolded by an immature MOTD is jolting to the customer. It was simply the wrong way to deal with this (or any) issue which Sony may be having. Sony, open your eyes. And THINK. That message was stupid. We know you won't acknowledge this. Don't do it again. Bara
I am the one that lost the rare time limited cloak (Mighty Cloak of Flames) to the ninja looter. I am convinced based on the screen prints of the raid and conversations between him and his friend that it was deliberate. His friend sent me the screen prints. My Resolution guild leaders have said that they will buy me a better cloak in bazaar at up to $1.5 million plats, even though they are not responsible for my loot being ninja'd, nor for Sony's policy change to stop dealing with ninja looters. Now THAT is customer service. Sony should take a lesson.
I obviously don't post very often... the new policy is dumb. SOE has a choice of being cheaper on CS without just providing none.
