This is ZOS customer support

Vatter

so about 2 days ago I ran White Gold Tower with a pug group. It took a decent amount of time to complete due to the fact that a few of us were first timers. We finally get to the final boss, get her down to about 10% and my client crashes to a ESO crash report. I quickly sign back in and when I do I'm outside the throne room. So I start making my way back to loot the boss, I enter the throne room and go to the side door and the open option is greyed out. can't get back in no matter what you do.

We spent about an hour and a half running the dungeon and now i can't get back in to get the fruits of our labor. So i decide to put in a ticket asking for help as in previous games a moderator will IM you within 10 or 20 mins. So I wait....and wait.....and wait....nothing. So I leave the instance and think maybe they are just busy and will get back to me later. Just a few mins ago I receive this email....

Helping you is our passion!

We will assume your issue has been resolved if we do not hear from you within 96 hours (4 days).

If your issue has not been resolved, you can respond directly to this email. We look forward to working with you again should you need us!
Subject
i am in the gold tower and wasnt able to loot the boss. now i cant get back to her. i need

Response By Email (Kenzie) (09/08/2015 03:40 PM)
Greetings,

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited team. In light of the excitement and great demand for ESOTU, we are currently experiencing high contact volume. We encourage you to search our support site at https://help.elderscrollsonline.com for any in-game topics or issues you may have questions about. There are lots of helpful FAQs and links to our social pages.

Most in-game UI issues (including NPC, quest problems and missing crowns/entitlements) can be resolved by logging out for five minutes then back in which will load you into a new game instance.

Additionally, other great resources for in-game mechanics can be found via our forums: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en

There are also many wonderful community wikis:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
http://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/

Please note, we have also recently released a new patch for PC/Mac including our first DLC game pack: Imperial City! Review the patch notes for all of the recent changes here: http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/category/patch-notes
Best Regards,
The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited Team

WTF does this have to do with anything.

And its not just this time. I've had multiple issues with the game in the past and received only generic responses. Or I've created forum posts for issues and the only help I get is from some moderator deleting posts or telling us to we have violated the code of conduct in some way. (obviously they make up any excuse they can to remove a post that shows the many many many negatives this game has.) And this has happened a lot. But this...this is def the straw that broke the camels back. why on earth would you design a dungeon where you can't get back in for this very reason?

lag, exploits, awful design decisions, disconnects, load screens, unable to log in, falling through the floor to my death, and now this...been playing since beta with hopes that all of this will change but I see now it never will.

I just wanted to rant a little bit and say, ZOS you have finally convinced me beyond all doubt that you will never improve, you have absolutely no idea what your doing and you simply don't care. You will never get another dollar from me again. ever.

snowmanflvb14_ESO

Well I have received the same response at first when i have had an issue. I respond back that the information they provided did not contain a solution to my problem. I usually then received a response either fixing the issue or informing me that it is being moved up a tier. Then I usually get a response in a day either through mail or an actual gm ingame. Usually the whole process takes a few days. Yes in some games they response is faster and in others it can take several weeks. ZOS seems to be in the short to middle response time frame.

starkerealm

Yeah, canned responses like that as the first line of defense are pretty common in Customer Support.

Funkopotamus

starkerealm wrote: »

Yeah, canned responses like that as the first line of defense are pretty common in Customer Support.

LMAO!

Noerknhar

Just respond to the mail?

MikeB

I was told my ticket was sent to a higher level of support over a week ago about not getting my ESO plus crowns and haven't heard back. I have officially cancelled my ESO plus.

SLy_Kyti

The Autobots, Dwemer automatons or whomever they've contrived to answer the support requests always do what any unsavory corporation does at the first sign of trouble...deny.
Deny there's an issue.
Deflect to other posts or FAQs.
Obfuscate.
It's only when one pushes past this Sheorograthian madness a possible ( but not likely) solution will be offered by a real human being.
In brief- the first email says essentially "hello we see you"...."human or bot?".
The second response from you tells them "hey! I'm real"....for me, my response is usually "Hey, I'm real...angry".

Good luck.

Araxleon

All customer support responses are saying *high volume* at this point I dont believe it...

Altaire

Sheorograth would say "You have been promoted to bug tester, which is only slightly better than a bug."

Personofsecrets

@ZOS_RichLambert @ZOS_MattFiror

Can customer service at least be allowed to always restore deleted, deconed, and sold items?

It is 2015, starbucks will replace a 6 dollar beverage on the house if it get's spilled, but you all can't give back a digital item, with a marginal cost of production of 0, if it accidentally is sold. That is a heap of rubbish.

b92303008rwb17_ESO

It's ZOS. What do you expect? The only thing they are good at is screwing their game and customers.

Noerknhar

The amount of "ZOS is ***" lately in the forums is emberrassing.

Why don't you guys just quit the game and do something else, if the developer and the game suck so badly? Noone forces you to play, so if you really hate everything that much, do something else and stop spilling your "ZOS sucks, ESO sucks, everything sucks" crap on the forums.

SeptimusDova

this happened to me with campaign rewards past 3 30 day campaigns resolution was a dead end escalated up one tier and walla nothing heard from since. Par for the course. I would give someone my stuff but why pass on the grief

Troneon

It's the worst CS of any game I have played. They also had a lot of their support staff layed off in Ireland recently so this is probably why. They also lost a few key devs from the team.

http://tamrielfoundry.com/2015/08/zos-cuts-support/
http://massivelyop.com/2015/08/19/rumor-more-layoffs-for-zenimax/

b92303008rwb17_ESO

Noerknhar wrote: »

The amount of "ZOS is ***" lately in the forums is emberrassing.

Why don't you guys just quit the game and do something else, if the developer and the game suck so badly? Noone forces you to play, so if you really hate everything that much, do something else and stop spilling your "ZOS sucks, ESO sucks, everything sucks" crap on the forums.

No harm in beating a dead horse. I am going to keep bashing ZOS as this is what they deserve for their lousy work performance.

Altaire

Anyone notice now much Sheorograth looks like Richard Branson the virgin airlines guy, maybe he'll buy the company, fix it. Then launch it into space.
Wait, last virgin space launch didn't go so well.... NM

UltimaJoe777

b92303008rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Noerknhar wrote: »

The amount of "ZOS is ***" lately in the forums is emberrassing.

Why don't you guys just quit the game and do something else, if the developer and the game suck so badly? Noone forces you to play, so if you really hate everything that much, do something else and stop spilling your "ZOS sucks, ESO sucks, everything sucks" crap on the forums.

No harm in beating a dead horse. I am going to keep bashing ZOS as this is what they deserve for their lousy work performance.

And you will likely end up banned for it so you might as well stop being a p***k and move on to something you don't hate because you're not harming anyone but yourself here.

nine9six

Canned Response. Terrible "first-liners".

"Do they even read the question?"

...no, they don't.

ADarklore

Plus, they laid off a huge amount of people at the Customer Service location... and the PR Rep said it was to 'improve customer service'. Go figure.

Mighty_oakk

I had a couple terrible CS experiences here. Basically consisted of me replying to the email saying it didn't work and then the next day getting the same email again then repeat 5 to 10 times.

Was during first month of console launch but I guess it hasn't improved much.

Thing that pissed me off was the 'we will consider this matter solved unless you reply' ... repeat 5 to 10 times

snackrat

I had all the nodes of the WW survery disappear after only picking two of them. (I'd guess they made me swap shard or something.) So I lost ~8 chances at some rare crux.

When I reported this, I was told to quit and retake 'the quest'.

Hmm.

andreasv

I like the game but have to admit their CS is one of the worst I've ever had the displeasure to deal with. Using templates and even worse was when they tried to do the "Hello Adventurer . . . " and sort of lore-friendly "customized" emails.

Anyway . . Have you tried disabling every add-on known to humankind?

Alright - alright - I see myself out!

Turelus

I'm pretty sure they have this one new guy in their team who only knows how to copy paste that message.

Merlin13KAGL

Vatter wrote: »

Helping you is should be our passion paycheck!

We will assume your issue has been resolved if we do not hear from you within 96 hours (4 days).

@Vatter , you neglected to mention that they likely changed the status of your ticket to "Resolved" at the bottom of this extremely helpful and informative email.

If you don't email back, they mark it off as good without ever doing anything about it. There is no "four day wait."

Their advice is to look elsewhere (wiki's/forums) & that nothing is, in fact, wrong.

The only ones I enjoy even more than this are when they take the time to route it to a second party, who then informs you that they're too busy to respond.

Molag_Crow

Hmmmmm..

Maybe it is time for ZOS to make a whole dedicated team of customer support like Game Masters on WoW? or maybe even Player Moderators who are able to teleport straight to players and help them with issues like bugged loot, or offensive behavior from other players, etc

/shrug

Lamiai

you need to respond to the email then they start investigating i think.

Nifty2g

what do you expect them to do, lol like really? they cant be right there for your email and teleport you in magically all they can do is tell you to repair your client. some people want too much

Junglejim82

Same response for everything . Still waiting on a human reply about mats bought from a trader and never delivered. Need that mastic zos it was effing expensive

willymchilybily

I dont want to bad mouth the customer support, im sure its hard to balance the morons, and lazy people who dont try to resolve the issue with information already out there, and the genuine people that need help.

But you do have to be pushy (but polite!) to get passed the generic response. it took me 2 weeks of contact with ESO CS and alot of self diagnosis troubleshooting, to get my forum invitation because i put my email address "." in the wrong place when entering it on console. I just wanted to play the game so rushed and didnt care if it was wrong. One of the guys even sent my new forum invite and the confirmation to the faulty email. but eventually you get there.

I think they should cut the generic info response, if they are unable to use it correctly. it only enrages the player, causing them to likely be less than polite. Then again i sometimes think CS sometimes like to troll.

Lamiai

willymchilybily wrote: »

I dont want to bad mouth the customer support, im sure its hard to balance the morons, and lazy people who dont try to resolve the issue with information already out there, and the genuine people that need help.

But you do have to be pushy (but polite!) to get passed the generic response. it took me 2 weeks of contact with ESO CS and alot of self diagnosis troubleshooting, to get my forum invitation because i put my email address "." in the wrong place when entering it on console. I just wanted to play the game so rushed and didnt care if it was wrong. One of the guys even sent my new forum invite and the confirmation to the faulty email. but eventually you get there.

I think they should cut the generic info response, if they are unable to use it correctly. it only enrages the player, causing them to likely be less than polite. Then again i sometimes think CS sometimes like to troll.

Thing is a lot of players think its actually CS who come up with the idea for bot/ generic responses, they have 0 say in it and have no real influence in how a customer is contacted, i'm guessing they follow the processes set up for them by higher ups who don't actually interact with the community that much if at all.

P3ZZL3

willymchilybily wrote: »

I think they should cut the generic info response, if they are unable to use it correctly. it only enrages the player, causing them to likely be less than polite. Then again i sometimes think CS sometimes like to troll.

Edit: Sorry, just realised it's a wall of text. Sorry

The problem with this idea, is that not all customer service people work with the same mentality.

There are a few, who genuinely love what they do and will do all they can to fix the problem that has been addressed. They will bend over backwards to make it happen. These people are absolute assets to any customer service group and almost always provide an excellent service.

The next group are those that are doing it as it's a job. CS Roles do NOT pay good money. You are at the customer facing front end. You take the brunt of a disgruntled customer. The vast majority of customers do not think about this, and just give you crap about something that is really nothing to do with them, they are just there working trying to do they're job to make ends meet. The nicer you are with them, the more they will try to help - but you put their back up, they will stone wall you. I know, it's crazy they are paid so little for such an important role - but management has and always will see customer service as a necessary evil. It's a cost they have to wrap into their product/service as it's expected. And things are getting worse for management. OVer the last 5-6 years with the speed at which information travels and how important peoples feedback direct to their friends/colleagues is, they HAVE to take note. Hell, it's even moved into Enterprise support where companies accept they MUST pay more for better specialists who know how to work with customers - hence the creation of "Customer Success Managers" in the US a few years back - something the UK and EU is now taking on.

Then you have the third category. These are the ones why there is a script in place and everything is effectively robotic and non-helpful. These people are employed simply because they passed a few HR questions and are cheap. Ireland has a problem in terms of economic growth, they gave crazy tax breaks to tech firms setting up CS and support centres over there. Because the economy was so bad, people had to drop their rates/expectations/salaries just to get work to survive. Not pretty, but true. So they end up employing people "Cheap" as it looks good on paper and a spread sheet, with little to no regard that this affects the attitude and demeanour of said employee. If you have a few of these people, who do get disgruntled, with free response/access - then they can cause a LOT of problems to the game.

It's not easy for any company to find the balance. Gaming has always had a challenge putting together a financially sensible, high customer service level, support offering. When you allow for the fact about 60% of any game budget is marketing, I guess it's not surprising. Support is almost an after thought.

Anyhows, out side of all that I typed, I've had to use Customer Support twice in 9 mths. Both times it's been excellent. The second one, was a very complicated and political situation and I probably spent the best part of 2 hours on the phone to a senior support manager in the US.