Not a lot of sympathy

wiz12268b14_ESO

Nearly 5000 posts in this forum with complaints, bugs, inability to log in, etc less than two weeks into the games existence. Not a true shock but still a lot of problems.

But how many people are REALLY surprised? Even the most blind fan of this game knew there were problems going in. Obviously the same old problems are still there, but the new ones that have arisen are the ones that are mind blowing. But not all that shocking.

ZOS has never made an MMO therefore they have never had to deal with customers or servicing customers. So the way theyre handling it (or lack thereof) isnt a shock either.

Seriously anyone that has followed the development of this game without blinders on saw these things coming or could anticipate how they might be handled given a 'worst case' scenario.

I just hope everyone who feels let down remembers this the next time a game is hyped to high heaven and everyone is willing to throw their money into a company and a game that is clearly not ready for release.

I thought SWOTOR woke people up but it wasnt enough. Hopefully the implosion of this game will open enough eyes so that these gaming companies look to have a quality product, which goes beyond the game itself and how they handle all of the business surrounding the game.

Sihnfahl

ZOS outsourced their support, apparently. Header information in posted emails indicates it's an Oracle-owned support company hired in.

randomaffliction66

What does this have to do with customer support? Also this game isn't facing any problems that any brand new mmo faces. The problem isn't the lack of customer support, it's the fact that people expect brand new games to be perfect lol, you can't expect a response to every post in the forums in fact they out right tell you not to. Which is why there is an in game feature and email support. This game is amazing imo and believe me when I say im the first person to complain, and loudly at that look through the forums to find my name lol. But seriously its brand new people have to give it time.but they won't because they never do lol its the same old story

Moobs

The game is fantastic as long as you don't have any issues that require a support ticket...still waiting for mine after 6 days but at least I can play.

I feel sorry for those that can't even login, they're really missing out.

But no I am not surprised, I've been thought many MMO releases and they're almost always the same.

Elsonso

wiz12268b14_ESO wrote: »

I just hope everyone who feels let down remembers this the next time a game is hyped to high heaven and everyone is willing to throw their money into a company and a game that is clearly not ready for release.

I played in two of the scale beta weekends and almost decided not to buy the game, especially after the second beta was worse for me than the first.

To say I am pleasantly surprised at the release would be an understatement.

Are there bugs? Oh, yeah. Did they make critical design decisions that I strongly disagree with? Yes. But, based on the last 11 days of game play, if they announced an expansion pack pre-order today, I would buy today.

felixgamingx1

wiz12268b14_ESO wrote: »

Nearly 5000 posts in this forum with complaints, bugs, inability to log in, etc less than two weeks into the games existence. Not a true shock but still a lot of problems.

But how many people are REALLY surprised? Even the most blind fan of this game knew there were problems going in. Obviously the same old problems are still there, but the new ones that have arisen are the ones that are mind blowing. But not all that shocking.

ZOS has never made an MMO therefore they have never had to deal with customers or servicing customers. So the way theyre handling it (or lack thereof) isnt a shock either.

Seriously anyone that has followed the development of this game without blinders on saw these things coming or could anticipate how they might be handled given a 'worst case' scenario.

I just hope everyone who feels let down remembers this the next time a game is hyped to high heaven and everyone is willing to throw their money into a company and a game that is clearly not ready for release.

I thought SWOTOR woke people up but it wasnt enough. Hopefully the implosion of this game will open enough eyes so that these gaming companies look to have a quality product, which goes beyond the game itself and how they handle all of the business surrounding the game.

i think they just gave up on us or maybe the auto replies were just enraging people instead of fixing anything.

sidecup

i'm pissed because i bought 30 days game time, can't play, and my game time is still being consumed. and i cant get a hold of support to stop it.

shadyjane62

I just saw that ZOS outsourced the customer to an Oracle owned company. I lol so hard I peed my panties. I told my husband he just looked at me and said get a refund this game is toast. Don't know if it's true but it would explain everything.

l-wilson-1986b16_ESO

Please provide proof? I have heard they have outsourced development too and as a developer myself (in a different industry) then it would certainly explain why the Army of Meridia npc hasn't been fixed in nearly a week. If any of this is true then I really do see the game going f2p, despite being absolutely incredible the lack of support will destroy this within a month.

Elsonso

Yeah, they hired a company to do customer support and another one to host the forums.

I am wondering whether the forum staff is Zenimax or a contract company.

shadyjane62

They may have hired them but maybe they didn't pay them since I have seen no evidence there is a customer service department other than a snarky role playing computer churning out canned responses and nobody answering anything on forum. I think they all opted for something akin to witsec considering the state of the game.

Eris

You would be surprised how many companies hire third party customer care management companies. The company that I worked for had numerous Fortune 500 companies including top 5 banks and computer manufacturers.
It is easier for a company to out source this sort of operation... the hardware to manage a call center is expensive and very specialized from the phone switching system to the network infrastructure and then there are the customer support scripts too. This is mostly for tier 1 support, escalation often goes to the company itself where they have a small center or a group that represents the company at the call center itself.

Saerydoth

lordrichter wrote: »

Yeah, they hired a company to do customer support and another one to host the forums.

I am wondering whether the forum staff is Zenimax or a contract company.

I'm pretty sure the forum staff are Zenimax employees. The only support that was outsourced was basically the tier 1 support. Escalated issues come back to Zenimax, and of course the developers are all Zenimax also.

byghostlightrwb17_ESO

wiz12268b14_ESO wrote: »

Nearly 5000 posts in this forum with complaints, bugs, inability to log in, etc less than two weeks into the games existence. Not a true shock but still a lot of problems.

But how many people are REALLY surprised? Even the most blind fan of this game knew there were problems going in. Obviously the same old problems are still there, but the new ones that have arisen are the ones that are mind blowing. But not all that shocking.

ZOS has never made an MMO therefore they have never had to deal with customers or servicing customers. So the way theyre handling it (or lack thereof) isnt a shock either.

Seriously anyone that has followed the development of this game without blinders on saw these things coming or could anticipate how they might be handled given a 'worst case' scenario.

I just hope everyone who feels let down remembers this the next time a game is hyped to high heaven and everyone is willing to throw their money into a company and a game that is clearly not ready for release.

I thought SWOTOR woke people up but it wasnt enough. Hopefully the implosion of this game will open enough eyes so that these gaming companies look to have a quality product, which goes beyond the game itself and how they handle all of the business surrounding the game.

how are these forums any different to any other gaming forum? Doesn't matter if its an RPG, MMO, FPS all gaming forums look like these. Either some of these people are completely new to gaming or just are living with tin foil hats on their heads.

Having an external company handle customer service is no different than having one under their banner. they are still hiring new people to help deal with new people, on a new game.

This game has been one of the most stable launches of an mmo in ages, that doesnt mean it is flawless, that doesnt mean their isnt teething problem or game crushing big ones. Once again those things arent new to the world of gaming. You use the figure of 5000, no idea where that is from but given this game is supposed to have 5 milliion accounts at launch, that isnt a huge percentage of problems.

People need to stop trying to make this into a "sky is falling" thing, especially when all the greats like WoW, EQ2, DAoC, SWTOR all had exactly the same things.

Players are expecting perfection and that the customer services are capable of inhuman amounts of time management. Time is the answer to problems, if people werent willing to have these issues then perhaps they should have delayed getting into the game.

You make this about ESO, yet what we see here is typical of any gaming launch. Should a game launch without any issues, no bugs, everyone can play, SURE, in a perfect world we can also have world peace... doesnt mean it will ever happen.

jdkorreckpreub18_ESO

Pretty standard launch in my experience. Nothing exceptionally great but nothing exceptionally horrible in terms of a launch.

byghostlightrwb17_ESO

shadyjane62 wrote: »

I just saw that ZOS outsourced the customer to an Oracle owned company. I lol so hard I peed my panties. I told my husband he just looked at me and said get a refund this game is toast. Don't know if it's true but it would explain everything.

sorry how exactly does having an external company handling the first stage of customer services a bad thing, that it spells doom for the game completely? So many massive companies outsource their help to overseas

You would very shock how many companies you think you are calling to get help, arent even located in the same country, let alone part of the official company you believe you are calling.

wiz12268b14_ESO

Always good to see the "(fill in the game here) had a bad launch its typical" comments. Some of those games dont even exist anymore and only one (WoW) even charges a sub, and if it werent for the way they do subs they wouldnt have subs either.

Now of course some games have some issues, but ESO has them all. Plus they throw in an account hacking incident and insta ban policy for good measure. Plus they still have it where if you ignore or friend or guild someone you can, if their account name is a common one they use, you can find out everything about them.

Then of course the bugs the phasing the instancing problems, and oh yeah you cant group with people you want to group with or at least arent guaranteed to all be in the same spot at the same time. Which was the whole point of making an ESO MMO right?

Hey look I wanted this game to be awesome, but when I first saw it in July I was very disappointed. But at that point it didnt look like anything. But as it grew and developed it surely wasnt anything special surely not what an ES game should have been. But those are opinionated things, which I try to keep away from. But since there is so much other stuff that is not subjective there is still plenty to talk about. So when you have that many 'buts' talking about something it just isnt there.

There are plenty of anecdotal issues people will remember. But (theres that word again) there are many tihngs that are universal. Those are the things people still try and explain away, which if that was all there was (with none of the other problems) it might be OK.

Just because every other game had the same thing it doesnt mean every game that will ever come out should have them also. I guess hackers and bots are OK too? because every other game has also had them?

jdkorreckpreub18_ESO

wiz12268b14_ESO wrote: »

Just because every other game had the same thing it doesnt mean every game that will ever come out should have them also. I guess hackers and bots are OK too? because every other game has also had them?

This right here is something that can't be avoided because of the nature of the media. I don't want to go into the methods used to create any of those things and inadvertently give someone the information of how to do these things, but it's very very hard to completely eradicate them, and likely it's actually impossible.

Vlas

You see... feed back and acknowledgement of a problem is a big thing for those requesting support. If you dont acknowledge there is a problem, then how do we know they know there is a problem?

Canned responses really do not help, and to top it off, they tell you they assume their autoresponse of "cant help you" tells you that it assumes your issue is resolved after a set time even though they did nothing to help you.

So... if the automatic response is basically a GFY response, then the standard customer response will be what you see on these forums.

Now, if an outsourcing agency is handling the tickets, then what is their process of escalation? Do they wait for that canned response to have a reply before they read it? Do the correlate the data and send it off to ZOS? How long does this take? Does ZOS have direct access to this or is it sent via 7 day snail mail? When is ZOS supposed to get back to them, thus getting back to us? When do they declare something a problem? What is their escalation procedure? Is the third party support company playing games with ZOS to increase profits? (yes they do this, I used to work for one that played these games because they got paid per call and found ways to generate more calls, could be the same here).
ZOS management really has to take a hard look at the support group right now... I mean deep hard look, something that bypasses those at the top of the support groups, because clearly they have no clue.

This whole thing smacks of and is indicative of poor management and planning coupled with a third party support group that is fed directives based on that poor management and planning, causing the customers (us) to sit here twiddling our thumbs hoping for a simple acknowledgement of the problem we are having.

So here we are...

wiz12268b14_ESO

Bottom line is before the game was released it looked like a cash grab with how they set everything in motion.

Now after the game has launched it looks even more like a cash grab. But now there is some sort of 'proof'.

They really cant seriously think they will retain any sort of players with what is going on can they?

I said it well before launch (basically when they announced the CE paywall and pre order wall stuff) that theyre catering to a very specific player base. One that has a blind allegiance to this title. Not even ES but ESO itself. Those that look at the game as if it can do no wrong. Which I never understood how people could do it for something like this. Because they have followed it? Because they have time (and sadly emotion) vested in it?

How people can become so obsessed and taken in by a game before its release is beyond me. But we see it time and time again. ESO is just the latest.

But those are the people who will be milked and will foot the bill for any progress the game makes going forward. Until its eventual transformation to free to play. Which may or may not mean anything. If the game is still unplayable performance wise, and boring and generic playstyle wise then it will go the way of the other games out there. Which is sad. Because IPs that would make awesome MMOs are dwindling down. And none of them to date has been done 'correctly'.

So again this looks like the usual case of "give us all your money up front and hope we fix everything along the way to make it worth paying a sub for'. Except they dont even look like theyre making an effort. Excuses of third party issues are fine and all but where is ZoS in this? Nearly two weeks in and its crickets. Other than three stickied announcements up top there isnt much being said.

oeb17_ESO

Launch was stable and problems aren't really different to any other mayor release.
Have you ever checked any other releases out there, which millions of people buy and wanna play ??
Every year a new fifa game comes out, every year the same problems, and that forum is exploding compared to this one, although millions are playing fine.
And fans of the game are still increasing, so something must be good about it.

Software is always full of unknown errors. Some can be fixed but need many pages of yet unknown code. others will never be.

Sihnfahl

byghostlightrwb17_ESO wrote: »

sorry how exactly does having an external company handling the first stage of customer services a bad thing, that it spells doom for the game completely?

Consider the complaints about the Tier 1 support. They have reportedly closed tickets with canned responses that have no bearing on the issue the support ticket was submitted for.

It gives the impression that the Tier 1s are closing tickets for high ticket closure rates rather than customer satisfaction and problem resolution rate.

KerinKor

wiz12268b14_ESO wrote: »

Nearly 5000 posts in this forum with complaints, bugs, inability to log in, etc less than two weeks into the games existence.

Considering the majority of threads are likely posting the same problems over and over and over ad nauseum the number of threads is irrelevant.

As for 'imploding' you're predicting the future and as such it's not worth discussing, you clearly have an agenda so I'll let you be happy with it.

Yshaar

Problems and crying on official forums? Welcome to the net. Check out, just for fun, riots forum for LoL. It is a complete and utter desaster. You might think this game is unpopular and completely bug-ridden.

Paradox: the more the pigs fly in the forum, the more popular (maybe good) is the game.

SavageHenry

I think we all should go to the zenimax home page and start posting there, because these guys don't seem to be in any way aware of the frustration being express on these forums.

drizzintahl

We all expect problems at launch, even big ones effecting small amount of people. But the support team combined with the incredibly slow bug fixing is just insane. Week 2 and we can't access end-game content because ONE npc that people can SEE isn't talking to players, that literally can NOT be a hard thing to fix, temp fix it, I don't care, give her the voice of that female from Bleakrock with the squirrel, nobody would mind, make the character model a creeper from Minecraft, just slap a bandage on it and call it good. Instead, they risk thousands of players who can't progress leaving the game and not looking back, no matter what they promise in the future. Fans of the genre have Dark Souls II on PC to look forward to this month, while MMO fans have WS and EQN:LM to hop on right over the horizon, and with the first month being this crippling, I don't see much positive "you should get this" coming from people.

Not to sound... important, by any means, but factor this. I know about a dozen people that love MMOs, and haven't bought ESO. They've asked me and my group if it's worth grabbing. At launch and prerelease I was all for it and pulled a few into it, now since the rest of the game isn't working and about 5 days since the groundskeeper bug and it hasn't been fixed, such a minor issue not being able to be fixed, I'm turning people away from it. If they can't fix this, they sure as hell aren't going to be quick when real issues arise.

Now picture the thousands of players in my shoes, with a lot of MMO experience, a lot of friends, and either groundskeeper bug or login issues or character issues preventing them from playing the game, they're not resubbing because they know the future isn't bright with such slow response time, and they're not going to be recommending the game.

I'd literally *** myself if this game is still around with a $15 sub in 6 months. I absolutely loved playing it, but MMOs aren't about putting up with a bug, people play them pretty seriously. If raiding was a thing right now, and another random bug came up preventing people from getting boss credit, or dungeons being shut down for days, that's game breaking stuff that is miles more coding than one npc's ability to interact with players.

MMO launches should have lag, rollbacks, queues, bugged items and quest areas, but anything preventing players from furthering... anything... gets immediate attention, and maybe a 10 hour server maintenance to fix it, even if it's a temporary fix. I could still enjoy the game with guild functionality gone, or in-game mail not working (though that was a pain in the ass!) we all expect crap like that, this is just something else.

Here's to hoping Wildstar's support is ready for the massive influx of hungry MMOers in the next few months

Getorix

If ESO still has these problems in 2 months then ill agree theres a problem. But as of right now this game is as bug free and more complete than any mmo ive played at launch and ive played most of them since EQ1.

And you cant compare this game to SWTOR, swtor wasn't just released to early. It was launched by people who don't even know what an mmo is. The more I play ESO the more I see that the devs at Zennimax know exactly what an mmo is and are actually dragging the mmo genre back out of the deep dark hole games like wow and swtor buried it in.

drizzintahl

er... how can we not compare a game made by a company with zero mmo experience to a game made by a company with zero mmo experience?

Now to not sound like an ass, or be an ass, can you state some things you've noticed in this game that make you say this?

"The more I play ESO the more I see that the devs at Zennimax know exactly what an mmo is ..."

again, not to come off like a complete ***, I'm really curious what people see in this to say something like that. I love a lot of aspects of this game, but I wouldn't agree with that remark, so I'm looking for aspects that support it. Again, sorry >.<

merced

the game is decent, good enough to hold its own if it were functioning properly. Sadly thats not the case, and 6+ days to address a game breaking progression quest is ridiculous.

Vyndetta

What many seem to miss in the complaints is that we know launches can be troublesome, it's the lack of any real customer service and/or communication that has people upset.

I, like others stated in this thread, have been warning friends away from this game. My suggestion to anyone asking is to wait at least three months before trying it. And, honestly, if the customer service doesn't improve, I can't see this game lasting long.

therasia2_ESO

This game is doing fine, they are addressing quest issues as they are reported. Give them a break, they are trying to satisfy not just a few people but hundreds of thousands of people. All in good time you will not see the issues that are in some of the quests. ZOS Customer Service has always been top notch, any change in that has to be due to the tremendous amount of players experiencing issues with their game and or account. They will do their best to assist you as soon as they are able to......remember you may be in a customer service que and your number may be.............599,999.999