TL;DR: Game is a lot better than launch. Submitted three customer service tickets, all of which received "standard form responses" with no evidence of individual attention (not referring to the auto-responses), hoping that this will change in future

Hi, I'm posting this to provide some feedback to the ZOS team. To preface this, I'm an international player played the game on and off since launch. Bought it, paid the monthly fee, continued subscribing as long as I was playing - the whole package. I haven't played in a year, and am back to play the DLCs and to rejoin all of you in experiencing the game during my summer break from work.

As a massive fan of the single player Elder Scrolls series, I have thoroughly enjoyed many aspects of the game. While the "MMO" features can be improved further, I like that I can just turn off zone/guild chat and enjoy the game for the awesome single player reminiscent of TES series. Unlike 99% of the other MMOs I have played, this game is actually fully voice acted and this contributes massively to immersion for me. Combat is fast paced. I actually like the OST so I don't put on my own music like in other MMOs, and even turn the volume up (especially at the login screen). The frequent content updates to the already massive game means no content droughts for a casual player like me.

Having said the above, a few issues remain - latency, the lack of a substantial OCX/SEA playerbase on NA/PC, the highly unpopular recent changes to animation priority, long loadscreens in PVP, fluctuating latencies, etc. Every MMO has issues and these are things which the ZOS team has been working on, to what degree of success I have less credibility to comment as someone who hasn't played in a year. If you've played the game for a long time like me, you probably remember the days where a far more substantial amount of quests were bugged and everyone wore a skirt and stick. Many of this issues have been fixed or substantially improved - including the crashes and long load screens, the annoying amount of inventory management we had to do, grouping, etc. However, I think that the ZOS team needs to review its customer service philosophy. I now come to the main point of this post.

Over the past week I have submitted a total of three tickets ( #160705-002052, #160704-000602, #160705-002052, in that order) with regards to a quest that is only bugged for one of my characters. The second was accidentally submitted because of in-game lag which resulted in me thinking that it had not been submitted. In my first ticket, I explained my issue and received an auto-response. It was not helpful because I had already attempted all of the listed solutions beforehand (and more) - I belong to the age where the game was known to be the elder bugs online. I replied stating so and explaining the issue in more detail. A customer service officer replied to inform me that he was passing my issue to the development team and that I would not receive anymore replies. My second ticket received the exact same treatment and that was when I started to suspect that no attempts as making any investigation was made

I was absolutely sure that it was only bugged for that particular character because others in the zone have completed the quest before my eyes and I managed to complete it on another character. I decided I would troubleshoot the issue and as a backend developer myself I submitted another ticket (I could not update the previous two because they were marked as "solved") indicating what I thought to be the issue. In this ticket, I described the issue in full details of my character and the quest, complete with screenshots and videos, and suggested what the solution might be. I also explicitly stated that I had already attempted all the suggested solutions in the auto-response, but to no avail. Quite interestingly, the customer service officer who responded sent me almost the exact same response as my previous two tickets, suggesting nothing in addition to the auto-response

I am no completionist by any measure and can deal with a broken quest. But this is particularly disappointing because it is clear to me now that i) no attempt has been made at investigating my issue individually, ii) my ticket was either not read or not read carefully (I put quite a number of asterisks behind the fact that I had already attempted all the suggested solutions), iii) customer service can do nothing but to pass on ingame issues to the development team. In which case, why not simply append the auto-response to the ticket submission form and state that if the ticket is submitted anyway it will be forwarded to the devs with no reply?

The reason why I'm posting this on the forums when I think it would be more appropriate to submit as feedback through support is that I am concerned that it would be treated the same way my support tickets were. Please don't misunderstand - this is not a flamebait against CS. I should mention that customer service was better at launch, with officers at least bothering to investigate on their backend (they even called me when I am an international customer). Not to be snarky but if I resub, can l get the same quality of customer service back? I have played a number of AAA MMOs and the general sentiment I am getting (both on the forums and ingame) is that customer service in ESO may be wanting. Perhaps update 12 will feature some customer service improvements? As I see it, this will go some way in achieving what the recent rollouts are trying to achieve - a bigger population

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom For your kind perusal please. You might also want to take a look at some of the threads which have received responses but have not received any updates for some time (e.g. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/269046/light-attacking-is-broken-and-animation-priority is quite persistent on my feed)