A shoutout to the Zenimax Online team

Nyxeia · April 2014

Dear anyone who is reading this,

Before I say what I want to say, I want to make sure that you don't misunderstand me. I'm not angry, I don't hate the game, I'm not here to flame. I love this game and I see a great future. And no, I'm not one of those 'Im paying so I want a perfect product', thats not it at all. I understand this is a launch, and launches are always hectic. There's just one thing I need to let out of my heart.

It is so incredibly important to let your customers know about the issues the product you're offering them is having, they're paying for it after all. If you need to hire someone for that, do it, we're paying you a lot of money after all. When a feature gets disabled or the servers go down, you need to let your customers know why this is happening and whats being done to solve it. Not in great detail, but you catch my drift! Right now, all we're getting most of the time is 'We're disabling this, thanks for your patience', and that's it.

leothedino · April 2014

I couldn't agree more. There is nothing worse then bad customer service. I've had at least three encounters with the guys on the customer-care-counter, so to speak, and all of their replies and "support" has been as useful as braille to a deaf man.One time I asked if there would be a way for RP'ers to be seen and noticed in the game for easy access... and their reply was "indeed, there will be eight character slots for you to make different alts". Fun fun fun. Customer care lessons 101, that's what they need!

Ojustaboo · April 2014

While I don't disagree with you at all, looking at it from another point of view,

I know they aren't taking the servers down for fun or disabling the guilds just to annoy me, I know they must have had a real urgent need to do so.

That being the case, while its nice to be kept informed, does it really help us.

For example,

If they had said "we are taking the servers down in 15 mins to fix an urgent exploit", does that really tell us anything or would people demand to know what the exploit was.

It's not really a good thing to say how an exploit was done or even just what it allowed, because even if fixed, it gives certain players ideas to try and find other exploits.

Then you have situations where a few threads appear like today where people have lost their bank items. This only happened on the US server but I suspect (could be wrong) that had a lot to do with in game mail and the guilds being disabled for the EU players.

For every reasonable player there would at least one that isn't. If zenimax had put a huge announcement on the launcher that it's been disabled due to banks emptying, I think it would cause a kind of panic from certain players and would cause an influx of unnecessary support questions from EU players worried about using their bank, even though zenimax stopped the problem reaching them.

So sometimes explanations can do more harm than good.

But i also think how a company appears to treat their customers goes a long way. The official news and discussions section of the forum should have had info in within minutes of say the guilds being disabled. Something along the lines of

"We're really sorry guys, a problem has surfaced with the guild system that could cause huge problems if we let it continue until we have a fix. We feel the best option is to temporarily disable the guilds while we urgently get a solution.

We know how frustrating this is for you and it is being worked on as I type this.

I can't give you an estimated time but we are hoping we are talking hours. If it becomes apparent it will be longer or if we have further information, we will post here as soon as we get it.

We will, give a brief update every 2 hrs regardless of whether we have any new information as we appreciate how much of a pain this is for you.

Zenimax apologises for having to do this, rest assured when you are not happy, we aren't either"

Just a simple thing like that goes a long way for many players

Nyxeia · April 2014

Exactly what Im talking about!
You're making a good point about some information doing more harm than good, but there should atleast be a form of information given to us. Such as, "We're working on an urgent issue with the banking system" etc, that would make me alot happier than getting nothing at all. Sometimes there's information being given hidden in comments in people's questions, but this should be given at their official announcements.

I dont know if you've had any encounters with their customer support in game yet, but right now the responses you get from employees are of a very low level, something that I hope will improve in the future.

Thralgaf · April 2014

Honestly, the last patch, despite the long downtime was a freaking God send. Game is playing flawless, and continuity is awesome. Good job ZOS.

Nyxeia · April 2014

And yet their customer support is pretty bad. I think they should invest some in that