I do not feel as though there is enough support staff currently on staff to handle a friday launch. I don't know if the volume of tickets was more than expected or what. It's a game, seems like more people'd have issues on the weekend when they're not working anyhow.

Why don't we get official word on anything? Alan, Gina, James, the forum mods are trying but... why is the MOTD still the same? Why are there no news posts acknowledging some of this stuff, to cut down on duplicate forum posts?

If a company is going to use the ELDER SCROLLS NAME to make money, then it sure as *** should be ready.

Bugs, etc, I kinda expected, as should you all. I can't remember hearing of a game released bug-free lately.

But I do have concerns about the customer support.

They state we're not talking to robots.. But then so many ticket responses are as good as: copied and pasted set messages.

Again, I would accept these... if they were actually in any way relevant to the question asked.

??

seangcxqb14_ESO wrote: »

Many of the quests in the game are broken, despite most of them reported by myself and others in the beta.

The game engine is extremely buggy. In a one hour timespan I fell through the floor or ran through buildings 4 times.

The website is currently down, just in a soft way, a queue, for at least 30 minutes. This should not be happening when cloud computing is so readily available.

The forum software is terrible - there is no localization and therefore there are different languages on the same page.

The business practices are questionable - when we paid in advance for 30 days, our pre-paid subscription is being suspended so that payment information can be re-gathered.

Overall, the game clearly has a lot of potential, but I can foresee a lot of players leaving due to how poorly this release is being handled. We all expected downtime and bugs, that happens with every release of a MMORPG, but the poor handling of such problems, the questionable business practices, and the overall lack of clarity are likely to cause players to not return.

EVERY mmo at release has issues, bugs whatever you want to call them, heck wow was unplayable and pretty much unable to be logged in by a lot of people, FF 14 arr was the same way, if you got in on early access you couldnt choose the server you wanted to because servers were capped or locked and you couldn't access the account page half the time.

So before you start talking smack you need to look at the reality of what you're saying and what it means, it means that you don't know anything about what your talking about. The launch has been great with very minor issues which is usual for EA and early launch and the account page was handled very well considering you have an estimated million people trying to hit the account page at the same time and the company had the forethought to setup a que system so you wouldn't see "this page can not be displayed" as you do with just about every other company out there and most. Your comment about the cc, its pre authorization and anything debited is refunded within an hours time, its their way of validating the card as other companies do by charging you a dollar or 3 then giving it back in a few days, nothing new here.

You need to get off your soapbox and appreciate how good it is compared to previous launches of mmo's.

Just a note but after rereading your post you have an arrogant know it all attitude about the could setups, sounds like you should donate your expertise and time to help companies solve problems likes these before it happens, just a suggestion since you seem to think you have all the answer.

The launch has been great with very minor issues which is usual for EA and early launch and the account page was handled very well considering you have an estimated million people trying to hit the account page at the same time and the company had the forethought to setup a que system so you wouldn't see "this page can not be displayed" as you do with just about every other company out there and most.

The queue system is completely unnecessary and ridiculous. Do you think Facebook should implement one? Maybe they can save some money when they get a massive influx of people trying to login.

EVERY mmo at release has issues, bugs whatever you want to call them, heck wow was unplayable and pretty much unable to be logged in by a lot of people, FF 14 arr was the same way, if you got in on early access you couldnt choose the server you wanted to because servers were capped or locked and you couldn't access the account page half the time.

issues != bugs
When talking about issues, I mean the lack of communication and clarity with why players are unable to play a game with game time they have paid for, why they are unable to login to their accounts, why there are sudden unexpected outages, or why EU prime time is chosen for a planned outage.

Your comment about the cc, its pre authorization and anything debited is refunded within an hours time, its their way of validating the card as other companies do by charging you a dollar or 3 then giving it back in a few days, nothing new here.

Most of the players of this game are currently in a 30 minute queue with a line of over 100 people, unable to access the game they paid for. It in fact is new, as no other MMO operates in this fashion. With other MMOs, you pay for the game and and ~30 days of game time, and when that game time expires, you either enter in payment information or your time expires.

You need to get off your soapbox and appreciate how good it is compared to previous launches of mmo's.

I disagree. Less bugs, less downtime, absolutely. But the poor handling of accepting payments, giving customers what they paid for, and dealing with outages and bugs, that is a serious problem, and it's not one that every MMO launch has. A quick browse through the forums of any other MMO during it's release, and you will see that they have handled it much better than here, despite there being an equal amount of bugs, if not more. Of course the problems here are not so much the bugs, but the questionable business practices, and poor handling of service outages, which are much worse than simple bugs. http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=11&order=desc&page=4586 , https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/account?page=260

Just a note but after rereading your post you have an arrogant know it all attitude about the could setups, sounds like you should donate your expertise and time to help companies solve problems likes these before it happens, just a suggestion since you seem to think you have all the answer.

It is common knowledge how to setup a web application so that it can handle large influxes of people without resorting to a queue, and it is nothing they should need assistance with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)

Zero problems here. Like most people.

Still working on this list to send in with my CSR survey if anyone has any thoughts.

1. Game is missing some features I had expected, although my expectations weren't necessarily justified. Thieves guild, poison use... not saying any of them were promised to me, but somewhere during the betas I had formed an impression I could expect one or both at launch.

2. Game is missing some features that seem kinda standard to me. Number of chat channels... is low. There's not a lot of ways to filter by topic, basically. Zone chat could be much more, people'd sell spam there, but it's the ONLY place for advertising wares or guilds. There's no AH, where else is the socially disinclined PC gonna hawk stuff? Guild store, IME, you can't search my item name? When you filter by materials it is "show all", in effect? Haven't checked these yet since ~9pm 4.5.14, don't jump on me if they got fixed but there's been no patch.
Can't destroy items while they're in your bank? Have to jump through menus to go from personal to guild bank? It's just... I dunno. Maybe I'm over-reaching, but the entire inventory management interface is frustrating for me to use.

4. Forum needs more staff or volounteers or w/e. Lotsa pissed people, it pisses off more people, threads devolve easily into arguments, duplicate postings for almost every issue there is. Obviously (to me) the mods are swamped. Obviously, they are stuck communicating with people they wouldn't normally have to devote a lot of time to on a normal given day.

4. Is there a PR liason for this company? Is there a person who's job it is to communicate with the playerbase as a whole? It's weird. No new MOTD, nothing on the news page. It'd cut down on duplicate forum posts to get a laundry list of known issues broadcasted somewhere everyone HAS to see. Anyone who cares knows what's broke, it's not even about being upfront. The forum is useless as is, IMO, because everything is in a tornado. Pls. do something to start cutting down on the number of threads getting created.

5. Going through the CSR ticket system via email (and thanks again Hugo for re-opening my ticket, still dunno if emailing would've re-opened it automatically?) the forms that get sent out to show receipt, continuance, getting forwarded to different depts. etc. need some focus testing. I wonder too if letting us users reply by email is a BAD idea- what does the formatting of those look like, received,on the CSR side? I had a CSR close a ticket as resolved while addressing the absolute wrong thing, but I had replied over the course of a couple days updating them on what I was doing. Who knows what that LOOKS like to them? The emails I got told me I could reply to the original email if my issue was unresolved, but after the inaccurate ticket closure, when i replied I didn't get any confirmation on my ticket re-opening.

6. The credit card thing has it's own thread. I've got posts there.

7. No General Discussion Forum?


Yeah, I know, this is mostly useless to ZO as a forum post if I care. Kinda typing it up to send with my REAL support ticket closure, so if you have constructive thoughts it'd be useful.

Ahh the infamous excuse of "every other game...."

Yeah sure there are games who released with bug, but Bugs is a big term.

ESO has so much more wrong with it that i goes well beyond bugs. Just a list off the top of my head....

This is likely to be a wall of text but simply because the issues are so numerous.

Phasing, still and always has been non functioning aspect of the game. Is the major reason for a majority of the 'bugs' people describe. But phasing issues arent a bug theyre a flaw in the core system of the game. The overflow servers probably helped a little but not nearly enough obviously.

Accounts getting hacked. I dont think anyone predicted this one in he long list of predictions people made about this game, but might be the most negative of all. They claimed ot have fixed it but there have been claims made about stuff that was fixed that wasnt, so take the 'fix' with a grain of salt.

Related to that is the UserID system the game has. Basically if you ignore someone you dont ignore that toon specifically you ignore or are guilded or are friended with the userID of the account. Which can be in a round about way used to collect personal real life inofrmation on said person owning the account if they set it up with a conncted ID.

Falling through the world, happens sometimes in games, but not AAA ones usually, and certainly not as widespread as this one.

"Broken' areas with random rollbacks and basically non working. Vanguard territory here. Yeah dont wont to use the V word too soon, but hey if the shoe fits.

Shutting down accounts after the early access. Granted some games do require a sub plan in place before you get your 30 free days, but not many have been as strict as this one. First they charge the full 14.99 to 'verify' the card then if you dont set up the plan youre account is locked and then you have to sit in a queue for who knows how long to rectify it.

Random log in errors with so many codes and problems people still havent, after a week, been able to log into the game at all.

Insta-bans on a great many people for a wise variety f reasons. No questions asked bans or after the fact bans are as Micky Mouse as it gets. Someone asks for support and through an 'investigation' they see some fishy activity its a ban. Or things that should be investigated are simply banned for a couple days and then with an innocuous letter the ban is lifted.

Customer service, nearly non existent for people looking for help. Granted CS in most games is very poor but this one is exceedingly so. Phone support is the epitome as it directs you to email or some other non instant form of service. Which is why people make a phone call in the first place, to interact directly and in real time with someone they hope can help them.

Then of course things that are bugs or might not be bugs: losing all your Imperial and early access stuff, not getting codes in time (thus causing them to extend early access), bank vaults and other gained items lost due to who knows what, the UI bug, horse demounting, hirelings not delivering, and some obvious bug bugs.

So it goes well beyond just bugs when it comes to launches. Or being release ready. Most of the things predicted have happened, some have not, but there have also been some pretty major additions to the negative side that people didnt or couldnt have predicted.

But as with everything user experiences can vary ,but I would think it s safe to say that for a majority of people this is in the bottom half of AAA releases they have experienced. Notwithstanding the few people who claims they havent encountered a single solitary issue.

Again, the most basic thrust behind most of these complaints is from a lack of customer support. I think they just understaffed. That's not something I personally cut people slack on. *shrug*

Grjjboy wrote: »

I've literally had no problems aside from not getting Balreth's soul, which was fixed at release. Besides that, the game has been perfect. I think it's hilarious that people are bad-mouthing this game when Skyrim, after so many years from release, still has a *** load of bugs that were never patched and makes the game unplayable without the unofficial patches (you can't even get passed the quest where you absorb the first dragon soul if you have the last DLC, so you can't even progress in the story).

As for the forum and questionable business practices, I can not say anything about them. The forum was fine during the beta, I do not know what changed for it to make you see multiple languages when choosing one, and I haven't had to give bank account information (most likely because I ordered the imperial edition straight from ESO store) to have an opinion whether it's questionable or not.

NONE of Bethesdas games have been any good until guys in their basements fixed them for them. So no it isnt a surprise this game is riddled with bugs just like their console games, but the fact this is an MMO and the list I presented is what every company does that never released an MMO before it shows a lot. The fact that as you say yourself Skyrim has never been fixed, then how can you think ESO will ever be fixed? These bugs, issues, phasing problems have existed since last summer with zero ability shown to fix them. Just like a lot of the log in issues have existed that long.

Just because you think you have had no problems you cant really be sure because if there wasnt something there that was supposed to be there for you you wouldnt know the difference. Also just because you havent run into the problems that fill almost 100 pages of support doesnt mean they dont exist. There wouldnt be 100 pages of issues if there werent problems.

30 days will tell the tale and how many people are left or how many new people hear good things and jump on board post launch. I suspect the retention and new sign ups are going to be historically bad. Especially if (something I didnt mention above) there are problems with Cyrodiil now that more and more people are getting to a level they might want to go in there but cant for whatever reasons. Considering PvP is the only thing that is long term in this game if PvP is broken that is the end.

It's impossible for any system as large as this to be "ready" for the huge influx of players that will happen on release day. Server-related problems have actually been pretty minor. There are a few quest bugs that are actively being worked on.

The only suggestion I would make would be a web interface to check the status of tickets we have put in. I imagine the support department is overwhelmed right now (we can also assume, as in all games, that people are putting in tickets for things that in-game support can't help with, like putting bugs in /help tickets rather than in /bug reports).

Also, a right click - report spam option would be greatly appreciated. Right now we have to right click - report, then select spam, then type "gold spam" or whatever in the field, and then click submit. Streamlining this process to right click - report spam without having to type anything would help a great deal.

Why are people defending and making excuses saying things like " Wow had the same issues at launch"

That was 10 yrs ago!!

What has been learnt since then. Nothing!!