Characters stuck in imaginary group - Support does not even care to respond

Nightingale707 · April 2020

Sooo. Last week tuesday, this thing happened in my raid group: My raid leader disbanded the group and re-invited us all again. The invites failed, and as a result the group leader and a second group member got their characters stuck in a state where the game thought, they were still in a group. This made it unable for them to join groups of any kind (no matter if grouping manually or trying to queue for a dungeon or battleground).

Logically, I sent a ticket:

Dear Support,

after our group leader disbanded our group after succesfully killing Lokkestiiz in veteran Sunspire in Hardmode difficulty, me and the group leader got stuck in a state, where our characters are unable to join any groups. We cannot get invited into groups or invite others to group with us. We are also not able to queue for any dungeon or battlegrounds.

In my case the character in question is a breton templar, character name Lelyssa Night.

Please fix this problem asap, since I plan on using this character again tomorrow evening at 22cest.

Thank you

And I got an amazing answer:

Greetings!
Players who want to change their guild's guild leader due to inactivity, should first try contacting that guild leader directly or through other guild members. If the guild leader cannot be reached, we will need you to send us the following information provided below:

Name of Guild
Name of Guild Leader
Period of Guild Leaders Absence

Each case will be investigated individually, and we will take appropriate actions to match each specific situation.
Warm Regards,
The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Obviously this (bot sent) answer to my issue was extremely helpful. Still, I decided to respond to the email, explaining that it would be very helpful, if they got an actual person on fixing this thing.
And I wrote another email midday on the next day, since I had a raid sceduled again in the evening.

You are free to guess, when I got an answer to this: sometime in the future - it is not like this is a pretty gamebreaking bug in an MMORPG, where a lot of the activities are group-related.
It makes total sense, to ingnore something like this for a whole week.

And guess what: we had the same exact issue happening again tonight.
So, I sent another ticket.

Maybe, support can finally respond and fix issues that are actually preventing people to play the game.

Ticket numbers: 200422-010176 and 200428-005597

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Steenn · April 2020

I can confirm, was in the same group.
Hopefully they don't delete this message (like they do in Twitch streams) but instead open their eyes.
#FIX THE SERVER, the community is begging you!

SvariBK · April 2020

Unbelievable that this is a thing in an MMORPG i am shocked. Bugs are normal and it's okay to have them but this support answers have nothing to do with the problem even. Sure looking for keywords etc. but really? Imagine you can't group with your character with anyone else and are stuck playing solo/not at all coz you want to play dungeons or trials until at some point in the future this gets resolved.
I see ops frustration and wish you all the best to get it working again. Hopefully sooner than later.

Unbelievable really

HEIIMS · April 2020

I had similar issues when I couldn't purchase crowns, I too sent a ticket and got a bot response which gave me a list of things I should check, despite the fact that I specifically stated in my ticket that I already did all of that like contacting my credit card company etc. etc. It wasn't something urgent so I sort of forgot about it and the issue fixed itself after few weeks.

I'm sure that it is hard to manually check every ticket, especially when most of them are people not understanding/doing things properly so bot that is looking for specific key-words is handy, BUT in specific cases like OP here, you're basically helpless, stuck with a problem preventing you from playing the game (in this case all group related content).

Surely there should some sort of preventative measures made for specific cases like what OP is having right now, especially since they stated that they have sent SEVERAL emails, and the only thing they got was more bot responses completely unrelated to the issue at hand.

Best of luck, and I really hope someone from support staff sees this and is able to provide assistance.

IAm_Namless · April 2020

I was also in the group at the time that this bug happened [both times] please fix this situation and allow us to #PlayOurWay with the characters that we want and with the players that we want.

Pls help asap

Raisin · April 2020

Just so you know, updating an old ticket and/or starting a new one puts you back in the queue. So you reset whatever wait time your ticket had. Support has been completely overloaded recently and wait times have been slow for everyone. A week seems to be an easy minimum right now, as many people have waited far longer than that, so it will probably be a while(starting from the 28th, where you reset your queue position). Unfortunately I don't think the urgency of a ticket can/will even be noticed by anyone until that first content is made, so right now your ticket is likely indistinguishable from ones regarding more minor issues.

Not saying you're not right about this being completely game breaking, especially for someone who raids, but wanted to give some insight on the process.

@ZOS_BillE can check to make sure your ticket is in the right spot and moving along at least, not sure if there's more he can do.

redgreensunset · April 2020

Raisin wrote: »

Just so you know, updating an old ticket and/or starting a new one puts you back in the queue. So you reset whatever wait time your ticket had. Support has been completely overloaded recently and wait times have been slow for everyone. A week seems to be an easy minimum right now, as many people have waited far longer than that, so it will probably be a while(starting from the 28th, where you reset your queue position). Unfortunately I don't think the urgency of a ticket can/will even be noticed by anyone until that first content is made, so right now your ticket is likely indistinguishable from ones regarding more minor issues.

Not saying you're not right about this being completely game breaking, especially for someone who raids, but wanted to give some insight on the process.

@ZOS_BillE can check to make sure your ticket is in the right spot and moving along at least, not sure if there's more he can do.

In addition there's a pandemic on and everyone is working from home which further prolong waiting time. It sucks but that's how things are right now.

Nightingale707 · April 2020

Since no one is reading my first ticket, there is very little chance of my second ticket putting my first one back in the queue ^^

But I am now at least collecting entertaining bot replies.

Working from home should not prolong waiting times, people still work the same hours.

And one week being the minimum time until a support ticket is read by an acutal person instead of a bot is simgly unreasonable. If this is the case, ZOS needs to hire more support staff.
The fact, that I need to answer to an email, that a bot sent me, to get an actual person looking at my issue is already something that should help differ between actually urgent issues (like a character not being allowed to group!) from issues that might be less time sensitive.

I guess I will just keep pushing this post until someone finds the time to deal with those issues.

Once again: this same issue occured again within a week, while support still fails to react to the inital problem.

Skullderic · May 2020

Can either of you invite others to the group, If so try giving crown to the player not stuck in the group & letting them disband the group.

Nightingale707 · May 2020

We tried everything, the only thing that worked for us the first time is the maintenance that was on the following day.

So now we have again 2 players stuck in a group since tuesday (IT IS SUNDAY BY NOW!!!) and there is no maintenance sceduled for tomorrow and no word from support for 11 days now (the first incident and ticket were sent on the 23rd of April).

ELEVEN DAYS.

This has to be a bad joke at this point.
If there is no maintenance and support doesn´t bother to answer, it looks like our raidlead will be stuck with playing the wrong character for another week.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_BillE @ZOS_KaiSchober @ZOS_AntonioP @ZOS_JessicaFolsom
Someone needs to finally get on this, not getting a response on game-braking bugs like that for 11 days is unacceptable.

The characters in question are:
"rndm fgt" (@Schäffo)
"Budget Templar" (@Secilina)

asdruvalete · May 2020

i've the same problem

The character in question are:

Asdru (@asdruvalete)

Darenohej · May 2020

@Nightingale707
I have a suspicion that you updated your ticket, so it ended up at the top of the queue, but this, of course, does not fully justify such a long wait.If this is not the case, I think they will respond soon, because my friends and I also recently contacted customer support and helped us for 2 weeks.

P.S.
It's right that you make your problem public, so you increase the likelihood of being noticed. My problem was also ignored until I wrote about it on the forum. It is very sad that you need to complain on the forum to get help

Nightingale707 · May 2020

hey,
I actually did not update my ticket, I just sent a response to the bot-generated email (that is something you need to do, or they assume that the problem got resolved)

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_BillE @ZOS_KaiSchober @ZOS_AntonioP @ZOS_JessicaFolsom it is monday, and this thread is now being ignored for almost a week (in addition to support not reacting for almost 2 weeks)

Khuul99 · May 2020

This happened to a friend and myself as well.

Did you get any help at all?

ZOS_Volpe · May 2020

Greetings,

With there already being a thread opened on this subject here, we're going to go ahead and close this one down. You may continue the discussion here.

Thank you for understanding.