Tag Archives: swtor

Customer service is becoming an artifact of a time that has long since passed

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The other night I was watching Game of Thrones on HBO Now through my Apple TV (yes, how many products can I mention in one sentence?). Up until now, Apple TV and HBO Now has been a great service where I’ve really enjoyed the shows and the quality used to bring them to me. However, on this evening (and the following week), I discovered that the sound for Game of Thrones is horrible, to the point where I couldn’t hear the dialogue at all. I ended up turning up the sound on my television to practically maximum and still couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. When the show ended, the sound kicked back in and nearly blew out the speakers in my TV. Both weeks, I’ve been unable to hear the sound on this one show. I can hear it fine on every other show, both on and off the HBO Now service.

So, I sent an email to the customer support people at HBO Now and received one of those “we thank you for contacting us but we’ll have a real person get back to you later” responses. A day later, I received the most generic response ever, indicating that NO ONE read the email, but it was filtered through some program that must have caught the word “sound” or “volume” and then told me to go through the FAQ they have about how to handle problems with adjusting the volume with an Apple TV. Really? In other words, no human is EVER going to deal with the issue. In other words, having a customer support system is a joke and an insult to anyone who may ever feel the need to use it.

If this was just a one-off situation, I’d just chalk it up to that sort of thing. But no, I’m starting to run across this ALL THE TIME. An example: Electronic Arts, the company that is constantly competing with Comcast for the worst customer service on the planet. Some years back, back when the Internet was young, I used to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. And then I quit. A couple of years later, I decided to play it again. Except there was a problem. Let me explain.

When I first played Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), it was owned by Electronic Arts, but it was billed by its subsidiary company Origin. Sometime during that period when I was no longer playing the game, someone breached Electronic Arts’s servers and stole a bunch of accounts. One of them was mine (inactive at the time because I wasn’t playing any games that Electronic Arts owned). Someone tried to buy FIFA (some soccer game) on my stolen account, but was thwarted by the fact that my credit card had expired a year or so before the transaction was attempted. By the way, EA somehow has translated that to believing its crack crew of cyber security experts had “stopped” the transaction and did a great service to me. Keep in mind, the only “stop” that was conducted was my bank saying, no, that credit card hasn’t been valid for a long time now. Anyway, to make a long story short, EA incorporated Origin into its service as its process of charging everyone for everything, so when I went to reactivate my account for SWTOR, EA refused to let me put any credit card information onto the account because my credit information was now “flagged”, which really translates to “we tried to let a thief fraudulently charge a game to your account and the transaction failed, so we now have to flag your account as one we can never allow you to make charges on again, even though our customer service people have given back access this account to you, no longer the thieves.” All attempts to “fix” this account have failed, as I have escalated the issue to the top echelons of EA, and each time it gets rejected based on…well, no one really knows why. It just keeps getting rejected. And then I get a really friendly email from EA stating: “So, is there anything else we can help with at this time?” I guess just rejecting me isn’t enough. They want to rub salt in the wound, too. For the record, the people at SWTOR have been very kind, but have resigned to the fact that if EA can’t fix it on their end, the issue is out of the hands and incapable of being fixed. Sure, I could start up a new account, but I have a ton of maxed characters on this account and a lot of game money in their banks, or possession. Starting over is not something I desire to do, so I’ve pretty much just stopped playing the game. I could play by buying a monthly game card (for game time), but that means I have to pay the maximum price to play the game each month, which is a direct insult to someone who was a member of the game when it first launched.

Strangely enough, gaming companies do this sort of thing a lot. Sony is a good example of this. I had an Everquest account back in the day, but when I stopped playing, somehow my account then became “flagged”. I can’t get my account back now. It’s like I was doing horrible things in the game and am now banned. But I’m not the sort of player who does any of those kinds of things, but as usual, I can’t even get them to tell me why the account was banned, meaning it was probably compromised during the time I was gone, or it was breached during one of those early periods when entire batches of accounts were breached at once by overseas hackers and rather than deal with each case one by one, they just banned everyone as a consequence.

The point is: Customer service is almost nonexistent these days. Because of automation and outsourcing, we now have a situation where if you ever need customer service for a game or product, chances are pretty good that you’re going to end up very dissatisfied. There are some good companies still out there, but they are becoming rarities, and one thing I’m starting to recognize is that when someone recommends a company to me for good service, it’s usually because they had good service from that company YEARS ago and probably haven’t had a recent situation they’ve had to deal with concerning that company. I’ve had a few encounters like that recently where I went with a company because of past, good experiences, only to discover that they’re currently a crapfest when it comes to dealing with customers.

Just saying.

Dealing with companies with horrible (or lack of) customer service

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star wars satele

Recently, I’ve been dealing with one of those companies known for horrible customer service. You know, one of those corporate entities that everyone loves to hate, yet they keep doing their thing, somehow convinced that people will just forget about horrible customer service in the past, forgive them completely and even though they haven’t done anything to fix anything, their belief is everything will somehow improve.

The company we’re talking about is Electronic Arts, the monopolistic entity of the computer gaming world. Disclosure: Years ago, I worked for them when Maxis was bought by them (and I worked at Maxis Software). That doesn’t mean I have become their biggest fan (or worst enemy either). When I left them, I was lukewarm about the company. My complaint today is coming strictly from a customer, or at least a former customer if you want to be completely honest.

My problem stems from one of those game properties they have that I hate to love, but tend to return to as most gamers seem to have one or two of those kinds of titles in their back list. My title was Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I’ll be honest: It’s one of those games you can enjoy for great segments of time before you grow bored with it and put it on hold for months (or years) before picking it back up again.

Well, I was on my third or so time of going back to picking it up again when all of this happened. I grew bored with World of Warcraft, was looking for something to scratch my gaming itch, and decided to come back to Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few times in returning back, the game is a lot different from when I first played it. You see, back in the older days it was one of those $15/month games, like World of Warcraft. But it kind of failed at that type of game and became one of those free to play (or purchase to play free, or whatever acronym you need to use). The monthly fee was now waived, although if you wanted the full experience of the game (all your characters and not feeling like you’re a toddler in an adult game), you basically had to pay the full price ($15 a month). So, I went to update my billing information and was immediately denied. For some reason, it wouldn’t take my credit card information. So I went to the Paypal option, and it denied that as well.

What I discovered, after some time on the phone with their customer support (this is SWTOR customer support at this time) is that EA has disabled my pay options because during the time I was away from the game someone tried to access my account and buy a copy of FIFA (some soccer game, or something like that). The person was denied (only because my credit card information had lapsed; not through any great action on the part of EA). But because of this, my account has been frozen.

So, I had to then call EA (not SWTOR) customer support where I went through a maze of customer support people who all promised they could take care of it, but each needed the information told to them from the ground up and then hung up and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. A few days after EACH call, I got an email from someone who said he or she was the one who could fix this if I provided more information but that person couldn’t ask me the information by email, so I would have to call back to relay the correct information. Each time I called back, I was given yet another clueless customer service person who couldn’t acknowledge the person who left the message, so they had to start the process from the beginning again. I should add that he email address of the person who wrote me each time basically went back to someone who would state that he couldn’t help me unless I contacted customer service directly.

So, this went on for weeks. All I kept asking for was someone to unblock my account so I can put my paypal information onto my account and be able to play the game again. There has been absolutely no resolution to this issue whatsoever. Fun fun.

So, as it is, I will probably never buy another game from any entity involved with EA, including, of course, EA.

This is customer service at is very worst.

That moment when you realize you’re probably going to quit an MMO

Computer Games, , , , , , , , , , ,

ghost5As I mentioned in a previous post, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on an almost daily basis for the last few months, and only recently I stopped playing, focusing now on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Since playing the latter game, I haven’t signed into SWTOR once. Which brings me to the point of this post, and that’s the realization that I’m probably going to be cancelling my subscription with them soon.

There interesting thing is how much email they send me, trying to convince me that GREAT things are still happening in the game. I still get endless emails from Lord of the Rings Online, even though I dropped that subscription nearly a year ago. They, and Guild Wars 2, are convinced all they have to do to get me back is somehow sound like their game is just as exciting as it was when I decided to start playing it.

What game designers don’t seem to understand is that if a player has left your game, he or she left for a reason, which means that continuous advertisements and announcements of doing the same things you’ve always been doing are probably  not going to win back your former members. An example: Star Wars: The Old Republic decided at some point to integrate starship combat into the game. That sounded great. But in doing so, they decided it was only going to be added as player versus player. Now, a lot of people, like me, abhor online player versus player sort of play in our games. If we want that, we’ll sign onto a game that is designed specifically for that. But SWTOR was never about pvp. It was about player versus environment (pve), which means now having to get totally into the wrong kind of play means that the game has moved into a direction that is never going to attract me back. So that means they can stop sending me announcements about all of the great additions they’ve added to the game that are all designed to “enhance” the galactic starfighter part of the game (i.e., pvp). I don’t think they understand that. Oh well.

The other thing they do is keep announcing extra goodies they’ll give me just for staying with the game. The current one is some kind of land speeder that everyone gets as long as they’re activated members on some date in March. I don’t know exactly what date because honest, I don’t care. If I’m not signing into the game to play it, I’m probably not going to sign into it to get my new speeder to run around on a planet where I’m not playing on any way. Just saying.

If you want to win me back into a game that I’ve decided to leave, address some of the reason why I left in the first place. Star Wars Galaxies was notorious for not doing this in the old days. They’d get nonstop complaints about some problem, never fix it, and then beg you to come back because they added elves, or some other stupid shit that you didn’t ask for and really didn’t want in the first place. Everquest was a lot like that.

At least World of Warcraft didn’t promise you anything new. They just figured they were so freaking awesome that you’d come back regardless. And at least three times I did. Not a fourth. They’re currently on yet another expansion I’m going to miss. They haven’t done anything to make the game more interesting. It’s still about running the same big end game dungeons for better gear so you can run those same dungeons at harder difficulty. That got old the second time. The 90th time? Well, that’s why they don’t get money from me any longer.

So, I’ll be dumping SWTOR any day now, kind of like the many women over the years who have dumped me. Like those situations, it wasn’t the game. It was me. Please don’t take it personally.

But please stop calling. The new game is starting to get jealous.