Support tickets are a joke

[telperion]

This is happening. People get refunds for exploding ships. But it is not the most stressing concern. There are people who can't even start the game.

BTW If your ships explodes every evening there is something fishy going on. Have you tried to reinstall the game? I know that this can happen sometimes, but my ship didn't explode once in 200 hours.

Thanks for letting me know about that. It's only happened a few times and it hasn't happened since the 1.1 patch so whatever the bug was that was causing it may well be fixed.
As I mentioned, I'm just frustrated with the wasted time from a live game and the complete lack of support response. I think I've now got it out of my system for a while and for that I thank all of you. Hopefully they'll catch up on the tickets soon, eh?

 

[xyphic]

You say that it would take Frontier seconds to refund your "bug related costs". I'm sure they have a process in place to do just that. However, the process has to take into account that not every claim for a "bug related cost" actually a) stems from a bug and b) is an accurate estimation of the loss. If it became clear that Frontier were refunding every claim without investigating the circumstances surrounding them, they'd be inundated with people claiming they were destroyed by a bug when in fact they were either simply careless or killed legitimately. It takes time for support to verify your claim, and that will necessarily take a lower priority than the investigation of the actual bug.

What I will agree on is that the support system needs improvement to give better feedback on the status of your ticket (e.g. has it been read? what priority has it been given? what's the estimated time to resolution?) so that you don't get so frustrated that you simply stop reporting tickets.

 

[MikeSnos]

My issues are all regarding exploding for no reason. The cost in insurance is about an evening's trading (1.3mill) so every time it happens I lose an evening's play due to the game being released with bugs in it. It would take ED seconds to refund those bug related costs which would keep the customers happy whilst they work out why it's happening and fix it. we've paid for a game which is no longer in beta and yet we're still suffering beta style bugs.

It might not be important to you but wasting entire evenings because the game bugs out is annoying to me. What's more annoying is the fact that Frontier don't care that this is happening and consider the effect of losing an evening's play time to one of their bugs a perfectly ok thing to happen to their customers. Even if they simply acknowledged that the ticket had been read with a stock comment "Bug report received - thank you" or "Your refund request has been accepted" or "Your refund request has been rejected" or other stock phrases it would help to alleviate the issue of the support ticket system appearing to simply not being used by FD.

I've just reached my frustration boiling point and I've come onto the forum to complain as is my privilege as a customer. I doubt it will make any difference and I doubt anyone from FD will even care but it was at least a cathartic process for me.

I understand your frustrations and you DO have my sympathies. As someone else has said, there are refunds being given (in-game refunds I should add) for loss of credits etc and you do have a genuine issue that really does impact you. My main targets were those who whine about the smallest insignificant bug and not getting hourly updates on them when there are other more crucial bugs (such as yours) that need addressing...

But, I still say that being nice and respectful gets you a lot further than being an unpleasant sod (I'm sure you're not so you'll be OK )

 

[telperion]

You say that it would take Frontier seconds to refund your "bug related costs". I'm sure they have a process in place to do just that. However, the process has to take into account that not every claim for a "bug related cost" actually a) stems from a bug and b) is an accurate estimation of the loss. If it became clear that Frontier were refunding every claim without investigating the circumstances surrounding them, they'd be inundated with people claiming they were destroyed by a bug when in fact they were either simply careless or killed legitimately. It takes time for support to verify your claim, and that will necessarily take a lower priority than the investigation of the actual bug.

What I will agree on is that the support system needs improvement to give better feedback on the status of your ticket (e.g. has it been read? what priority has it been given? what's the estimated time to resolution?) so that you don't get so frustrated that you simply stop reporting tickets.

I understand your points in your first paragraph and agree with them. I also agree with your point in your second paragraph and I think that is the main source of my frustration. If that had been better dealt with I don't think I'd feel as frustrated.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

I understand your frustrations and you DO have my sympathies. As someone else has said, there are refunds being given (in-game refunds I should add) for loss of credits etc and you do have a genuine issue that really does impact you. My main targets were those who whine about the smallest insignificant bug and not getting hourly updates on them when there are other more crucial bugs (such as yours) that need addressing...

I absolutely concur and wouldn't mind waiting several months for my tickets to be investigated and actually acted upon if I'd been told that was what was going to happen. To be singularly met with silence is my main issue. Thanks for your response

 

[Harbinger]

What I will agree on is that the support system needs improvement to give better feedback on the status of your ticket (e.g. has it been read? what priority has it been given? what's the estimated time to resolution?) so that you don't get so frustrated that you simply stop reporting tickets.

I agree with this, the main problem is you just don't know the state of your ticket. First reporters of a specific bug tend to get replies but anyone else reporting the same issue tend to see their ticket remain at NEW until you get the "We are just reaching out to you to see if you are still having the issue you had originally reported." response 2 months later.

It would also be better for all parties if they had a known issues popup when attempting to open a ticket like they had on the old beta ticket system. Support wouldn't get flooded with tickets on the same issue and we wouldn't need to waste time reporting known issues. Win/Win.

 

[tdquasar]

As annoying as it can be, it seems they work on tickets based on priority.

Got a bug? It gets passed on to internal testing to see if it can be replicated.
Unable to play? These will take priority.

You need to take a look at how many people are playing, and the size of Frontier.
They have recently hired more support staff (according to the newsletter) - these new staff members require training before going on live support.

Frontier isn't like Blizzard or EA, with a massive ton of cash at their disposal for support.

Besides, if you think Frontier's support is bad... you haven't experienced Steam support.

You need to be patient with tickets. If it's a minor bug, don't expect a response too soon.

I now have tickets (plural) older than 2 months. I believe that is unacceptable regardless of any circumstances.

 

[Globusdiablo]

The support ticket system isn't a support system. It's a system designed to massively off the player base.

So the process seems to be:

1) set up ticket
2) wait.....
3) get frustrated....
4) get REALLY annoyed.....
5) quit playing the game

Why the hell do you even have a support ticket system when you're not actually bothering to support your customers, Frontier? For frak's sake, either switch it off or reply to your customers! Just letting them create support tickets that are then completely ignored is extremely bad business practice and does nothing except make all the current customers bad-mouth your company to anyone who'll listen.

I played the original Elite, I've been a staunch supporter of ED from the beginning (being an original backer from the kickstarter) and I've been extremely excited about the game but this has completely turned me off the game and the company and I know I'm definitely not the only one. I've gone from saying to people "Yeah, David Braben and his team know what they're doing, get involved" to "They clearly have no idea what they're doing, have released a buggy product and provide precisely no support to their customer base to the point that people are wasting entire evenings recovering from the effects of bugs and Frontier simply don't care about it one bit. Do not under any circumstances buy this game until they've got their stuff sorted, if indeed they ever do."

This is a massive change in my (and a lot of others') perspective which could have been easily avoided. It's a shame that I and the other backers thought that Frontier would be a professional outfit. We were clearly wrong.

Yours sincerely,

Mr. Cathartic Outburst

I agree with all of the above.

 

[Gogster]

I've only submitted 1 ticket.

It took 6 days to reply, the response wasn't quite what needed, I followed up and FD replied & solved within 5 hours.

I guess a lot of it comes down to the complexity of the issue you are reporting, but to say they don't respond is incorrect.

 

[telperion]

... but to say they don't respond is incorrect.

I'm pretty sure they have responded to some tickets but it's all a matter of perspective. From my perspective (and that of many others) they don't respond because they haven't responded. I have no evidence that they have responded to you or others and so from my perspective you could be either lying or an alt account of a Frontier employee that's trying to make it look like they are when they aren't. I'm fairly sure you aren't and you're reporting something correctly but considering there are people who have stated they've been waiting for a response for 2 months and I personally have been waiting for over 3 weeks it certainly looks to us as individuals as though tickets aren't being responded to.

Yes, some of that is pretty tin-foil-hat-wearing perspective

 

[Harbinger]

Michael Brookes made a statement about support improvements in this weeks dev update:

Last week’s newsletter included a statement about support and improving our response. This is important to us not just from a customer support perspective but also from the dev team’s point of view. As well as hiring more staff we’ve also been reviewing procedures so there will be some changes coming in how bugs are reported and tracked. There’ll be more information on this once everything is in place, we anticipate this being within the next couple of weeks.

 

[telperion]

Thanks Harbinger. I haven't seen that so appreciated. Hopefully it'll improve soon then.