Tuesday, April 29, 2014

TESO 27 Days In- Cancelling

Off into the sunset I go... 


I really wanted to write good things about TESO in this post, about how much fun we've had. Mostly about my journey through the teens and how the game progresses. My son started playing about a week ago, he's gotten to level eight. He was pretty happy to play with Heri and I, things were all peachy. The second day of his playing he was kicked from the game, no email, no word as to why. Apparently he's been flagged as spamming gold spam. No questions asked, no logs checked, simply banned. It has really gotten under my skin so badly I haven't even felt writing about it. I'm utterly disgusted and appalled at the way this whole situation has been handled.

Basically it hasn't been handled. Zenimax/Bethesda do not send out emails when you've been banned, you're left wondering what happened. You might think the servers went down or maybe your account got stolen. You have to contact them. Pretty sickening to be accused of gold spamming on your second day of playing. When you contact them, you do not get an update. You do not get any confirmation, redirected, and again, redirected to another email/form. Same deal with phone support.

The phone support is 24 hours a day, but we're guessing it is a contracted company, they just have no real idea about the product or how things work. They have zero power to help with anything, you have to really push them around a bit to even get a supervisor on the phone. Which accomplishes nothing, they have zero power to do anything else. I was told by one employee to take my boxed copy of TESO back to the store I purchased it from and to ask for a refund. Seriously? An opened box with a consumed key?! You work in a video game call center?! He was either very stupid, or he thought I was. This is the caliber of support and we're dealing with. Basically they can make tickets, that's it. Best bet is trying email instead, IF and when they get back to you. After a week of waiting, we still have no word. It might be in a queue, I can't tell because support can't tell. Nobody knows anything!

I had been playing alts so not to out level my son, I now have four three (the number just changed upon logging in again) days of free time left. I feel very jaded. Nothing of the sort happened to Heri or I, just my son. Though now we all feel cheated, my son and I feel ignored, helpless. We just blew a lot of money on this game. I am SO glad I didn't upgrade him to CE (which I regret doing for myself). Tonight I've cancelled, there isn't any reason to continue with this bull.

A pack of bots running through a quest area, killing everything in sight.

No matter how wonderful a game is, I honestly think this is a wonderful game (truly!), you can't keep people with horrible support. This is the worst I've encountered in my 14 years of playing MMO games. It is a red flag in my eyes. Things may sort out in time, after the initial first month rush. I don't care to find out, nobody cares enough to just give us some word on what's happening. I don't care to hand over any more money. First impressions are everything. Look back to many game launches, a lot of things stuck to the games name even if things evened out years later. Some never recover.

The game is great. It is beautiful. It does have bugs and too many gold farmers at the moment, but it also has a nice quest and story flow, a good feeling to questing, gorgeous scenery as well. It just isn't enough to keep me. Sure, they may reinstate his account in a few weeks, but he's already regretting that he wanted to play. We both are. We lost interest. We lost trust.




There are many people out there without these problems, but for now I'd advise giving the game a few months to smooth things out, seeing if Zenimax/Bethesda steps things up with customer support and relations, if they can stop the bots/spammers from ruining the game. Because they have, when legit customers get lumped in with them and left out in the cold to wonder, it hurts the game in a big way. You'll read this, you might not agree with me, but it will sit with you, you'll remember it. It might cause another reader to think twice on picking up the game. It has an effect in the end.

I cancelled my account this evening. Which is so disappointing. If you wanted my opinion, based on support alone, I'd say run as far away as you can from this game in the current state. I could get past the massive amounts of bots, the bugs, but I cannot get past a company who does not value and want to help customers, one that doesn't see value in keeping customers. In my eyes this is stealing, it is lazy, this is no way to handle a launch, the worst kind of thing you want to run into with any MMORPG. Word of mouth is a very powerful tool.

I know I may sound irate, which I am to a point, but I've not been out of line in any way. They got my money and left us high and dry. Simply put, I do not feel I can trust this company, nor do I feel this company cares if I stay or go. For those of you enjoying the game, I hope none of you run into the grief it has caused us. It honestly is a good game, a real shame, in our case as they lost two additional players. I suppose the gold farmers can make up the loss.





7 comments:

  1. Well, thank you for this posting. Was linked to me from another blogger. I've been looking at this game pretty hard, but your experience has definitely given me second thoughts about going forward with the purchase. I've regretted purchasing boxes for MMO's before, but usually because the game turned out to be bad, not for lousy customer support on this level.

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  2. It is such a neat game is what makes it a real shame :( Hate to see anyone have to go through this. Hopefully they clean up their act before it impacts the game more than it already has. I'm really wondering how many people will sub after this first free month is up, which is quite soon.

    If they were to reinstate I might check it out six months from now, if not I won't ever touch another game by this company. I'll keep the blog updated on how it turns out. Thanks for stopping by!

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  3. Sorry to read this, what a shocking way to treat customers! The support sounds worse than a lot of F2P MMO and that's saying something. As you say a new MMO really needs to get customer support right from the start. For some reason it continues to surprise me that these companies do not learn from the horror stories of other companies failures, they are debated in public and told and retold yet developers/games operators do not seem to take anything on-board before they repeat the same mistakes!

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  4. You might try sending links to this post to some of the MMO and general gaming news sites, especially if you're prepared to pursue it further. Maybe also to whatever consumer protection authorities operate in your area. Isolated cases may not mean much but if news or regulatory authorities see a trend they will follow it up.

    Also worth putting your complaint in writing (physical letter form) and sending it to a named individual in the company, with copies to whichever news/regulator you think would be interested. In these days of electronic communications actual letters cause a disproportionate amount of concern if you can land them on the right desk.

    Or of course you could just do what you have done, cancel, don't give them any more money and warn others. That's a good response too. In the end its a relatively small amount of money and a short-term annoyance that isn't worth remaining stressed over for any longer than you need to.

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  5. You are not alone! I have been documenting my own trials and tribulations as well. I am not on week three without a response from Customer Service. I email them again every day, updating the count, and asking for a response. Nothing.

    I thought about calling them, but given your experience, I think that would be a waste of time.

    I really have never encountered anything like this in customer service, its truly disgusting how bad things are.

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  6. Kaozz,
    God, I'm sorry to hear that happened, and especially to the most vulnerable member of your family. I can only imagine the kind of frustration that must cause for all of you :(

    It seems that as the companies get bigger, MMOs become more mainstream, and the games get fancier and fancier, what's being left behind is custserv. I have had bad encounters with several megalithic custservs, all similar to your own: people who clearly don't understand the situation making pointless suggestions that do nothing. I'm sorry you've had to deal with this.

    Thank you for writing about it, all the same. I've been on the fence about TESO, but this has firmly set me against it, at least until I hear that things are better - if they ever are.

    Best of luck finding a resolution to all this.

    Sincerely,
    Stubborn

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  7. Thanks for the support guys, means a lot to me taking the time to offer ideas and comments <3

    As I went to post a reply here tonight, the phone rang. It was a support member calling to let us know that he reinstated the account, and an apology. Which did help make me feel a little better. They gave some time back to the account as well. Which was quite a huge jump from no contact to a personal phone call.

    I really love the game a lot and it is tempting to at least play my remaining few days to see how I feel but I just feel so drained from it all. More thoughts in my next post. I'm glad to see the company was simply backed up and didn't forget us, but still a bit sad that it had to be such a guessing game, every MMO gamer's nightmare. Lots to chew over, even if I don't play again, I do wish the company the best, it is a fantastic game, hopefully over the next few months they can have things together more so on on support's end. Heaven's knows they really need it.

    I guess the best bet, Hzero would to be wait it out, they say they are getting things smoothed out, they have been quite backed up but are working on things. Hopefully they help you soon as well too!!

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