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.