Monday, March 21, 2011

customer support

we hunt kariberov - cbIpoK

as part of my quest to commit acts of violence against all things shitposting, i have a very excellent and personal example of the incredibly high-quality customer service that ccp provides

as i typed that line, i can already tell what my responses would be. initially, someone reading this might think i was being facetious or sarcastic. what, with calling ccp customer support or service high-quality, i must be high as hell, right? i can't possibly be serious. upon reading, however, i'll probably be accused of sucking someone's e-dick for some sort of benefit or another. i'd like to state that it is definitely the case and completely true as evidenced by the nice things that i say and have said. i got a whole bunch of faction gear, t3 hulls and subsystems as well as the ability to explode any ship i engage just by double clicking them in space

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now for a little backstory: i had let both of my accounts lapse around late october 2010. i wasn't able to play worth shit on skyblue(fucking worst net ever(tm)) and was just not up to trying to hack it out with the sometimes 6000ms latency to anything. on top of that, in december i found out that mrs. protagonist and i are expecting our second (omgwtflol) child

i know, right?

so eve kind of took a back seat to the hilarity that ensued. on february 7th, however, i received this very polite message:

Greetings from CCP!

We're reaching out to players that have recently canceled their subscription to EVE Online. We'd like to make a final attempt to address the reason you've decided to stop playing EVE if you'll allow us.

If you've had an unresolved billing problem, an issue with an unanswered petition or a petition you feel was improperly handled on our part, experienced an episode of harassment or been the victim of an exploit, or any other problem that resulted in your decision to leave EVE, please give us one more chance to address the problem to your satisfaction.

We also encourage you to visit our Expansions page and see what new features, fixes and updates have been added since you last played.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you want to take another look at the game and we will gladly open your account for a few free days.

You can either answer this mail directly for a discussion with a senior customer service representative, or if you have a petition you would like us to further review, we would be happy to take another look and see if there is anything we can help you out with. We are always available at support@eveonline.com and will do our utmost to help you out with whatever problem you may have.

Sincerely,
EVE Online Customer Support

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wasn't that sweet? i'm sure anyone else that had let their account go to shit got one just like it. i know that i'm not special. however, i was kind of in a good mood when i got that mail and decided to write a little response to the automated form letter i had received:

greetings!

i am just taking a moment to respond to this email for your benefit
i absolutely LOVE this game. for a while, i was at home being a stay-at-home father to a newborn infant and i was managing to play 40-60 hours a week. i lived in molden heath low sec and ran around with some notorious eve celebrity pirates, bloggers, scoundrels and roughnecks and it was the best gaming experience i have ever had
that said, i cannot maintain my account(s) currently as my wife and i are expecting our SECOND child and work/family is taking my top priority. perhaps in the near future i can return and enjoy the game as i once did, but for now, i simply cannot
i would still like to receive emailed newsletters so that i can keep abreast with official press releases, but there is little that can be done to get me to reinstate my account(s) at this time
thank you for making a great game!
xX REAL NAME HERE Xx
dirty protagonist

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in case you were wondering, yes. the brown stain did come off of my nose after about 30-45 minutes of scrubbing

i thought it was over at that point. i'm sure their email system was configured to sort the deluge of whinefuckery that an email like that was certain to generate and it made me feel a certain bit of smugness that i would be (in my head at least) the only one writing them back saying that they're doing a really fucking ace job and made a pretty nice game

imagine my surprise when i got this letter the next day:

Hello, GM Yuggoth here.

I can very well understand that you won’t be able to play a lot for now. It’s good to see that you have your priorities sorted out, because although we want people to play our game we certainly don’t want their real lives to suffer for it. I hope that you will join us again in the future when time permits. We’ve never removed any characters from our database to this point, and don’t plan to in the future, so you can rest assured that your characters will be waiting for your return.

Let me know if you have any further questions or if there’s something that we can help you with. Also, congratulations on your second child that’s on the way!

Best regards,

GM Yuggoth

The EVE Online Customer Support Team


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holy fucking shit! did yuggoth really just take the time to handwrite a response to my little bit of knobbery?! i think he did! holy shit!


joking aside, i was absolutely gobsmacked to get a response to what i thought was just a meaningless email fired off from my blackberry in the middle of the night into the black abyss that is an automated email system


this isn't really a huge deal, i know. it also certainly doesn't prove or disprove anything about the level of customer service that they provide... and maybe i'm easily impressed. i will say, however, that of the many (and it is a fucking lot) of online games i've played, i have never ever received a personal email or response to something insignificant as that before... and that really impressed me


i think that a lot of the eve community (certainly among my friends and the blogs/tweets i tend to read) people find that abusing ccp over everything from game design to their development schedules to their customer service is not just okay but an important thing to do. frankly, i think they need to shut the fuck up and shoot something already


jesus



3 comments:

  1. That is indeed pretty fucking rad, sir.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congratz on the second :)
    Good to see stuffs looking good and that maybe someone I know will be online next time I'm back :P

    ReplyDelete