37 replies to this topic

[Koniks]

Appogee, on 06 January 2015 - 04:09 AM, said:

It's ridiculous that your entire customer support team disappeared for the past two weeks.

This is 2015. No business should be leaving its customers unsupported for two weeks.

This is especially true when your business is entertainment, and those two weeks are when your customers are going to be using your product the most.

At the very least you should have skeleton crew working through that period and dealing with priority issues.

Annual leave rostering - it's not hard.

They did have a skeleton crew working. They didn't have enough people to respond to all the tickets. Personally, I'm grateful they delivered the CW beta early and then spent a week delivering hot fixes.

Maybe I have low expectations from the first half of this year. But I'm also not going to begrudge an employer who decides that employees should be allowed time off when their family and friends are also off.

But then I also don't shop on Thanksgiving Day or Black Friday because saving money isn't as important to me as not imposing on workers.

[Appogee]

Mizeur, on 06 January 2015 - 06:36 AM, said:

They did have a skeleton crew working.

No they didn't. I sent in a Support request and received an email back saying they were gone until 5 January. And that was the last I heard from them.

Incidentally, I am aware of at least 10 other customers/players having exactly the same problem that I was... and they were probably just a sample of a much larger number who didn't bother to seek help on the forums.

Mizeur, on 06 January 2015 - 06:36 AM, said:

Maybe I have low expectations from the first half of this year. But I'm also not going to begrudge an employer who decides that employees should be allowed time off when their family and friends are also off.

This is not about whether employees get time off. This about ensuring you plan ahead so that your employees get time off AND your customers continue to receive service during the time when they use your product most.

This is easily managed through rostering. Many employees don't actually mind working during the holiday period, particularly when they receive some kind of additional consideration from their employer as recognition for it. It just requires a leadership decision to focus on customers, and then management action to plan well in advance.

For example, in my team, I am already planning in advance who will work the holidays during this year. That way everyone has clarity well in advance and can plan accordingly.

Edited by Appogee, 06 January 2015 - 07:12 AM.

[Bluefalcon13]

I think any employee should get time off assuming they have it banked for the holidays. I work for a company (only because I am using my GI Bill and going to school full time) that thinks its OK to make people work on Thanksgiving. Vacation is forbidden during the Christmas season as well. I would have been canned if they scheduled me for Thanksgiving because I would not have come in.

Appogee, considering PGI is a smaller company, and generally their support fixes the issues at hand with a positive resolution, I think your opinion is completely asinine. To enforce work during a major family holiday is pretty crappy for a company to do. They are hitting the ground running post-break (assuming from Russ's post), and that is good.

[Appogee]

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 07:12 AM, said:

Appogee, considering PGI is a smaller company, and generally their support fixes the issues at hand with a positive resolution, I think your opinion is completely asinine. To enforce work during a major family holiday is pretty crappy for a company to do. They are hitting the ground running post-break (assuming from Russ's post), and that is good.

In my 30 years of working, I've never worked for a company which shut down customer support completely at holidays... and I've worked for small (30 employee), medium (400 employee) and large (340,000 employees) companies, as well as for myself (1 employee).

What is asinine is your condoning any company just walking away from their customers and leaving them unsupported. So stop being part of the problem.

Incidentally, I appreciated the hard work the PGI guys did in (finally) delivering CW, AND that they released it earlier (than the last moment of Fall) so they could bug fix before end of year. In fact, I was one of the first to applaud their move and thank them for it.

However, that doesn't make it ok to stop supporting customers having fundamental billing or server access issues during the holiday period, the time when people most wanted to use the product they'd paid for.

Edited by Appogee, 06 January 2015 - 07:21 AM.

[Bluefalcon13]

Appogee, on 06 January 2015 - 07:15 AM, said:

In my 30 years of working, I've never worked for a company which shut down customer support completely at holidays... and I've worked for small (30 employee), medium (400 employee) and large (340,000 employees) companies, as well as for myself (1 employee).

What is asinine is your idea that any company can just walk away from their customers and leave them unsupported. Stop being part of the problem.

Not really sure how I am part of the problem, I have a ticket logged, and am waiting as well for my issue. TBH, your opinion and attitude screams "I want, I want, I want..." and I deal enough with that from my kids (not saying you are a kid, as with 30 years working, you are obviously not). I stated my opinion, and I think PGI was right not to enforce a minimum staffing. IMHO, I will be MORE likely to spend additional money on this game, because I like that the management isn't screwing people over under them.

On a side note, how many jobs have you had where you were supporting an ENTERTAINMENT product, and not corporate-to-corporate (IT services, ADP, support for IT equipment for example) or even a commercial product (consumer stuff)? I personally was a network engineer for 4 years, and understand minimum manning. At the same time, entertainment products are not mission-critical items, or, for that matter, life essential. I can understand being upset your issue isn't resolved. Hell, I am not happy about my issue, but the truth of the matter is there are employees at PGI who are PEOPLE. With families. Think about that for a moment if you will.

Either way, I have stated my OPINION (wrong or right it may be), and you are entitled to yours as well. I was meerly trying to get you to see things from a different perspective. Maybe I approached that in a less than stellar way, so if you take offense to it, I am sorry. I get pretty offended when people get upset about holidays and allowing employees to spend time with family.

[Appogee]

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 07:33 AM, said:

TBH, your opinion and attitude screams "I want, I want, I want..." and I deal enough with that from my kids (not saying you are a kid, as with 30 years working, you are obviously not).

No , my opinion and attitude is "business leader who expects other businesses to focus on their customers as I do, and also expects other business leaders to plan ahead to be able to support customers".

In fact, after about 6 hours debugging, I worked out and fixed the problem I was experiencing with PGI's product. I then also took the time to share the solution with the other 10 people who'd posted threads in the Support forum after they couldn't get any help from PGI.

So, my only purpose in posting here is to get PGI's leadership to do better on customer support during the holidays, for the benefit of other players and customers in the future.

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 07:33 AM, said:

I personally was a network engineer for 4 years, and understand minimum manning. At the same time, entertainment products are not mission-critical items, or, for that matter, life essential.

When your entire product is entertainment, then you have a responsibility to your customers to ensure your product is available when your paying customers want to use it.

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 07:33 AM, said:

truth of the matter is there are employees at PGI who are PEOPLE. With families. Think about that for a moment if you will.

Yes. I am PEOPLE too and I too have a family. And I planned ahead with my team to ensure our business was appropriately staffed for the sake of customers, and I personally worked 10 hours while I was on holidays, to ensure we didn't let our customers down.

Because that's why businesses who care about their customers do.

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 07:33 AM, said:

Either way, I have stated my OPINION (wrong or right it may be), and you are entitled to yours as well. I was merely trying to get you to see things from a different perspective. Maybe I approached that in a less than stellar way, so if you take offense to it, I am sorry. I get pretty offended when people get upset about holidays and allowing employees to spend time with family.

No personal offense taken. I understand your point of view.

My point of view is that customers who make excuses for companies who provide bad products and/or support actually de facto encourage companies to provide bad products and/or support. Hence my comment about "being part of the problem". I trust you understand where I am coming from on this.

Edited by Appogee, 06 January 2015 - 08:00 AM.

[Rebas Kradd]

Appogee, on 06 January 2015 - 07:15 AM, said:

In my 30 years of working, I've never worked for a company which shut down customer support completely at holidays... and I've worked for small (30 employee), medium (400 employee) and large (340,000 employees) companies, as well as for myself (1 employee).

Have you worked outside the U.S.?

[Appogee]

Rebas Kradd, on 06 January 2015 - 07:56 AM, said:

Have you worked outside the U.S.?

Always. And I've worked for US companies. How is this relevant?

[Bluefalcon13]

Appogee, on 06 January 2015 - 08:17 AM, said:

Always. And I've worked for US companies. How is this relevant?

Different cultural beliefs reguarding holidays mostly as far as I can see.

[Appogee]

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 08:18 AM, said:

Different cultural beliefs regarding holidays mostly as far as I can see.

Fair enough. But then, MWO is a global product.

[Slater01]

Appogee, on 06 January 2015 - 08:21 AM, said:

Fair enough. But then, MWO is a global product.

Knowing people on both sides of the north american boarder and in europe. There is a working cultural difference between the typical American company versus a typical Canadian one. It's quite smilliar to Western European versus those in the Eastern half.

[Rebas Kradd]

Bluefalcon13, on 06 January 2015 - 08:18 AM, said:

Different cultural beliefs reguarding holidays mostly as far as I can see.

Yeah, that's what I figured the issue might be.

Heck, in Europe people close shops and go home for lunch.

[AnimeFreak40K]

I think it is a combination of factors that determines what a company does or does not do, some take a fairly religious bent and observe the Sabbath where *ALL* employees have the day off on Sunday. Period. If you have a problem with anything, it can (and will) wait until Monday (Chick-fil-a is an example of this).

Other companies require minimum staffing, others don't. I've been a government contractor for the better part of 10 years and depending on the agency and/or department being supported determines minimum staffing levels. It all depends on what the company does (as in product/service), the culture of that company itself as well whatever nation makes up the majority of that company's workforce or the nation that company resides and/or conducts business.

My best guess is that PGI decided that the quality of life of their employees was more important than customer service and thus ensured that folks are free to take time off for Christmas and New Year's. They chose to pretty much close up shop for two weeks and accept the risk that some folks would have problems and that those problems could wait until everyone got back to resolve. I refuse to call this a bad decision, because it's not; I would also not call it a good decision either on a strictly logical manner either. It is simply a choice between two options that have basic costs and benefits and the folks in charge felt that the benefits of cutting everyone loose and locking the doors for the holidays outweighed any potential costs and/or the benefits just weren't as great.

Now, if you want my opinon, I think that PGI made the right choice. But then again, I also feel that *ANY* company that puts the quality of life of all of its employees above anything else will make right decisions.

[I_AM_ZUUL]

What a joke.... PGI has always been great about Support tickets even during the very worst time under IGP. Reading posts of complaining about waiting 2 weeks over the holidays in comparison of those of us had problems with the clan packages. We had to wait for up to 2 months so PGI could finish the change over. If you had a money issue, be proactive. Do the math of what the MC package was worth in total value and what mechs you wanted to buy on sale price (probably could get away with the mechbays as well) and put that in the reply all worked out. I would expect them to just inject the items into your account, they have always been very good to everyone I know.

Nathan

[LoRdLoSs1337]

Appogee, on 06 January 2015 - 04:09 AM, said:

It's ridiculous that your entire customer support team disappeared for the past two weeks.

This is 2015. No business should be leaving its customers unsupported for two weeks.

This is especially true when your business is entertainment, and those two weeks are when your customers are going to be using your product the most.

At the very least you should have skeleton crew working through that period and dealing with priority issues.

Annual leave rostering - it's not hard.

Spot on.

[Bluefalcon13]

Any updates on current ticket backlog status?

[MX Duke]

Mumpitzmaster, on 05 January 2015 - 12:43 PM, said:

According to your list of items that will be discussed:

European Players:
Take all matches, played over the whole period, into account. The 15 Areas can stay as they are. That's for deciding if attack/defense or counter/hold is played. But if the planet goes to the attackers or stays at the defending faction, ALL matches count. So the effort of the european players is not worthless.

Grouping with all faction members:
Why can't you just allow public groups to drop in CW. The faction to drop for is either taken from the group leader or from the chosen planet. After the faction is clear, it is just an additional condition for the group to be able to launch. Just like the 3-3-3-3 Rule.

Queues in general:
Cant you just search possible groups in the background? Lets say a stack of ten possible matches where the player/group would fit into. If one match is filled up with another player/group, it is poped out of that match stack and another one is searched for. That all should happen in the background while the player is looking through his mechlab/skills, is chatting or doing nothing. If the player/groupleader the is clicking on the launch button, he should have instantly a match. The Match-Stack is discarded every time a mech/loadout changes. If there are no matches found between last stackchange and launch the you can still show the search circle.

Auto wins? Just make CW more attractive and this will solve by itself. We need more Maps and maybe also some other kinds of playmodes in CW. This are things that can only be done with time and resources. Add things constantly and this will also get better. For now, we may have to deal with it.

Take these ideas into your meeting and let us all know what YOU think about these.

AnimeFreak40K, on 05 January 2015 - 01:55 PM, said:

Interesting read and even if January is a bit of a wash regarding patches and such, I am pretty much okay with this, as you guys put in a LOT of effort to get things reasonably smoothed out ahead of your own posted schedules and deadlines. You then took a (well deserved) break for a couple of weeks and stuff’s piled up and it will take time to parse through it all… so any delays and such are understandable from my end of things.

As far as stuff that needs looking into and/or fixing for CW, I’m not exactly sure how the issue of the Light Mech Zerg-Rush can be fixed, adjusted or otherwise mitigated, if it can be done at all. I realize that increasing the minimum tonnage was designed to force players to take heavier mechs. Unfortunately, my observations in a handful of recent matches shows me that this really changed nothing at all.

I say this because even with the increased minimum tonnage, there is nothing stopping a group of running their first drop entirely in Spiders, Jenners, Ravens and Firestarters leaping over one (or all) of the gates and bulldozing over the objectives. Very little actual coordination is needed for this tactic other than the group deciding that everybody’s first mech should be a jump-jet capable light and leaping over the wall at the same time then swarming the sub-generators.

A reasonably competent group can easily kill all three sub-generators and deal grievous damage to the primary generator on this initial rush, making the second rush a walk in the park.

To be quite clear, I am aware that the current missions and maps heavily favor the Defenders. I am aware that for the Attackers to win, a sizable amount of coordination, timing and tactics are required; things that the defending force can pretty much eschew.

Interestingly enough, it seems to me that for a coordinated group to reliably win, the Light Mech Zerg Rush is really the only reliable and viable tactic, which pretty much goes in the exact opposite of what you guys were shooting for when it comes to how you wanted CW battles to be fought, especially when it comes to having large groups.

All of this being said, I’m just not sure if this is something that can be fixed without some serious overhauling of several aspects of the game…

Anyway, thanks again for all of your hard work and I look forward to seeing more great things in 2015.

TiguriusX, on 05 January 2015 - 04:45 PM, said:

Some quick proposals for common CW items

Ceasefire issue
Replace the single ceasefire deadline with multiple deadlines
Anywhere from 3-5 would create a more dynamic CW experience for players outside NA (I am on the West Coast and can't even make the prime time hours because I have small children that take priority etc.)

This will also remove the "dead time" that is the first 16 hours or so of the current ceasefire. Multiple ceasefire deadlines create a constant incentive to go to war.

After 24 hours all the ceasefire results are tallied and planets officially change hands


Zerg rush issue
Modify the turrets to specifically stop lights
-Don't have pop ups. Leave them up
-Increase the damage potential of turrets so speed doesn't get you pass them

This makes turrets more deadly but lets you kill them from distance much easier. Heavier units will slow down and sweep the turrets before proceeding.

Lights have to stop or get decimated. Should help with zerg rushing


New player guidance
The objectives and scoring need to be changed to encourage TEAM play.

Track who kills or deals damage to turrets, gate generators, ogens and Omega itself for the attackers.
Greatly increase rewards for this behavior


*Edit*
Added new player guidance

This thread is about the Customer Support, these posts should be in Russ's discusion thread.

If this is a sample of what people send to support as trouble tickets, no wonder its taking so long for the mastery pack I ordered to be injected.

Edited by MX Duke, 14 January 2015 - 12:02 AM.

[Kinski Orlawisch]

Any plans to let CW games count for the normal achievements?