[Resolved] ]Lost 5* Strange, No help in sight.

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  • The rockett
    The rockett Posts: 2,016 Chairperson of the Boards
    MacEifer said:
    Treras said:
    The rockett said:

    Example 1:  A video was oisted of a 500+ roster and he raged quit about 3 weeks ago. Sold everything due to Gambit.  
    Resolution:  Roster restored fully. 

    Example 2:  460 5* roster rage sold due to 15 dupe BB covers and CS not helping out because he could not pull the one darn color he needed.  2 weeks ago. 
    Resolution:  Roster restored fully. Rolled back 1 week. 

    Example 3:   500+ roster had major FB saving issues. Entire account gone. 
    Resolution:  Account fixed and was very well compensated. 

    Example 4:  500+ roster locked out due to FB saving error.  This was end of last season. 
    Resolution:  Account fix BUT he got no end of season rewards personal or ally. Got no other compensation. 

    Example 5:   Account got its 4th time 1 time exception of a cover swap for another 5*. 


    All of the above.  As someone else said it, D90 is still far from platinum level. 

    #restorestrange
    Do you have indications that case 1&2 were not their 1st time exceptions?

    As 3&4 were not self inflicted, of course they would need CS to fix them. These should be the cases you have CS for.

    Unless I'm mistaken, Cover swaps for LL pulls when you are capped on that colour wouldn't be one time expections but simply assistance by policy.


    And honestly, this isn't even the argument. Even if people got support in ways that don't line up with policies as they are explained to you, that doesn't make one eligible to receive the same benefit. That's like saying you should get out of a murder charge because OJ got out of a murder charge.

    If you haven't done game support, I'll break it down for you.
    60 - 90% of the stuff on your desk is stuff you should be helping with according to your policies.
    5 - 35% are people you can't help. You simply can't change what their problem is and you ask them to submit feedback so whatever they're struggling with can be improved.

    The last 5% are the unpopped popcorn kennels. Pleaders, chancers and scammers.
    Now technically you get these in other support jobs as well, but here it's different because it's a game.
    When I don't get someone a new phone because they asked nicely, that conversation ends.
    When you don't give someone something in a game and they don't want to end the conversation it doesn't end because "it doesn't cost anything" and "that guy in my guild got the same thing" and "you're supposed to keep me as a paying customer". Game communities are highly networked and their members flock to spectacular cases of company intervention. This generates "precedent" and like anyone who has seen 3 episodes of LA Law and smoked cigarettes behind the gym with the lawyer's son we all know that precedent means that "that's how it's done now".

    The problem there is that that's not how you can run customer support. You could run a search to see how many WoW characters are out there named "donotrestore". Little hint, there shouldn't be any, but you can see that's where some people messed up. There's some characters in WoW that have very funny achievements, like achievements their class shouldn't be able to complete. But they do because sometimes people in customer support can mess up.
    If someone messes up in that way in game support, it is news, sometimes small, sometimes big.

    None of this is a precedent. None of this makes you eligible for anything like it just because you know it happened.
    In the end, CS has an obligation to find the correct response to your request. Not the best one, the correct one. It might not be the best for you, it might not be what you wanted, but it's the correct one and when you got the correct one that doesn't mean you're supposed to be happy about it, but you should know you did all you can.

    Now there's some things I've been called out for, first of all The rockett called my out for calling you all 13 year olds, which was not my intent. I said "It's like a gaggle of 13 year olds in here who think their parents should drive them to the cinema because they can drive them to the cinema."
    The point here is 13 year olds see there's a car in the driveway, their parents are home and they want to go to the cinema. That is all the information they see. The fact that their parents may have had 10 hour working days, money might be tight or that they haven't done their homework in a fortnight doesn''t occur to them. It's the same here. Everyone talks as if they couldn't possibly be missing anything important because all the information they need to argue in their favor clearly is there.

    The other thing is that I said "This thread will go on for another 20 pages because you're asking the wrong questions and demanding the wrong things." without saying what it is you should be asking and that's a fair callout. I might as well just have said it instead of being all mystical about it.

    The questions D90 would need to ask of CS should be along these lines:

    Do you have a full record of our previous interactions?
    Was I offered an explanation of what a one-time exception is and what the potential magnitude of it was?
    Was I given the opportunity to accept or reject the restoration of the 4* cover at the time after being educated on the mmechanics of this exception?
    Was I informed of whether this exception will be renewed at certain intervals? (some one-time exceptions are actually "one-time-per-year" or "one-time-per-expansion-cycle" etc for some games.It#s different from company to company)

    Now CS would usually be able to provide information of this nature to a customer and the answers to it should give you an idea on whether they have an education process in such cases and if it was followed.
    You can always make a case of process over merit. If the original one-timer was done without appropriate warning about the nature of the request, then you should be able to plead for them for a do-over with an appropriate education this time and if they see it that way you might actually get it.

    Sorry if I come across a bit tense on the subject matter. I've spent a lot of time having my decisions torn apart on reddit and the forums for a half dozen games over the last decade or so. There's professionals sitting on the other end who come to work every morning to help you as best they can. Don't get cynical with them. Nobody can pay them enough to get dragged out into the yard like this for the resident cynics to descend upon them and question their motives.
    I made a promise to myself while drinking my whiskey last night that I would never responsed to your posts again, but here is am. 

    If you think a 500+ roster NEVER got an exception, then I do not know what to tell you. For those of us around when the first 5* were released know that they were make these then and this guy is a long term player. 

    The 460 roster, who I know very well, couldn't even get them to switch 1 color of his 15 Dupe BB. Let me say that 1 more time so it is clear.  He has a BB with 12 covers.  He had gotten 15 dupe BB covers and CS would NOT HELP.  They restored his roster.  This guy has been playing the game 2 weeks from when it started. So yea, been around a bit. 

    For any saving issues, with some of your other posts, why should they do anything?   How do you know the player didn't do anything to cause this?  Do you know there history?  Do you know there requests that have been made?  

    Instead of trying to deflect with this long posts that quite frankly i needed to refill my whiskey glass while reading, until you have dealt with some of the things that a lot of the long term players in this tread are telling you it would be good to listen. 
  • MacEifer
    MacEifer Posts: 45 Just Dropped In
    carrion pigeons said:
    I'm afraid I don't actually see what all of that about chat logs has to do with the situation here.  My best guess at your line of thinking is that "the OP is probably misrepresenting his case and that company policy is actually completely fine, here let me give an example of that happening".  Except, of course, you know neither of us actually have any evidence one way or the other.

    All we can really trust to be true is that CS declined to restore a single championed 5*.  Let's start from there.  If you were establishing CS policy for your own game that happened to be structured exactly like this one, I'm interested to know what the circumstances would be where you would think that such a refusal is good CS policy.  Some kind of evidence of abuse?  What would, or even *could* constitute abuse?  Some threshold of expended time?  Does that threshold justifiably fall below the time it would take to automate the process?  Why would it?  Some other reason?

    I am explicitly asking you to avoid the argument "they didn't do it because it was against their policy".  I'm not interested in that discussion.  Clearly it's true that some people along the line had no power to change the policy, and the only way for them to change the outcome here was for them to break the rules.  But I'm not saying those people did anything wrong.  I'm asking you about the choices of actual policy-makers.

    The basic idea is that game CS is there to serve the players with anything unforseen or unintended outside the control of the player that affects them in a meaningful fashion.

    The first problem is that unforseen or unintended means different things to different people. So you have to come up with a framework of scenarios. There's payment scenarios, access scenarios, error scenarios, restoration scnearios etc. Each of those scenarios gets a predescribed solution and basic communication guidelines.
    Now here's the first thing nobody seems to understand. There's likely not a "restoration scneario". There's 5 restoration scnearios, maybe 15. My old job had 40-ish restoration scnearios for different types of items, ways in which they were lost etc. And that's only items. You could lose a whole lot more than items in that game.
    Then you have to foolproof the policy. You make it narrow. Why? Because people tend to overshoot anyway. Remember, saying yes is the easy bit. Saying yes makes your life immeasurably easier than anything in the world. 

    So why narrow?
    Surely anything that has a significant impact on the player is worth solving, right?

    Well you can't say yes to everything. Now here's where the problem of line drawing comes in. You have to say no at some point. Surely you have to say no to the guy who says "hey I got a 2* from a heroic but I wanted a 3*. Could you change that for me?". And don't you for one lousy second think that ticket doesn't happen. It happens.
    So you have to draw a line and you pick a point on the scale of what you do and what you don't. So over time that scale changes. Because some players are just sooo close to the point where you could help them. So you go get an exception approved. Next time that thing happens you get an exception approved. They're just sooo close. At some point you just skip the exception. You got so many of these approved because it makes so much sense you now have a new policy, not because the text has been rewritten, but because you the CS agent have made it obsolete through your actions. That's how policies on a scale work. At some point you're at the point where the guy gets a 2* swapped for a 3*, because it was the only thing left you haven't said yes to.

    So if you allow CS action based on significance, at some point, everything is significant.

    But MacEifer, I hear you say, why is that a bad thing?

    Funny you should ask. It's terribly bad because it's cheating. Not the stuff you have no control over, but the butterfingers, the mistakes, the drunken rage deletions, you kids getting on your phone your wife getting on your phone your ex still has your password and your cat walked over the keyboard and deleted your character including confirming the deletion with a mouse click and keyword. Developers build the game to be used by you, the player. The more ownership you have over your actions, the more you are engaged. The more ownership for your mistakes you can shove on to CS the less you are engaged.
    Now games are still meant to be played "as is". Anytime you have to involve CS is entirely undesireable from a game management point of view. That's why you have safeguards ingame like confirmation windows. So anything that you do that isn't happening in the game through something the developers put in there is a cheat. Even when CS does it for you, technically it's a cheat. Even if you feel like it's justified, it's a cheat. It's someone from outside the game changing things inside the game for you, not just for everone at the same time because of your actions in an effort to get them undone. This is not to be confused with a "fix" which is the same thing but for reasons outside your control, likely some database hiccup or other technical problem.
    Now you're asking for a cheat because you made a mistake and because we are all human and some mistakes have lasting effects on us you allow some cheats. But if anything you allow people to resolve based on significance is fair game at some point down the line, doesn't that mean at some point people can cheat all they want?

    There's a long answer to that, but yes. At some point, anything but the most egregious, hamfisted abuse is fair game.

    The only way around that is to put questions of significance out of the equation. You go by number of incidents, time passed, etc. Clearly countable non game related measures to make sure none of your CS get ideas above their station. Because they really, really just want to say yes.

    Now you might think "isn't it their own fault for not being able to stick to their guns and not move the line in the sand?". It is to a certain degree, but remember who the people are who are asking them to cross it day in and day out. Might not be you but it's someone just like you. They're resonable people, working 1.3 jobs, they have 1.7 kids and are average in almost ever other way. Surely their request is reasonable. After all, it's soooo close to the line in the sand.

    Just remember that your request is one of thousands that all form data points in some excel sheet. Surely doesn't feel like one to you personally, but it is. You look at one request and think "surely this can be solved in a rational fashion by just looking at all the data, considering the situation outlined by the player and making a reasonable judgement call of what to do with it." Yes, you could. But if you do, you make the system open to even have a line in the sand, and as outlined, once you have a line in the sand, it starts moving.

    Now real-world CS is different. You pay for some item, some service rendered some utility provided and when there's a real problem you need a real solution. There's rarely a problem of who should be owed what kind of customer support. When you can't fill a bathtub because there's no water in the pipes your water provider can't just say they don't offer that kind of assistance. After all you're still looking at an empty bathtub. In a video game, the entire service is untouchable artifice. Anything could be done because it's just data in a sheet. You couldn't give everyone a gigawatt of electricity or a lake full of water, but you could give everyone a trillion HP at no cost but the cost that it takes someone in systems management to write that script and execute it.

    It is incredibly hard to reign in CS options. At some point you will always come to this point. The point where the community thinks you should be able to help but you can't. In a good CS environment that's based on some number of incidents so they don't have to discuss merit with you.

    For you, the customer, especially when you get into a situation like this where a case is dragged out of the shed and paraded through the streets, you will always shake your head in disbelief because you always believe there must be a solution when there's a problem. When you are dealing with the wholly digital, there is an artificial limit. It needs to be there because the only alternative is no limit. Everyone on the other side of that artificial limit is going to be sorely disappointed because they know they are soooo close.

    And please don't think I'm trying to shut anyone up or such. I'm simply saying you'd get somewhere if you accepted how CS for games works and tried working with it instead of going on about how you think it should be. I can only tell you how these things work in the industry. Some of the things I said might be right on point, some of it might be way off. I've only had one ticket with D3 so far and that went exactly by playbook, and I'd say they'll likely be somewhere within the industry standard.
  • BZoetic
    BZoetic Posts: 5 Just Dropped In
    edited December 2017
    Intentional or not, clearly a noob mistake was made by someone who clearly is not a noob. I think the benefit of the doubt should be given to a player well into a 4-digit number of daily logins who, taken at their word here, has had one complaint to CS during those 1000+ days, a year ago.  Obviously a set of rules and guidelines regarding modifications and restorations is necessary to prevent scammers from taking advantage of the developers. But to lay those rules like a blanket over this sort of circumstance just isn’t good customer service. To me it’s a no-brainer — remove the currency gained from the mistaken sale and restore this person’s 5*. This story is very discouraging for the rest of us long-term non-whale players. Again, assuming we have all the facts of the situation. 
  • Crnch73
    Crnch73 Posts: 504 Critical Contributor
    How is this still a “debate”? I think we can all agree on a few things:

    1) it is rather unfortunate for the OP, a tragedy as far as this game goes, I feel bad for them, regardless if it was their fault or not. 

    2) whether you believe they should get their 5* back or they should be forced to live with their mistakes... the true problem here is that, living in a connected world, we often get to see things that we may not be supposed to see. We have seen many instances of preferential treatment for those who have spent a great deal of money, even if they represent a minuscule sliver of the CS tickets submitted... it’s certainly been enough to take notice of. That is often how the world works, and often how games work too... sorta. If you buy all the DLC in a PlayStation game, you’ll have a head start on people. But don’t expect Sony or the game mfg to step in and fix a mistake you made in a game, even if you’ve bought 500 PlayStation consoles. At best, maybe they’d give you a cheaper rate on future purchases? But here, we are seeing people who do stupid things in a fit of rage (or maybe just for YouTube views), only to suffer zero repercussions. They got the best of both worlds, because they were “preferred” members of the inner circle. 

    I liked the analogy of the OJ trial. You are correct, just because he was found innocent of a murder he probably committed, that does not mean I should be. However, should I not be outraged when a murderer is set free, regardless if I have committed a murder or not? If 1 out of every 10,000 murderers were told “you know what? It’s ok, we will let this one pass”... wouldn’t you be hoping you’d get the same treatment? And if you didn’t, was there any criteria as to why THAT guy walked free and you did not? Was it random? Or did the now-free man happen to contribute thousands to the police station, therefore giving him a head start. At some point, if the people who get preferential treatment are all high-paying people, doesn’t that start to smell like bribery and corruption?
  • MacEifer
    MacEifer Posts: 45 Just Dropped In
    Crnch73 said:

    I liked the analogy of the OJ trial. You are correct, just because he was found innocent of a murder he probably committed, that does not mean I should be. However, should I not be outraged when a murderer is set free, regardless if I have committed a murder or not? If 1 out of every 10,000 murderers were told “you know what? It’s ok, we will let this one pass”... wouldn’t you be hoping you’d get the same treatment? And if you didn’t, was there any criteria as to why THAT guy walked free and you did not? Was it random? Or did the now-free man happen to contribute thousands to the police station, therefore giving him a head start. At some point, if the people who get preferential treatment are all high-paying people, doesn’t that start to smell like bribery and corruption?
    Well it's absolutely desirable for there to be nuance and all that for you to feel like you've been served to the full extent of what is possible and of course in that environment you wouldn't have the smell "we'll let this one pass" scenario that everyone's going on about.
    I never said everyone gets the same treatment. Everyone is meant to get the same treatment.
    I'm also not advocating for it. I spent years railing against some of these practices and some of them I find absolutely wrong and unnecessary if you have the right climate in which you can do things differently. I can't tell if they could do that at D3 or if they would. I'm also not wasting my time sitting them down to troubleshoot their CS because I have no firsthand problems with their CS.
    All I'm doing is trying to give an account of what it's like on the inside and what you're dealing with.
    You might not like that that's how it is, but you get an inside-ish look and some inside-ish bit of advice and that's all I can contribute here. Apparently to some that makes me some sith lord level bad guy, but I don't take it that personally really.

    TL/DR I'm for nuance. But you can't have nuance.
  • DarthDeVo
    DarthDeVo Posts: 2,178 Chairperson of the Boards
    MacEifer said:

    Apparently to some that makes me some sith lord level bad guy, but I don't take it that personally really.
    No offense, but the avatar probably isn't helping distance you from that association. :tongue:
  • STERLING21JJ
    STERLING21JJ Posts: 103 Tile Toppler
    rbdragon said:
    1) Give d90 their Strange back. It's ridiculous that it's even an issue. Take away the iso/hp received from selling (or roll back if that proves difficult).

    2) Allow us to favorite/lock characters to prevent selling like so many other games already do.

    I never will understand why this game, more than any other game I've ever played, seems to go out of their way to make things more difficult for their customers in so many ways. I could go on further, but I don't want to hijack the thread ranting.

    CS stands for Customer Service. d90 is a customer who made a mistake. Provide the service that keeps d90 a customer in the future. Seems like a simple decision to me.
    I agree with this statement more than any of the others one here.  My background is a customer service warranty manager though for a major RV dealer in the US, but hey what do I know.
  • STERLING21JJ
    STERLING21JJ Posts: 103 Tile Toppler
    The rockett said:
    MacEifer said:
    Treras said:
    The rockett said:

    Example 1:  A video was oisted of a 500+ roster and he raged quit about 3 weeks ago. Sold everything due to Gambit.  
    Resolution:  Roster restored fully. 

    Example 2:  460 5* roster rage sold due to 15 dupe BB covers and CS not helping out because he could not pull the one darn color he needed.  2 weeks ago. 
    Resolution:  Roster restored fully. Rolled back 1 week. 

    Example 3:   500+ roster had major FB saving issues. Entire account gone. 
    Resolution:  Account fixed and was very well compensated. 

    Example 4:  500+ roster locked out due to FB saving error.  This was end of last season. 
    Resolution:  Account fix BUT he got no end of season rewards personal or ally. Got no other compensation. 

    Example 5:   Account got its 4th time 1 time exception of a cover swap for another 5*. 


    All of the above.  As someone else said it, D90 is still far from platinum level. 

    #restorestrange
    Do you have indications that case 1&2 were not their 1st time exceptions?

    As 3&4 were not self inflicted, of course they would need CS to fix them. These should be the cases you have CS for.

    Unless I'm mistaken, Cover swaps for LL pulls when you are capped on that colour wouldn't be one time expections but simply assistance by policy.


    And honestly, this isn't even the argument. Even if people got support in ways that don't line up with policies as they are explained to you, that doesn't make one eligible to receive the same benefit. That's like saying you should get out of a murder charge because OJ got out of a murder charge.

    If you haven't done game support, I'll break it down for you.
    60 - 90% of the stuff on your desk is stuff you should be helping with according to your policies.
    5 - 35% are people you can't help. You simply can't change what their problem is and you ask them to submit feedback so whatever they're struggling with can be improved.

    The last 5% are the unpopped popcorn kennels. Pleaders, chancers and scammers.
    Now technically you get these in other support jobs as well, but here it's different because it's a game.
    When I don't get someone a new phone because they asked nicely, that conversation ends.
    When you don't give someone something in a game and they don't want to end the conversation it doesn't end because "it doesn't cost anything" and "that guy in my guild got the same thing" and "you're supposed to keep me as a paying customer". Game communities are highly networked and their members flock to spectacular cases of company intervention. This generates "precedent" and like anyone who has seen 3 episodes of LA Law and smoked cigarettes behind the gym with the lawyer's son we all know that precedent means that "that's how it's done now".

    The problem there is that that's not how you can run customer support. You could run a search to see how many WoW characters are out there named "donotrestore". Little hint, there shouldn't be any, but you can see that's where some people messed up. There's some characters in WoW that have very funny achievements, like achievements their class shouldn't be able to complete. But they do because sometimes people in customer support can mess up.
    If someone messes up in that way in game support, it is news, sometimes small, sometimes big.

    None of this is a precedent. None of this makes you eligible for anything like it just because you know it happened.
    In the end, CS has an obligation to find the correct response to your request. Not the best one, the correct one. It might not be the best for you, it might not be what you wanted, but it's the correct one and when you got the correct one that doesn't mean you're supposed to be happy about it, but you should know you did all you can.

    Now there's some things I've been called out for, first of all The rockett called my out for calling you all 13 year olds, which was not my intent. I said "It's like a gaggle of 13 year olds in here who think their parents should drive them to the cinema because they can drive them to the cinema."
    The point here is 13 year olds see there's a car in the driveway, their parents are home and they want to go to the cinema. That is all the information they see. The fact that their parents may have had 10 hour working days, money might be tight or that they haven't done their homework in a fortnight doesn''t occur to them. It's the same here. Everyone talks as if they couldn't possibly be missing anything important because all the information they need to argue in their favor clearly is there.

    The other thing is that I said "This thread will go on for another 20 pages because you're asking the wrong questions and demanding the wrong things." without saying what it is you should be asking and that's a fair callout. I might as well just have said it instead of being all mystical about it.

    The questions D90 would need to ask of CS should be along these lines:

    Do you have a full record of our previous interactions?
    Was I offered an explanation of what a one-time exception is and what the potential magnitude of it was?
    Was I given the opportunity to accept or reject the restoration of the 4* cover at the time after being educated on the mmechanics of this exception?
    Was I informed of whether this exception will be renewed at certain intervals? (some one-time exceptions are actually "one-time-per-year" or "one-time-per-expansion-cycle" etc for some games.It#s different from company to company)

    Now CS would usually be able to provide information of this nature to a customer and the answers to it should give you an idea on whether they have an education process in such cases and if it was followed.
    You can always make a case of process over merit. If the original one-timer was done without appropriate warning about the nature of the request, then you should be able to plead for them for a do-over with an appropriate education this time and if they see it that way you might actually get it.

    Sorry if I come across a bit tense on the subject matter. I've spent a lot of time having my decisions torn apart on reddit and the forums for a half dozen games over the last decade or so. There's professionals sitting on the other end who come to work every morning to help you as best they can. Don't get cynical with them. Nobody can pay them enough to get dragged out into the yard like this for the resident cynics to descend upon them and question their motives.
    I made a promise to myself while drinking my whiskey last night that I would never responsed to your posts again, but here is am. 

    If you think a 500+ roster NEVER got an exception, then I do not know what to tell you. For those of us around when the first 5* were released know that they were make these then and this guy is a long term player. 

    The 460 roster, who I know very well, couldn't even get them to switch 1 color of his 15 Dupe BB. Let me say that 1 more time so it is clear.  He has a BB with 12 covers.  He had gotten 15 dupe BB covers and CS would NOT HELP.  They restored his roster.  This guy has been playing the game 2 weeks from when it started. So yea, been around a bit. 

    For any saving issues, with some of your other posts, why should they do anything?   How do you know the player didn't do anything to cause this?  Do you know there history?  Do you know there requests that have been made?  

    Instead of trying to deflect with this long posts that quite frankly i needed to refill my whiskey glass while reading, until you have dealt with some of the things that a lot of the long term players in this tread are telling you it would be good to listen. 
    Drink more whiskey Rockett and everything will make more sense:)
  • animaniactoo
    animaniactoo Posts: 486 Mover and Shaker
    A few things:

    1) Customer service will NEVER be a hard and fast rule business. Never ever ever. Why? Because doing it that way leaves out the option for human understanding, reward for human behavior and so on. So it will always be guidelines and special exceptions.

    What this means: Sometimes you get the right agent on the right day and sometimes you don't. Unless the issue is huge, it is not worth arguing with the CS agent about it. Celebrate the luck when you get the right agent on the right day and shrug when you don't and move on.

    Caveat: Some exceptions become egregious. It happens. Players file enough tickets for whatever reasons, and it's been known to happen that they develop a relationship of sorts with one particular agent who then ends up applying more benefit of the doubt or friendly-feeling than is reasonable to that player and their tickets. This is something it is important to track internally to prevent such abuse through a developed CS relationship.

    2) From a business standpoint, I was always taught that you treat your smallest customer/cheapest job just about as good as your largest/highest paying one. Why? Reputation. Plain and simple, it's about reputation and every customer is an advertisement for another. You can't buy that kind of goodwill and reputation any other way than through acting on it. I have followed this throughout my career and I have yet to see it actually fail. Doing it any other way is generally stepping over the dollar to pick up the dime. Either the game is worth it on its face and its general CS handling to spend money on or it's not. From what I've seen of how various issues have been handled, I am less likely to spend my money with D3/Demi than more likely. That's purely a personal opinion.

    3) My phone has a password lock on it. My husband has it. He still scolds me about leaving it set to open to an app rather than the "home" screen as it were. This is absolutely about device management and so on and pocket dialing/buying/selling/etc. is not an issue if you haven't left it to open back directly to the app rather than minimizing back to the home screen. So I agree that it is still on the user/player to pay attention and work to avoid mistakes rather than pointing out how easy it is to make a mistake if you've already made 2 other mistakes in protecting yourself from accidental anything.

    That said - human error exists and we're talking reasonableness here of the level of mistake, the number of times help has been asked for, and so on - if the situation is as s/he reports it, give the player back their Strange.
  • Ducky
    Ducky Posts: 2,255 Community Moderator
    Matt Murdock said:
    MacEifer said:
    Matt Murdock said:
    MacEifer said:
    [...]
    Let's assume this is the case for the sake of argument. Lets assume that CS doesnt want to restore his character because this is something that people would abuse in some way. That being the case, wouldnt they want to be sure that he did it purposefully? Losing a 5* character isnt something to be taken lightly. With the amount of effort it takes to champion a 5* in this game, its something they could easily lose customers over.

    Say all you want that its his fault, that he should have been more careful, that he shouldnt play while intoxicated (seriously?? You cant enjoy a leisure activity with a beer? Tinykitty off...). But the fact is that i have accidentally bought a 40 pack while sober. I placed my phone face down with the screen on, and in the act of picking it back up i somehow hit purchase and confirmed it. It can happen. Falling asleep while playing is another likely situation which could result in a lost 5*. And the fate of the best characters in the game that take ages to build should not lie behind a couple button presses. I asked CS to restore my HP but they told me that because there is a confirmation button, i had no recourse. I had nightmares about accidentally selling a 5* after that. But after thinking about it i guess i assumed that CS would do the right thing and restore it to me. I am very saddened to learn that that is not the case.

    My point is, a simple confirm button isnt enough to establish intent. It isnt enough to protect your account against other people securing your phone, against your will, and deleting your characters. And in rare (but clearly not impossible) circumstances, it isnt enough to prevent an accident. I maintain that selling a 5* specifically needs to be pin protected, and until that is the case it is unfair to hold the customer to their (possibly unintentional) actions. They need a better way to establish that it was done intentionally before they go categorically denying these sorts of claims. To be quite honest, it reflects very poorly on them because it makes them look greedy. Innocent until proven guilty!
    This really doesn't hold up and I'll tell you why.

    You have not the slightest idea what people tell you when they want their stuff back and start pleading their case.
    I've spoken to people who with a straight face told me their dog needed surgery and they had to sell their account so Fido could be cancer free again.
    There is no investigating if something happened with intent or for the wrong or right reasons. If you make your customer support people sit through that bull then you might be handing out vodka shots at the start of their shifts. They'll need them.
    The only way to put a stop to that is clear rules. It's your phone, your game, take care of it. If you're prone to butt dialing, better make sure you engage your lock screen.

    The whole innocent until prven guilty thing bugs me. There's some assumption there that there would be a version of the situation where you would be entitled to get help. You did it with intent, you don't get help. You did it by mistake you don't get it either.

    There's a case to be made here that you maybe should get help if you did it with intent, because your intent can be reasoned with whereas your butterfingers or lack of device security can not. When someone nukes their roster and then sees the error of their ways, that is something you can work with. You can't work with "the dog ate my homework" stories.

    You're missing the point. I'm not saying that CS should have to establish intent on a case by case basis. I'm saying that adding a pin or some added security feature before selling something incredibly valuable would in itself establish intent. Then you know that if someone actually entered the PIN to delete their character, they did it intentionally and shouldn't be helped. Unintentional sales like this would no longer be an issue.

    I started off by saying: let's assume that, as you suggested, the reason they wouldn't restore his character is because it could be abused by people (doing it intentionally). That being the case, they need a better way to make sure it couldn't happen unintentionally. Then they could ignore pleas to restore characters knowing that these people did it intentionally and it would get rid of complaints about unintentional issues. This would reduce their workload. But now you're claiming that the people who did it unintentionally deserve to be punished for their sloppiness and those trying to abuse the system (like in your example, someone decides to quit the game so they delete their characters and then changed their mind, creating more work for CS) should be rewarded. Which kind of invalidates your argument that they do it to protect against abuse. So which is it? Be logically consistent please.

    Look, if you accidentally transferred a large sum of money to someone you could do a chargeback. If someone dropped their wallet on the ground, the right thing to do would be to return it, not to keep it as punishment for a careless moment. Just because you seem to have a vendetta against people who are sloppy with their phones doesnt mean that they dont deserve to have what is rightfully theirs.

    So again, my point is that until they have a better way of protecting people from these mistakes, they should be given the benefit of the doubt. Add in a PIN and then they have grounds to ignore those requests.
    Why is it their responsibility to ensure we don't make mistakes? Shouldn't the player be responsible at some point?
  • Ducky
    Ducky Posts: 2,255 Community Moderator
    Just seems like people are expecting CS to bail out people when people should be held accountable for their actions. If I purchase an item from a store and get it home and accidentally drop it and break it, I'm not expecting the store or the manufacturer of said item to replace it because I messed up. Why is this any different?
  • mega ghost
    mega ghost Posts: 1,156 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited December 2017
    Ducky said:
    Just seems like people are expecting CS to bail out people when people should be held accountable for their actions. If I purchase an item from a store and get it home and accidentally drop it and break it, I'm not expecting the store or the manufacturer of said item to replace it because I messed up. Why is this any different?
    Because if you buy a physical item at a store, get it home, drop it, and break it, there is a cost associated with replacing the physical good for you. Even then, if the cost is minimal, some retailers and manufacturers WILL replace it for you in the hope of acquiring a repeat customer, because they understand the value in that.

    This couldn't be any further from that though, because there is no physical good. It's purely digital. There was a cost associated in the development, the licensing, the programming, the artwork, etc., but past that they could make one copy or 10 billion copies and the cost would be the same (past increased hosting expenses for such a huge volume of player info.) The only cost now is how many minutes it takes for their CS person to resolve the issue, which amounts to cents, and spending those cents on a customer that has spent nearly $1K on the game and is likely to spend more if this doesn't go terribly is an amazing investment any reasonable company would love to make.
  • mega ghost
    mega ghost Posts: 1,156 Chairperson of the Boards
    I'm going to blame this ridiculously smooth Laphroaig 15-year scotch for how angry I'm getting at everyone that's not grasping the basic economy of this.
  • Phumade
    Phumade Posts: 2,503 Chairperson of the Boards
    mega ghost said:
    Ducky said:
    Just seems like people are expecting CS to bail out people when people should be held accountable for their actions. If I purchase an item from a store and get it home and accidentally drop it and break it, I'm not expecting the store or the manufacturer of said item to replace it because I messed up. Why is this any different?
    Because if you buy a physical item at a store, get it home, drop it, and break it, there is a cost associated with replacing the physical good for you. Even then, if the cost is minimal, some retailers and manufacturers WILL replace it for you in the hope of acquiring a repeat customer, because they understand the value in that.

    This couldn't be any further from that though, because there is no physical good. It's purely digital. There was a cost associated in the development, the licensing, the programming, the artwork, etc., but past that they could make one copy or 10 billion copies and the cost would be the same (past increased hosting expenses for such a huge volume of player info.) The only cost now is how many minutes it takes for their CS person to resolve the issue, which amounts to cents, and spending those cents on a customer that has spent nearly $1K on the game and is likely to spend more if this doesn't go terribly is an amazing investment any reasonable company would love to make.
    Let me add one more point in support of mega's post.

    Precisely because this is an intangible virtual currency.  CS is actually more important and meaningful to the guest.

    When goods are physical, tangible, bought from phsyical stores.  People can release their frustration through physical action.  (i.e. drive back,  blow it up, blah, blah)  This has a real and meaningful effect on allowing people to release their frustration.  It allows them to better conceptualize and deal with what's personal frustration vs solvable complaints.

    When goods are virtual,  People can't address and release their frustrations.  They are robbed of their senses of looking at the person's eye, listening for the sincerity in their voice,  assessing is the shop well run.

    I.e. Do I believe that this company is interested in my concerns and issues.

    Is it surprising then, that a customer will ask alliance members about their experiences with CS.  Is it surprising that a whisper network exists where they know every CS agents initials and the likelyhood of success or rejection?


    At the end of the day, its a poor company that fails to understand the differences in how people relate to live in person conversations vs "online" convos where you lose the ability to assess honestly, sincerity, effort.  Is the employee making the extra step or is the business well run with Open and transparent rules for dealing with conflicts.

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