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

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  • Ducky
    Ducky Posts: 2,255 Community Moderator
    Warranties are limited, even the extended ones you pay for. You pay for insurance. The Domino's deal is pretty rare. Also, the physical goods vs digital goods doesn't hold up, imo. Both are goods that are being distributed that are allowing people to make a living. Neither should be given out easily or for free too often or people would be out of jobs.

    I still contend that people should be held more responsible than most in this thread are contending. Yes, I realize people make mistakes; but when I make the same mistake twice, I don't expect anyone to bail me out for it.
  • animaniactoo
    animaniactoo Posts: 486 Mover and Shaker
    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.
    FYI, this is not how licensing generally works. At all. If you want more details, I can provide them, but there are additional costs for selling more and very painful costs to selling less as contracts usually have a minimum guarantee. The goal is to sell more in order to reach the point of diminishing costs for what's in the licensing contract plus other maintenance costs so that you are actually pulling in a profit.

    My argument here, @Ducky, is simply that in extreme cases where it takes little or nothing to make it right and help has not been excessively demanded, it is simply good business sense for player goodwill etc. to "make the customer whole", particularly when it can be done at a minimal cost to you. Either that, or that better be the most perfect bug-free game you've ever seen in your life and never rely on the players' goodwill for shrugging off the occasional "oops" in return for token rewards.
  • Phumade
    Phumade Posts: 2,496 Chairperson of the Boards
    Ducky said:
     Both are goods that are being distributed that are allowing people to make a living. Neither should be given out easily or for free too often or people would be out of jobs.

    Is that insight backed up with an actual Profit Loss statement, has a report been compiled across industries, is their a study to support this? I don't ask that in a snarky tone. Only to point out that I had the same perspective before I saw the customer surveys results. Before I read and logged the yelp reviews, before I saw the season values for "Solve it" tickets vs incremental revenue. We can surely go round in round about managerial accounting and what are proper metrics etc... But its hard to look past actual survey comments, tracked revenue/costs, see a P&L statement that lays out success in Red and Black numbers.
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    edited December 2017
    mega ghost said:
    Ducky said:
    Why is it their responsibility to ensure we don't make mistakes? Shouldn't the player be responsible at some point?
    This isn't an issue of someone accidentally swiping the wrong tiles and messing up a potential match-5 that would have won a very close match for them, but instead they lost and didn't come in first place in PvP. In that case, they have to swallow that bitter pill and live with it. This is an issue of an unintentional loss of a high-value asset that took months (with money spent) or years to acquire and build up.

    This also isn't an issue of responsibility. The developers are responsible for a functioning game and to secure our private info (although I don't know if they even have access to our CC info if we've made the purchases through iTunes or the Play store, etc.) — that's it. But it's irrefutably in their best interest to make players want to continue to play their game and to continue to spend money on said game. If I lost a nearly-complete 5* character due to what was tantamount to a pocket dial and CS refused to help me, at best I would never spend a cent on the game again, and at worst I'd delete the app right then and there.

    CS exists to solve our issues, to keep us engaged and to keep us spending. That's why these people have been employed. They don't serve other purposes within the company, and requests made to them aren't an annoying aside or distraction. Some requests are absurd and unfair, certainly, and those should be politely declined with a reasonable stance explained. Others, like this one, are extremely understandable and should be met with swift resolution. And to avoid situations like this in the future, especially if they are common, it would also be in their best interest to develop a solution to the problem, to keep players happy and spending and not completely disenfranchised.
    and

    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.

     
    Spectacularly well said, @mega ghost, I agree with every bit of it.
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    JHawkInc 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?
    On the one hand, a physical product you purchase and are responsible for the care of and remove from the store to take to your home and would cost either you or the manufacturer funds to replace is close to the opposite of a digital product you earn with a significant investment of time that is still stored on their servers AND is free for them to replace.

    On the other hand, Domino's Carryout Insurance.

    Or warranties on electronics. Or automotive insurance. Or when you spill your drink at a fast food place and they give you a new cup because it's just decent customer service.

    It's not some crazy alien concept we're talking about here.
    I will add to this by noting that this is more analogous to a situation where one stays on the vendor's property and uses the vendor's items while there for amusement. They arrive empty handed and depart empty handed.

    Crucially, the customer in this game never acquires any property interest of any kind, whether or not money is spent. If D3 shuts down tomorrow, players will never have any legal recourse whatever to recoup any value from our participation in the game. The OP never "owned" his Dr. Strange, let alone took him off property. Rather, the OP was an invitee (legal term) using D3's goods at all times.
  • mega ghost
    mega ghost Posts: 1,156 Chairperson of the Boards
    animaniactoo said:
    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.
    FYI, this is not how licensing generally works. At all. If you want more details, I can provide them, but there are additional costs for selling more and very painful costs to selling less as contracts usually have a minimum guarantee. The goal is to sell more in order to reach the point of diminishing costs for what's in the licensing contract plus other maintenance costs so that you are actually pulling in a profit.
    You are correct RE: licensing and I did not mean to imply that this is how licensing in general works, but the model you're discussing is not (as far as I know, I may be corrected) what's in play here. I would be hideously surprised to learn that the developers have to pay extra licensing fees for every player that has gotten an X-Force Wolverine cover, or if a single player decides to roster a second X-Force Wolverine they pay additional licensing fees, or that with every champ level I get from an acquired X-Force Wolverine cover they have to pay more — instead, they've gotten the rights to use the character once. Maybe it's for a period of time and then it needs to be renewed, but my point was that whether they give a player one cover or a thousand covers, the cost behind said digital cover does not change.
  • sirwookieechris
    sirwookieechris Posts: 131 Tile Toppler
    Sounds like a bad case of being poor. Have you tried giving them more of your money? I hear that alleviates most issues!
  • Nick441234
    Nick441234 Posts: 1,496 Chairperson of the Boards
    Ducky said:
    Warranties are limited, even the extended ones you pay for. You pay for insurance. The Domino's deal is pretty rare. Also, the physical goods vs digital goods doesn't hold up, imo. Both are goods that are being distributed that are allowing people to make a living. Neither should be given out easily or for free too often or people would be out of jobs.

    I still contend that people should be held more responsible than most in this thread are contending. Yes, I realize people make mistakes; but when I make the same mistake twice, I don't expect anyone to bail me out for it.
    Exactly this. You learn from the first mistake you made and you make sure you are super careful from that point on. The OP wasn't. He got a Get Out of Jail Free card the first time, why should he get one again because he didn't learn from his first mistake? 
  • NotBAMF
    NotBAMF Posts: 408 Mover and Shaker

    I've actually come around to the "Replace his character" side in the last day or so of reading this topic. To me, it comes down to a few things:

    1) Replacing this character costs the company literally nothing. It's an imaginary digital item. They don't need to pay small Asian children 30 cents an hour to produce it. They don't have it ship it anywhere. It's just a few keystrokes. Compare that to, say, the OP taking their response as a hint that he should either quit playing the game or, at the very least, never again pay for anything in game because he is unhappy with CS (and the discussion of whether he has any RIGHT to be unhappy is irrelevant if he just decides he is and never spends money on it again), and it's an easy business call. Neither restoring nor NOT restoring costs the company any money, but only one option likely results in a loss of future income. So restoring it just makes the most financial sense here.

    2) I'm still lost as to whether CS can see the lifetime progress of players, but it sounds like they can based on all the comments here. Which means this isn't an easily breakable system where people are going to demand lots of characters they never owned be restored. And if that's the case, you're hardly setting a dangerous precedent here by restoring a character you can confirm existed. So maybe I'm missing what the harm in doing so is.

    3) The analogy of buying a physical item and breaking it is "whataboutism" pure and simple and not really in play. But if we do insist on doing that, here's a better analogy: if you a buy a physical item, take it home, and within a day or two you think "Hey, I don't like/need this. I still have the receipt, and it is still in 100% perfect condition", you can take it back to the store and return it. It's buyer's remorse or whatever, and virtually every business on the planet has policies to let you do this. The OP didn't "break" anything; he made a purchase he regrets and now wants to exchange it. Heck, my wife returns things to NY & Company or Victoria's Secret darn near weekly; it's not like they tell her "Naw, you returned something last year. Now you have to keep this ill-fitting sweater forever".  


    Anyway, that's my two cents. I'm still a little off about the whole "Oh no I have no idea how this happened woe is me" part of the story because if this has happened before, you put some extra security measures on your phone like an intelligent person would, but heck... just assuming the guy did it on purpose and immediately regretted it, there's still no reason not to restore it for him. 

  • Pants1000
    Pants1000 Posts: 484 Mover and Shaker
    Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but it would get abused if CS did restores like this without question.  

    Based on what I’ve seen, CS can’t remove covers/ISO/HP from accounts.  That’s why you have to sell the 5* yourself and you get to keep 2000 ISO when you do a latest swap.

    If CS restored characters easily, how many people would sell a character occasionally for ISO/HP, then ask to have the character restored?  Do that with a max champ 3* and you profit 105k ISO and 500 HP.  Do it with a 4* or a recently reworked character for a bigger profit.

    At least with full roster restores, it sounds lik they can do a rollback and the player profits nothing.

    Since it could be abused and would cost CS time, the one-time exception rule makes sense.  Maybe it should be once a year instead of once a lifetime.
  • LifeofAgony
    LifeofAgony Posts: 690 Critical Contributor
    You mean having clear published guidelines could help alleviate some of these issues?  Snark aside, it would be so much easier to enforce and keep people at bay if they knew the rules and then could understand they screwed thenself by asking for a 1x exception much less important than accidentally selling a champ 5*.
  • animaniactoo
    animaniactoo Posts: 486 Mover and Shaker
    If CS can't remove iso and other rewards gained in exchange for the character back at the last known specs for it (confirmed via backups of account status, etc.), they're doing something wrong. Seriously seriously wrong.

    I do not think the game needs more impediments such as a pincode lock than it already has to "accidentally" doing something. Frankly, I think that just increases the likelihood of CS tickets "I don't remember my passcode" (probably you could automate this but maybe not depending on the code). There are many ways already available to protect oneself from accidental sales/etc. such as minimizing the game when you're not actively playing it and having your phone's base state be at the home screen. If you're not willing to develop/incorporate that habit into your own safety/usage protocols, that's on you.

    However, I also do not think that a 1x ever rule is reasonable for a daily play heavy usage game. That is, to me, not a reasonable standard for human error. An average of 1x a year would be much more reasonable imo. So unless the player had issues also in (e.g.) August and October of last year, the standard being applied here is too strict for actual risk expectancy in this kind of situation.

    Separate from that, unless I misunderstand the situation, the OP is owning that they were responsible for the single cover that was restored in January but is claiming lack of ownership for the Strange deletion. That is a potential avenue of investigation "how did this happen" because it is possible that this is a technical issue vs accidental player action. A much lower possibility, but still one that should be looked at.
  • Beta-Ray Bill
    Beta-Ray Bill Posts: 124 Tile Toppler
    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?
    Return policy of a certain amount of days. Feel free to go buy something, break it, then return it. I can assure you they will exchange the item for the same item you had. Companies do it all the time. Why do they do it? It’s good business. It generates repeat business due to the happiness of that person being taken care of. In this case d3, CS, Demi, or whatever you want to call it, fail to have good customer service
  • Spudgutter
    Spudgutter Posts: 743 Critical Contributor
    Everyone, at some point in their life, should have to work a job in service or retail.  

    Those that don't, have no idea how far a kind gesture goes.  If you are waiting tables and a toddler knocks a plate off a table, you dont walk up to the parents and tell them "tough tinykitty, you are responsible for your actions."  

    We know from some threads on cheating that they can roll back a roster by a couple weeks.  If i accidentally do something, i would be totally ok with rolling back my roster to save it. Its also the best of both worlds, because since there is nothing to be gained, it cannot be abused.

    There is absolutely no downside to showing some compassion in life.  
  • Rod5
    Rod5 Posts: 587 Critical Contributor
    broll said:
    DaBeast911 said:
    @d90

    I sympathize with you and agree 100%. It takes no extra work to restore your 5 star, people have had it done before. I've seen entire rosters deleted on a video and then miraculously restored so restoring a character is a minor feat. It would be such a big deal if it is was a 3 star or heck even a 4 star but those 5 stars are extremely rare to come by and then to accidentally sell one is deflating. A year ago, restoring it wouldn't have been a problem, I sold a fully covered 266 Storm and had it restored, no problem. They simply looked at my roster the day before I sold it, saw it was there and replaced it. Heck, they even let me keep the ISO, which I was shocked by. I sympathize with you and hope that it works out.

    It's impossible that it "takes no extra work to restore your 5 star".  I don't know how much extra work it is, but the fact that someone needs to read a ticket and respond to it invalids your statement.  If it were no extra work it would be fully automated and require 0 human interaction.  I don't know how complex it would be to restore a 5* and neither do you.  I would guess it's not overly complicated, but again I don't truly know.  Let's say for the sake of argument it takes 10 minutes and CS can do it.  If they applied a policy of everyone can blanket undo a delete of any character and 1% of the players base takes advantage of this twice a year or more.  Let's suppose the game has 100,000 active players (I'm guessing i have no idea).  CS is now spending 10,000 minutes or 167 hours or 21 business days a year just supporting fixing peoples mistakes.  It's even worse if you consider it could take developer involvement and then you're taking 21 days of development time away from the game to support this for all players.

    The point is something small done a lot really adds up, a lot more than you'd initially think.  As a small company they have to make choices as far as what their CS resources can spend time doing.  They have to put barriers to the time spent on such things otherwise actual support issues and or development couldn't done (or they'd over hire, become non-profitable, and the game tanks).  

    I see more validity in the argument that they should support for all or support it for none. However since 100% of their revenue is micro transactions and most likely only a small percent spend a lot and an even smaller extent spend a ton they make exceptions for those players that spend enough that losing their business would hurt.

    All that to say you can spout all day how easy it is and they should just grant any request that comes buy, but at the end of the day they are a business with limited resources and they have to choose how to spend those resources effectively to keep the game running and profitable. To make a parallel let's say your roster was full of sentient characters.  If 1* Spider-Man makes a mistake that would cost you 1000 ISO to fix and there was a reasonable likelihood that more characters would make that same mistake, would you be willing to sacrifice your gameplay to accommodate them?  Even if 1* Spider-Man just deleted himself from your roster would that kill your gameplay?  Conversely if L500 Gambit made the same mistake for 1000 ISO it would probably be worth it to you to keep him from deleting itself.  These are the kinds of decisions Demi's management has to make to keep the game going.  For better or for worse.
    “I don’t really know how difficult it would be, in fact I have no idea whatsoever, but I am going be REALLY insistent on how difficult it must be just to be contrary”
  • Kahmon
    Kahmon Posts: 625 Critical Contributor
    Not to derail, but something like this probably happens often enough that it may be worth creating an in game restore feature with some kind of penalty. Maybe 10%? 20%? Even 50% above the iso and hp sellback.

    For example, if I decide to (or accidentally) sell my maxed IM40 for the 105K iso + 500 hps and decide having the 266 was much more valuable than my new one then with a 20% penalty I could buy it back for 126k iso and 600 hps.
    I don't know what a 453 5* sells for but I'm sure 20% would be well worth it to the op to get back.

    This could even be extended to covers on the vine. To many people it would probably be worth some iso so extend the viability of a cover beyond the 14 days currently given. Kind of like paying off the interest on a pawn shop ticket.

    I can see this could be abused of characters that get reworked, like selling Gambit now then rebuying when he reverts to a lower price, but as long as the price is tied to what it was when sold instead of current value then no problems.
  • The rockett
    The rockett Posts: 2,016 Chairperson of the Boards
    @d90 any update on this? 

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