Support and MMO's

[bonedancer-SiN]

Last night my account was suspended in Age of Conan along with hundreds of others across the realms. Like the others I received an email saying that it is suspended pending an investigation. A review of their tech support or general forums (which are now constantly being 'managed') you can quickly see they went after ANYONE who spent large sums of money in the last week. Sadly, that just happens to be every Architect/GM in the game that has been in the Arms race of city building. I take on average 2-5 gold from each member, each day and that number has been getting bigger each day as people level. Two days ago my daily high collection was in the teens and I suspect as people learn quests = fat cash it would have kept climbing. However, in the mean time I'm flagged as a gold farmer or some type of cash manipulator and have to wait for them to answer me petition requests. I've filed 3; all have been ignored save a ticket number auto response. In today’s day of MMO expectations this is really armature bullshit.

I always say there is nothing new under the sun this game has sadly proven that once again. Many moons ago in a game called UO there arose a problem between the players and the development team of the game. The short version of the story is players started doing things with their game that they didn’t expect the GM's started banning or removing players for doing these things. Further as the game developers wanted to protect their reputation they started banning players from forums, deleting threads, and numerous other draconian steps to put their sheep back in line. In the vacuum of customer service spawned Dr Twister, this guy basically single handedly reformed MMO support role. Blasting Ultima Online development team repeatedely until they started addressing their custoemrs, started answer obvious problems and stopped sweeping them under rugs or pretending the consumer was the enemy. He did such a good job at riding roughshod on them that the company created a new type of position called 'Community Manager'. Later Dr Twister changed his name and was hired by DAOC and did a magnificent job for that game doing the best he could. Often times the answer is 'I just don’t know but I'll keep asking' but frankly that’s all it really takes to make any of us happy... someone to at least act like they care.

Putting on my Mr. Twister hat for a moment allow me to give you my spin. First, Funcom has alot of bugs, many identified in the beta but simply ignored because they were hell bent on releasing to a set date. I'd be willing to bet my paycheck there are more than one 'game breaking' bug, and when I say game breaking I mean duping, world manipulation, stat hacks, etc. Second, rather than taking power gamers to their beta and listening to the few they had they filled it to the rim with the 'everyman' and proceeded to turn a blind eye to their own problems. Third, people are pacing through content far faster than anticipated and into 'untested' stuff which just leads to more of one and two. Put all this together and you have a situation teetering on collapse and they paniced and hit the eject button. In the crossfire is me and god knows how many other players, leaders, guild banks etc. Fine, you want an aggressive stance on cheating you want to find the cheaters and ban them... awesome but be be prepared to answer the 'wtf' messages when your receive them. Obviously their targetting methods grabbed people unintended and a pettion of any of the guilds involved in the arms race for city warfare will show everyone is loosing someone or some amount of money and NONE of them are getting any answers on why.

There are so many bugs in this game right now and frankly that’s not my complaint... hell you can walk straight through some of my city walls. My complaint is that 16 hours have gone by and not one single response. I don't know if I need to buy a new account and start over, I have no way of communicating with anyone sentient about my particulars. Basically, I'm a cog in the wheel of some giant cesspool of complaint tickets and have to pray to the giant Norwegian in the sky that they will sort it out and unfuck me. For the record I have about two weeks solid played in this game between a couple weeks of beta and release. I still have no clue how to do some of the basic things in the game and certianly not enough information to start fucking the system. My only conclusion is that they selected me because I grab money from every guild member every night and spent it immediately on our city. I have never cheated in this game and in no way deserved to be suspended or banneed.

I was prepared for the bugs, I was prepared for slow responses, I wasn’t prepared for the complete and total lack of customer support from their support team. As a final note to you nay sayers out there (and I know you’re out there) go ask any of the competitive guilds what’s going on, most have had gold deleted, some have had characters suspended, and others banned. None of us have had the ANYTHING in the form of reasonable communication from the company we are paying.

[bonedancer-SiN]

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First support ticket 19 hours ago no response yet.
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reply-tosupport@ageofconan.com

dateTue, May 27, 2008 at 9:27 PM
subject[Funcom Support #1000110199] AutoReply: My Account - support petition
mailed-byrt3.funcom.com
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Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated in response to the
creation of a ticket regarding:
"My Account - support petition",
a summary of which appears below.

There is no need to reply to this message right now. Your ticket has been
assigned an ID of [Funcom Support #1000110199].

Please include the string:

[Funcom Support #1000110199]

in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. To do so,
you may reply to this message.

Thank you and look forward to seeing you all in Hyboria very shortly,

support@ageofconan.com

[Abso]

Hey at least you're almost in the first billion support tickets!

They are trying to fix all the GMs at the same time, but they definitely have all your info and the influence of folks looking out for you.

On behalf of Funcom and Eidos, you have our apology.

[Jabbuk-SiN]

While this game has promise, I am really not impressed. Too much random down time, too many bugs, and now this. If I was you Bone, I would have a SUPER hard time justifying buying another copy of this game, part of me regrets the initial purchase. Why in the fuck would you feed more money to these guys after they ban your account for no cause? They OWE you that money or an explanation, if not, it is flat out stealing and I think EU / US laws would agree.

On the plus side, your still listed as our GM in game, so maybe they have not deleted your character yet =)

[CnC]

What downtime? I haevn't had any since ... ever.

[Abso]

Originally Posted by CnC

What downtime? I haevn't had any since ... ever.

lol? All I see in shoutbox is people bitching about servers being down!

[CnC]

Oh, thought he ment like downtime in the EQ sense of medding. The server downtime is just par for the course of a new MMO.

[Nilek]

If they haven't deleted his account, their just suspending all accounts that are even remotely suspected of malicious actions or exploits until they can properly fix the bugs in the trader / duping or whatever... You got flagged for the gold transactions, but I'm sure their just suspending all flagged accounts while they take a closer look at each accounts actions.

I'm hoping their not getting back to him because their figuring thier shit out.

[simbala-SiN]

I can handle downtimes. I can handle stupid little bugs that make me go "hmmm" and interface designs that aren't quite effective.

But this...this is just stupid. Someone made a decision to globally suspend players whose accounts met a certain, VERY GENERAL, criteria. Here's a tip, FunCom: Create a more specific query, let it run for an extra day, and receive much more accurate results to avoid trouble like this. Or perhaps find a better solution, as there are many. But banning the accounts of the top guild's GMs (and any guild storing coin to build a city) is a terrible solution, and it's bad publicity at best. Is this really the treatment you want to give the top guild's GMs only weeks after release? I would hope not.

Many words can describe this experience, but I think "unprofessional" just about sums it up. How can a company create an immense game like AoC and then make such a screwed up decision? I just don't know.