Guild Wars 2

We’ll be sure to PM you about it!

Gaile Gray.6028:

This is a personal note, and I’m sorry to make a post about this, but it’s time:

I have more than 400 PMs in my in-box. Some are great, and entirely appropriate. Some are there because (very rarely) I ask for information that is best sent by PM. I thank you for those.

But the vast majority of the PMs are from people who should be posting their issue, request, or question in the forums. Or from someone who posts and then PMs me to ask for special care. Please do not PM me to request a ticket review, nor to ask me to expedite your ticket, your brother’s ticket, your friend’s ticket, or your sister-in-law’s dog-sitter’s parking attendant’s ticket.

I spend as much time as possible on the forums, and I do my best to help everyone. And while the friendly note is more than welcome, I can’t justify handling account issues via PM — they need to be in the forums themselves (without personal information, of course) or, even better, they need to be sent to and resolved by the Customer Service Team.

Thank you for understanding!

But then how will the dog park the car without a ticket?
…What am I talking about?!

Perhaps you want to sticky that on the top, because anyone who sends you a PM like that has not read a lot of things you have already said …

Or maybe get an automated answer, similar to if we send an answer to the forum team?

Hi this is Gaile, I am sorry I am not able to answer your PM at the moment, if you wish to enquire about … please press 1.

I almost sent you a private message saying thanks for appreciating my sense of humor, but then thought: “I bet she gets a kajillion private messages a day.”

So, thanks for getting my sense of humor. I am not always whiney and truculent. Really.

And…I appreciate all you do, and have done over the years to make Guild Wars a nifty place.

well I tryed to give you some praise in the main forum but apparently I am not allowed to use your name in a threat title and was subsequently slapped on the wrist by the moderator , so with that in mind.

Everyone needs to give the above dev a huge HUG for all her hard work with the Lost Shores and the karka chest reward. She has gone out of her way to help us all with this matter above anyone else’s efforts and for this we should all be very thankfull.

So (HUG) from me ty for the great work

hope you have a wounderfull xmas

cheers Phabby

Gaile,

Other staff have been very unhelpful with a ticket so I sent you a PM. It’s not fair for someone to say “no help, case closed”. After using the proper channels, what other choices are left to get help?

What’s your stance on sending you pictures of cats?

Don’t worry too much about coming across as cranky. For all the great support and patience you offered, I’d think you’re allowed to feel a little miffed if you’re getting drowned with inappropriate requests.

I hope this thread gets through to people, and keep up the great work Gaile, I love your positive attitude!

Gaile, you could never be cranky! Your doing a great job and some of us know what a difficult job it can be some times.
I thought of sending you a PM myself, but just knew you where probobly being buried by them so I will say it here.
You once told me seeing my name made you smile. It’s time for me to return the favor.
Just seeing your name here in the forums brings a smile to my face as it makes it feel like it’s home here.

And to the other posters, come on guys, give support a break. There are millions of us and only a hand full of them. Give them a chance to work on your issue before posting multiple requests looking for help, opening mulitple tickets, or in Gaile’s case, burying her in PMs. I do tech support myself, it’s not fun. You deal with people who have problems all day, and will more times then not, somehow think it’s your fault they can’t do/get what they want. Support is there to help you, it’s thier main job, let them do it.

Maybe you can explain to us how someone who’s account has been mistakenly banned by ArenaNet is supposed to post in the 3-day thread?

I should have read this thread first!

Sorry if I ended up making your job harder. The temptation to sate your need to feel like you’ve done everything possible is tough to resist.

Why not program the forum to auto-reply to any mail that is sent your way, telling them generally where their info should be directed?

Software is software, there is no reason why somebody can’t make it happen.

Sorry about that.

Maybe you can pin this up as well.

Gaile Gray.6028:

This is a personal note, and I’m sorry to make a post about this, but it’s time:

I have more than 400 PMs in my in-box. Some are great, and entirely appropriate. Some are there because (very rarely) I ask for information that is best sent by PM. I thank you for those.

But the vast majority of the PMs are from people who should be posting their issue, request, or question in the forums. Or from someone who posts and then PMs me to ask for special care. Please do not PM me to request a ticket review, nor to ask me to expedite your ticket, your brother’s ticket, your friend’s ticket, or your sister-in-law’s dog-sitter’s parking attendant’s ticket.

I spend as much time as possible on the forums, and I do my best to help everyone. A friendly note is more than welcome. But I cannot justify handling account issues via PM — they need to be in the forums themselves (without personal information, of course) and almost always, before they are posted here, they need to be sent to and resolved by the Customer Service Team.

Thank you for understanding!

If you wan’t to significantly reduce the number of PMs you receive, I don’t see that creating this thread will help much, since probably more than 90% of the forum users won’t ever read it.

Gaile Gray.6028:

Loli Ruri.8307:

Why not program the forum to auto-reply to any mail that is sent your way, telling them generally where their info should be directed?

Software is software, there is no reason why somebody can’t make it happen.

Don’t have the programming to do that right now. I’m not a fond of auto-responses, but I may need to ask for that to get coded.

For your situation you should ask for a unique coding outside the default auto-responder. [unless i missed something outside the auto responders function]

Maybe something along the lines of:
-Before the user hits submit to send a message to you, a prompt will pop up that would require the user to scroll to the bottom before they are able to to close the prompt gui. Basically stating along the lines of: "If you are looking for support this is not the right location please file a ticket at: " < insert url > " or if you have a question please post it " < insert correct sub thread > " If none of those define your message purpose then please hit submit below "

~ Could push for an amendment code named “dumb kitten” to where if they submit a message asking for help regarding a ticket or anything that is not appropriate for a PM you would be allowed to gag their PM rights for disrupting players in need of help. Since essentially they are disrupting staff members from helping the other players who are waiting so in essence they are disrupting the players as well since they can’t fully enjoy the game.

O.o but ya, chances are all the new pm’s you are getting about tickets are from people just trolling you since they now know that it annoys you.

Sorry for sending you a PM, I was merely trying to get something important out, basically merely trying to help. Sorry once again if i am one of the offenders.

It is always the person with empathy everyone wants to contact.
It could be suggested that the staff there learn some of your empathic skills.
All organisations can benefit from that so this is not a personal attack.
Call it “empathy and resolution training” with staff having rostered hours set aside as one of their monthly activities. They could be reviewed by their peers in a group exercise and also have formal written tests.

That way the one or few persons that shine in their job because of empathy and attention to detail, do not get work fatigue. They get the support of their peers and the respect of the customers increases to include the whole team as a relevant point of contact.

Measuring performance stats for call and email is only an indication of how staff perform and so easy to exploit one way or another.

Quality caring and attention to detail gets the job done with out having to have repeat follow up and is so much more economical in the mid to long term.

Thank you Gaile for the support you provided me when I had an account in GW1 as Tempest Thyme and I am glad to see you in this role doing a great job for GW2.