Guild Wars 2

I do not understand the logic in refusing to assist your customers who have been on the unfortunate end of a bug in your application. “Sorry, just start over and you should be okay” is a horrible response to people who have had a bug ruin their character at level 30 or 70. So now, the specifics…

My wife and I play together, she is a sylvari mesmer and I a ranger. We enjoy our play time together and I managed to convince her to give WoW a rest to try GW2. We were having fun and she was convincing me to expand our character spots so we could try all the stories and different class combos. However at level 30 it all came crashing down.

We would take turn ‘hosting’ the personal story and talk about which path we would travel. It was nice not having to do the same task twice and we really were enjoying the game. At the end of a game night we decided to follow Cai and the Order of Whispers so that is what I selected and she accepted the advancement. However when we logged on the next day to play I was on Cai’s path and she had to talk to Brayth. ( I believe the names are accurate and spelled correctly.) So we abandoned our story and she logged a ticket in game for help. A few days later she logged a report on the bug forum. Apparently Sylvari can bug at level 30 and 70 and select your path for you regardless of what you selected. There is no assistance in the pinned 12 page thread for this issue.

Another player sent me a link to a locked thread, where they were told that ArenaNet can’t tell if a player was bugged or just chose that path. I am not sure what the big issue is changing a players path if they have not continued the quest chain, but apparently ArenaNet’s solution is to have players delete their character and try again. They have stated they have ‘fixed’ the bug, but if there are scores of players stuck on the wrong path you havent fixed the bug you have simply prevented (hopefully) more people from falling prey to it…and said screw off to the customers reporting it. Surely this cannot be your business model, I will not unlock any new content if this is the support you plan to provide. Fool me once, shame on you…

We deserve a proper answer to our problem. We have lvl 60+ characters, your deep regret won’t level us a new one to that level.
If the support team can’t help us, then get a developer involved. It’s the least we deserve as PAYING customers. If you are unable to fix it “automatically”, then do a proper job and fix it manually, in a case-by-case basis. We didn’t pay full price for a game only to be left to our own devices when we are struck by a bug.

We need our “personal” stories fixed. It’s one of the most important features of the game, and personally its the feature that I like the most, and I got really attached to my Sylvari path.

Thinking that my only two options after this bug are: 1) Leveling sixty levels again, while having a full-time job, going to college, and having to maintain my own apartment… well, first option is a little out of the way for me.
2) Continue with the Order randomly chosen by the bug for me. Well, I really hate The Vigil, because they represent a style of thinking/doing that I'm SO much against. "Weee, we will just attack head-on, and kill a lot of innocents, because nothing matters if you do THE JUSTICES". I’m not going to role-play actions that I personally despise.

So please, if you could take time to manually fix problems even for people who ruined your game, then please take time to fix the bugs that kills the people who LOVES your game and wants to play the way you meant.

EndlessDreamer.6780:

ANet pretty much explained the issue with this. It’s not something you can do without potentially having quite a few issues with that character or breaking quite a few things.

You’re making that up. They never said that repairing the problem would cause issues or break things.

Honestly, for right now, it doesn’t matter what Order you go with, it affects a total of maybe 7 or 8 personal missions and then you’re done. The end is the same for everyone, regardless of your Order.

It changes the quests that you do, something that matters for people who like playing the story mode. It also changes the faction armor you can get.

This isn’t Arena Net refusing to help players because they don’t want to or it’s too much work. They can’t without potentially bugging a lot of things. There isn’t just some button or code that will set your character in to a certain quest.

Again, making things up.

I’m sorry that you guys are upset about this, but I think acting as though ArenaNet is doing this on purpose just because isn’t going to help.

They aren’t doing it on purpose, but they aren’t trying to help either.

Also, -threatening- the company by saying you won’t buy any more content from them unless they do exactly what you want isn’t exactly the most mature thing to do. They explained that they couldn’t due to limitations and they apologized. You really have to either try again on a new character or keep playing your old with the change.

That wasn’t me, but I see it as a normal thing. If a service provider fails to provide support to its customers, some people are bound to change their preference to other providers. In this case, a MMORPG game being the service and Arena.net being the provider.
The limitations are on the support team, not on the whole company. I’m pretty sure the developers could do something to help us if someone would get them to work on our issue.

The story is familiar. My wife and I both made Sylvari, and coordinated our multiple-choice questions so we could play through the same personal story together. It worked great, and we had a fantastic time…until, at the Lv 30 branch, we got put in different Orders. We both wanted to join the Durmand Priory, but I got put in the Vigil. I have kept my personal story on hold, hoping that it would be easier to fix. Besides, I have no wish to play the Vigil storyline.

If they can give malicious Karma exploiters a one-time by-request reprieve from having their account banned, certainly they should give “Sylvari-who-got-put-in-the-Vigil-against-their-will” a one-time by-request story fix.

EDIT: Apparently the bug is not yet fixed but the fix will be in the Oct 22 update. Is there a way we could warn all the Sylvari characters who still are in danger of having their characters permanently hijacked?

“Our CS team does not have the ability to change your current quest or order, either, so it’s not something that we can manually fix on a case by case basis, either.”

CS stands for Customer Service. They said the ArenaNet Customer Service Team can’t do it. That’s a long ways from saying that nobody in ArenaNet could do it. They never said that, did they?

EndlessDreamer.6780:

Really now? I’m lying? Wow, that’s a tall order to fill. Well let’s get down to lying some more, shall I?

From https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/BUG-Party-members-getting-sent-to-wrong-faction-when-sharing-their-Personal-Story/first#post463999

Your own thread by the way, which the devs were nice enough to answer to.

“Our CS team does not have the ability to change your current quest or order, either, so it’s not something that we can manually fix on a case by case basis, either.”

CUSTOMER SUPPORT team doesnt have the ability. Developers do. I was talking about them.

Oh dear. Wow, I mean, a post in red never said that. Also, given that that response was in your own thread, calling me a liar is pretty downright silly, don’t you think? So, now we know that it is something they can’t change manually. Okay, so lie number one, obviously not disproven.

I didn’t say you were a liar, I said you were making things up. Nobody said EVER that fixing things manually would break things, and none of your quotes here prove that.

Huh now. So, I’m lying about it breaking things. Oh right, because it wouldn’t. If they can’t automate it, it would affect accounts that hadn’t finished it yet and possibly hit ones that it wasn’t supposed to. There is no way to put it in without breaking someone else’s game while fixing yours.

If they attempt to fix things manually, they could talkt to the people who are affected by the bug so they don’t change the stories of people who are ok with what they have.

Let me put it this way. If they were purposefully ignoring something, then I’d understand the “Oh we’re not going to pay you anymore because you’re bad at customer service.”

But if you’re telling them to make pigs fly when pigs aren’t nearly aerodynamic enough to do so, saying that you’re going to stop paying and playing because they can’t jump through hoops that are 10 stories up from the ground is downright silly.

Nope, I’m not telling them to make pigs fly (which would be easy, this being a game and it being their own game :P), I’m asking them to rollback the story of my fiancee and the other who were affected, just as they did with the bug that made ppl skip steps of their story.

“ArenaNet is full of liars. They -can- do something, they just won’t and I’m going to whine and complain until they do and then when they ask me to stop, I’m going to go in to someone else’s thread and continue to do what they asked me to stop doing.”

I never said they were liars. Don’t put words in my mouth.

Let me re-iterate: ArenaNet is -NOT- refusing to help customers. What they’re doing right now is attempting to fix what is broken. However, refusing and being unable to help are two -very- different things. So if they can fix the problem but can’t fix the byproducts of the problem, yes, that is unfortunate, but if they can’t, they cant.

Fixing the bug is perfectly fine. Customer support not getting the developers involved with our problem isn’t. The developers never said that they weren’t unable to help. Only Customer Support did.

The mature response is to grit your teeth, bear it and say “Well crud, that sucks” and either continue along or play a new character. Bugs happen. Sometimes bugs happen that they can’t do anything about.

I’m not OK with mediocrity. There is no such thing as an unsolvable bug when you are a member of the developer team.

What you do is you go to the already enormous topic on this issue:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Story-Skipped-or-Changed-merged/first

You post the information they asked for

And you wait and see what they can do.

I’m not bugged. My fiancee is the one affected by this bug. I’m just here trying to get someone to help her and the other people who got this bug.

Now, between you and me: There is no reason for you to post here. This is between arena.net and the people who got the bug. They don’t need you rallying to protect them from us. We didn’t do anything wrong. We were affected by a bug and we want a solution. This doesn’t affect you at all. This is not your fight.
Having said this, I won’t answer you anymore. Sorry if this bothers you, but discussing the matter of our issue with you isn’t going to get anything fixed.

This is something we are begging for a fix since more than month and a half ago. We are not “instantly demanding, whining and complaining”. We went only on the official routes: I first generated a ticket, the ticket got answered 10 days later, and in the closing ticket it said that I could post this on the forums.

Also, there’s a lot of people who got this bug. I’m Shamash fiancee, not “Morakyr” (the creator of this thread), so, as you people can see, we aren’t just a bunch of people talking about an obscure bug.

I’m surprised that some people are not being moderated for being off-topic (like I was), so I’m going to believe that someone here is affiliated with ArenaNet.

I do not feel this issue is getting treated like it should. If this can’t be fixed, at least do something so we can get what we can’t right now, like having a workaround to get access to the Orders armor. Or at least -something- more that a ’I’m sorry’ and then trying to censor us, because there has been various posts deleted and I think that trying to evade the bad PR just gives you a worse reputation.

I wish that ArenaNet would understand that this is a game-breaking bug for some of us who wanted to have a “personal story”. Thanks for reading.

Endless Dreamer, you are wrong. Or you don’t know the difference between the jobs customer service and software developers do? Or you don’t understand how software applications are made…or supported. Or all of the above.

My CS people make around $25 an hour, my developers more than double that. My CS guys handle trouble tickets and correct errors when customers make them. When the customers come across a bug it gets reported to the engineering teams…who then fix them. If my customers have data issues they get resolved for them, regardless if it means a dba had to manually update tables or an engineer has to to write new code. Because if our application doesn’t work correctly our customers will look for another that will.

And while you may feel that “Im not spending any money on a company that can’t be bothered to do their job” is not mature…that is reality. Customers do not support poorly run businesses, and they internet is full of barely populated games that are good examples of that. It isn’t like we are a bunch of idiots who decided to argue in a thread that has nothing to do with us…that apparently is the ‘mature’ person. We are customers being treated poorly and pointing that fact out.

Customers were impacted by bugs in the software they sold, it happens daily. Now it is up to them to mitigate the damage, if they care to do so. They have given an answer that it is impossible to fix the problem, which many people find shocking. Being in the business of creating software applications I have a decent understanding of what is possible. Now there could be many reasons for their statement, perhaps they actually use Customer Service reps to write the code. Maybe they fired all the coders and have nobody to do any fixes. Perhaps all of their coding is done offshore and is sub-standard handling issues. All of those would tell the impacted customers the company would fix it if they could, instead of sounding like they arent even going to bother to try. Telling customer it is impossible works if they have no clue about software development. The fact that the “fix” is going in on 10/22 lets me know they have coders who can resolve issues. The fact that it is, or SHOULD be, a fixable issue and they have deemed it impossible tells me they either are incompetent (I doubt) or just don’t want to bother with it. Hell, given one 3 week sprint I could probably have their impossible task resolved so I don’t think it is a matter of can’t but more of won’t.

They have a thread of 12 pages of customers whom they’ve told to delete their characters. 12 pages of most likely unhappy customers. 12 pages of customers who could have been thrilled if they would have taken the time to explain why they are refusing to help them. 12 pages of customers who may have been loyal if they actually went in and corrected the issue that they knew about for over a month and didnt bother to inform users with a login message or such. I repeat 12 pages of customers because if 12 pages of customers are too many for them to address, they are in the wrong business.

It took this long for my wife and I to hit level 30, their solution is to delete and start over. My immediate thought is why would I bother, if the solution to bug impacts is to inconvenience the customer. How am I going to feel when I get back to 30 and something else happens. Or 40. or 70. The conversations we have had with ArenaNet CS have told us they will not help customers impacted by a known bug that has not been fixed. Hence the thread.

And I am happy they have you as a fanboi that can jump from thread to thread blindly defending them. It doesn’t make you or them right, but they may be happy to have at least one blindly loyal customer.

Edit: Yes, agree they have been VERY polite. The posts and CS folks have been polite, I dont think we’ve said they were rude. They just havent been very effective.

Arena Net knew about the issue a month ago.

If they don’t have the means to fix the problem or need to test the issue further… I can completely understand. What I cannot understand is why not let the player base know about the issue with a message when you log in to the game, updates on the log in page, or something warning players so that it does not happen to more players.

They could let players know that currently they don’t have a fix for it and whether they are working on it or not… or that there is a fix for it, when its going in.

For players impacted already they need to let the players know if they can fix it, if they can’t… whether they are working on fixing it or not…. Honestly I haven’t seen anyone other than Jeffrey Vaughn a Content Designer and Gaile Gray an ArenaNet Support Liaison discussing it. And both have politely said that they don’t have the ability to fix the characters. I can understand that.

I suppose what we would like to know is who would have the ability to fix it? And is it something that is being worked on? If not is it something that will be worked on in the future and when?

Honestly, I couldn’t care less what specific path I am on… its just a game. What bothers me is that I was trying to keep my path the same as my husbands character to keep our exp much the same, and maximize our time together since our play times are very different and when we play together its a huge pain to be doing the quests double because now we aren’t on the same quest line. I personally would like to be on the same line as my husband’s character, it would have been nice to know about this bug before we had gone into the instance, it was completely preventable…. and I am thinking that maybe that is why the customer base is upset. No one was warned about the bug until they find out on their characters themselves. Its not too hard to put text in chat windows when you log in, and its not hard to put update text on the log in page to prevent other players from getting this bug.

Avarycce, very good points. If I’d been warned about this bug just three days ago, it would not have happened to me. I’d still be happily playing. Instead of posting here, hoping to avert the loss of a month’s play, and the “death” of my all-time favorite character’s storyline.

I deleted my posts. People were right, had no real reason to be posting here. I appreciate the last three posts in at least their tone much better than the original ones, and hope you guys can come up with a reasonable discussion with ANet on the issue. I do agree that it was a problem, I just had serious issues with the way you were addressing them. But again, wasn’t my issue.

For any posts referencing mine, people can assume correctly that I was being pretty bratty and out of control and I apologize. I just figured removing them would probably be best for this thread not being closed and you guys actually being able to start up a discussion.