Guild Wars 2

Over 2 months ago I requested support for my guild wars 1 account as NCsoft just sends me to the GW2 website. Still no response… Is this how Arenanet takes care of its loyal customers?

Ive supported their company since Guild Wars 1 but for some reason they dont feel obligated to provide even the illusion of support…

Can something please be done, this is beyond frustrating at this point.

Your ticket will be addressed once it makes its way through the queue. The queue is very large, seemingly, but tickets do get addressed. You can place your ticket number in the pertinent Sticky, if you so desire.

Good luck.

Sorry I dont accept that at all. A long wait is 2 weeks, a month would be unacceptable. This has been over 2 months, they are simply ignoring it.

Accept it or not. It’s an old game, and they can choose to have as little or much support as they wish. It’s free to play, and their main focus is GW2. They can also cancel all support on the game if they see fit. They can also close the game down without warning.

You can submit a ticket, and wait.

They are not ignoring it. But a game that is basically in maintenance mode will not have more than a very low number of people working on it.
There was this one guy that spammed the forum about his ticket and he got the issues fixed after 85 (or 84?) days, so they do fix issues, it just takes time.

They can’t really afford to have a full dedicated support team for a game that is basically costing more than it earns.

Ellieanna.5027:

Accept it or not. It’s an old game, and they can choose to have as little or much support as they wish. It’s free to play, and their main focus is GW2. They can also cancel all support on the game if they see fit. They can also close the game down without warning.

You can submit a ticket, and wait.

The game is not free to play, anyone with an account has paid for one. Consumer laws actually prevent them from choosing not to support customers who have paid for the service they provide. If they want to close the game down they can do so, but they can’t stop supporting the game and leave it running.

I understand the point that you guys are making. But it isn’t helpful to shut people down and simply tell them to wait for a response. Arenanet has a duty to support customers who have paid for a service, it really isn’t acceptable for people to be waiting months for any kind of assistance.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I understand the point that you guys are making. But it isn’t helpful to shut people down and simply tell them to wait for a response. Arenanet has a duty to support customers who have paid for a service, it really isn’t acceptable for people to be waiting months for any kind of assistance.

But how long?
Some people bought the game 10 years ago. How long should they be allowed to demand swift support?
And with which money should said support be paid?

And to be fair, the service people paid for was access to the servers, nothing else. It is also written rather clear that they can shut down an account for no reason whatsoever whenever they want if they choose to.

There is nothing in the agreement you singed that says that you will have access to swift support (or support at all for that matter) forever.

lordkrall.7241:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I understand the point that you guys are making. But it isn’t helpful to shut people down and simply tell them to wait for a response. Arenanet has a duty to support customers who have paid for a service, it really isn’t acceptable for people to be waiting months for any kind of assistance.

But how long?
Some people bought the game 10 years ago. How long should they be allowed to demand swift support?
And with which money should said support be paid?

And to be fair, the service people paid for was access to the servers, nothing else. It is also written rather clear that they can shut down an account for no reason whatsoever whenever they want if they choose to.

There is nothing in the agreement you singed that says that you will have access to swift support (or support at all for that matter) forever.

But there are things in consumer law, which companies don’t get to just ignore by putting a clause in their own user agreements…

Given that you have no clue how much money they still have in their budget for GW1 I don’t think your comment is warranted. Even if there were just one person working on GW1 support they should still be able to get through a reasonable quantity of support tickets per day – sure those tickets might not be resolved in one go, but the number of responses and active tickets should be quite high. Given the number of people who haven’t had responses in very large spaces of time it’s reasonable to assume that they don’t have someone continuously working through the tickets. It’s far more likely that the tickets are being worked through by the GW2 support staff when they aren’t busy trawling through the GW2 support tickets that they also (and also unacceptably) are failing to work through in a reasonable amount of time.

Arenanet is running a product that is sold all over the world, and they are subject to the consumer laws that run in any country they sell the game in. I live in New Zealand for example, and our consumer guarantees act would give me legal right to a total refund for GW1 because they aren’t managing to support me for the service that I paid for. Of course I have absolutely no desire to do that, I’ve put almost 10 years of time and effort into that account, I’m just pointing out that Arenanet can’t simply get away with really really awful support because they don’t feel like putting the resources into responding to paying customers. That’s how you alienate players…

Of course they can. There is (as far as I am aware) not a single law that says that a company most give support for a product forever. In fact I can almost guarantee that it is not a law, seeing as that would basically mean every product ever would be required to be supported forever, which simply would be impossible.

If I contact Blizzard today, with a support issue for Diablo (1 or 2) it is very unlikely that I would get lightning fast support (if any). Last time I tried (had issues with my D2 disks about 5 years ago) it took them almost a month to even reply.

lordkrall.7241:

Of course they can. There is (as far as I am aware) not a single law that says that a company most give support for a product forever. In fact I can almost guarantee that it is not a law, seeing as that would basically mean every product ever would be required to be supported forever, which simply would be impossible.

If I contact Blizzard today, with a support issue for Diablo (1 or 2) it is very unlikely that I would get lightning fast support (if any). Last time I tried (had issues with my D2 disks about 5 years ago) it took them almost a month to even reply.

There’s a big difference between a single player game that came out 15 years ago and an MMO. MMO’s are designed to last a much longer time. Single player games are never really expected to be supported for more than a year post-launch. If Arenanet had said that were ceasing support for the game it wouldn’t be an issue, but they haven’t said anything to that effect. The GW1 support forums direct players to the GW2 support forms which sends a clear message that players can still expect account based support.

There is no law that guarantees product support forever, but there are laws that protect a consumer’s rights in an instance where they aren’t being supported for a product they have paid for and can reasonably assume that they should be. Maybe there isn’t something to that effect in the US, but there is in New Zealand and they have to adhere to it. As stated previously, Arenanet are subject to the consumer laws in any country that they sell their games in…

Guild Wars 1 support aside, there are plenty of instances of people not receiving support for their GW2 accounts for weeks to months, which is certainly not acceptable. You managed to get support for Diablo 2 in under a month despite the fact that it was a single player game that had been released some years ago – instead we are talking about two active games. Defend it all you want but their support is dismal and it isn’t acceptable.

If you are so sure about said law, why not bring it to court? I can almost guarantee that you would not stand the slightest chance of winning. Simply because such a law don’t (and can’t really) exist.

Why would it make any difference whatsoever if they said that there would be no support or not? If there actually is a law about it, what they are saying would be completely irrelevant.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

lordkrall.7241:

Of course they can. There is (as far as I am aware) not a single law that says that a company most give support for a product forever. In fact I can almost guarantee that it is not a law, seeing as that would basically mean every product ever would be required to be supported forever, which simply would be impossible.

If I contact Blizzard today, with a support issue for Diablo (1 or 2) it is very unlikely that I would get lightning fast support (if any). Last time I tried (had issues with my D2 disks about 5 years ago) it took them almost a month to even reply.

There’s a big difference between a single player game that came out 15 years ago and an MMO. MMO’s are designed to last a much longer time. If Arenanet had said that were ceasing support for the game it wouldn’t be an issue, but they haven’t said anything to that effect. There is no law that guarantees product support forever, but there are laws that protect a consumer’s rights in an instance where they aren’t being supported for a product they have paid for and can reasonably assume that they should be. Maybe there isn’t something to that effect in the US, but there is in New Zealand and they have to adhere to it.

And there is no law that says if you offer support that it must always remain at the same level as the day you first offered support for the product. So them having reduced support for GW1 is not illegal.

I’m not condoning the lack of support for GW1 by any means. However, there is a lot of armchair lawyering going on in this thread. I’m sure Anet/NCSoft legal departments are well aware of their legal obligations.

If I recall correctly Anet stated that they would keep the original Guild Wars servers and support going for quite a length of time before GW2 came out. I too have a ticket that’s almost a month old, and I agree, I think it’s an inordinate amount of time.

Sorry, but phone/email CS consultants aren’t exactly making huge bucks out there, I know I worked several of those jobs in the past. So the cost to them is negligible, especially now that they’ve stated they’ve rolled the GW1 and GW2 support ques together. I’ll give them a little longer to work on my ticket and then turn to the BBB. Seriously, how long does it take to look at a persons account information and send a reply and a link? 5 minutes? Over an 8 hour day that would mean one person could probably respond to at 12 people an hour or 96 people in a day. I’d imagine with canned responses and links that 5 minutes is pretty generous. How many people from GW1 are still requesting passwords? SMH

Anyone who thinks that a month is an acceptable amount of time is either a troll or a fanboi extreme. If you are going to support the game, support it, if not, then declare as much and call it a day. As of yet, I’ve seen no declaration of such so people are right to get upset when they ask for assistance on a game that they say they are still supporting and yet you hear nothing for a month (or 2!)

Sal Headtosser.1879:

I’ll give them a little longer to work on my ticket and then turn to the BBB.

While I agree that support for GW1 needs improvement, I just want to clear something up because I see these threats posted time to time. The BBB is not a government agency. They have no power to act on behalf of the customer and they won’t attempt to do so. The BBB is non-profit business organization that is supported by dues from “accredited businesses”. Here are some facts about the BBB posted on their own website.

http://www.bbb.org/blog/2011/10/five-facts-you-didnt-know-about-the-bbb/

I post this because I think when people say they are going to the BBB they think they are reporting to some governing agency or an agency that will fight for their customer rights. That is not the case.

More interesting reading:

http://business.time.com/2013/03/19/why-the-better-business-bureau-should-give-itself-a-bad-grade/

I didn’t say they were some all powerful government agent, please don’t place words in my mouth. Also, Anet is not an active member of the BBB, that being said, the last thing most businesses want is a negative rating with the BBB. Sometimes the BBB can help to expedite issues when there is no response from the business in question regarding a customer service issue. I am well aware of exactly what the BBB is and is not, but thank you for your concern for the state of my knowledge in regards to the BBB. Oh, btw, my statement was not a ‘threat’ merely a conveyance to those others on this thread who are not receiving anything approaching timely customer support. I spoke personally with Gaile Gray while she was online the other day and she assured me that they had recently added numerous CS reps to help with the backlog. I sincerely hope this is the case, because as it stands currently, the CS is in a truly abysmal state.

I wasn’t putting words in your mouth. I never said you thought they were a government agency. I posted that because many people think they are. In fact according to their website it is the first thing they mention in regards to what people don’t know about the BBB. I also never said Anet was a an accredited member of the BBB, so stop putting words in my mouth. See how that works? I think the BBB has lost some credibility over the years. I don’t think their ratings carry the power you think they do. Read the Time article I linked. And this:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-money-buy/story?id=12123843

In my opinion they are basically an outdated version of Yelp that accepts “dues”. This day and age I’m guessing very few people consult the BBB before buying a product.

Again, I agree some areas of CS need improvement. I never argued that they didn’t.

I did go to the BBB site, and saw that ArenaNet had a 5-star A+ rating. I also read many of the ‘complaints’, and found them highly entertaining.

It seems if a player has an issue with which the CS Team can assist, they will; if the player is just not happy with some action, or lack thereof, on their account, they have another place to post their dissatisfaction.

I’m not convinced your link in the Review thread will have the anticipated outcome. Do keep in mind that the CS Team has received ~100,000 tickets/month these last few months, and thus, the time needed for support assistance has been longer than usual.

Regardless, good luck.

Well I agree that a lot of the complaints were baseless, I don’t think asking for assistance with a password would be considered as such, do you? It would also appear that a lot of the people who aren’t getting responses are exactly those, correct? Or am I not seeing what I appear to be seeing?

I have no idea how many responses the CS team has received, but seeing as you seem to be quite “in the know” regarding such things, perhaps you can tell those of us who are waiting exactly what an acceptable time period for a password reset request is?

I keep wondering why people simply can’t make sure to know their passwords.
I have never required any sort of assistance in re-aquiring a password for any single thing, despite having used the internet, many different games and a rather large number of different passwords over the last 15 years.

If people could just be a bit more responsible for their own access the amount of tickets (and thus also the response time) would be much lower. When I worked in support, about 99% of the calls were about having lost a password, and I would assume it is the same here.

lordkrall.7241:

I keep wondering why people simply can’t make sure to know their passwords.
I have never required any sort of assistance in re-aquiring a password for any single thing, despite having used the internet, many different games and a rather large number of different passwords over the last 15 years.

If people could just be a bit more responsible for their own access the amount of tickets (and thus also the response time) would be much lower. When I worked in support, about 99% of the calls were about having lost a password, and I would assume it is the same here.

Thanks for mentioning me above, it seems even in threads that have nothing to do with me, you still find a way to bring me up.

In response to your comment about people needing to take better care of their passwords, that’s not the case.

I knew my log in details for GW1, as it turns out, even though what i was inputting was correct, my account was unable to be logged in due to it not being merged to the new system in which you log in with your email address and not the old user@ncsoft.

So you saying we need to take better care of our passwords is null and void, if you missed the merger, you simply cannot log in with your old user account details until you contact Customer support and get them to merge your accounts together or change your log in details.

I could log into my GW1 account on the GW2 account management page, i was introduced with a string of numbers as a username, a “linked to nothing” account, and a password and linked email address i could not change.

And that is just another point:

Everyone got information about the required merge long before the deadline. The fact that people don’t care enough to spend those two minutes required to secure their accounts isn’t really ArenaNets issue.

lordkrall.7241:

And that is just another point:

Everyone got information about the required merge long before the deadline. The fact that people don’t care enough to spend those two minutes required to secure their accounts isn’t really ArenaNets issue.

Wrong, i never received an email about the merge, many people didn’t. I have over 15000 emails in my inbox, i never delete anything. A simple search of “Guild” comes up with nothing relating to a guild wars 1 merge occuring which will need my account to be updated, and my emails from guild wars go all the way back to 2010.