Guild Wars 2

Hey guys,

Can’t I just pay for faster support? I can’t imagine it’s that hard to keep up with tickets. Everyother company in the world manages just fine. If it’s because you guys can’t afford to hire people to work the support. Please, I’d be happy to pay to end up in an express lane.

How can a simple ‘reason for suspension’ request take 4 days to reply. I mean, any person could handle a hundred if not thousand of those requests a day. (Obviously there are harder tickets out there, but in my friend’s case it isn’t)

tl;dr
I’d happily pay 5-10 dollar/euro’s to get a reply within 5 hours. Can we make this happen?

Sidenote: I’m in no way trying to offend any service employee at ArenaNet. I’m sure you guys work hard. It’s just hard to believe support has to take this long, so I’m guessing it has to do with the ammount of people working there.

So the players who can’t afford to pay will never get their tickets answered because everyone else just pays and gets bumped ahead of their ticket?

No thank you.

No definitly not, that would be awful

No, they would just hire Extra staff from the newly generated income. Obviously it shouldn’t have a bad effect on the rest. I bet it would generate so much income they could hire so much more staff, that other tickets could be handled faster too.

Everyone seems to think their problem is more important than those of other people. CS is swamped at the moment, so it takes a bit longer than usual, but replies still seem to arrive within a reasonable time frame.
You also seem to think CS is made up entirely of robots. I doubt it’s possible to handle “hundreds or thousands of tickets” per day for any single person. If a ticket takes five minutes to get through, that’s over 8 hours of work for a hundred tickets, and that’s not taking into account that reviewing evidence, particularly in suspension and ban cases, likely takes a lot longer than that.

GW2 is not, and never has been, a P2W model, no matter if the winning occurs in the game or in the CS queue. I hope the model you suggested will never be implemented. It’s a horrible idea. SWTOR has this terrible system where you need a subscription to even post on the forums, never mind submit a ticket as a non-subscriber (preferred status suffers from this as well), and the free hotline is apparently manned by a single person in each region, causing wait times of up to six hours. No thanks. I’d rather spend my money on shiny stuff from the gem shop.

It would affect those who can’t afford to pay.

Last month alone Support got upwards of 100,000 tickets. There were 672 hours last month. That’s 149 tickets per hour submitted. That’s more than 2 tickets per minute. That’s enough to say that if only 50% paid that it would mean that those who do not pay will never get a response. Because a minute later, someone else’s timer is running out.

No to paying for a faster response time. Tickets should be handled in the order received. Not by who can pay and who can’t.

I’ve never had a problem with CS reponse times. I usually get a response with a day, sometimes the next day.

It also really helps (coming from a tech support/CS background) to provide AS MUCH INFORMATION as possible. For Tech support, download and run NCSofts game advisor. and send the report along with your ticket.
For account stuff, give any and all information you can. What EXACTLY is happening, what EXACT errors are being display, if any? Etc.

Also, if you are polite, courteous, and patient, you’ll be helped far more efficiently than if you are being a kitten.
While working CS, when I had a customer come raging, swearing, demanding, accusing, etc. I would of course help them. But I took my sweet time about it. I would very carefully follow every exact rule in the book by the most extreme interpretation of the letter. If a rule said I needed to talk to a supervisor, I would find the supervisor the furthest away from my location, and WALK to them, slowly, ask them in person (waiting if they were on the phone or in a meeting) about what needed to be done, even if I knew the answer, and meander back.

I’m not saying that Anet CS does that (but it wouldn’t surprise me) but being polite goes a very long way in working with CS.

I’m not claiming my friends problem is more important, nor would I pretend it is. Fact is, support is swamped. No matter how many employees you have, if you get enough tickets, you’ll get swamped. And clearly 149 tickets per hour is too much for the ammount of people they hired.

Solution: More people working at support. However that would be quite expensive, considering loans, workspace, training etc.

I have no idea how much profit ncsoft/arenanet is making on this game. But as any profit making company you can’t spend more than you make. And assuming they hire all the people for support that are worth hiring, considering the money the company makes. This is probably the best they can do.

So another stream of income could free up money to hire more people.

Guestimating:
Just assuming 5% would pay 10 dollars for an express ticket. That’s 5000 tickets x 10 dollars a month. 50.000 dollars.

Assuming a support agent makes 2,500 a month that would mean they could hire 20 more people to work support.

20 people working 40 hours a week, that’s about 3200 hours worth of support. If an average ticket takes 20 min to complete. (I have no clue, just guessing). they could handle those 5000 tickets in 1667 hours. leaving 1533 left over hours to help the other support teams in which case support overall would become quite a bit faster.

Obviously all depending on how big the team actually is, and how long an avg ticket takes to process.

@Red Queen “and that’s not taking into account that reviewing evidence, particularly in suspension and ban cases, likely takes a lot longer than that.”

Wouldn’t the evidence already have been collected before the banning/suspending occurs? I mean you get a custom errorcode, that should link directly to it’s cause wouldn’kitten Or atleast, there should be a reason, before someone gets suspended, somewhere. You’d think that in such a case, it would just be, looking up the code in a table and copy whatever the reason is.

But hey, I’ve never worked at support, so I’m just a random dude on the internet. Trying to help out by thinking out loud.

*Edit: Trying to fix grammar

@Almoszt

Certainly hiring more people would be the best situation, but that also increases the operating costs quite a bit.
You have to not only factor in wages, but taxes, insurance, benefits, vactions, workers comp, equipment, raises, etc.

So with that extra revenue generated from paying for faster support, you wouldn’t be able to hire as many people.

No, paying for faster support wouldn’t be a very good idea. It sends the wrong idea about the company. Basically they would be saying “We don’t value our customers. If they want to jump the queue, then they pay more. We care more about making money than we do about providing quality service to everyone who has purchased the game” This is a REALLY bad image for any company. Such things tend to get spread around, and other companies take such things into consideration when dealing with them. Because it also reflects on them. Investors particularly take these types of things into consideration. If the company has such policies, why would an investor want to invest in such a company?

Your 5% is way too low. You greatly underestimate the number of people who think their ticket is the most important ticket in the world.

If I saw that the average wait time was 2-3 days and I could afford to pay $5-10 to have that shortened to a guaranteed 5 hours max, then I would pay it. Especially if I had a more complicated ticket.

No one’s ticket is more important than anyone else’s. How rich someone is should NOT be a factor in how quickly their tickets get answered compared to others.

Tickets should remain done in the order received. No matter how rich or poor the submitter is.

No to paying for faster support.

pdavis.8031:

@Almoszt

Certainly hiring more people would be the best situation, but that also increases the operating costs quite a bit.
You have to not only factor in wages, but taxes, insurance, benefits, vactions, workers comp, equipment, raises, etc.

So with that extra revenue generated from paying for faster support, you wouldn’t be able to hire as many people.

No, paying for faster support wouldn’t be a very good idea. It sends the wrong idea about the company. Basically they would be saying “We don’t value our customers. If they want to jump the queue, then they pay more. We care more about making money than we do about providing quality service to everyone who has purchased the game” This is a REALLY bad image for any company. Such things tend to get spread around, and other companies take such things into consideration when dealing with them. Because it also reflects on them. Investors particularly take these types of things into consideration. If the company has such policies, why would an investor want to invest in such a company?

You make a good point!

ps,
Only saw your first post after I was done writing mine. But I totally agree. I always try to add in all the information I can gather, and be as polite as possible. Some people just seem to forget that there is a person on the other side trying to help you. I can’t stand those people who go all apekitten in their tickets. One of the many reasons a job working support isn’t meant for me

Seera.5916:

Your 5% is way too low. You greatly underestimate the number of people who think their ticket is the most important ticket in the world.

If I saw that the average wait time was 2-3 days and I could afford to pay $5-10 to have that shortened to a guaranteed 5 hours max, then I would pay it. Especially if I had a more complicated ticket.

No one’s ticket is more important than anyone else’s. How rich someone is should NOT be a factor in how quickly their tickets get answered compared to others.

Tickets should remain done in the order received. No matter how rich or poor the submitter is.

No to paying for faster support.

Hey Seera,

I totally agree with you. No one persons problem should be more important than others.

I just realised they needed more people at support to be able to handle tickets faster. And I figured noone would just donate 5-10 bucks to increase the speed of CS in general. (since most people are selfish in this world)

Then maybe, if there are people willing to pay that much extra for some quicker response, everyone could benefit from it. (if you balance out the numbers that is).

Personally I wouldn’t care if others could pay extra for faster support, if that in return would make my support faster too. But hey, if treating your customers as equals has clear benefits for the company’s image.. then it might not be a good idea indeed.

I must say that I am quite surprised by your position on this. If waiting times go down, without it costing me a thing.. they could harpoon whales for all I care.

(I’m not a fan of harponing whales, PTA please don’t come hunt me down)

Almoszt.6175:

Seera.5916:

Your 5% is way too low. You greatly underestimate the number of people who think their ticket is the most important ticket in the world.

If I saw that the average wait time was 2-3 days and I could afford to pay $5-10 to have that shortened to a guaranteed 5 hours max, then I would pay it. Especially if I had a more complicated ticket.

No one’s ticket is more important than anyone else’s. How rich someone is should NOT be a factor in how quickly their tickets get answered compared to others.

Tickets should remain done in the order received. No matter how rich or poor the submitter is.

No to paying for faster support.

Hey Seera,

I totally agree with you. No one persons problem should be more important than others.

I just realised they needed more people at support to be able to handle tickets faster. And I figured noone would just donate 5-10 bucks to increase the speed of CS in general. (since most people are selfish in this world)

Then maybe, if there are people willing to pay that much extra for some quicker response, everyone could benefit from it. (if you balance out the numbers that is).

Personally I wouldn’t care if others could pay extra for faster support, if that in return would make my support faster too. But hey, if treating your customers as equals has clear benefits for the company’s image.. then it might not be a good idea indeed.

I must say that I am quite surprised by your position on this. If waiting times go down, without it costing me a thing.. they could harpoon whales for all I care.

(I’m not a fan of harponing whales, PTA please don’t come hunt me down)

No one and I repeat no one should be able to pay to get their ticket looked at ahead of others.

Because the number who would pay would be so high that it would take more than they would be able to reasonably hire (ANet’s not going to let Support staff have an too much proportion of the staff, looks bad to investors) to achieve the deadlines. Meaning quality of support goes down as it turns to we just need to get these tickets done so that we meet the 5 hour deadline.

So that those who do not pay don’t get their tickets worked on for much longer because people who pay keep sending tickets in.

No thanks. Tickets should ALWAYS be done in the order received. No one should be able to jump to the head of the line because they can afford to pay.

One problem might be….who would pay the initial money for extra support, and wait the six or so weeks while the new staff is trained?

Giving 10 dollars to move up the queue would only work if there were extra support staff to serve these special requests. Where does the money come from to train these Team members?

Hmm…food for thought. =/

You could just stop giving them your money. If you’re not provided a service you pay for, then they don’t deserve your business.

Pigcomet.8397:

You could just stop giving them your money. If you’re not provided a service you pay for, then they don’t deserve your business.

Well that’s the whole problem with a “free to play” mmo. There is only one initial fee (or none at all), after that you’re not paying anymore. Unless you buy stuff from the gem-store.

And I’m assuming most people filing tickets can’t play, so the people waiting aren’t bringing in any money, can’t even.

I’ve played quite a few mmorpg’s in my time, most subscription based and their support was always amazingly fast.

So what you’re advocating for is a paid VIP system for players? A most excellent idea!