Assembly Hall

Yeah I put a billing/accounting enquiry in well over 24 hours ago... still nothing.

It's basically keeping me from playing, admittedly I caused the issue, but still taking a long time to even get an answer as to if they ARE WILLING to fix it.

Kinda blows your averages out of the water.

Edit: Although also, I think our GM's are pretty nice and decent guys. I've sat and chatted with them over questions I had a few times and got myself some decent answers to questions. Had I asked the questions on the forums the threads would've just been trolled to death.

ie. Not just a machine based automaton like GM's in WOW etc.. they have opinions and will answer if asked. Pretty cool that they will do that.

While I'm very happy to see that many of you speak kindly of us GMs and the support we provide, I can also understand many of the concerns raised in this thread. In regards to those, I want to add a few points to the discussion:

First of all, we actually do have a mixture of new and older GMs working in Customer Support. Even if the employee turnaround within Customer Support is relatively low (as most of us love to work on EVE and for CCP), there are always some GMs being recruited into other departments of the company and some that leave due to some other reasons. Those are replaced by fresh blood, which are very often EVE veterans and/or former ISD members that have performed well as such. That being said, of course we also need to look at many other skills to determine whether someone is well suited for customer support, such as good language skills and communication strengths. The guy who knows everything about EVE will not necessarily make the best GM This we know from experience.

Regarding our response times, we do our best to keep them down as possible, but of course this can vary on the petition category, the current load of incoming petitions at any given time and the issue at hand. But just to give you an idea of what you can usually expect, here are some average first response time numbers for our main petition categories.


All petition categories:

• Last 12 months = 32 hours and 31 minutes
• Last month = 16 hours and 31 minutes

Stuck petition categories:

• Last 12 months = 1 hour and 4 minutes
• Last month = 41 minutes

Billing & Account petition categories:

• Last 12 months = 22 hours and 6 minutes
• Last month = 12 hours and 6 minutes

Technical Support categories:

• Last 12 months =32 hours
• Last month = 11 hours and 52 minutes

Of course these are only averages and some petitions may need to wait for longer. Also these are only first response numbers and there may be more delay in between replies when petitions drag on/are escalated etc.

On reimbursement of losses in EVE, I'm not sure what to say as you have probably heard it all before. The fact remains that EVE is a very, very competitive game and in some aspects on the brink of what is technically possible, so our task is not always that easy. Of course we know that players lose ships and items to bugs and server issues, but we can simply not apply some kind of blanket "The customer is always right" method of deciding when to reimburse and when not to. We believe this would ruin the experience for everyone in the long run and thus we try to set clear policies that are equally fair to everyone (and equally unfair in some cases) and stick to them. Usually this means server log verification is required aka our logs show nothing

That being said, we will always keep working with the Dev teams on improving those logs/tools so that we have the verification needed in more cases and getting the bugs we are frequently exposed to through petitions fixed (with the current focus on EVE within the company, good things are happening in this area). Furthermore, we can keep working on finding the right balance between "canned responses" and manually typing up long personal and poetic replies to every petition with detailed explanations of everything and nothing, that would in turn slow the whole service down for everyone.

Finally, remember that if you are not happy with how your petition is handled, you can always request that a second opinion is given by another GM and/or a Senior GM.

And finally (again) ...use the rating tool to rate different aspects of our services after a petition is closed. It really helps us focus on where to improve and tells us how we are doing overall (overall rating for last year was 7.7 of 10 based on 63.731 rated petitions. Not all that bad but can of course be improved).

Winter is coming,
Lead GM Panzer

Also one thing more comes to mind:


GM Panzer: Has the Customer Relations Department ever considered internally maintaining a metric on players that submit legitimate reimbersement requests as opposed to those that attempt to abuse the system?

Not suggesting any pilot be singled out for past 'offenses', but wonder if this has ever been done in the past/considered/ attempted/ or is currently done to improve efficiency by improving 'routing' of petitions based on prioritization.

This way even a repeat offender will still get his 'hearing' with a GM, but it may not necessarily be as fast as someone that has always submitted legitimate petitions.

??

reasonable & brave words

But how do you determine if a request is legitimate or not since the logs never show anything? For my case as an example how is CCP going to prove that I wasn't stuck?

their*

One question I have for GM Panzer:

In games I have played previously, the GM's work off an unofficial policy that first replacement request is always 'no', this then weeds out bogus claims. Only those players that demand an escalation are taken seriously, and then their petition is actually investigated.

Rather than ask if CCP applies this specific procedure, and create emo rage for the community services department - let me ask if this tends to be the industry standard on handling petitions, and if CCP has the same, or different/ more innovative approach to handling reimbursement requests? (Such as clearer filters to distinguish between items lost in a station/hangar and something lost due to combat?)

Also one thing more comes to mind:


GM Panzer: Has the Customer Relations Department ever considered internally maintaining a metric on players that submit legitimate reimbersement requests as opposed to those that attempt to abuse the system?

Not suggesting any pilot be singled out for past 'offenses', but wonder if this has ever been done in the past/considered/ attempted/ or is currently done to improve efficiency by improving 'routing' of petitions based on prioritization.

This way even a repeat offender will still get his 'hearing' with a GM, but it may not necessarily be as fast as someone that has always submitted legitimate petitions.

??

But how do you determine if a request is legitimate or not since the logs never show anything? For my case as an example how is CCP going to prove that I wasn't stuck?

GM Panzer its been since 10/31 since my petition has been submitted and still no fix... This is just plain stupid. Every petition I have ever submitted has not been returned in my favor.... And NONE have been about ship losses. You can always make more ISK to get another ship... Rule #1 of EVE, Never fly anything you aren't prepared to lose... Do me a favor and take a look at my petition and see what you can do to help me out. Just once I would like a favorable reply from a GM. Your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

-I had a bug where I couldn't create a contract with a container. It kept claiming item X (which changed) couldn't be found. Different containers, different stuff in them. Repeatable for over a week. Did the GMs fix the problem? Move my stuff because I couldn't? Nope. I kept the stuff there for a week so the bug could be investigated expecting a reasonable response (i.e. "It's repeatable - grab it and kill the bug!" ). Didn't even get a "Thank You" . Bug report came back "Unable to replicate on any test system". Really? what a big surprise. What a waste.