Does in-game Customer Service or any kind of support still exist?

It’s now 4 weeks since submitting my petition regarding my lost item. I still have not received a reply or any feedback. I’ve attempted to get help on the SWL Discord channel, used the ticketing system and have sent an email directly to a Coummnity Manager. I get the same automated response of “Please be patient. GM’s are busy dealing with…”. Given the current player populatio levels I cannot understand why there is this ridiculous delay on dealing with petitions. Being asked to be patient after 4 weeks is insulting and the changes that have taken place in that time, especially the one referring to “Paying Players”, seem designed to ease your workload rather than provide any customer satisfaction to those of us who were patrons and used your aurum purchase services. You publish on your website that the GM’s are available from 08:00 - 16:00 EST and yet I have not had a single response during these times.

If this is a case that old tickets and submissions are not being handled or have to be resubmitted could you please let all of us that have been waiting on them? That way we can resubmit our tickets along with the date we originally submitted them and you could deal with these older tickets as a matter of urgency. If it is a case of you not having the staff to deal with them then again could you let us know with an ETA of when exactly we could expect the level of basic service we should take as granted from a company that supposedly has experience in these matters?

If it is a case that you have no intention of dealing with our cases then again you could at least have the common courtesy to let us know rather than us wasting our time trying to get something that we would consider to be a basic level of support from other games. Goodwill only goes so far and I think that despite the core game being solid it is being let down by this kind of service.

I am sure that other people have experienced this situation not just with items but with Customer Service wait times on tickets. If any players out there have had similar experiences please add your comments to this thread so we can get an idea of how big this issue is.

Thank you for your attention.

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I can’t really defend the poor quality customer service of late.

I will say that adding to the petitions (either through the email or by closing and re-opening in-game forms) can end up complicating matters because they then have to merge the queries (yes, we know they are the same issue but the system doesn’t).

Support crosses all the Funcom games, including AoC, Ao and Exiles. With what seems to be less staff, a need to check on a users subscription status and additional demand in older games (due to changes there that will increase support requests) it means most games are having to wait.

I wish I could offer a more positive response but sadly it seems that waiting is what we’re all stuck with.

No idea what’s going on with CS atm, but they remember that it’s Funcom CS, not just SWL. No idea what it’s like in the other titles at the moment, could be worth looking

They’ve previously said that submitting multiple tickets won’t help, and it seems unlikely that a newer ticket would be seen before an older one.

It’d be really nice to know what’s going on tbh.

I haven’t had any direct contact with in-game customer support in a while, so I can’t add my own personal anecdotal evidence. I’ve heard several accounts from others in game and there are some on the other thread that TheAscendingOne linked.

What bothers me more than the lack of customer support is the lack of communication from Funcom addressing it. Customer support being overloaded could be a result of many different things, but I don’t understand the reasoning behind not answering questions for clarification. Unless, of course, the very people who could answer are too busy responding to support tickets.

The other thread did finally get a response after a month, but it didn’t address many of the concerns and raised some new questions. There hasn’t been any further response.

That’s a good question. And maybe the other fanbases have asked the same questions about this new policy change and have actually gotten answers.

Edit: I did a quick search on the forums for the other games and found a similar thread that also never got addressed on the Age of Conan boards that was started on March 15th. Customer support changes?

I didn’t see anything on the Conan Exiles boards, which seems to have way more traffic. I’m tempted to start a thread there asking how their customer support is, but I’m not sure if that’s against the rules.

Just spotted this in Anarchy:

and someone else saying their petition was solved in 24 days.

Having a skim through, it looks like Exiles has recently had a problem with a DLC not showing up for people with Season Passes in US regions. I’m guessing that’s generating a LOT of tickets :frowning: Given that there’s more than fifty times the traffic on the Exiles part of the forum than the SWL one, that could well have swamped CS and it’s not been the only problem with Exiles they’ve had /shakes fist at fate. Throw in the the new Anarchy server’s also fairly fresh, so will be making lots of tickets and that might explain why it’s taking a long, long time to reach CS atm :frowning:

Nice investigative journalism there. I guess it’s somewhat comforting to know that it’s not just SWL getting the shaft. That’s not going to replace mRbL’s missing item though.

What I want to know is if Funcom is currently hiring and training new customer support reps to address the increased strain on the system. Or do they expect this to be a temporary issue, and things will get back to normal in time? Because regardless of the reasons behind it, the current level of customer support is unacceptable, especially considering how good it was up until just a few months ago.

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Wow… we have the exact same issue on Age of Conan. We have ppl now waiting for over 30 days on submitted tickets. It’s sad but true. I wonder if it’s the end of the line…

If I manage to get a hold of nirvelle I will ask him maybe if he can put out a statement or something. Whatever is going on doesn’t seem to be fixable in a bliss but at least some open communication would be nice.
The current state is consistent since weeks and it shows it’s negative impact around seemingly all games.

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@Nbnion The fact that it’s company-wide is actually a good sign, strangely enough. If it was just one game then it would show that Funcom doesn’t prioritized that game anymore, so likely it would be headed towards being shut down or at least put into maintenance mode. Hopefully, this is just an issue of being swamped by more tickets at one time than they were expecting and we’ll get back to normal wait times before too long. The other possibility is that Funcom decided to cut customer support staff as a money-saving measure, and that has a much worse outlook for the future. Whatever the issue behind it, Funcom needs to get it sorted before there’s permanent damage to their various player bases.

@Leogrim If you can somehow coax an official statement out of one of the higher-ups, that would be helpful. This is the kind of issue that really needs better communication. And it would be great to get a more honest statement this time around. The original announcement tried too hard to spin it in a positive light. A direct quote: “To be clear, most customer service interactions will remain unchanged”. That conveniently leaves out the possibility of substantially increasing wait times. I don’t really blame Christa for that. She’s probably just saying what management told her to say.

Nirvelle may not be the person in a position to make a statement though. Depending on how separated CS is, he may be able to poke them internally, but it’s technically not his department, so may be limited on what he can say publicly.

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At this point I think people would be happy with any feedback from Funcom.

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Thank you guys for your support, much appreciated \o/ !

If it’s true that the maximum time they can store info about pur sells/purchase is 1 week, it means noone works on this game anymore. If they had anyone competent in CS they would be able to track how many times I did swear in private messages using mother tongue in December 2017. There is no way that such records could evaporate. It’s actually ridiculous. The fact that Community Manager works on updates link to post doesn’t look promising at all. He said “I fixed the Announcements…” hmm…

Thing that concerns the most is that Funcom did nothing to make his customer happy, nothing to keep me in game. Obviously subscriber = income. Also, two weeks ago I met one of SWL crew member in Rosenbrawl hanging out with other players, of course during, based on their website, GMs hours. Due to lack of in-game support I decieded to quit the game. It’s not the only one reason, let’s say it was final nail in the coffin.

All I want now is to get any reply from CS like “We will be online X day X hour, please log in so we can help you with lost item” or “It’s too late, apologize, we cannot help you”.

Yup, part of Andy’s role is running this discourse site, not sure what the problem is there tbh.

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Fair enough. I don’t actually know who is and isn’t allowed to make official statements. But Leogrim can poke Nirvelle, and then Nirvelle can poke someone higher up. Even if it needs to be a poke-chain that goes all the way up to the CEO it has to start somewhere.

@TheAscendingOne Yeah, the fact that they don’t give out even a general idea of what’s being worked on is a bit worrying. Not just because we’re unaware of what’s coming up, but it leaves the door open to all the speculation that the game is basically in maintenance mode. Add that to the lack of communication about the customer support issue, and it’s going to have a tangible effect on how many people stick with the game.

Maybe it’s an issue of Funcom staff being stretched too thin. They obviously don’t have enough customer support staff to go around. But hey, I’m not going to knock Andy if he’s taking time from his other responsibilities to actually communicate with the players.

At the very least they should acknowledge customer petitions, even if they can’t actually solve the issue immediately (or at all).

The fact that @mRbL has waited a month for any kind of acknowledgement is pretty inexcusable. Not to mention extremely frustrating.

(Posted way later than I wanted to)

Well, I’m tempted to do the opposite, post here about your customer service.

Anyhow, Conan Exiles no longer has payed content which goes through Funcom. Due to issues with the Barbarian Edition content, (mainly) its T-shirts, it was recently discontinued.

There’s still various visual bugs on the forums which Andy really wants to fix, but he doesn’t have it working yet on my end at least so he’s busy getting over that every day now I imagine :sweat_smile:

As you said, Comunity Managers do not work on updates (or directly on financial support), they work on communication and platform management.

had to get another account cause forgot password to mRbL - -’

Anyways, after almost 3 months finally I got feedback - as “new forum member” I can’t post pictures and links so I will just type it here:

“GM Shaogens: Greetings, we are sorry to hear about the issues with the weapon. Any item sold to a vendor will show up in the buyback tab of any vendor, which allows you to purchase-back the item for how much it was sold to the vendor for. If you have sold several items since, or if the item was deleted, the weapon would unfortunately no logner be available to restore.”

I’ve heard that a lot of peeps got their missing items, even after 2 months of waiting and I got nothing, probably because I decieded to stop supporting the game with my mani. Looks like FC forgot I used to be a subscriber for over 1,5 year and treated me like F2P player which is trully disgusting. All hope is gone.

What can you expect from GMs that spend their time streaming SWL instead dealing with overdue petitions? :-/ My epic journey with SWL and FC ends here. Thank you, magnificent ppl I have met during this almost 2 year adventure. Love you all.

Sorry to hear that you didn’t get any help from Funcom. But the community managers that do the streams are not customer support. They used to be, but they’re no longer responsible for petitions and tickets.

That is their area of ‘helping the community’, both CS and CM exist and is needed, as separate enteties. One doesnt take away from the other.