Feedback and Communication, a 2-Way Street

[RuQu]

AKA: A remarkably refreshing Customer Service Experience.

 

First, let me say that most of my interactions with the actual moderators on these forums have been pretty positive, and I know that they are Forum CSRs, and not the Developers, and can't answer most of our questions.

 

With that out of the way, I want to provide some feedback based on a recent interaction I had with another company, who I won't name and I will omit any identifying details.

 

One of the long running complaints of the Healer Forum Community has been the lack of any Developer interaction, and the lack of information that is provided. When we tested on the PTS, it was commonly felt that our feedback was ignored, and only bug reports were of any interest. Whether or not the players enjoyed the changes was considered irrelevant, or so it felt. Developer responses on the PTS forum provided no meaningful insight into questions of real importance to the mechanics of the game in general and Healers in particular.

 

Contrast that to a recent Open Beta weekend I participated in. I sent in a lengthy feedback. I think my style is well enough known here, and my formatting was similar. Specifically it was an extremely long wall of text broken into numbered points, with suggested possible solutions to problems whenever possible.

 

Here are some excerpts from the response I got. Note that I think English is a second language for their CSR, since the game is semi-foreign.

In regards to the bugs:

 

I have documented every single one of these bugs for you and sent them up for review. For this reason I would like to say, we are always very open and appreciative about any one of our customers submitting feedback and bug reports. It is a pleasure to know that you are willing to go that extra mile to help us find the issues so that we can resolve them and be able to provide the best video game experience possible.

 

For your suggestions:

 

I have also sent these up as well and made sure I included all the great information that you provided. I really do like every single one of your ideas and can see why they would come to mind. They would certainly help out the Guilds. So everything has been sent up with all your information and again all of your great detail.

 

Note how in the suggestions section they not only say they liked them, they also specifically mention the subject that some of them were about, and they specifically say they forwarded them on to the Development Team. It doesn't even matter if they did or if they just Mad Lib'd one of the general topics my suggestions discussed into a non-grammatical form letter. What matters is that their feedback response makes the customer feel that their feedback mattered. I have no reason to doubt that they did forward on my bugs and feature requests, and even if none of the features I suggest ever makes it into the game, I feel like I am a valued customer.

 

Compare that to BW's most recent round of testing and the free time debacle. No one vetted how the non-level 50 players who have played since Early Access would feel when they gave free time out only to the level 50 players and called them their most valuable customers. The PTS testers felt ignored and as if their feedback didn't matter, as stated by Lileth when he reported his guild had stopped testing on the PTS. Lots of dedicated players who wanted to test the changes felt slighted by the closed transfer process. The changes to healers in Patch 1.2 had almost no relationship to all of the feedback Healers provided from Beta through 1.1.5.

 

In my feedback letter I also requested some information that I felt players needed but didn't have access to in the Open Beta test. The CSR provided me links to some of the info, and reported that some of the rest was not available at the moment but that they forwarded it on as a suggestion to add that info to the official site game guide.

 

While the CSR's here will sometimes drop in a thread and post a link, what was really great here was the "I don't know, and that info isn't public so it isn't fair for me to tell you directly, but I'll see if we can make it public. Keep watching the main site for updates." Again, that is good service. It doesn't answer my question, but it doesn't ignore it either.

 

Finally, the end of my feedback was just a description of my impressions of the game. Commentary on art style, feel, etc. The CSR literally went line by line and responded to my feedback with comments from their own experience testing the game. Every point was specifically acknowledged, and my feedback to them was as long-winded as most of my posts here (like this one). This specific acknowledgement that they actually read the letter took up about half the length of their response. I won't quote any of it as it would identify the game and this thread is about how to do Customer Relations right, not about advertising another game.

 

Contrast this with BW feedback. I believe it was ShadowAxe (or something close) who pointed out that when unsubscribing BW doesn't bother to try and retain you. They just send a generic survey that lacks a lot of options for "other" and providing meaningful answers, in favor of forcing you into a closest answer checkbox that makes for easier metrics (hmm...a trend). While the forum CSRs can be helpful, the feedback@swtor.com responses and in-game ticket responses all come from people RPing as robots, or robots programmed to simulate people RPing as robots. You can't tell. There is no indication that your feedback was sent anywhere except the trash folder.

 

SWTOR needs a lot of work. At this point I am loathe to suggest anything that would take away from the coders' time. However, EA/BW also has some of the worst Customer Relations I've ever seen (and even was voted the Worst Company in America by Consumer Reports this year). Fixing how you interact with people would go a long way to retaining them long enough to make this game live up to its hype and potential, and doesn't take any coder time at all.

Edited April 24, 2012 by RuQu

[Xaearth]

And it really doesn't take all that much. Some form of dialogue between the healer community and the developers would be great, but really if we ever got anything other than "You're fine, suck it up and deal with it." the healer community as a whole wouldn't be so... downtrodden? depressed? hopeless? UNSUBBED?

 

Of course, it doesn't help that the only time the dev team acknowledge one of the healers was underperforming, they pretty much lied to our faces before stabbing the other two in the back.

 

So yeah, we aren't going to take "Ok, Merc/Commando healers are underperforming..." too well either, but that doesn't mean you can't say it, follow through on it, and actually try and garner from your customers the slightest bit of confidence in your ability as a development team.

 

PS: When addressing community concerns, don't use, imply, or even give the slightest possibility of a hint at the word "metrics", as our BS detectors immediately start blaring and drown out whatever obvious fabrication you're about to say.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Xaearth

[oredith]

a guildie has a screenshot of a CSR email reply from SWTOR. He had written in to complain about an unscheduled, prime-time server shut down on a Friday night, where he and his wife couldn't play (we laughed about it on our forum, on how maybe that's the game's way of telling him he should have taken his wife out on a date or something.. ).

 

he got a response back, except the CSR mixed up the response box, with their internal file.

 

the response he got was "player expressed outrage at primetime maintenance. replied with apology template, ticket closed"..

 

i wonder if they have multiple apology templates, or if they all look the same.

[RuQu]

a guildie has a screenshot of a CSR email reply from SWTOR. He had written in to complain about an unscheduled, prime-time server shut down on a Friday night, where he and his wife couldn't play (we laughed about it on our forum, on how maybe that's the game's way of telling him he should have taken his wife out on a date or something.. ).

 

he got a response back, except the CSR mixed up the response box, with their internal file.

 

the response he got was "player expressed outrage at primetime maintenance. replied with apology template, ticket closed"..

 

i wonder if they have multiple apology templates, or if they all look the same.

 

And "templates" aren't even necessarily a bad thing. They ensure a consistent response, and make sure your reps aren't saying anything that will get them in trouble.

 

Just, you know, get better templates. People already see CSRs as uncaring robots as a stereotype. Making your staff RP as robots might seem tongue-in-cheek funny, and might fit with lore, but when a customer has a real problem they want to know it was addressed by a real person.

 

Fill in the blank responses are fine for one-off bug reports and complaints. "I'm sorry you were inconvenienced by <insert one line bug description>. Rest assured that we are looking into the situation and will resolve it as soon as possible. Thank you for your feedback." Nothing more needs to be said.

 

When a customer sends in something more substantial though, there needs to be something in place to respond in kind. If the customer spent 20+ minutes writing up 3 pages of itemized feedback, they deserve a response that says someone took at least 5 minutes to read over it.

 

I'm pretty sure the response I got from this other company was not a template. If anything, the guidance said "When you get an itemized feedback list, respond to every item on their list, no matter how trivial, with at least one sentence." I'd submitted some other smaller feedback emails before about minor issues. They were all resolved and the responses seemed personalized but could also have been high quality <insert issue> style templates. They could also have been handwritten by people who write a lot of them. This one, though, was probably about 2 pages double spaced, with every single point responded to.

 

I don't know, I guess its like being in an abusive relationship, finally leaving them, then getting in a normal healthy relationship. Every day you are like "Wait...they aren't insulting me? They are...being nice? What's going on here!?":eek:

[Yakito]

a guildie has a screenshot of a CSR email reply from SWTOR. He had written in to complain about an unscheduled, prime-time server shut down on a Friday night, where he and his wife couldn't play (we laughed about it on our forum, on how maybe that's the game's way of telling him he should have taken his wife out on a date or something.. ).

 

he got a response back, except the CSR mixed up the response box, with their internal file.

 

the response he got was "player expressed outrage at primetime maintenance. replied with apology template, ticket closed"..

 

i wonder if they have multiple apology templates, or if they all look the same.

 

I got a template once too After reporting a player using an exploit. It went something like this:

"Complemented the customer for reporting the exploit, passed the message on, closed ticket" instead of the proper message

[XtremJedi]

My favourites were the very long list of automated feedback I got about the Focus Targeting bugs, which I tested and re-reported after every patch. Each one listed the testing I'd done, the procedures for replication, environmental factors etc. To each one I received the pat response saying that they wouldn't give feedback on it.

 

So I also took to posting regularly into the Customer Services forum, where they have that sticky thread in which they list the "high priority in-game known issues" - pointing out that targeting is a pretty basic functionality issue, that these bugs had been around since Beta and I'd reported them so many times that they really had to be known... so why weren't they in the "high priority Known In-Game Issues" list? Take a look at that list now... and decide which of those issues they've got there are higher priority for you, than targeting not working reliably or any number of other bugs that you could name.

 

They responded to one by saying that they take a variety of factors into account to make the list, ignored the next couple and then started moving them into the Discussion Forum - despite the fact that the posts were about a list that they were maintaining in the Customer Services forum... which is clearly about Customer Service issues.... meh.

 

As far as I know, nobody from BW has actually acknowledged the Focus Targeting bugs (abilities land on self instead of focus target when queued and sometimes in lag situations, focus target portraits disappear but focus target remains set after zoning, Focus Target is completely deselected sometimes and has to be reset).... This in a game, where the targeting options for healers have always been very sparse and the one option we had was so unreliable as to be nigh on useless anyway.

 

I mean... why would faulty targeting ever have a high priority than:

 

UI

 

• Players may become incorrectly flagged as "AFK" and kicked to character selection while actively adjusting parameters in the User Interface Preferences menu for more than 15 minutes.
   
   
  
• When using "R" to reply after recieving tells from multiple other players, the chat field can reach a state that autopopulates the reply name incorrectly, but the whisper will go to the player who most recently sent a tell.
  

 

After all... those two are the bugs that must just be burning in people's minds as High Priority ones.... mustn't they?

 

X

Edited April 25, 2012 by XtremJedi

[RuQu]

XtremeJedi, I think, to paraphrase one of the Devs in the Commando Free Respec thread, this is just a case of you being self-centered.*

 

Why should your problem be moved to the top of a list with such pressing community issues as:

Legacy

• Each character on an account must be logged in individually before they will appear on the Legacy Family Tree.
  

 

Targeting is only important if you actually want to have meaningful gameplay. SWTOR is about tacking a 2007 MMO mechanic onto 8 single player story arcs.

 

*While I'm sure he is aware, for random readers unfamiliar with us, the entirety of this post has been double-dipped in sarcasm.