Why is it so hard for support to give you the answer?

jana

I just bought VIP lately, I loved having it when we got in free in parts of Dec. & Jan. I noticed one of the perks was being able to teleport to PE or moommask but I could never find where to do it. I asked repeatedly "I am sure there is a simple answer could I have it please' and I got the typical what steps are you taking and a link to how to take screenshots etc. I found out on my own that the silver thing in the upper left has all that carpe diem for each character (also a question) and the green emerald next to the map takes you to PE. How hard would have that been to just simply say that. And of course if it is a matter of not receiving states for upgrades all I ever get is they will let the developers know which means your s.o.l. which is shysty.

plasticbat

It is hard for the support because they know nothing about the game.

pitshade

The 'green emerald' is for the teleport stones located in various maps. It isn't related to VIP and it will take you to whatever stone you clicked on last. The only way to teleport to PE with VIP is using the signpost, but it allows travel to anywhere a normal gate would do. VIP allows you to teleport to the Workshop as well, regardless of whether you used a signpost or gate.

plasticbat

1. If you have VIP 4, you can bring up Signpost to go anywhere in big map.
2. With VIP 2, there is a direct way to go to Moonstone Mask without using Signpost.
3. As mention, the green emerald does not always send you to PE. At least, mine does not because I set that up to go somewhere else.
4. The green emerald gives you one free teleport per hour. It will be changed to AD (symbol) after the first usage of an hour. In that case, you will need to pay AD to use it. As mentioned, that has nothing to do with VIP. Green emerald was created to help people who does not have VIP.

greywynd

The VIP bug is up beside your avatar. Click on that and you will get a menu of your current options.

armadeonx

Their support is outsourced & they do customer 'support' not customer 'service', meaning that they may pretend to address a technical issue you have but in no way will go out of their way to advise you on anything outside of those strict parameters.

Most of the time this 'support' is replying "post your issue on the forums". (and Cryptic pay these people?!)

If you want to know anything about how the game operates, your best choice is to join a guild with experienced players - who can tell you pretty much everything & anything you need to know.

hotfrostworm

My wife said, for a few years Thomas Foss, would actually answer politely worded PMs here on the forums. We both assume he was either let go with Magic or jumped ship last summer. Either way, fly be free! We wish him the best and know he is a bright man who will be at home anywhere he landed. Other developers, I assume get scolded or punished for talking to the players? Most people assume @nitocris83 is a developer, but she is the community manager, her current job is to relay the overall community vibe to the management, individual customer complaints should never be her department. Liaisons between the community as a whole and the few that run the big show is a tough job without playing tech support as well.

Meanwhile most large software companies have "levels" of user support. For example... let's talk about a company I am all too familiar with Amazon.com. If you are a face in the crowd, you will get the lowest level of support, but better than none at all. Emails, chats, and phone calls would be handled by an outsourced contractor, they will run a playbook given to them by Amazon about the application. Then if they spend sufficient time with the customer or the customer status is of a high level it gets sent up a chain of higher levels of support. By the time they reach me, the customer is pretty mad and hostile for being "jerked around" or "played hot potato" in chat. If their status is high enough they never get the others and end up talking directly to someone such as myself. I don't run any playbook, I am a hands on type of support. While many applications are at my finger tips, I have to go through some verification and that can be difficult with the person being irate and thinking I might be another person who is going to ask the same questions for the tenth time. I really don't care to field trouble tickets but it is part of the job. Knowing Cryptic has been a few hundred people means you probably have fewer levels to hop up to get to a real helpful person.

Strange but true story how I ended up where I am today.
I use to contract for GM Powertrain and Grey Iron Castings in Saginaw. One day about 20 years ago, I was negotiating my new contract and sitting at a board with 8 people. Nancy at the opposite end of the table told me that $1.50 was too much and they could outsource to India for $0.75. I said, "Then you must be selling a lot of product to India. I have a fully loaded Pontiac with leather seats sitting in your lot. I don't think they will buy a donkey cart from you. I won't be buying your product either. Good day!".

After I left, I drifted from one gig to another, then I started outsourcing from home. After I sold the Pontiac, I bought a Kia Rio (Korean built car) after it broke down, I sent it to the scrapper, and haven't owned a car in over 10 years. I walk, take a cab, or rent cars for business trips. GM never got another dime back from me. I have nothing against India, but if you ever plan to outsource, it should be done from nearby.

jana

I appreciate all the answers here, I wish I had known that about the emerald a long time ago. But no one answered why it is easier for the 'support' to ask a bunch of questions than just say it is the silver wheel near your player name you need. How can they be support if they don't know the game at all. I believe legally when there is an exchange of money they have to have support. They don't have all the laws in place yet, and I really believe someday what they do here will be illegal. They have the right to change a game anyway they want, just like we have a right to stop playing if we don't like it, but the money spent on a game to get to a certain point should not be wasted in a new system that isn't equitable, which causes you to lose a lot of time and effort and in this last update, cost me a lot of money. I love this game but if I see to much more of the EA tactics in my face, I might or will get out.

mentinmindmaker

This is the standard way first line CS works in all companies:
You get a standard list of questions you can answer, with the standard actions to do and standard answers to give.
No qualifications are required on the product you are providing support for. (There is a reason turnover in first line support is high)

Anything beyond that will either be deflected by polite phrases or relayed up to 2nd line support if it seems important enough.

For Neverwinter the polite phrases seems to be 'Ask on the Forums'

hotfrostworm

Things sure have changed over the years in software and not for the better. In the 90's most software was sold in store, the games had to be 99.9% bug free or people wouldn't buy them. Patching was done physically by snail mail. For example; GTA San Andreas version 1.0 was sold in stores (Target, Walmart, etc.) in 2004. Later in 2005, when the disabled sex mini-game was discovered by Patrick Wildenborg, a game hacker/modder, the fallout was to recall all version 1.0 disks by mail, for version 2.0 completely removing the mini-game. It required knowledge of how to "crack the executable" just to turn it on, so very few disks were sent or received in this fashion. Most version 2.0 disks ended up in discount bins for $10 or less. Statics showed that most people who owned a copy were just after money.

Today games are released over the internet, in a broken state, they are incomplete, or just nonfunctional at all. It is almost, like the community will buy anything from a "trusted developer", as long as they promise to fix it later. I was watching my neighbor playing Skyrim or Oblivion, the horse and cart clipped through the side of a mountain and disappeared. He just laughed about it. But I was thinking, this is slop art. People are paying $50 to $100 for broken games and then continue to add more broken features.

Insanity with consumers and developers without work ethics are a terrible combination.

plasticbat

hotfrostworm said:

Things sure have changed over the years in software and not for the better. In the 90's most software was sold in store, the games had to be 99.9% bug free or people wouldn't buy them. Patching was done physically by snail mail. For example; GTA San Andreas version 1.0 was sold in stores (Target, Walmart, etc.) in 2004. Later in 2005, when the disabled sex mini-game was discovered by Patrick Wildenborg, a game hacker/modder, the fallout was to recall all version 1.0 disks by mail, for version 2.0 completely removing the mini-game. It required knowledge of how to "crack the executable" just to turn it on, so very few disks were sent or received in this fashion. Most version 2.0 disks ended up in discount bins for $10 or less. Statics showed that most people who owned a copy were just after money.

Today games are released over the internet, in a broken state, they are incomplete, or just nonfunctional at all. It is almost, like the community will buy anything from a "trusted developer", as long as they promise to fix it later. I was watching my neighbor playing Skyrim or Oblivion, the horse and cart clipped through the side of a mountain and disappeared. He just laughed about it. But I was thinking, this is slop art. People are paying $50 to $100 for broken games and then continue to add more broken features.

Insanity with consumers and developers without work ethics are a terrible combination.

At that time, the game is pretty much static (as it would not change). It also had a big manual for the user to read. Most answer would be found in the manual. If that was not enough, someone would actually wrote 1st/3rd party books for the game. Back then, calling support (long distance call) was considered expensive (if support existed at all). They were hardly 99.9% bug free. It was either people ignored them or they found ways to workaround them. i.e. player (in the old days) would spend time to read and to figure out how to overcome problems themselves.

thorncrusher

Support for this game is non-existent. The 'support' team just tells people to come to the forums so they can close their tickets and have good numbers.