Can Someone Tell Me Why?

tiageros · December 2015

Ok, so I'm off doing research on other MMO companies trying to find a suitable replacement for PWE.

I keep running into these articles boasting how PWE/Arc is the largest MMO provider basically in the world.

This article for example, states the following...

PWE/Arc has a playerbase of 30 million people worldwide and is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Under its wing is Cryptic Studios and Runic Games. PWE was originally established in 2008 and rapidly became the greatest powerhouse in free-to-play games in the market today.

Now, this was written about a year ago, but I cannot imagine the numbers have changed that much.

So if PWE/Arc is the biggest, baddest MMO provider around, why the **** is their support so god awful bad?

I mean, we cannot even get a straight response from our CM on issues that have plagued players for months.
"Soon™" is just about the only common response that we ever get in the forums, and the support team apparently doesn't know how to actually provide support. They would much rather tell you to post of the forum than to actually get a clue about what their job is.

dblazen1 · December 2015

Because PWI isn't the only game PWE runs.
And considering their support staff is rediculously tiny for the amount of players it should report, the support is absolutely ****.

mulier · December 2015

playing the game since 2k8 i think ... support in tickets and live support, has always helped me on good terms, especially live support does speed things up quite a bit. in addition im using german support latelym which aint that bad either... and i have had some fcked up problems in the past

.. literally the only thing they could not do (technically) was restoring a character i had deleted like 2 or 2.5 years prior to contacting teh support

i do confess, that its kinda a luck thing though, which support person one is getting to check the ticket. there seems to be a high discrepancy in terms of knowledge among the support crew.

that for actual behind the scenes support ..... the ingame or forum support , especially in terms of communication, has always been bad, and just got worse over the course of last years...

catgirldesu · December 2015

mulier wrote: »

i do confess, that its kinda a luck thing though, which support person one is getting to check the ticket. there seems to be a high discrepancy in terms of knowledge among the support crew.

This, basically. There are times when I have the exact same issue (eg. promo points not working right) and one time I will get reimbursed quickly, but another time they just keep copy & pasting the same response, that isn't even related to my comments, until I just give up.

blazerboy · December 2015

1) This will probably get shutdown for hurting GM feelings so cudos for trying!
2) The support on PWI from my personal experience is kinda tricky. By this I mean it got significantly better AFTER I began cash shopping. Not saying they only appeal to Csers but its like we get priority. I have one friend we always run into issues and it always seem like mine are solved in a week while his take 3 to 4 weeks and personally I think thats Jacked up because I dont matter more then any non-CSer I really dont
3) i do think CSers should get more bang for our buck in terms of packs ect but we arent any better in terms of support or treating everyone fair when they have a issue they cannot even control. Also PWI had wayyyyy better support when it FIRST came out now every 6 months a new game is out most are **** but they keeo trying new stuff and basically neglect their pilot as if it didnt make them what they are today geez talk about grateful man.

sylenthunder · December 2015

@blazerboy It's not violating any rules, so it will stay up.

Support is a complete crapshoot. I've discussed this before. Over the past two years it's more like Russian Roulette with 4 chambers loaded. The norm is to not do anything and redirect users to post in the forum. When the norm should be providing support.

CS'ers already get more bang for their buck in rewards for buying/spending gold. They don't need better chances on packs or support.

Back in 2008/09, PWE had one title. They had about 12 people on the support team. All were very active in-game, and were very helpful on tickets.
Around 2010-2011 PWE increased the number of titles. They didn't increase the number of support people. On top of that, some of the good people left and were replaced by college interns.
Around 2012-2013 The support staff got increased to about 25 people. They were supporting around 12-15 titles at that time, and were college interns with no clue about the games for the most part. That was when it really went downhill.
It hasn't gotten any better since then, and I've been given the impression that the number has dwindled once more back into the 15-20 range.

So basically, you have a small handful of people, supporting a large number of titles with millions of players each. It's not a recipe for success.
A few of the titles have separate support by their own development studio's though, so that helps a little. For them.

blazerboy · December 2015

Thats just depressing to hear how downhill things got when the solution is to high people with an actual idea of what to do... @sylenthunder

tiageros · January 2016

So, it's a new year, anyone think they'll consider upgrading their support?

rieihdius · January 2016

tiageros said:
Ok, so I'm off doing research on other MMO companies trying to find a suitable replacement for PWE.

I keep running into these articles boasting how PWE/Arc is the largest MMO provider basically in the world.

This article for example, states the following...
PWE/Arc has a playerbase of 30 million people worldwide and is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Under its wing is Cryptic Studios and Runic Games. PWE was originally established in 2008 and rapidly became the greatest powerhouse in free-to-play games in the market today.

Now, this was written about a year ago, but I cannot imagine the numbers have changed that much.

So if PWE/Arc is the biggest, baddest MMO provider around, why the **** is their support so god awful bad?

Not trying to bash PWE/ARC pride here or anything but as far as I know the most played free MMO game in the world is that Popular MOBA from that another rival company that I cannot name by forum rules. said title is supposed to have like 27 millions players worldwide (must be less but companies like to brag about big numbers) so that almost the same as all the arc games players together?

My point is that while there could be a lot of people playing Arc games titles, could be that also those articles you are reading are just exaggerating a bit. Even if a company is greedy and all I doubt that so small support team would be able to handle those 30 millions players.

Maybe is more like that MOBA I was talking about before, maybe they count all the alt accounts and guys that created an account 4000 million years ago as active players worldwide?

Can Someone Tell Me Why?

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