in response to Q&A - 2005-04-12 - Xavier

[xenofur]

to all the kind of people that do tl;dr : i am not critisizing the csr personnel in any way
and now back to the scheduled rant:

-----

Quote:
Now that everything is handled by one company, will we be seeing improvements / more feedback on bug reports?

--

Now that the support is centralized, CSRs are all part of the same company, and Jolt will be able to have more feedback at hand, which will facilitate the cross-over. The concrete result will be that they will be able to have a more precise view of your concerns, and Nevrax will get less fragmented reports. So, yes, things should run in a even smoother way.

But your question is also a good place to show some self-satisfaction, since customer support for Ryzom is one of its great strenghts : there is an average answer time of less than 12 hours, in a lot of cases tickets are answered within the hour, and even within a few minutes if your issue is critical (typically regarding stucks/harassement/etc.). But even there, we are still looking forward for improvements.

-----

As you are indeed reading the forums I chose to answer you here regarding the section quoted above.

It seems to me that you completely misunderstood the question. Noone here would ever question the level and speed of support that is provided by jolt(and previously to the same extent by others). What i see this question being aimed at is you, specifically Nevrax. What the one asking that question, me and many others would really like to know is if there will be improvements in the support communication between us, the players, and you, Nevrax. Currently there are many things that are quite sub-optimum, examples:
The category "question": As far as I am aware I have never gotten any answer to any question i sent in per ticket if the guide wasn't able to answer it, nor have any of my friends.
The category "suggestion": As far as i know there was never any response to those, we were never told if the suggestion was already submitted, was rejected or was accepted.
The category "bug": To my knowledge there was never any response wether a submitted bug was a bug or not.

The question is, will any of this change, or is nevrax going to stay a big black box in regards to customer *support*. What this question also means is wether or not you are going to waste your own time, the time of your CSR teams and the time of your customers, by having us submit things again and again, having the CSR team filter them and your own team filter them again(since nobody is perfect), because the feedback described above is missing?

Not that i really expect an answer to this, as this would be one of those "difficult questions" that rarely if ever make it into your q&a, but i'm willing to give you the benefit of doubt and let you surprise me.

EDIT:
in short:
player ----> CSR ----> Nevrax ----> CSR ----> player
|---------perfect-----------|
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|-------non-existant?!------|

[nonne]

Hmmm this is strange, I have only gamed almost 4 months now and sendt in maybe 7-10 tickets both in-game and IRL... In-game I have been contacted by a GM or support almost right away (with in 5 min) and got help over question/problem I had. Outside-game it took something between 2-7 hours before I had a new mail in my mailbox..

The CSR and GM team have everytime helped me solve my problems and always been nice (even that I had some n00b questions/problems sometimes)..

So if u dont have get any answer might be just bad luck I don´t know but I know that they are doing there best to support the best MMO I ever seen/gamed yet.

Keep up the good work Nevrax, GM´s and CSR team..

[mmatto]

Playing at Aristopotle, I have got timely response to all of my tickets, including suggestions, bug sand questions.

[mboeing]

As xenofur pointed out. Its not a problem with the GM / CSR at all. They do what they can and they do it fast.

Maybe you have been lucky so far that all your questions problems could be solved by them imediatelly. But once they reach their limits either in knowledge or technical support its getting difficult.

Because then all they can do is forward the problem towards Nevrax. Until now I never have heard from the tickets that were forwarded ever again. And I seem not to be the only one.

[aylwyne]

Correct me if I'm wrong xenofur, but I believe what he's asking for is something beyond the "thanks for the suggestion, I'll send it on up" type of response. I think most of us would agree that the GMs respond very quickly to tickets. However, I find that most of the time, they're not in much of a position to do anything but relay the information to Nevrax. At that point, all communication stops.

Like once it's "sent up" and Nevrax evaluates the suggestion or bug, it would be nice to have a way to see if the suggestion was rejected or not or if the bug was confirmed or dismissed as working properly.

Also, the point about wasting time submitting things over and over is very valid. Ideally, it'd be nice to have a searchable database of the previous submissions so if you ran into a bug that was already posted, you could just flag it as something you also ran into rather than submitting the same thing again. It could be similar for suggestions in that you could add your "vote" to a suggestion as something you'd also like to see implemented.

[xenofur]

@nonne and mmatto: please read the whole thing again and also note the small diagramm i added

@mboeing and aylwyne: you got it exactly right

[dazman76]

Come on peeps, read the whole post and don't get bored when you see 2+ paragraphs

As suggested, a player-accesible bug tracking system would be ideal, if only to allow viewing of existing tickets/bugs/suggestions. Nevrax are surely using such a system in-house (we used one for developing internal business websites, for example), and making that information visible to players would go a long way - in fact, it would almost remove the need for direct Nevrax -> Player interaction and communication.

[sasaj]

in short:
player ----> CSR ----> Nevrax ----> CSR ----> player
|---------perfect-----------|
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|-------non-existant?!------|

Just remove "?" and keep "!"
There is no back-communication. Story for the player ends with "i'll send your ticket/sugestion to the devs". Is it enough? Yes, for me. Last two my tickets are solved in patch before merge. It's enough for me to see that they care and work on things.

[dazman76]

It's enough for me to see that they care and work on things.

When your ticket/bug is fixed by a patch, sure. When it isn't, you have no idea what's happened to it, it's current status, whether it's being worked on, or whether it's even recognised as a bug.

[xenofur]

to give a very prominent example: try using double wield daggers for a while, use dmg inc, watch the damage, first dagger does double the amount of dmg of the second, even tho both are exactly the same. what's more weird, after doing that for half an hour or so, the right hand dagger shows wear, while the left hand dagger is still shiny fresh. ticketed that a month or two ago, never got an official answer wether that is a bug or not.