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Support tickets

Dec 22, 2019 Dilan Rona link
What is the average response time for support tickets? Lately my tickets seem to be completely ignored.
Dec 23, 2019 incarnate link
Sorry about that. We've had a lot of distractions, lately.

Some of your requests were also for things we don't do, but we should have responded at least.
Dec 27, 2019 K1773Rslave1 link
Same for me, been 6 months already :(
Dec 27, 2019 Satanic Soul link
Same for me too , been 2 months :(
Dec 27, 2019 incarnate link
Heh. Satanic Soul has been banned from opening tickets with any frequency, because of a history of doing so to exhausting excess, and repeatly badgering the developers to the point of being threatened with banning over abuse of the ticket system. Your history of frustrating "noise" tickets are part of the reason why they get overlooked. Also, this is a great way to get your specific tickets to be ignored.

K1773Rslave1, I responded to your ticket now. It came in when there was a lot of travel going on, and it's a request that we do not ever agree to, and we've written about that publicly before, but I should have followed up directly.

Anyway, it is on the road-map to update the ticket system so that un-responded and "fallow" tickets get more notifications and the like, and make the system easier for us to manage. But, I have not prioritized that ahead of our recent and time-sensitive game and gameplay development.

We do answer the vast majority of tickets in a timely manner. But tickets for things we don't do (requests that will be refused), have a history of delayed responses, particularly if they come in at a chaotic time. We'll endeavor to improve that.

In the meantime, on the off-chance that it's been a few weeks and you haven't heard back, you can open another ticket.

I'm locking this now.
Jan 02, 2020 incarnate link
I'm going to make one additional note on this thread.

We've had a major increase in the number of people trying to exploit the game through Administrative Action over the last couple of years. Basically, people opening tickets that have kind of unusual requests, and then we later discover they were trying to sell game content to other players (violation of the EULA), or exploit some kind of gameplay, etc. In some cases, people have gone to some lengths to hide who they are, and their actual motivations behind the given request.

There is a reasonable expectation by rest of the player-base that we won't allow people to exploit or cheat or otherwise diminish the game, through administrative action. As a result, we've had to limit the actions we do support, and we've started to be much more careful about "unusual" requests.

This "care" means the requests require more analysis, and this takes time. If we don't have time to look into what someone is doing with their odd request, or why they're making it, then the ticket tends to get deferred.

You'll note that every delayed-ticket referenced in this thread is "unusual". These are not character name-changes, or billing problems.

So, while I definitely take responsibility for the delays in processing these tickets, and we should have been more communicative, there is some reasonable back-story as to why. Some of the tickets we should have simply "denied" immediately, instead of deferring the ticket to try and help the player; but it's our natural tendency to.. try to be helpful? Ironically, the delay(s) often stemmed from helpful intentions.

Obviously, we have limited time resources, and sometimes if we're working on something delicate (like the recent major server migrations, which can take weeks to fully complete), we will "defer" tickets that are a bit odd and require additional scrutiny. Because the related exploit problems and increased scrutiny are relatively recent, we don't have a strong system for managing "deferrals".

I mentioned earlier that we have changes to the ticket-system on the roadmap. This will likely include more concrete policy changes on what we will and will-not do, and a new submission structure to help guide people in how they make those requests.