And it is by your favorite Wiki-King.  I won't post his full last name here, but it's been everywhere already.

Maybe he thinks shilling for SSG will help him finally get his dream job with them. I mean nightmare job.

"5/16/2017
Donald F.

Excellent customer service. Very friendly and helpful service associates with reasonably quick turnaround time."

https://www.bbb.org/boston/business-reviews/video-games-dealers/standing-stone-g...

But wait, there's more! Turbine also has one and only one positive review. Guess by who?

The BBB is a scam. If you are not a member they rule against you and give you an F rating pretty quickly. A useless ruling as they have no means of actually doing anything for you. If SSG ever joined the BBB then they would have an A grade regardless. BBB is in the business of selling memberships. I am actually surprised that anyone took the time to respond to any of the complaints from Turbine or SSG. It's really useless to respond to any of them and a huge timesink for no return unless you pay the BBB the extortion err membership fee. I guess it demonstrates some level of customer service that they at least responded to the BBB complaint. But it also shows how shoddy the BBB is in that Turbines & SSG's complaints are lumped together.

I only half-agree with you guys, having spent some recent time dealing with the BBB.  You only get an F rating if you don't respond to complaints *at all*, which you'll see is quite a few of the cases there.  That's just shitty business, regardless of the legitimacy of the BBB itself.

On the flipside, having to deal with the cocksmoking teabaggers at Verizon, one complaint to the BBB resulted in a phone call from Verizon two hours later, with somebody who could actually make decisions.

So maybe they're a scam, but they can actually work.  Comparing them to Yelp is just dumb.  Sounds like more "the market will sort it out" nonsense, which means you buy MOTU, don't get a working key and then... what?  You're free to spend your remaining money elsewhere?

BBB is not a scam, its actually a pretty well-respected organization.

Complaints DO garner action from most companies, and a lot of people do actually look at BBB ratings.

Yelp is a free-for-all, anyone can post anything. BBB actually collects specific details and requires to you to provide legitimate contact information. Filling a complaint isn't just posting a bad review, it actually means the BBB will contact the company on your behalf and make sure your complaint is at least heard. They will then act as an arbitrator.

As far as consumer advocates go, they're a lot better than nothing.

I wonder how long this approach of "Ignore all complaints, provide rotten service" is going to keep the company going?

I plan to un-sub in a few days over the piss-poor customer service. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Remember: the worst thing you can do to SSG is keep playing the game but stop giving them money.

The 5% XP boost was the only reason I bought VIP in the first place, be sad to see it go!

In other news, I am about 90% sure SSG outsources its support through a company called Zendesk. I was muching about on the SSG not-helping site and during the login the URL briefly redirected to one that included Zendesk. I checked their site out, and they are a third-party, customer service outsourcing group. They don't really handle games, which explains part of the shitty service.

I can't find any mention of SSG on their site so far, but then again people tend to only post relationships they are proud of.

noamineo wrote on Sep 19^th, 2017 at 11:07am:


Zendesk is a software program that your support team can use internally to track support tickets and manage queues, resolutions, etc.  I didn't know they actually provided employees to do the support.  That wasn't of interest to my company, so I might have just overlooked it.  Or it is a newer offering.   I've seen the software suite.  It is nice.  We chose a different product at my company, but they were one of the options we were considering. 

Regardless, my guess would be they are using the software with their own staff vs. outsourcing customer service.

NoGoodDoc wrote on Sep 19^th, 2017 at 11:38am:


Ah.  Didn't see that post.  Interesting.  I'm generally not a fan of outsourced CS.  Too hard to control the customer experience, imo.  I hope they do bring it back in house.

Asheras wrote on Sep 19^th, 2017 at 11:41am:


Was Turbine trying very hard to control customer experience back when CS was inhouse?

Look.. in not giving up vip for a few reasons..

I like the 10% especially when reusing stones.. that 200k from the stone extra is dope.

I also dont want to bust out like $300 or more at once to buy all the packs/classes/races/mm/shared bank/character slots and whatever else there is that im missing.

I own almost 0 content.. only the expansions and whatever was part of the black fri sales.. If i could buy stuff as it goes on sale while im vip, id have much more. But they trapped me. Plus I need dat 10%

10% exp boost IMO is kind of "meh." It's nice, but I can easily do without it. I've never been VIP and I've gotten along fine. There's so much exp around these days anyway.

I remember back when I first started DDO, I came to the realization that VIP is better in the short run, whereas buying a certain amount of TP is better in the long run. In the short run, VIP is fantastic since it gives you access to ALMOST all the content, all but a few of the classes, and so on and so forth. It's a good deal if you want to play the game and don't intend to continue for that long. On the other hand, if you want to shell out maybe $100 for TP, and then use those TP wisely to only buy sale stuff when it's on sale, then you'll probably get a better bang for your buck than you would with VIP.

I think I've spent around $200-$250 on DDO in my entire 7-year career of playing the game, and all of that was spent towards TP, not VIP. If I had gone VIP, that would've been ~$700 by comparison, and I wouldn't even be taking advantage of it most of the time, since I tend to take long breaks. That's another thing with VIP: I'd feel the need to play compulsively, so as to get my money's worth. When buying adventure packs, I know that I can return to them whenever I want (before DDO closes down, at least) and try to enjoy the content at my own pace. So personally, I don't see the appeal to VIP, though of course your mileage may vary.

Quote:

If you had gone VIP for 7 years, then you would have paid less than $9 for 20-40 hours of entertainment each month.  That's a Netflix level of a good deal.

If a $15/month sub requires financial analysis about whether you can afford it or not, stop playing the fucking game and go improve your job marketability instead.  FFS, $15 is the cost of a decent lunch or cheap dinner.

Metal-Beast wrote on Sep 20^th, 2017 at 10:29am:

That might change. Check out DDOCast 488.