Firegoddess says he won't be back.

[Neils.Bohr]

Great news on the results!

Real bummer on what it took to get there.

Great results and news indeed!


So now we know that it IS possible to recover all of that stuff.

Possible to recover lost TR cache items.
Possible to recover lost Inventory items.
Possible to recover lost Stat tomes.
Possible to recover lost Skill tomes.
Possible to recover lost XP, RXP, EDs, Crafting XP.

Possible to recover all the lost things that never seemed possible to recover.


It may be harder to get someone to do it than it is to have an unsupervised 13 year old rake leaves, but it seems it CAN be done, and that's not nothing.

Cat's out of the bag.

Thanks, FireGoddess.
Much Appreciated.

[AstorPotamus]

Great results and news indeed!


So now we know that it IS possible to recover all of that stuff.

Possible to recover lost TR cache items.
Possible to recover lost Inventory items.
Possible to recover lost Stat tomes.
Possible to recover lost Skill tomes.
Possible to recover lost XP, RXP, EDs, Crafting XP.

Possible to recover all the lost things that never seemed possible to recover.


It may be harder to get someone to do it than it is to have an unsupervised 13 year old rake leaves, but it seems it CAN be done, and that's not nothing.

Cat's out of the bag.

Thanks, FireGoddess.
Much Appreciated.

Yeah, it takes hiring a lawyer to send a Letter of Intent, so hope you either have money or a buddy with a J.D. willing to do it for free.

[myliftkk_v2]

Possible to recover lost TR cache items.
Possible to recover lost Inventory items.
Possible to recover lost Stat tomes.
Possible to recover lost Skill tomes.
Possible to recover lost XP, RXP, EDs, Crafting XP.

Should post this to the wiki along with a link to appropriate legal firms if you know, SSG doesn't start delivering this service to all of its customers when these things happen.

[SerPounce]

Yeah, it takes hiring a lawyer to send a Letter of Intent, so hope you either have money or a buddy with a J.D. willing to do it for free.

Getting a lawyer to write a quick letter isn't that bad. I bet there's even something boilerplate out there for this. Now if you want to follow up with anything more than a letter it's going to get expensive fast. That said, as someone with a JD myself, I doubt it helped much. In fact he's lucky it didn't slow things down even more as everyone starts running stuff through their own counsel (who are much more likely to tell their clients to slow down further and not do anything then to try to work it out directly). Contrary to popular belief "lawyering up" is not always a great strategy.

[Loromir]

I am surprised that a law firm even agreed to handling a case like this even just to send a 'letter of intent' - according to SSG's terms and the contract that we sign when playing DDO, are not all digital goods within the game the 'property' of SSG/DDO and subject to final arbitration by SSG alone? Would there be any case/standing if a lawsuit followed?

it was probably cheaper for SSG to pay an employee to manually restore all of their TR cache items than it would have been to pay a lawyer to defend a potential lawsuit.

[Loromir]

The CS side of SSG is revoltingly inept to the point of being deliberate malingerers that are outright stealing their pay from SSG. Don't knuckle under to their efforts to destroy the game.

From my perspective....this statement might be a bit unfair.

My theory is: they probably have one or two customer service reps to handle the literal hundreds of potential CS issues that come up. To say a person is "outright stealing" is a very strong statement that I wouldn't make unless I was 100% sure it was true.

My point is...you are pointing the finger at the CS employees...when maybe you should point the finger at SSG management instead.

[apocaladle]

So he threw a temper tantrum after not hearing back right away and SSG game him his stuff back after 2 weeks.

Can we lock this toxic thread yet?

[Bobmj]

If you're playing on one character for 7 hours and something happens to an alt character on the same account while you're playing, how do you know when something happened to it to know that it was recreated 2 hours later as a Level 1?

I'm just curious if there is some timer or tool that I don't know about that would be cool to use or helpful in some other way.

[palladin9479]

From my perspective....this statement might be a bit unfair.

My theory is: they probably have one or two customer service reps to handle the literal hundreds of potential CS issues that come up. To say a person is "outright stealing" is a very strong statement that I wouldn't make unless I was 100% sure it was true.

My point is...you are pointing the finger at the CS employees...when maybe you should point the finger at SSG management instead.

SSG doesn't have CS folks, they are outsourcing it.

The behavior we are witnessing is indicative of outsourcing Customer Service / Help Desk functions to certain overseas locations. Those firms care about metrics and the only real metrics are "tickets closed", "average ticket time open", "number of tickets open past X days". This is why we get so many cases where tickets are marked "closed" but aren't actually resolved. Close as many tickets as quick as possible with as few people as possible. It results in really bad customer experience but a big costs savings for the company. The only way to push back on this is to highlight the hit on corporate image that happens for substandard performance of their contracted services. This causes someone from SSG to poke around and usually illicit's an immediate response from the contracted company.

[nokowi]

So he threw a temper tantrum after not hearing back right away and SSG game him his stuff back after 2 weeks.

Can we lock this toxic thread yet?

We would not have known any of the positives if SSG listened to such requests. I am glad know that they can and did resolve his issues.

I will suggest you stop reading the thread if you find it toxic.

I find the information to be very valuable, and I like to hear opinions other than my own.

I find your post to be more of a tantrum than the OP's - he had a reason to be upset, and your reason seems trivial.

[nokowi]

Getting a lawyer to write a quick letter isn't that bad. I bet there's even something boilerplate out there for this. Now if you want to follow up with anything more than a letter it's going to get expensive fast. That said, as someone with a JD myself, I doubt it helped much. In fact he's lucky it didn't slow things down even more as everyone starts running stuff through their own counsel (who are much more likely to tell their clients to slow down further and not do anything then to try to work it out directly). Contrary to popular believe "lawyering up" is not always a great strategy.

I tend to agree with this.

Any lawyer will likely advise SSG to stop communication, so one should expect to hear very little if they take this tactic.

The lawyering-up process was close enough to the resolution that it seems to me like it would have been a non-factor, but people (including me) tend to twist information to their own views. It seems to me like SSG did the right thing here, with poor enough communication to create a very poor user experience during that 17 day period.

There were positives and negatives, and how we weigh them depends on what we value (user experience vs ultimate result).

[Mindos]

Yeah, it takes hiring a lawyer to send a Letter of Intent, so hope you either have money or a buddy with a J.D. willing to do it for free.

So you're saying my self written Astral Blue Crayola crayon missive was in error?

Now that this is all done, does this mean that the rest of us with tickets in the system will get some attention too?

I am Firegoddess.

I have sent in 17 tickets within the 1st few days with NO response from SSG's CS.

Is this the secret? I don't even know what to write 17 times without just repeating myself. Is this 17 replies to the one ticket or is this 17 unique tickets? I guess I could send one word at a time for each ticket?
1. Hello
2. SSG
3. please
4. take
5. my
6. money!

[myliftkk_v2]

So he threw a temper tantrum after not hearing back right away and SSG game him his stuff back after 2 weeks.

Can we lock this toxic thread yet?

If one leaves any heavy customer hanging for 2 weeks on a major issue, and one doesn't expect them to throw a fit, one has no idea how businesses function.

On top of that, closing out the customers threads here instead would have been totally unnecessary if there had been a perfunctory acknowledgement of working on their issue. Could have seen the customer response coming a square mile away, but either sin of omission or commission prevented dealing with it properly.

[myliftkk_v2]

Getting a lawyer to write a quick letter isn't that bad. I bet there's even something boilerplate out there for this. Now if you want to follow up with anything more than a letter it's going to get expensive fast. That said, as someone with a JD myself, I doubt it helped much. In fact he's lucky it didn't slow things down even more as everyone starts running stuff through their own counsel (who are much more likely to tell their clients to slow down further and not do anything then to try to work it out directly). Contrary to popular belief "lawyering up" is not always a great strategy.

It's not a great strategy when the other party is actively attempting to solve the issue and in communication on the issue. When the other party is not, or is duplicitous about what they are doing, reaching for a lawyer is the equivalent of hopefully slapping them across the face to get right with the program.

It's up to them to make the cost/benefit calculation at that point. It appears, for all intents and purposes, SSG calculated that cost of complete restoration at far less than the hours their lawyers would charge them for (assuming they even retain one for this particular kind of dispute, debatable). Not to mention fighting claiming of jurisdiction, including potentially being forced to fly to CA to attend arbitration sessions. Plus, you have to look at the interplay between CA and MA law.

It get's very expensive very fast, but pique suits aren't remotely unheard of, and the downsides if the company loses can be pretty bad beyond cost.

[myliftkk_v2]

SSG doesn't have CS folks, they are outsourcing it.

The behavior we are witnessing is indicative of outsourcing Customer Service / Help Desk functions to certain overseas locations. Those firms care about metrics and the only real metrics are "tickets closed", "average ticket time open", "number of tickets open past X days". This is why we get so many cases where tickets are marked "closed" but aren't actually resolved. Close as many tickets as quick as possible with as few people as possible. It results in really bad customer experience but a big costs savings for the company. The only way to push back on this is to highlight the hit on corporate image that happens for substandard performance of their contracted services. This causes someone from SSG to poke around and usually illicit's an immediate response from the contracted company.

I don't know any company that would stick with a CS SLA is the vendor provided service such as SSG's CS. No matter how you slice it, responsibility rolls to SSG.

Literally isn't hard to enforce an SLA, and frankly a competent CS firm should be surveying the consumer after the experience and a decent chunk of their pay should be based on performance on those surveys over time.

Yes, vendors want to cut costs, but competent vendor management prevents that. Of course, that requires competence at SSG... something clearly in short supply in any silo we care to peer into.

[myliftkk_v2]

it was cheaper for SSG to pay an employee to manually restore all of their TR cache items than it would have been to talk to their lawyer.

ftfy

Everytime my attorney picks up their phone the fare clock starts running.

[Enoach]

I am Firegoddess.

A few weeks ago, while I was playing an alt (on the same account as Firegoddess), my main Toon (Firegoddess) was deleted and then 2 hours later, recreated (in name only) as a 1st lifer.

I was playing my alt all day (approx. 7 hours straight).

I have sent in 17 tickets within the 1st few days with NO response from SSG's CS. I then contacted a law firm in LA county USA to send in a "Letter of Intent" to start Arbitration with SSG. Hours after this, my character was returned to me (complete), except for my TR cashe. After a couple more e-mails, my TR cashe was "in-game "mailed to me. This was great except for now I do not have any room on this character to pick up anything in quests (something I can live with if they can not help me with this issue). I will need to TR Firegoddess again (TR number 408 on her!)


So, after all this, I would like to let everyone know, that if you can be patient (which I am not, unfortunately), all issues can be resolved.



As for what happened or why it happened, no one knows. ( I will state that I do not dupe or Cheat and would never do anything that might get my account banned as I have spent far too long playing and investing time and money into this game to risk this). I also did not delete my main toon by accident as some have asked in this thread ( I have TR'd Fire over 400 times and I have 2 other completionists, so not an error I would make).



I do miss my online friends and hope to have this solved in the next couple weeks. Looking forward to getting back into the game.

Someone at SSG's CS must have looked into this case and recovered all my items and then in-game mailed them back to me 1 items per e-mail.

Not sure how this works, but just to send an e-mail and attached an item takes me 10 seconds ish…..so, I looked to verify just now.....They sent me 208 items!. So, someone at SSG's CS spent a lot of time (as far as I can see) to correct this issue.

As I was saying in my last post, "If I was more patient", maybe it would have been done without me going to an LLP. But, having said that, this would have been a LOT less stressful if CS would have replied to any of my tickets and let me know that someone was actually working on it. Communication goes a long way when it comes to CS.

I am seeing several posts that seem to indicate this only happened because of the "Letter of Intent" ... But reading this I'm getting the impression that the "Letter of Intent" wasn't needed

1. I then contacted a law firm in LA county USA to send in a "Letter of Intent" to start Arbitration with SSG. Hours after this, my character was returned to me (complete)..
There are some that are assuming Hours after this means the letter was sent, but this could also mean after Firegoddess requested the letter. Not sure if the drafting, delivery and receipt of a "Letter of Intent" could occur within "Hours" especially from One side of the US to the other with a 3 hour time difference.

2. Twice were Firegoddess mentions "If I was more patient"
This could be read that they now understand SSG was doing something, but only because of actions that occurred after they sought legal help. Actions that were likely in play before they sought the legal help.

So what this looks like to me is that SSG failed not in resolving the issue, but in "managing the expectations" and communicating with the effected party. It has been brought up several times, even back in the "Turbine" days that communication appears to be sacrificed, it is also what gives the impression of lack of customer support. It is something I hope SSG considers looking into for improvement.

In the end I understand how Firegoddess felt. I'm glad there is a path of resolution that puts them back to a place where Firegoddess can move forward. And see this as a reminder that we are not granted patience but learn it from practice

[palladin9479]

I don't know any company that would stick with a CS SLA is the vendor provided service such as SSG's CS. No matter how you slice it, responsibility rolls to SSG.

Literally isn't hard to enforce an SLA, and frankly a competent CS firm should be surveying the consumer after the experience and a decent chunk of their pay should be based on performance on those surveys over time.

Yes, vendors want to cut costs, but competent vendor management prevents that. Of course, that requires competence at SSG... something clearly in short supply in any silo we care to peer into.

You realize they aren't in the USA right? These places are usually located in India or Eastern Europe, giant warehouse like locations where a couple hundred people work taking "Customer Support" calls from all over the world at all hours of the day. The rates are stupid cheap compared to the costs of hiring people in the USA so virtually every online company ends up going this way eventually.

I've done a lot of integrations work with various large software vendors. During the "engagement" with professional services we have solid folks with high levels of technical skill, after the engagement period our support then goes to regular customer support and that's when the problem begins. Open a CS ticket about a setting not working right, get a nonsensical reply in the middle of the night that has absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand. End up spending a few days going back and forth until management gets ****ed and picks up the phone to our account manager at the vendor and within an hour we get a return call from one of their senior technical folks to resolve the problem. This is for a vendor that we spend well over half a million USD in licensing and support costs per year, and they aren't the worst.


Now here it how this is supposed to work,

Customer puts in ticket for issue.

Tier one support (that's helpdesk / call center folks) pick up ticket and do initial estimation.
If it's something they can fix, they fix it and close the ticket.
If it's something they can't fix or can't even understand, they escalate the ticket to Tier 2 / 3 who then fix it.
Tier 2/3 gets credit for the tickets closure on the metrics.

Now here's who this really works.

Tier one support (that's helpdesk / call center folks) pick up ticket and do initial estimation.
If it's something they can fix, they fix it and close the ticket.
If it's something they can't fix or can't even understand, they keep the ticket open awhile and don't escalate.
Right before metric time they close the ticket with a standard copy + paste message.
They get credit for the tickets closure on the metrics.

Now when all these people work in the same place it's not a big deal on who gets credit for ticket closures. When tier one is outsourced and use's those metrics to drive billing or support costs it's a huge deal when a worker forwards a ticket.

[myliftkk_v2]

I am seeing several posts that seem to indicate this only happened because of the "Letter of Intent" ... But reading this I'm getting the impression that the "Letter of Intent" wasn't needed

1. I then contacted a law firm in LA county USA to send in a "Letter of Intent" to start Arbitration with SSG. Hours after this, my character was returned to me (complete)..
There are some that are assuming Hours after this means the letter was sent, but this could also mean after Firegoddess requested the letter. Not sure if the drafting, delivery and receipt of a "Letter of Intent" could occur within "Hours" especially from One side of the US to the other with a 3 hour time difference.

2. Twice were Firegoddess mentions "If I was more patient"
This could be read that they now understand SSG was doing something, but only because of actions that occurred after they sought legal help. Actions that were likely in play before they sought the legal help.

So what this looks like to me is that SSG failed not in resolving the issue, but in "managing the expectations" and communicating with the effected party. It has been brought up several times, even back in the "Turbine" days that communication appears to be sacrificed, it is also what gives the impression of lack of customer support. It is something I hope SSG considers looking into for improvement.

In the end I understand how Firegoddess felt. I'm glad there is a path of resolution that puts them back to a place where Firegoddess can move forward. And see this as a reminder that we are not granted patience but learn it from practice

FYI, LoI or other rather low level legal documents are often sent via email, so yes, could have been drafted, sent, and received in short order, especially by an experienced attorney. Time zone variance really would have been irrelevant.

Yes, we'll truly never know whether SSG was dutifully hard at work fixing the toon because they choose to be opaque about the entire episode, even to the affected party. Generally speaking, that type of CS is typically read as the "they don't give a ****" from the customer's perspective.

[palladin9479]

I am seeing several posts that seem to indicate this only happened because of the "Letter of Intent" ... But reading this I'm getting the impression that the "Letter of Intent" wasn't needed

1. I then contacted a law firm in LA county USA to send in a "Letter of Intent" to start Arbitration with SSG. Hours after this, my character was returned to me (complete)..
There are some that are assuming Hours after this means the letter was sent, but this could also mean after Firegoddess requested the letter. Not sure if the drafting, delivery and receipt of a "Letter of Intent" could occur within "Hours" especially from One side of the US to the other with a 3 hour time difference.

2. Twice were Firegoddess mentions "If I was more patient"
This could be read that they now understand SSG was doing something, but only because of actions that occurred after they sought legal help. Actions that were likely in play before they sought the legal help.

So what this looks like to me is that SSG failed not in resolving the issue, but in "managing the expectations" and communicating with the effected party. It has been brought up several times, even back in the "Turbine" days that communication appears to be sacrificed, it is also what gives the impression of lack of customer support. It is something I hope SSG considers looking into for improvement.

In the end I understand how Firegoddess felt. I'm glad there is a path of resolution that puts them back to a place where Firegoddess can move forward. And see this as a reminder that we are not granted patience but learn it from practice

The LOI was most certainly the reason this got taken care of and this is why.

In my previous post I broke down how outsourced Customer Service systems work. The guys manning the phones in India / Poland / Ukraine / Pakistan really don't like to escalate those tickets to the more senior technical staff at SSG headquarters. Thus during the entire time the folks who could solve the problem weren't aware there even was a problem to solve, they don't browse the forums, they come in, drink their coffee / monster, do their tasks for the day, write documentation, execute upgrades and system maintenance and generally get on with things. I know because I used to be one of those folks. Then a Legal document arrives in the mail and the receptionist / worker who's job it is to go through that stuff recognizes that it's something to do with "legal stuff". That worker notifies their boss that they got some legal document that needs to go to the right place. Their boss looks at it and realizes its a legal document regarding lawsuits and immediately brings it to their boss or the on site legal representative (if they have one, most small shops don't). This kicks off a sequence of questions like "what is this"," where did this come form" and so forth between middle management until the guy responsible for the technical staff see's it and says "let me look into this". On site technical staff pull up the records and viola they now see there is indeed a problem and that customer service has failed to escalate and then the senior technical folks resolve the issue in the 30 minutes or so it takes them.

What the LOI did was bring attention to a problem that was going unresolved, the right people see the problem and resolve it.

I know all this because it's what I did awhile back, now I'm considered tier 3 / 4 and rarely get involved with user / customer problems unless it's really bad and effecting the system as a whole.