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Poor Customer Service in FF14
robhyp10
Member Posts: 13
This post is about how I got hacked in FF14, and my experience with customer service. I have always had a rule in an mmo that I do not let a game become as serious as events in real life. I know we gamer's invest a great deal of time and effort ( and in some cases money} into our hobby, but at the end of the day they are just games. However, my experiences with customer service in FF14 compel me to give an account of my experience with them. I do this not to try and hurt FF14, I really enjoyed my short time playing the game. It is a fun and well made mmo in my opinion.
I got hacked once before in wow. I am sure it was my fault. I may have downloaded a key logging program, and from that, hackers got my email address and password. Then they used that to hack my account. I had not played on the account in some time. A friend called me and said I saw your toon on line, and tried to talk to you.... the next day I called Blizzard. I think I was on hold for 15 minutes. Then I told the customer service rep that my account had been hacked. He asked me some basic account verification questions, and said it could take some time (I think he said 2 weeks ), and the conversation was over. I think I got my toon back in two days, with everything I had. Blizzard made me whole, even though the root cause of the hacking was more then likely my fault. In my conversations with their customer service rep he never made me feel like it was my fault. His attitude was these things happen, lets get ya back to playing.
I was playing FF14, and having a great time in the game. I logged out one Thursday morning, and all was just fine. I attempted to log in the following Saturday, and I got an error message that I could not log in. The person I was playing with thought it might be that I needed to give them my credit card to set up a recurring payment. She was trying to guide me through the process, but I could not click on any of the navigation buttons for the account. This is when I realized that it might be a real ban on the account, and not just a hold for payment.
I called their customer service later that evening. I was on hold for a representative for a little over two hours. The representative was very kind, and seemed to want to help. Took down some basic information. He then described the review process. Stated it would take two weeks, and I would be notified by email of their decision to reopen the account. Two weeks pass, and I receive no email. I could not try and contact them until the end of the third week. This time I went the chat route. I sat on my couch with my computer beside me and watched tv until I connected with a representative. This was a two and a half hour wait. I spent maybe a minute in the chat session. The agent said that my account was still under review, and could not help me. At this point in time we are about a month from the chat session. I have not heard from FF14 at all.
I am not a gold seller or farmer, nor did I buy or sell gold in ff14. I know for certain at this point that my account was hacked. I can go into my banned account and see my toon names grayed out. I only made two toons when I played, and a third toon shows up in the list. most likely the password I was using was the same one from wow when I was hacked in that game. Since my being hacked was so long ago, I failed to consider the Square Enix password being the same. In the end this really does not matter. The complexity involved in placing blame on responsibility for hacking is very complex. Sometimes it can be their end, sometimes it can be me at my end, take that to all possible interactions on the web that involve information that could be used to hack a game account. Recursively that sucks. It seems that wow takes a player centered perspective. They are going err on the side of the player, which is very smart from a business perspective. At this point I have no idea what perspective Square Enix has. They lost two accounts over this. Mine, and my friends because I can not play it anymore. Their is a young man I work with. He had this same thing happen to him early on, say two weeks from the start of the game. he did get his account back. However he made a very interesting comment, "you know after what happened I just can't get back into that game". He is back to playing old school everquest.
This post is a warning. I am just a normal gamer. I spent 60 dollars on FF14, and a large amount of time in game. If I invest in a game there needs to be some sense of safety. I need to know that if the folks that are hell bent on doing wrong, do wrong to me, that I am protected. Not hard to hit the reset button. Just don't have a clue why Square Enix did not hit it for me.
Comments
"In the end this really does not matter."
Yes it does, as people like you who don't take any reasonable amount of effort in securing your account are the reason that Square's backlog is so long. This was entirely your fault.
To summarize the OP,
" Hi, I shot myself in the foot & am now complaing about the wait at the emergency room
because it's full of other people who shot themselves in the foot. "
If you've played FFXI and FFXIV you will see the same people work on both, they expanded CS from FFXI to cover FFXIV and seemingly didn't take any new people on. FFXI CS weren't all that great either and now they are swamped.
Having said that, almost every CS for mmos is/used to be bad. Blizzard changed that and boosted expectations above the norm is all.
Yes, the CS is crap.
The last time I opened a ticket, it took them 2 weeks to hear anything from SE, and when I did it was a Survey to let me know how satisfied I was with the response they had given me. They never gave me a response, I tried to access the support site and check my question and the result was "This question has already been answered and it has been closed." without even letting me see the answer. In the survey, I gave it the worst rating and in the comments section I typed "You're supposed to send the survey after you answer the question, not before." and after 3 weeks, they sent me the response.
With all the security issues ARR has, I hardly think this is the OP's fault.
A friend of mine 3 weeks into his free month was "hacked" losing game time and the free time they gave players.
He originally bought the game when it was first released. Giving him "free" access to the game this time around. He also purchased the upgrade for the collectors edition. (something I'm sure gold farmers do)
His account still remains locked and his NOT TOLL FREE phone calls he makes once a week never present him with any answers.
Squares customer service is beyond rediculous..
No one is working to restore these accounts.
Blizzard took the first step i think, the one where they tried to 'idiot proof' players accounts, the authenticator is probably one of the best things you can ever get for any MMO, it really amazes me that so many people begrudge paying a few quid for the things, and then complain about getting hacked when they don't, its not SE's fault people get hacked, thats a client side issue, something the players did either by using a password thats also used on another website/forum etc or visiting a dodgy website and letting some malware infect their system, or even just clicking on a link in an email they recieved.
Of course this also stretches to email accounts, if you have an email account with a password thats also used on a forum somewhere, then you basically are inviting hackers to use your email address, and that means any game account that uses that email address, is also compromised. Anyway, more and more games companies are using authenticators to add a level of protection for players who, for whatever reason, are unable to prevent their accounts from being compromised.
Welcome to todays internet, you either adapt and gain some measure of security sense, or you avail yourself of whatever security measures/devices are available. Head in the sand approach never worked for ostritches either.
Bullshit.
If I'm logging in from a different IP. My account should be immediately locked and I should be notified as such. There should never be at any time another IP address accessing and able to log in to my account long enough to get it banned for something such as gold selling.
But that would remove the need for an authenticator which I'm sure is a steady flow of income for the constantly getting hacked mmo games.
I have been a long time Square Enix user and yes their customer support is crap.As you mentioned the on phone rep was good that is the same response i have always had when phoning but as also mentioned,they put you on a long hold.The online chat is a total waste of time,after being frustrated with their nonsense on many occasions,i finally asked one if he was an actual employee of Square Enix or just some outside agency and got the obvious answer...outside agency.
First of all their actual support imo ONLY operates on a few days per month,that is why you wait so long as i have with past problems i encountered.There is no way in hell it takes a month to check some login files from 1 day prior to reporting problems of hacked account.My three times dealing with them has always taken right near 30 days,that is a really piss poor effort ,especially since that is an entire 30 day sub fee wasted.
What made my experience even worse was my account was login from japan,i live in Canada,so SHOULD have been cut n dry open/close within a few days,but nope almost a full 30 days passed.
This is the kind of stuff websites with a bit of size like MMORPG can do for gamer's all over the world is setup encounters with these game reps and ask why support is not better.Remember we are all consumers,they are retailers selling us a product,they NEED to keep customer's happy.
i have already black listed SOE,i will never again support them,even though their support staff is solid,it is their business ethics and the rest of the staff that annoy the heck out of me.NCSOFT is also high on my hate list,i don't like the way they treat people and customers EA is another one.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.