I think this thread is getting a little out of hand. You're welcome to believe what you'd like about our team. Here's the deal with how we'd like to handle customer service for the time being:
When someone opens a ticket, that ticket is automatically closed with an auto response. Our GM team will then look into it to see if it's one we are currently supporting if so they'll begin investigating and may open the ticket to ask for further information. This more or less was always the situation, we'd close tickets we weren't supporting and just deal with key issues. We've just automated that part of the process.
I understand that this isn't ideal. In an ideal situation, we'd be able to support every single ticket that comes in and deal with it from either a technical or customer service point of view. However, at this time in our development phase, we're going to be using this system to identify game issues and trends so that we can tackle them from a technical/development point of view. The team have determined that this is the most efficient use of our resources and will ensure that we're able to resolve problems quickly and for a larger amount of players. It will also ensure that we can avoid those problems existing in the future, the alternative would be tackling them more slowly and risking more players having to deal with game breaking issues.
Yes, having a large and super responsive GM team would certainly be helpful, and I would love it but as is recruiting programmers and engineers to work on core problems which will have much more of an impact on the entire player base. The goal is to solve problems so that they do not exist overall. However, this doesn't mean we won't be doing any GM/ticketing work. We still plan to take action against rule breakers, hackers/cheaters, people who are harassing each other, resolving company problems, etc using the report system and the tools we have available to us.
We've been pretty transparent about this from the beginning, it was mentioned in the initial Captain's Log, it was included in an announcement on our Official Discord, and our automated response when opening a ticket also makes clear what the primary function behind it is for. It's not a matter of not valuing your time, it's a matter of recognizing how we can best utilize the resources we have available to us and what practically is the best way for our team to fix problems with the game and that players are experiencing on a day to day basis.
Over time, the process will improve. We'll have a larger team, who will be equipped with better tools and information to tackle problems via tickets and we'll have dealt with a lot of the current issues which are plaguing the game, resulting in tickets being created. We believe that this plan of action will inevitably lead to a better game, a better experience for players, and in the long term a better customer support service.
I understand that you may feel frustrated with this in the meantime, and I am sympathetic to you, however, this is how are going to proceed going forward. Everything is a process, and as we make strides in our development resolving issues, that will clear up the response rate. Additionally, as the game grows and the project gets further into its development cycle, the team will grow too. That will lead to having more active GMs, readily available to handle tickets.
Going to shut down this topic, in future please be more civil with one another when discussing topics.
Thanks!
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