GGG sets the standard for customer service. Blizzard Entertainment takes notice.

"

Of the 10 years I have read Blizzard forums they have never engaged directly to players as GGG has done. Neither has any of the other popular online games I recently encountered. If you take a sneak peek at Blizzard forums today you will notice a difference in their behavior and seem to engage players more often. While Blizzard may have a(n) 1-800 to speak to a live representative GGG has something better. GGG developers directly reach out to players and don't hold back. Their genuine approach and passion for games puts them in my opinion as the current role models in keeping a thriving, sustainable and happy community buzzing with gratitude. Other developers can certainly learn from GGG and should pay close attention.

While I don't begrudge GGG their customer service record thus far, typically during a closed beta there is a lot more dev/user interaction than normal. I've seen this in about 6-7 implementations from Sony SWG to Tabla Rasa, Earth and Beyond, Shadowbane, etc.

The biggest thing I notice about GGG is they aren't hiding all the info on the the direction of the game. They are constantly interacting with the players (explaining game mechanics, etc) and releasing new info (like the teaser for the new skill).

If it gets pushed back or delayed, they say so. No biggie. I'd rather know what's coming, and have it delayed, then be left completely in the dark.

"

Boem wrote:

Spoiler

yes yes, i am optimistic

Was gonna say. :P

to be honest i dealt with support a few times before. And at the first time i did receive a respone so quickly that i thought it would be an automated confirmation that my ticket has reached them and was being processed so i didnt really care to check the content... Silly me, a day or two later i got mad and thought "duh, i know they have backlog but this isnt Runes of Maigc, they could answer" ... "but lets see what this automated emails 2 days ago had in it"..

...oh fuck, it was an actual answer by an actual human. within 15 minutes. lol.

The only thing that took a bit longer was to get to know the actual conditions for upgrading to Divine. But then again within 15minutes i had an email by a human telling me it would take a few days because the ones who handle/decide it are simply not in the office until Monday.

One daya few weeks ago, I had someone try to hack into my email account from china. So I sent a email to GGG so get my email changed since it would not let me change it, and within 3 minutes I had 3 different emails from 3 different reps trying to assist me.

They were either really board that day or, didn't mark the emails :p

Either way great support. Oh speaking of which! I have a bug to go report!

"

solwitch wrote:

Of the 10 years I have read Blizzard forums they have never engaged directly to players as GGG has done. Neither has any of the other popular online games I recently encountered. If you take a sneak peek at Blizzard forums today you will notice a difference in their behavior and seem to engage players more often. While Blizzard may have a(n) 1-800 to speak to a live representative GGG has something better. GGG developers directly reach out to players and don't hold back. Their genuine approach and passion for games puts them in my opinion as the current role models in keeping a thriving, sustainable and happy community buzzing with gratitude. Other developers can certainly learn from GGG and should pay close attention.

Blizz reps do post fairly frequently, just that what they say tends to be very neutral non committal type of comments. So nobody can exactly accuse them of not ever being present with their customers. Yes they are there on the forums... so that must equal servicing customers no?

Seems to me large corporations know how to spawn their employee minions in order to fight the customer service game.

"

Tsoukalos wrote:

Blizzard has over 10,000,000 people who play their games, GGG probably has about 5,000 people who play their game.

If GGG were to become as successful as Blizzard, I guarantee their customer service will end up taking a nosedive and it will be just as shitty as Blizzard's customer service.

actually WoW has been falling, it's around 8m right now I believe. and if you think only 5k people play path, idk what to tell you

I miss Samantha coming into chat and muting people. She was quite stealthy. Good times.

i remember back in the day when i could send a forum PM to jason_ggg and he would be like wut nou are a poopface and i will move your thread wherever i want

then you send pm back and you are like wtf suckabagofdicksmoveitnow and hes like gg kk ty bai and it happens

these days you send pm like omglookathiswtf and they do something about it but no response happens so O.o facial response gg corporate new zealand wins again probably will be communists soon

Blizzard follows the traditional "Costumer Support is the face of the company and only they deal with the players". The reason is to shield the devs from the players and the company from the infuriated reaction of the players if any dev says anything.
In some companies I've heard the devs actually are forbidden to write in the forums with a dev account unless CS approves, lol.


But, companies like GGG and Riot Games (which have the opposite philosophy, they encourage their employees to post and participate... under a strict happiness and positiveness for everyone regime, though) tend to let their devs to participate and discuss in the forums.

Now, their devs were players and forum trolls too, so they know the beast.