A lot of times, Kabam is defended way too much on forums (I've been guilty of it myself time-to-time). But this is a clear case of an accident that can be corrected if you're shooting us straight. Derank, cats back, no ISO/gold returned, and move on from there. This really shouldn't be considered a bad thing in any way, I would hope for help too if I made an error like this.
You would be surprised how many people would try to take advantage of Support if they Deranked every Ticket.
You're not listening (reading?). His was immediate, he didn't use Mordo for a week and decided he didn't like him. They can see that his Mordo wasn't used in content. There don't have to be blanket answers, each case can be and is unique. I'm in customer service, I would lose my job if I told every customer I couldn't help them when I really can. Three class cats and five basics costs more than $100 based on the values they have set. That's an expensive mistake to not be able to reverse in a situation like this.
Thank you. Most just seem to dismiss this altogether, but I did try hard to be obviously trying to help my own situation. I even offered to sell the 4* to prove my honesty lol.
It's still mind blowing that instead of getting behind this, people would rather try to project bad intentions en masse.
No one is projecting bad intentions. I'm explaining why I think you received the response you did. I have no personal judgment on you. Things happen.
You're saying that if a rank down occurred for a legit reason, droves of players would endlessly request rank downs that weren't for "legit reasons"... Game the system. That's projecting bad intentions.
Didn't think you judged me at all. Apologies if it came out that way. I do think you're off on this one tho. There's no reason to arbitrarily decide everything has to be black and white..
As far as the response, I did ask multiple times about who had the ability to do this? Can I speak with them? A supervisor? My final answer received was that kabam doesn't have that ability. Now, we all know that's not true and if we didn't before... We do now. So why lie? It's a few database settings lolololololol
The best thing to remember is that you always need to look closely at the screen before agreeing to sell or rank up a champ, filter the champs by star value and class if you have to.
I really do hope this get resolved, it sounds like an honest mistake but one where there are measures to make sure it doesn't happen, if these measures didn't exist you might have been helped out and not have needed to come here asking for help.
I agree it should be difficult to get help for something like a game cause if people are allowed to be careless then how can you be held accountable for your actions? This game would be boring and frustrating if you could do whatever and the game team cleans up after you.
A lot of times, Kabam is defended way too much on forums (I've been guilty of it myself time-to-time). But this is a clear case of an accident that can be corrected if you're shooting us straight. Derank, cats back, no ISO/gold returned, and move on from there. This really shouldn't be considered a bad thing in any way, I would hope for help too if I made an error like this.
And I'd have been ok with that, completely. Again, I offered cash, selling champs, non disclosure, etc. I deal with customer service daily in my work and I know there's an art to working with them properly and wanted both sides to feel like things were right.
They had a simple opportunity to make a customer feel like they weren't an anonymous number and that they actually cared about satisfaction with their product. It's the simplicity of the fix that makes it so crazy. Imagine the gas station clerk tells you that you can't swap out the unopened soda for the one you meant to grab. You'd just stare in confusion and disbelief. Would you ever go to that gas station again?
The best thing to remember is that you always need to look closely at the screen before agreeing to sell or rank up a champ, filter the champs by star value and class if you have to.
I really do hope this get resolved, it sounds like an honest mistake but one where there are measures to make sure it doesn't happen, if these measures didn't exist you might have been helped out and not have needed to come here asking for help.
I agree it should be difficult to get help for something like a game cause if people are allowed to be careless then how can you be held accountable for your actions? This game would be boring and frustrating if you could do whatever and the game team cleans up after you.
I agree with this as well... But advocating for the players to have an option to make things right with such a monumental mistake... And one with such an easy fix... Especially in an open and shut case... Isn't bad imo.
You would be surprised how many people would try to take advantage of Support if they Deranked every Ticket.
You're not listening (reading?). His was immediate, he didn't use Mordo for a week and decided he didn't like him. They can see that his Mordo wasn't used in content. There don't have to be blanket answers, each case can be and is unique. I'm in customer service, I would lose my job if I told every customer I couldn't help them when I really can. Three class cats and five basics costs more than $100 based on the values they have set. That's an expensive mistake to not be able to reverse in a situation like this.
Thank you. Most just seem to dismiss this altogether, but I did try hard to be obviously trying to help my own situation. I even offered to sell the 4* to prove my honesty lol.
It's still mind blowing that instead of getting behind this, people would rather try to project bad intentions en masse.
No one is projecting bad intentions. I'm explaining why I think you received the response you did. I have no personal judgment on you. Things happen.
You're saying that if a rank down occurred for a legit reason, droves of players would endlessly request rank downs that weren't for "legit reasons"... Game the system. That's projecting bad intentions.
Didn't think you judged me at all. Apologies if it came out that way. I do think you're off on this one tho. There's no reason to arbitrarily decide everything has to be black and white..
As far as the response, I did ask multiple times about who had the ability to do this? Can I speak with them? A supervisor? My final answer received was that kabam doesn't have that ability. Now, we all know that's not true and if we didn't before... We do now. So why lie? It's a few database settings lolololololol
No. You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm saying they are possibly told to refuse requests to Derank because whether legit mistakes or not, people would endlessly do it. Whether that's the case or not, I don't know for sure. We're talking about the Dev Team. Not Support. Two different areas. Of course the team has the ability. They design the game. A simple mistake of clicking the wrong Champ doesn't get elevated as much as an exploit that people were taking advantage of. Which makes it extrenuating. I can't comment on your experience with Support. To be honest, discussing it here is not allowed. However, it should be no surprise that the Dev Team has the ability. Support is not always the best. That's true of many companies. I can see why they would not be so quick to do it is what I'm saying.
And what I'm saying is I understand the roadblocks in the process and the need for them to be there... but once your ticket meets the required protocols of x, y, z... Your case should be moved to those that can help resolve the matter. This is the way all support works.
But I'm curious, @GroundedWisdom... What do YOU think should be done for me, if anything at all? I know I've posted a lot, but I assume you've read my story even though parts are broken up into other posts as I've remembered them.
off topic but i just wanted to say thanks to @GroundedWisdom for his insight in my flagging thread, it was closed before i could properly thank you. Although i dont agree with most of what you post i have gained respect for you for coming into my thread and relaying your experience to me
And what I'm saying is I understand the roadblocks in the process and the need for them to be there... but once your ticket meets the required protocols of x, y, z... Your case should be moved to those that can help resolve the matter. This is the way all support works.
But I'm curious, @GroundedWisdom... What do YOU think should be done for me, if anything at all? I know I've posted a lot, but I assume you've read my story even though parts are broken up into other posts as I've remembered them.
If you Ranked the wrong one, sure. If it was my call, I'd allow it. It's not my call, though. That's why I always pay attention to who I'm Ranking. We don't know their protocol X, Y, Z. We don't know if it fit that or not. They can't tell if it's a mistake or we just want a different Champ Ranked.
Did you see the part about running cat quests constantly thru the morning to r2 Mordo while my 4* Mordo sat? Then using aq rewards for more cats to complete the job? I mean, what I did was dumb.. I've admitted that lol. But my game logs would lay every bit of it out, especially "self-freezing" my account.
As far as the response, I did ask multiple times about who had the ability to do this? Can I speak with them? A supervisor? My final answer received was that kabam doesn't have that ability. Now, we all know that's not true and if we didn't before... We do now. So why lie? It's a few database settings lolololololol
It is entirely possible the person you were talking to literally didn't think that was really possible. Level one tech support only knows what they are taught. I'm surprised they can find the door to leave the house in the morning. And I'm not talking about Kabam support in particular. Last time I talked to VMware level one support I almost threw my phone out the window. And I'm on the seventh floor.
Technically, everything we do in an MMO is "just a few database settings" but in reality there are several complications. First of all, tech support doesn't have direct access to the databases. They never do. They have a computer screen with a support client that has buttons they can push to do things, and the only things they can do are determined by whomever made those buttons.
The dev staff has access though, right? Nope. In basically all MMOs like this, the developers are on the other side of a Chinese wall separating the dev team from the operational game. Game operations is performed by a totally different group of people. This is the industry practice to avoid many problems, from developers bypassing the development process to "just tweak that one thing" to developers outright hacking the game for their friends. They are never allowed to directly touch the game, the operational servers, or the live databases. All development is done on dev systems and then pushed live.
Someone has to be able to touch the live systems though. The operations staff does. However, they are generally not developers. They have the access, but they generally don't have the knowledge to make changes. They are specifically trained to operate the system: they can patch it, stop and restart systems, that sort of thing. When Kabam needs to do database maintenance of some kind, like lets say, oh, removing a lot of rewards from players that just happened to discover the monthly event is regurgitating rewards like Niagara Falls, the way that often happens is the devs have to write a set of scripts that can do that, test it on extracts of the live system, and then hand those scripts to the operations staff to run on the live servers.
By the way, that's why that sometimes goes horribly awry in many MMOs.
Given all of this operational structure, it actually isn't easy to just flip some fields in a database to make something happen. There are tons of barriers preventing that from happening, and a lot of institutional best practices that discourage MMO operators from making it too easy to happen.
So for this to work, someone has to make an actual button to give support the ability to grant a rank down ticket. Which they might have done in the past. But then they now have to train every single tech support person, many of which have the technical skills of your grandmother after her second stroke, to decide on their own judgment what a valid request for RDT is and what isn't. If it happens once in a blue moon, that's not that big of a deal. Escalate that request to the smartest guy in the support bullpen and let him deal with it. But if they are being flooded with requests for RDTs, that's impractical.
I get the feeling they were being flooded with requests, and removed this capability. I know they were being flooded with requests to replace accidentally sold T4CC, which caused them to change the game to make that impossible. You don't completely remove a feature from your game if people are using it accidentally tripping over it once or twice a day. And I remember hearing from somewhere that RDTs were in a similar situation.
Again, I went up the chain of command. I fully understand all your points. I have a lot of work experience surrounding issues like this... From the technological side to the customer service side.
Oh I also created a post here asking how to properly reach tier 2, elevated support, other staff teams, supervisors.. Basically anyone that could help with my issue.. I really did my due diligence on all sides.
Comments
You're saying that if a rank down occurred for a legit reason, droves of players would endlessly request rank downs that weren't for "legit reasons"... Game the system. That's projecting bad intentions.
Didn't think you judged me at all. Apologies if it came out that way. I do think you're off on this one tho. There's no reason to arbitrarily decide everything has to be black and white..
As far as the response, I did ask multiple times about who had the ability to do this? Can I speak with them? A supervisor? My final answer received was that kabam doesn't have that ability. Now, we all know that's not true and if we didn't before... We do now. So why lie? It's a few database settings lolololololol
I really do hope this get resolved, it sounds like an honest mistake but one where there are measures to make sure it doesn't happen, if these measures didn't exist you might have been helped out and not have needed to come here asking for help.
I agree it should be difficult to get help for something like a game cause if people are allowed to be careless then how can you be held accountable for your actions? This game would be boring and frustrating if you could do whatever and the game team cleans up after you.
And I'd have been ok with that, completely. Again, I offered cash, selling champs, non disclosure, etc. I deal with customer service daily in my work and I know there's an art to working with them properly and wanted both sides to feel like things were right.
They had a simple opportunity to make a customer feel like they weren't an anonymous number and that they actually cared about satisfaction with their product. It's the simplicity of the fix that makes it so crazy. Imagine the gas station clerk tells you that you can't swap out the unopened soda for the one you meant to grab. You'd just stare in confusion and disbelief. Would you ever go to that gas station again?
I agree with this as well... But advocating for the players to have an option to make things right with such a monumental mistake... And one with such an easy fix... Especially in an open and shut case... Isn't bad imo.
No. You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm saying they are possibly told to refuse requests to Derank because whether legit mistakes or not, people would endlessly do it. Whether that's the case or not, I don't know for sure. We're talking about the Dev Team. Not Support. Two different areas. Of course the team has the ability. They design the game. A simple mistake of clicking the wrong Champ doesn't get elevated as much as an exploit that people were taking advantage of. Which makes it extrenuating. I can't comment on your experience with Support. To be honest, discussing it here is not allowed. However, it should be no surprise that the Dev Team has the ability. Support is not always the best. That's true of many companies. I can see why they would not be so quick to do it is what I'm saying.
But I'm curious, @GroundedWisdom... What do YOU think should be done for me, if anything at all? I know I've posted a lot, but I assume you've read my story even though parts are broken up into other posts as I've remembered them.
If you Ranked the wrong one, sure. If it was my call, I'd allow it. It's not my call, though. That's why I always pay attention to who I'm Ranking. We don't know their protocol X, Y, Z. We don't know if it fit that or not. They can't tell if it's a mistake or we just want a different Champ Ranked.
It is entirely possible the person you were talking to literally didn't think that was really possible. Level one tech support only knows what they are taught. I'm surprised they can find the door to leave the house in the morning. And I'm not talking about Kabam support in particular. Last time I talked to VMware level one support I almost threw my phone out the window. And I'm on the seventh floor.
Technically, everything we do in an MMO is "just a few database settings" but in reality there are several complications. First of all, tech support doesn't have direct access to the databases. They never do. They have a computer screen with a support client that has buttons they can push to do things, and the only things they can do are determined by whomever made those buttons.
The dev staff has access though, right? Nope. In basically all MMOs like this, the developers are on the other side of a Chinese wall separating the dev team from the operational game. Game operations is performed by a totally different group of people. This is the industry practice to avoid many problems, from developers bypassing the development process to "just tweak that one thing" to developers outright hacking the game for their friends. They are never allowed to directly touch the game, the operational servers, or the live databases. All development is done on dev systems and then pushed live.
Someone has to be able to touch the live systems though. The operations staff does. However, they are generally not developers. They have the access, but they generally don't have the knowledge to make changes. They are specifically trained to operate the system: they can patch it, stop and restart systems, that sort of thing. When Kabam needs to do database maintenance of some kind, like lets say, oh, removing a lot of rewards from players that just happened to discover the monthly event is regurgitating rewards like Niagara Falls, the way that often happens is the devs have to write a set of scripts that can do that, test it on extracts of the live system, and then hand those scripts to the operations staff to run on the live servers.
By the way, that's why that sometimes goes horribly awry in many MMOs.
Given all of this operational structure, it actually isn't easy to just flip some fields in a database to make something happen. There are tons of barriers preventing that from happening, and a lot of institutional best practices that discourage MMO operators from making it too easy to happen.
So for this to work, someone has to make an actual button to give support the ability to grant a rank down ticket. Which they might have done in the past. But then they now have to train every single tech support person, many of which have the technical skills of your grandmother after her second stroke, to decide on their own judgment what a valid request for RDT is and what isn't. If it happens once in a blue moon, that's not that big of a deal. Escalate that request to the smartest guy in the support bullpen and let him deal with it. But if they are being flooded with requests for RDTs, that's impractical.
I get the feeling they were being flooded with requests, and removed this capability. I know they were being flooded with requests to replace accidentally sold T4CC, which caused them to change the game to make that impossible. You don't completely remove a feature from your game if people are using it accidentally tripping over it once or twice a day. And I remember hearing from somewhere that RDTs were in a similar situation.