Rare's customer service really could use some improvement

  • I have to say, I am really disappointed in the lack of customer service from Rare. They have always lacked decent if not better customer service, but lately it has gotten blatantly out of control. My crew and I bought potions to change our characters to very large fat pirates, as a way to poke fun at everyone else switching to skinny "tucking" pirates. We simply go out and destroy them, as fat pirates. We did this a couple of updates ago. We also bought many of the different emotes available. Two updates ago, something happened that makes our arms clip into our bodies when using many of the emotes that we love the most. So, we sent in support tickets. We also sent in support tickets for several other glitches such as ship cosmetics not showing up at a certain distance (again, we paid for those cosmetics to work). Rather than getting a response that shows Rare actually will work on these issues, we get |canned messages| back. All of our issues go the exact same response - "we might address this issue in a future update:. In other words, we might fix this completely by accident.

    First of all, from a customer service standpoint, this is beyond unbelievable. I paid for services, cash out of hand, and I can't use those services because they are broken. I should be offered some form of compensation. Instead, I am told, keep an eye out, we might fix this some day. And here we are, two updates later, and no fix.

    Rare has always been lacking in this department. The customer service department. Good customer service would offer something that costs the company nothing, but would be a good faith gesture to the customer. Either in the form of replacing the coins spent, or giving away some rare cosmetic (the rare cosmetic being the thing that costs Rare the least).

    The best part it, I replied to the canned replies stating how disappointed I was, and I got more canned responses back. Does anyone actually read them? Do they make it to the right person to fix and address them? Does anyone actually take the time to figure out, what do we do to make this customer happy? I have invested a lot of time and money in SoT. Buying the game not once but twice, buying merchandise from their store, buying many of the higher cost coin packs. so that I can get the latest emotes, ships cosmetics and a couple of animals. I believe it is fair to say that I should fell as though I am being treated fairly by the company and that I am getting the services I paid for. If not, then I feel I have a right to demand that I be compensated for the companies failures.

    What are your thoughts on this?

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  • Just going to drop this here... While I can't comment on your recent experience I hope it goes some way to describe what happens when a ticket is submitted.

    @rarecsm said in Bug reports being ignored?!:

    I thought I would just jump into this thread and hopefully give a little re-assurance, as there seems to be some misconceptions regarding bugs and what we do with them without knowing what’s happening behind the scenes.

    Firstly, I can personally assure everyone that submits a bug ticket, that not a single bug report is ignored under any circumstances. Even bug reports submitted to us that have little or no reproducible information are added to those which do have the information to give weight to an issue and, they assist us in evaluating player impact and prioritising studio responses.

    It would take far too long to detail the entire bug reporting/prioritising/fixing process end to end for a game studio, but every bug report is valuable to us – we do not ignore them ever and, they are discussed and evaluated on a daily basis (sometimes on an hourly basis for serious Live/Retail Incidents) within our CS, QA, Engineering, Production, Services and Design teams.

    This does not mean that every bug is fixed or is quick to fix. I am sure there are some software test engineers on the forums that can give better insight and examples, but occasionally bug fixes are deferred to future builds where new features or content will resolve an issue, others are of such low impact that they are not deemed high enough priority to look at, some are not re-producible at all, others are due to local hardware or software issues, occasionally a bug could require major game feature or engine redesigns etc.

    One thing however that all bug reports have in common for Rare… every single one of them are evaluated, discussed, prioritised and appropriate action taken based on impact and priorities. Only after we have collected all the necessary information internally do we respond to bug report tickets with a thank you and the ticket is closed (from a Bug reporting standpoint, not a Studio/Game resolution).

    I hope that gives a tiny insight into bug reports.

  • @musicmee Thanks for the reply mate, though it doesn't exactly answer what I am saying. My main thought is the customer service side. Yes, I want the bugs fixed. But the canned responses make the end user feel as if nothing is being done. Basically, the bed side manners are very lacking.

    Also, from a customer service standpoint, as someone who's job is greatly reliant on how well I take care of my customers, they seem to miss the mark to a great degree. Having a product that we paid for (change character potion and emotes) stop working correctly just a couple of days after purchase is not cool. Under any other circumstances, I could return for refund. But not with a digital purchase such as this one.

    So now, still having the issue after two full updates, I believe it is time for Rare to step up the customer service side of things and offer compensation. They could easily offer compensation through something that has little or no cost to them at all, such as a cosmetic. Or they could offer something that does cost them in the form of ancient coins. Either way, they should be offering something, since a refund is not going to happen.

  • With how the world is and they are at home, with less control over everything.

    Just be happy with what you got.

  • @burnbacon Which is what? I Paid for a product and did not receive a functioning product. So not sure what you are saying here matey.

    And further more, this post is more about the lack of customer service on Rare's end. They don't have it, so again, not sure what I got to be happy about. LOL

  • @nofears-fun

    Idk though, when I send bug reports and glitches I expect the canned response because I know they don't have time to tell me that they were able to reproduce it, are working on a solution, tell me what they believe caused it, etc etc...

    I have submitted inquiries on different occasions with specific issues on my own account where items were missing, I couldn't purchase a title or something, and for all of those inquiries I submitted that really needed a more personalized response, I did get that detailed individual response.

    My day job is a chat and email rep at a University, so I understand the pain of responding to lots of inquiries and I definitely use template responses whenever possible.

  • @nofears-fun I can only speak from my own experience, which was when I raised an issue for an achievement not popping when I had completed the equivalent commendation (Merchant Alliance Miles). I was contacted directly by a member of support to inform me that he'd made the required adjustment my account and that the achievement will drop the next time I log in, which it did.
    So I honestly think it depends on the issue being reported. If it's something personal to one account the it'll need to be looked at at an individual level. If it's a wider issue that's being reported by many people (which perhaps yours is) then it's likely that an investigation is already underway and the info in your ticket will simply be added to that investigation. I know it sounds impersonal, but trying to respond individually to many people for the same issue simply isn't efficient, especially if what you've reported is already being looked in to and no further update can be given at the time.

    I believe all the tickets raised are actioned one way or another. Though granted, having a ticket closed without a definitive answer is annoying, I'm certain that issue was already being looked at before you submitted yours.

    As for compensation... I guess you'll have to take that up with Rare and raise a complaint with them.

  • I agree. I come from a company that is quite unique when it comes to customer service and when I reached out about an inquiry I was basically told they didn't care enough to even try to help. So I was pretty disappointed. This happened in 2024

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