All gaming related issue should be the company's problem
PostPosted:Mon Jul 23, 2012 12:25 pm
Recently I've had some serious lag playing SWTOR and nothing else, and apparently I'm not alone since the customer support pages is filled with posts describing the same problem. It's obviously on Bioware's end (you randomly get unplayable lag on their server even though everything on the Internet is fine, including completely trashing your own bandwidth with a torrent (the lag is not caused by this)). What I don't get is looking at the threads that troubleshoot people it's all a pretty standard 'first reboot your machine, then run this log and whatever'. I mean I know the customer is dumb is your standard customer support policy, but enough people has this problem so it should be obvious the server is screwy (they did like 4 server maintenance in a span of 10 days). I don't think it's evenj reasonable to ask random guys to run traceroutes or whatever, but even the guys who do this eventually the response looks like: "It looks your ping to some intermediate point is high, please contact your ISP." I mean seriously, most people can tell the difference between having a faulty connection in general or just not being able to access a particular game. Sometimes my connection goes away completely for no reason and I call my ISP to fix that, but I don't call my ISP if I get crazy lag to SWTOR especially when everything else is working. Let's just say the customer support turns out to be correct and maybe your ISP is secretly boycotting SWTOR, what good does it do for me to call this? "Comcast, I'm found out your secret plan to make me unable to play SWTOR. I demand this fixed now?" No if I actually called them they'll probably tell me to reboot my computer and do exactly the same thing and if you're lucky they'll send someone to look at it. What should happen is Bioware (or any other game company) should be the one calling the ISP, because they presumably still carry more weight especially if they're sure the problem is ISP specific since they should have multiple examples of this go wrong, and being a bigger entity the ISP will probably take them seriously. I mean when the FBI calls an ISP saying they need their cooperation they actually get that, while I'm sure I don't get any of that if I tried to call an ISP even if I somehow had the info needed to take down an international piracy ring.
A lot of time I feel the customer support seems to spend all their time trying to show you it's not their problem. But that's really not the important part. If I use your product and it doesn't work and I can reasonably be sure the problem is on your end, then it is your problem not mine. If Russian mafia is secretly commandering my computer to prevent me from playing your game but not any other game (if I can't connect to any game I'd obviously call my ISP first) then it's up to you to figure this out since I obviously can't figure this out on my own, and no I'd just play a different game that the said Mafia doesn't care about if this persists. I'd wager it'd still take less total manhour if a customer suppport calls the ISP on behalf of the customers instead of answering all the customers with the standard run around with ultimate answer 'call your ISP'. I mean at least if you called the ISP you can say, "Yeah we already called Comcast, they say they're looking into it and until they do it we can't do anything about it." At least that might placate me for a while.
A lot of time I feel the customer support seems to spend all their time trying to show you it's not their problem. But that's really not the important part. If I use your product and it doesn't work and I can reasonably be sure the problem is on your end, then it is your problem not mine. If Russian mafia is secretly commandering my computer to prevent me from playing your game but not any other game (if I can't connect to any game I'd obviously call my ISP first) then it's up to you to figure this out since I obviously can't figure this out on my own, and no I'd just play a different game that the said Mafia doesn't care about if this persists. I'd wager it'd still take less total manhour if a customer suppport calls the ISP on behalf of the customers instead of answering all the customers with the standard run around with ultimate answer 'call your ISP'. I mean at least if you called the ISP you can say, "Yeah we already called Comcast, they say they're looking into it and until they do it we can't do anything about it." At least that might placate me for a while.