Most tales would begin with the start of a new day, but here in the Customer Service department there is never one start to a day. We flow from one shift to another to make sure every hour of every day of the year is covered.
Our motto in CS is to “put the team on your back” and to “say it with your chest!” We take pride in making ourselves the best support department in the video games industry and welcome any feedback you may have that can help us obtain that goal. The purpose of this blog is to give you all a little insight into what we do on a day-to-day basis in order to help enhance your gaming experience.
Everybody chips in to help CS here at Trion!
One of the things that make Trion a great company to work for is the involvement of so many hard-working people with the end goal of putting out a truly great product. In some companies CS can get made to feel like the redheaded step child (apologies to any redheaded step-children I may have just offended!), however at Trion CS is frequently asked for thoughts and opinions on things that some larger gaming companies I’ve worked with would never consider. Other times we get unexpected visitors to our offices here in Austin who hang out in CS and chip in by answering tickets submitted from players like you. Or, as we’ll see in some examples below, maybe some players NOT quite like you. Recently, the Game Director for RIFT, our very own Daglar, was in CS living a day (or multiple days in this case) in the life and answering player support requests. If you spoke to or received a response from a GM recently then that may have just been our very own Daglar in disguise. Don’t believe us? We have proof! I filmed Daglar for an uncensored look at his CS boot camp training.
Unfortunately we didn’t get any of the equally entertaining footage of him picking up the phone and calling people to fix some issues after reading some of these requests.
Additionally, our CEO used VPN via his cell phone (ain’t technology grand!) , while out of town, to get to our account tools in order to personally unblock the account of a person who had contacted him via Reddit. How awesome is that?!?
The Cold War has ended so we’re opening up our borders to the Russians!
The decision was recently made to allow Russian players to transfer to our European servers. The last couple of weeks have been quite busy trying to get all the Russian accounts set up on our shards so that the Russian players could continue playing on their same characters. They told us “I must break you” but just like Rocky we yelled something unintelligible and were able to get pretty much all of them transferred over. Please welcome these players with open arms and Vodka ☺. Any Russian players who have not yet been transferred and would like to be, please submit a support request to us including both your character name(s) and your playpass username within the ticket.
Exploit City
It seems that once again we receive information from our Great Leader Daglar that some people decided to participate in an exploit in the new raid Planebreaker Bastion. Although slamming the banhammer down on accounts and removing ill-gotten gains brings glory to RIFT it is not something we want to do often. Always remember the Mallard. While we are always appreciative of efforts to help us improve the game, “testing” over and over and over again is generally not necessary. If you find an exploit then please report it to us and allow our fabulous QA team to test it. You’ll never be actionned for a single test and reporting something to us – To the contrary, you might even be rewarded!
Player responses – The Good, the Bad and the Weird
People often ask what it’s like being a GM. Aside from the glamorous life of dating models and ordering bottle service in the VIP section of the club, it’s very much like other jobs within the Customer Support industry. We’re also asked if we ever receive requests that we find humorous, and the answer to that is definitely yes. We do laugh at some of the tickets we see. Each blog entry we’ll share some of these with you guys with the names removed to protect the innocent ☺
Picking one completely at random, here’s one of our recent favorites: “WTF ! IS THE BIG IDEA MAKIN DEFIANTS STUPID FREAKIN SKELLYS IN THE NEW BG AND GUARDS WEREWOLFS ITS NOT FUNNY ITS BS DOGS VS BONES? CMON MAKE IT BE RANDOM CUZ THIS BLOWS I LEAVE PRITTY MUCH ARY TIME IT QS “
Clint Eastwood understands
And now for something completely different:
“I am not a smart man. I purchased a large number of Freelancer’s Windstones (15 to be exact) along with a Warlord’s Empowered Large Cell and Myrmidon’s Empowered Large Cell. Can I get these removed and refunded? If that is not possible can I get my account rolled back to before I purchased them? I really screwed up here. Thank you!”
We love people who are pleasant!
The smile at end is the most frightening here: “I have a weird question, please contact me ”
No chance this is going to be simple.
We hope you enjoyed this blog post, which can also be titled “scenes from the Trion CS Department”. We’re working on a future behind-the-scenes post that includes footage of the team at work. In the meantime, enjoy this photo that includes much of the Customer Service team. As you can see, not everybody was available for the picture, so we used our master photoshop skills to add in some who couldn’t make it for the picture.