Custserv@wizards

Warning: Watch for high winds. There is some 'venting' taking place here:

I feel like I went out and bought a shiny new car.

On the way out of the lot, it began to make a funny noise. By the time I got it home, the darn thing was barely working. When I looked under the hood, I found that many of the engine parts were poorly built. Some didn't fit where they belonged and some didn't appear to be doing what they were intended to do. The car might be able to get around if I drived carefully and avoided doing certain things, but in the end, it was not something I could trust to do the things that I bought it to do.

So, I walk inside and call the dealer and ask what they'll do to fix it.

They respond by telling me, "Yes, those parts are broken. Good bye." Then I hear the click as they hang up.

I call back.

They respond this time by saying, "Yes, those parts are broken, but if you avoid driving over 25 mph and never hit a bump larger than an acorn, you should be able to get from point A to point B." Click.

I call again.

"Oh, you need to drive faster than 25 MPH? Try fiddling with the little green thing under the hood. That might keep the car from exploding if you go faster than 25." Click.

I call one more time.

"I'm sorry, but we're designing some new gadgets for you to put in your car. We really don't have the time to worry about the engines. Maybe somebody will get around to making it work. Someday. But for now, you'll have to figure out how to get what you want out of your car. Good driving!"

***********************

I'm really tired of getting conflicting responses from these guys. I've gotten conflicting answers from the same agent on many occasions. These guys are quite obviously not doing enough (if they are doing anything at all) to guarantee consistent application of the rules. They are doing nothing to research problems that are brought to them. They are doing nothing to improve the situation for all players once a problem is brought to their attention.

Questions that come to custserv frequently should be given an official answer and tosse in the FAQ. That is what it is there for: frequently asked questions.

I'm tired of them answering a question with answers that contradict the rules. I'm really sick of having to respond back to custserv with a second question that begins with "I read your answer, but it seems to contradict pg X of the PHB."

These guys should know the rules better than the rest of us. They shouldn't make many mistakes. I don't expect perfection, but I darn well expect competence. They should know the core rules, the supplemental rules and anything that gets posted on the WotC site. That is their friggin' job! It is really frustrating when they give an answer that directly opposes what has been said by the people that wrote the rules.

I see countless threads on various message boards with the same questions repeated over and over and over and over. That should be a clue to WotC that something isn't right.

Some people may say that WotC is stretched too thin on new products to invest time in fixing these issues. Bull hockey. They have people spending time answering custserv questions. Those people could do a better job in less time if they were organized. If a question gets an answer, it should go in a database where other people can pull it up and give it out. If it proves to be flawed, they can fix it on the database and send the fixed info out to the people that asked the question in the first place. Heck, if they made a database like this and made it accessible on the internet, people would be able to reduce the number of questions asked and decrease the demands on their time.

D&D 3.5 has some really nice improvements over 3.0. The problem is that many of these improvements are not fully fleshed out. They answer old problems by creating new questions. That would be ok if they took the time to answer those questions as well, but they have not done so.

The innovative ideas that went into 3.5 deserve a better treatment than they're getting.

Nice rant. I'm with you.

On the other hand, it's always fun to see somebody post a customer service response to "show" what the rules are.

The Hanged Man said:

Nice rant. I'm with you.

On the other hand, it's always fun to see somebody post a customer service response to "show" what the rules are.

Click to expand...

Heh. I think the last time I posted a Custserv response, it was a ten-email conversation.

I was in a debate on the WotC Magic Items board (well, by 'debate', it had come down to a page of "Is not!" "Is too!" after the first few pages ). The other guy had said he'd accept an 'official' response, so despite my personal feelings about the quality of Custserv's responses, I sent off an email.

Someone replied; I sent back a "That's fine, but what about page X1?" email. He came back with a slightly revised response, so I sent back another "Okay, but how about this from page X2?"

After a few of those, he said "Look, I can see what you're saying... I'm here alone today, but how about I talk to some of the line developers and RPGA guys tomorrow and get back to you with a definitive answer?"

"Cool," I said, "and can you make sure you check this point with them as well?"

A couple of days later he sent back the final verdict... which was identical to what I'd originally suggested

It's telling, I think, that the answer after the Custserv guy consulted with people who know the rules was the opposite of his original response...

-Hyp.

I'll rap with you a bit on this. First, I don't like 3.5 and avoid it -- "not fully fleshed out" indeed, very reminiscent of 2nd Ed ( www.superdan.net/down3-5.html ). Okay, so that's out of the way.

But, these problems with the customer service address have been the same for years, regardless of which edition you're talking about. If you're a serious D&D player just do not bother with customer service. If you know about the errata, FAQ, and the ENWorld rules forum, you'll get more informed responses there than anywhere else. Personally with an important and sticky issue I write directly to the Sage and I've been truly impressed by how likely he is to write me back personally (at least prior to last summer).

Why does customer service suck? Well, I could hypothesize. First, it's probably a pretty low-paying position, with not enough people hired to handle the incoming email, which is below the company's real care because it doesn't result in any income to the bottom line. So why bother with anything better?

Secondly, this same address serves everything WOTC makes, so the same people are fielding questions on Magic, Pokemon, Star Wars, D&D, and whatever else is rolling in -- D&D is probably a minority of what they deal with, and no one's going to expect the CS people to be truly proficient in all these different games. Probably there's a teed-off Magic player out there who is also thinking "the CS people should at least be DCI-qualified rules judges". Repeat that for every rules system.

Thirdly, and most generally, doesn't end-user customer service for everything just totally suck eggs? From what I hear, it's always a low-paying, no-respect, not-enough-people hired, dead-end job. Companies put a CS contact out there to make you think there'll be support when you buy a product, but underfund the actual CS because it's a cost (and not a profit) center. The goal of an end-user CS center is to deflect public criticism as much as possible, not actually solve problems. I can't get any answers out of my cable company CS, whether it's about the line being down or my billing being screwed up. My roommate can't get the phone company CS to track down his lost check. My sister can't get any answers from CS for her new Dell. You can't get reliable answers out of D&D CS, either. There's endless horror stories online about the absurd working conditions and demands placed on CS people. It's a total scam!

(phew)

End of hypothesizing. That having been said, I would be truly curious to find out some facts about why WOTC bothers with a customer service contact at all -- it seems like, for a non-technical product, you could just do without it, in fact.

Do they feel it makes extra sales? Do most people have such simple questions they come away with satisfactory answers? Is it just a historical standard that game companies keep customer service contacts?

How many people are actually working at WOTC, any way? How much do they get paid? What are they responsible for, exactly? Are they fully devoted just to CS questions, or do they have other job responsibilities and just answer CS in a part-time capacity? Are they actually employed by WOTC directly or are they outsourced to some company that doesn't know anything about gaming? Why don't they bother to organize a database of actual FAQs to make their job simpler?

It seems unimaginable that someone actually has full-time employment answering D&D rules questions and not ever appear cognizant of discussions on the ENWorld (#1 D&D website according to all signs) rules forum, but there it is, a whole department of them.

Finally, I'll say this. If there's anyone left at Wizards who reads this, I'll publically and personally offer to take the component of D&D customer support funding, outsource the rules questions, and with probably a few ENWorlders provide much better and more organized customer rules support than currently exists. In addition I'll statistically document the incoming questions and forward that data to R&D to focus attention on what's troubling to players and has the greatest demand to get fixed in the next errata/ FAQ/ d20 System edition, which I'm sure does not currently happen.

dcollins said:

Finally, I'll say this. If there's anyone left at Wizards who reads this...

Click to expand...

I know Baraendur/Whisperfoot was with Custserv... I'm not sure if he still is?

-Hyp.

IMO: Its always better to go directly to the developers.
So long as you're not rude and are respectfull you'll normally get a reply (though it may not be the next day.

Thats the great thing about the d20 community, most of the devs either run their own forums, or have public emails. Where WOTC Employees are concerned you just send an email to FirstName.Lastname@wizards.com to reach the appropraite person (unless they are strictly a freelancer)

I'm with you, dcollins, on that outsource idea. ^_^ It sounds like the best thing WOTC could do.

In fact, they'd be well advised to do the same thing for each of their large-fan-base products.

I have to check if my buddy who accidently mailed a question twice to custserv still has both answers... disagreeing with each other, naturally

I've been on a quest to get the polymorph/wildshape rules down correctly, as intended by the developers. It was important that I have a working system for a party that was comprised entirely of druids.

To that end, I have sent custserv a number of questions on polymorph. Each new set of emails began on a separate sub-issue of polymorph.

Each set of email answers I received contradicted each other on some really basic aspects of how polymorph works. Some of them showed a complete disregard for the 3.5 rules - as if the person answering the email had never even looked at the PHB.

In the legal industry, when a large set of documents needs to be shown to the 'enemy', there are a lot of rules that need to be applied to figure out which documents you can hold back and which documents must be given to your enemy. These rules are far from clear. They involve a lot of judgment calls. It takes some expertise to really do the job right and not give away too much or hold too much back.

When law firms prepare these 'productions' of documents, the people looking the documents over go through a process similar to the one that the WotC custserv people go through. They have a problem come before them, they apply the rules and then they determine the best answer that they can find.

In most large productions, a large number of people work on this process. When they come across difficult questions, they put together logs detailing the question that they faced, the answer they used and the reasoning for that answer. Those logs are put together into a single set of guidelines to make sure that the same rules are consistently applied throughout the entire process.

WotC should do the same darn thing. Collect the questions. Collect their answers. Collect their reasoning. Put it together in a sensible set of documents so that they can be consistent.

This isn't brain surgery. The process is very simple. A basic database program could handle it easily. Heck, they could make a private message board system to handle each issue. All they'd have to do is cut and paste from the emails they are sending out.

They have the people. They just lack the organization to do it right.

By no means am I demeaning or discounting the pain you are experiencing but D&D is by no means as important or comprable to reliable automotives or the ethical and lawful preperation of a law case.

The CS staff at WOTC are not paid like para-legals or junior Lawyers.
The cost of the creation of a database can not be offset by billable hours or a large settlement of a case.

The core 3.5 rule books alone comprise around a 1000 pages, add in all the 3.0 books and hardcover and softcover, and while we are at the modules as well, and we are talking quite a few DBA managing this data base, and a lot of programing of scripts to instruct the CS callers to the right question, and no script is going to be comprehensive and so on and so forth.

It just doesnt seem a feasable request,(remember I do identify w/ your pain).

At least rule 0, exsists which means you can make polymorph/wildshape however you like and the players have to abide by it or lump it.