Civil War - A story of failure

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Bugs and Technical Issues
1

Civil War was widely loved by most who played the event. Tokens, ISO and a rare 5 star cover were the rewards. I was also excited for this event until, well, I wasn’t.

I have been in my alliance since I started playing this game competitively. For this event, we had 21 members willing to participate so I volunteered to find a temporary home to play CW. I landed with the reputable aXe group who are known for their PVE prowess and I had no reservations we would hit the ultimate goal. Then D3 happened.

We were ready to go. All 20 people were in the alliance and boom, we were off. A couple of rounds in we noticed something was off. Only 12 members were showing for Team Iron Man. My immediate assumption was that some flipped and started as Team Cap instead. A quick look at the leaderboards showed that was not the case, nobody had registered a score for Team Cap. As the event wore on we got nervous and started submitting tickets to D3 CS department. Of course the immediate response from them was the official set of rules on the event. Boy was that helpful. Some were lucky and were able to start submitting proof that somehow our team was somehow split into 2 groups, one of 12 and one of eight.

This also led nowhere as we were told that eight members had joined as members of another group. At this time it was late on Friday and CS closed up shop for the weekend stating everything was working as intended and closed our tickets.

All weekend we worked our butts off to do whatever we could hoping D3 would somehow compensate us when all was said and done. Team 12 was finally able to polish off all 8 rounds for Team Tony earning us the 5 star cover. We then went on to finish 2 rounds of Team Cap before calling it an event. Team 8 kept battling and finished round 7. The math simply did not support them trying round 8.

The final results showed that we had the 2 leader boards for Team Tony and yet only 1 for Team Cap with all 20 members on it. How could we have members choose 2 different alliances for the event? It’s simple, we can’t. I am hoping someone will see this and escalate the issue with CS. We are looking for fair compensation. At the very least I want Team 8 to get the 5 star reward but collectively we would have gone a lot farther. I welcome any suggestions on how to get this fixed for us. I have pictures but I’m not really sure how to post them. Thanks.

2

I’m not sure posting here will fix your issue. Keep up with the support tickets. Give them your posted pictures and hope for the best.

3

That’s bizarre. You can post pictures by uploading somewhere like photobucket or tinypic then putting the direct link here between the image tags (the little picture icon).

Hopefully, David will be able to help.

4
5

What the good Doctor said, plus a little extra advice to go along with it: Send a PM to David [Hi-Fi] Moore with your CS ticket number. He generally can get some traction on investigating issues in cases like this.

6

I never actually allowed them to close the ticket and the fight keeps going. If we are yet again denied I will try to PM David. I was more wondering if any other alliances had a similar experience.

Nobody in the alliance is lying. We literally have screenshots of Team Cap with 20 members and 2 of Team Tony with 12 and 8. All the names are the same. Is there any other logical reason why this would happen?

The disappointment is with CS. Sure issues happen and I understand that. We have been dismissed quickly with them placing the blame on us. This was yet another golden opportunity to do right by their customers instead of calling us liars. We have never asked for the moon, only that scores from the 12 and 8 be combined to see where we would have ended up. Luckily, team 12 made it but that’s not right for team 8. Fingers are crossed this gets resolved.

7

Did any of the players start the event while still in a “pending” status? Would seem strange 8 players started while pending but not shocking.

The forum is a small microcosm of a huge playerbase so this very well may be a bug. However, with the amount of forum alliances that shuffled players for CW you would think another forum alliance would have experienced the same bug. We shuffled and had no issues. Maybe not a bug or user error, maybe server hiccup?

8

Really poor show from CS, this really should have been resolved by now.

9

Didn’t the weekend just end?

10

Not an excuse. If you run a competitive MMO that’s playable on weekends, you should have the 7-day presence of a CS department to go with it.

11

You gotta PM HighFi if you want anything done, he will sort it out. Good Luck!

12

I find that a little unreasonable for general play, but for a new event, yes you absolutely should have a community liason working at the very least.

13

Yo, sorry you had a bad experience. We are reviewing what went right and what went wrong. This was a first time for this type of event and we welcome the feedback to try and improve as always. I have no answers yet, which I know isn’t what people want to hear, but I’m not one to promise things that won’t come true cause that would make me more angry. All i can say is we are learning and will try our best to get it right with Civil War round 2.

icon_greengoblin.png
Cthulhu icon_greengoblin.png

14

Hearing something even if it’s just “we are working on figuring it out” is roughly a million times better than hearing nothing at all.

15

It did, but the ticket was raised right at the start of the event. CS have been a wall. Great to now have a reasoned response. FYI I’m not personally affected by this.

16

No, all 20 members were in place a few hours before the start of the event. No one was pending. We had put a lot of time and effort into pushing bodies around and getting the teams set prior to the event to prevent this from happening. We also, all started the event before anyone left the team.

We have the screen shots to show that all 20 members were part of the team Cap event, but that was not our teams primary focus. However, for the team Iron Man event we were broken into two teams 8/12. We, also have screen shots showing that the members of 8/12 are the same as the members of Team Cap.

The best we can come up with is that during the start of the event when the servers went wonky it broken up into two different groups. But for some reason it only affected the Iron Man half of the event.

CS is being very dismissive of this. We have at least 5 open tickets (maybe more). And the best we keep getting is “yep, we checked and you were on different teams when you started the event. Have a nice day. D3”

17

Thank you for your words. I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating it is to have CSR dismiss us so quickly without truly looking at the evidence that we have been sending. Obviously it wasn’t a massive glitch but it was a glitch nonetheless. I hope the matter is resolved soon.

18

As a member of the affected alliance is there any other details we can provide, not withstanding the fact that civil war has fallen off our story pages now. Most of use have been replying to our tickets to keep them alive when we get the canned “you were in a different alliance”/“some people moved”/etc default responses.

Most of use have screenshots included in our tickets that show Team Cap 20/20 and Team Ironman 8/20 or 12/20 plus our scores. Scores that mean we should have all gotten the 5* Ironman cover, even though it was a lot harder since our point scaling was slower, I can provide them here again if it would help move the process along. I am sure D3 wants to know why this problem occurred in the first place so they can fix it before the event runs again, but is it too much to ask to have the 8 players given the cover they missed out on? We know it is within CS power to award covers that were missed for other reasons. The people at D3 can continue working on the cause of the interim. But the responses from CS have been really disheartening as they come off as you must be lying.

Again if there are other details we can provide here I’m sure all my alliance would like to help

PolarPopBear/aXe Wildlings

19

Hello Cthulhu, glad that you guys are looking into this matter. I had been following progress of this case regularly. Its actually a very simple thing which customer support make so frustrated towards players.
Few problems i found mostly with cs is.

  1. They try to meet service level agreement with First Contact Resolution, so they tend to reply with generic reply and resolved the ticket as soon as they can.
  2. Customer supports representative seems working remotely and independently, from various places. That makes all CSR can’t grasp what is going on on daily support activities. Just make a roll call, discuss with team will reduced duplicate reply on this issue.
  3. CSR did not show ownership to they ticket. Without trying to understand player’s problem, they straight give and answer and resolved the case. i do understand there might be language barrier could be an issue, but at least show some ownership of their case and player will understand.)
    3 CSR group lack of knowledge/information sharing, knowledge/information has not been shared efficiently. (which i saw one one of the reply thread, 7th reply ended up exactly the same reply during first contact. it seems ticket was handled by different person and case history has not been read.

Axe Wilding’s problem is very simple,

  1. Axe alliance has been very organised . Axe Wildling grouped together prior and join CW. but got s;lifted into 2 different groups. 12 and 8.
  2. So their progression became slower as the have less players scoring to progress to next round.
  3. But they fight it through, 12 finished round 8, but not the 8 players group.
  4. They just want it to be fair, so that 8 players group can get the reward too.

I am sorry to write all of this. I love this game. And Customer Support Experience will be the best advertising/marketing tools in future. Words spread. I love to see D3 has a good name, expand more, and draw more new players into this game.
BTW, if customer service is charged per contact then D3 has pay more than what they should have.

Sincerely
Rips78

20

So here is an update on the Civil War failure…

Basically to summarize what is going on. aXe wildings had 20 members on the team at the start of the Civil War event. All 20 were on the team 1.5 hours prior to the event. None were pending. All 20 members started the event within 2 hours of the start time. No members left the team until everyone had started. For the Iron Man half of the event we were broken into two groups, a team of 8 and a team of 12. The scores for the team of 8 only counted towards their group total and the team of 12s scores only canted towards theirs. For the Captain America half of the event all 20 members were grouped together and all 20 members scores counted towards a collective total. It was the exact same members of the group of 8 and 12.

We have submitted tickets to customer support with screen shots explaining this. The responses we have received range from generic to really generic… The best explanation we have received to date is that members of aXe wildings were moving around prior to and during the event and that some of the members started the event with a different team. Despite repeated requests we have not gotten answers to the following questions:

  1. If the team members were moving around and in a different team when the event started, what team were they in?
  2. If the team of 8 was in a different team when the event started, why were their scores still counted with the team of 12s for the Captain America half of the event?

Even if the 8 members were moving around before locking into aXe Wildlings for Civil War they did not all move to the same group. And if they had locked in with a different group, why were they only locked in with that group for half of the event.

But our attempts to get those questions answered appear to have grated on customer service as they are now just closing our tickets without a response. Basically, they are just going to ignore us in the hopes that we will go away. Which is always a really good trait that customers look for from customer support. I mean, I have worked as IT customer support before and it always worked wonders when i just ignored my customers. It made my job so much easier. But I digress…

However, I promise this, the amount of time they will now spend closing my tickets concerning this issue will reach a point where they will have paid customer support far more than anything they would have lost in addressing and correcting the original problem.

Magic_Pants - aXe Wildlings command

Here is a running list of every response to the question I have posed above.

May 6, 15:07
Greetings D3 Go! Customer,

Thank you for contacting D3 Go! Customer Support.

In order to aid our investigation of the issue, could you please provide us with a screenshot of what you are seeing? (PNG or JPEG only).

Alliance Mechanics to keep in mind:

  • The first 20 people who join the event under an alliance are locked into that leaderboard for the remainder of the event.
  • If you join the event for an alliance that already has 20 people in the same leaderboard, you’ll be put into another leaderboard for the remainder of the event.
  • Your alliance must choose a side to fight on. This event is balanced so an Alliance can complete one of the Boss Battles, but not both. Trying to switch sides will not help you.
  • If you’re not sure which side you want to play, it’s okay to try both, but your alliance should focus on one side to get the best rewards.
  • Missions completed on one side are locked out for both sides until the mission refreshes.

If you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us again and it will be a pleasure to help you.

Best Regards,
D3 Go! Customer Support Team (KHY)

May 6, 16:27
Greetings D3 Go! Customer,

Thank you for contacting D3 Go! Customer Support.

We’ve already conferred with our technicians on a previous ticket from one of the other users of your alliance. Several users joined the event while they were still part of a separate alliance. That is why their credit is not being added onto your leader boards.

If you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us again and it will be a pleasure to help you.

Best Regards,
D3 Go! Customer Support Team (TJM)

May 9, 16:43
Greetings D3 Go! Customer,

Thank you for contacting D3 Go! Customer Support.

After conferring with our technicians, we see that players in the alliance had been jumping around with other alliances when the event started. That is why they were separated into another Leader Board.

If you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us again and it will be a pleasure to help you.

Best Regards,
D3 Go! Customer Support Team (TJM)

May 10, 10:14

Greetings D3 Go! Customer,

Thank you for contacting D3 Go! Customer Support.

We are truly sorry for any negative experience regarding your issue, but we are truly thankful for the feedback you have provided.

We take our customer’s feedback very seriously and we will certainly discuss it with the rest of the team and take it into consideration.

If you would like to submit further feedback on the subject, as well as stay up to date on current and future information, please visit the forums:

https://forums.505go.com/

I have personally added your feedback to our database. If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us again.

Best Regards,
D3 Go! Customer Support Team (TJM)