Refusing to help bugged customers?

#1 - Oct. 20, 2012, 8:41 a.m.

I do not understand the logic in refusing to assist your customers who have been on the unfortunate end of a bug in your application. “Sorry, just start over and you should be okay” is a horrible response to people who have had a bug ruin their character at level 30 or 70. So now, the specifics…

My wife and I play together, she is a sylvari mesmer and I a ranger. We enjoy our play time together and I managed to convince her to give WoW a rest to try GW2. We were having fun and she was convincing me to expand our character spots so we could try all the stories and different class combos. However at level 30 it all came crashing down.

We would take turn ‘hosting’ the personal story and talk about which path we would travel. It was nice not having to do the same task twice and we really were enjoying the game. At the end of a game night we decided to follow Cai and the Order of Whispers so that is what I selected and she accepted the advancement. However when we logged on the next day to play I was on Cai’s path and she had to talk to Brayth. ( I believe the names are accurate and spelled correctly.) So we abandoned our story and she logged a ticket in game for help. A few days later she logged a report on the bug forum. Apparently Sylvari can bug at level 30 and 70 and select your path for you regardless of what you selected. There is no assistance in the pinned 12 page thread for this issue.

Another player sent me a link to a locked thread, where they were told that ArenaNet can’t tell if a player was bugged or just chose that path. I am not sure what the big issue is changing a players path if they have not continued the quest chain, but apparently ArenaNet’s solution is to have players delete their character and try again. They have stated they have ‘fixed’ the bug, but if there are scores of players stuck on the wrong path you havent fixed the bug you have simply prevented (hopefully) more people from falling prey to it…and said screw off to the customers reporting it. Surely this cannot be your business model, I will not unlock any new content if this is the support you plan to provide. Fool me once, shame on you…

Gaile Gray

#14 - Oct. 21, 2012, 7:40 p.m.

The dev team is aware of a few issues with the way that the personal story develops in the game. The team has developed or is working on a fix for each of them. Here are the known issues:

The first bug involved a change in the personal story that “jumped” the character farther along the path than intended. This was resolved on October 1st. If your account was impacted, your character now should have all the options and quests that it needs in order for you to progress the story as you desire.
The second issue involves a split in party paths upon selection of one’s Order. This issue has been reproduced by our QA Team and a fix has been coded. Upon successful testing, this fix will be rolled to the live game. We will not be able to roll back accounts that are experiencing this bug because the details of the bug are different than #1 and we do not have the data needed to do such a rollback. We will, however, be preventing this from happening in the future.
The third issue involves a similar kind of split when the party chooses their Greatest Fear (at level 70). This fix is also under review by QA but the details are not yet fully known. The issue will be addressed as soon as we are able to replicate it, develop a fix, test it, and roll it to Live. Again, it does not appear that we can retroactively roll back the issue for those who currently have it, but we will take the steps necessary to prevent it affecting others in the future.

The above comments are official, developer-reviewed details about each of the three bugs. As you can see, there truly is nothing that can be done with the account or the characters — not by Customer Support, not by the dev team. We’re very sorry for the issue that a few players have experienced, and we do apologize for the situation, but as we have posted before, the characters impacted cannot be reset or fixed.

I pray that if you are tempted to start another thread about this subject, you will realize that this truly is the final answer, that you are not being ignored, that the problem cannot be individually corrected for your character, and that we truly are sorry for this situation.