MMO Gaming

A few days ago I did something stupid. Rather than wallow in my own idiocy i decided to use this as a chance to test out just how good or bad the NCSoft support staff really is. Here’s the breakdown of what happened.

• At 2:26 on the 21st I sent an e-mail to the support address detailing my problem. Within that minute I got an automatic response back with a bunch of links to various answers that they believed might help me. None of them could as I required talking to an actual person, but it was a nice gesture and the selection actually seemed to be at least decently relevant to the question I had asked which was a plus.
• At 2:56, 30 minutes later, I got a response from a GM. He notified me that it wasn’t within his power to help me, but he would forward the request on to the Account Support team. I thought that this response time was pretty good but, given that I had already picked the Account support department when I was filling out the form to e-mail them I felt this was more like an extra layer of filtering rather than a necessity. I’m not going to really complain to much about it though, as I can understand the need to direct questions to the proper place since not all people will know what to do. All in all, a fast response which made me happy.
• At 5:28 that same day (two and a half hours later) I got a response from a member of the Account Support team who requested that I send along some additional information so he could help. Once again I thought this was a good response time and the response clearly outlined what I needed to do, no real confusion so they are definitely doing things good so far.
• I responded to that message at 8:12 of the same day (the 21st) with the information they had requested. That ended the first day of my support issue, but, given that I had only contacted them with what they needed after business hours I can’t really hold that against them.
• On the 22nd at 11:34 AM I got a response back letting me know that they could do this for me as a one-time thing (my understanding is that this is the normal one-time grace they will allow any account, as doing it more than once is just because the account holder isn’t listening/doesn’t care). Once again the response was within a good time and I responded to that message at 11:36 AM accepting their offer.
• At 1:35 PM I got another response back which said I was being redirected once again to a different department which could actually process what was needed. I was told, due to the high volume of requests I should expect a response within two to three business days. At this point I was a bit unhappy as I really didn’t feel like waiting around for two or three days but there wasn’t really anything I could do so I just went ahead and started doing other things.
• That night, at 6:48 PM I got a response from the new team giving me all the necessary information I needed to set up the account as I had wanted to. I was fairly impressed by this as it really didn’t take them very long at all to get back to me. In total, it took them just over 24 hours to complete the support process, very good considering they obviously aren’t working 24 hours a day.

So, all told the NCSoft support staff, in particular the Guild Wars support team, did an excellent job. A little bit of hopping around from department to department so I was never left dealing with any given person for very long but every person I dealt with was pleasant enough and very fast to respond.

Final Score for NCSoft’s Customer Support: 8/10