I would like which is your opinion about the way SG answer to your suggestions, problems, and so on…
I open this topic because I have made a mistake and bought food when I was leveling some troops… You now, feeding a lot of 10 troops… At one point I ran out of food, and I press “ok” to buy food… I am a f2p so those hundreds of gems were a fortune for me… For buying food…
I asked the support, if they could reverse the operation… And give back the food and return my gems… And they said no… I may understand that. But they argued that it will be unfair to other players… And bla bla bla…
I don’t like those excuses… I don’t like the lack of empathy to their users…
What’s your experience? Is always like this, or it is just with me because I don’t pay money directly ( but I see hundreds of ads…)
Thanks zephyr1 for clarifying the rules.
It’s not my intention to speak bad about SG, only to gather some feedback from the users, so SG can check if the “it’s unfair to solve users mistakes” is better for the users or if it worse…
Because it seems to me that the “unfairness” of solving some user problems is more an excuse than a good thing for the users in general…
I wouldn’t mind if somebody feeds a 5* hero to a 4* hero, that SG would undo the action for that user… I wouldn’t say it is unfair to me…
I may understand for example a one “undo” action per 6 months or something like that so SG dont get overwhelmed with those requirements…
But, please, we are humans , everybody makes mistakes… SG makes mistakes, I make mistakes… I would expect some empathy from the users to SG mistakes and from SG to the users…
I did a ten pull and didn’t receive any five star heros, should I go and beg SG for a refund because I did not get what I wanted? Why is my situation different than yours? I made a conscience big boy decision to spend my gems in that way. Man up and live with your decision.
You decided to do a 10 pull, pressed the summon button, and you got nothing in return. It was not a mistake on your part. Read what the OP is saying about MISTAKES made by users before talking about begging for free stuff. That has nothing to do with the subject here.
@R0BlN I’m ftp too and I know how hard it is to get enough gems to do single pulls so I feel your pain. I made two mistakes during emblem quests, I ended up losing 150 gems for continues. I was in the middle of work both times. I shouldn’t have been playing hard quests so sending tickets to SG for my mistake would have been incorrect in my case. But I only lost 150 gems. I’d probably have send a ticket if I lost more than that.
I don’t understand why SG talks about fairness when refunding gems to users. I read they said that to other players in different threads. Why is it exactly unfair? Other companies do refunds. Giving back 300 gems won’t break the game. The odds of getting 5* heroes are ridiculously low anyway.
Warning, personal opinion that could be considered badmouthing by some people:
Being honest here, and looking at every building in the game, every training, and every offer in the shop, it’s obvious to me that E&P relies a lot on making its users click on things by ‘mistake’ to take away some of their gems and money.
The stronghold becomes a minefield to users who have lots of gems saved. Here’s proof: Clicking on training heroes by mistake? Clicking on building while those are being upgraded? Buildings way too close to each other? Imo all that was made by design. I think it’s one of the monetary reasons devs don’t wanna put the new hunters lodge / alchemy lab in a separate stronghold.
Anyway, there are probably many other people who lost their gems by mistake like you did. It sucks but there’s not much we can do
I’m not going to go into details, but I have experience of contacting support.
I did my best to engage them with humour and humanity and got the same in return. They were very prompt and friendly. They did not reverse my mistake but after the experience I was really impressed that I’d engaged with a real person.
I have not had any experience with SG support, but in other games I’ve played refunds have always been given for mistakes like this. I even had 100 USD refunded when I hit the wrong “buy” button a few months back in another game. I don’t think it is too much to expect a good faith refund now and again, mistakes happen.
I think the takeaway is they don’t want to be bothered with this kind of request, and are willing to lose some players to keep operating costs lower.
SBut put yourself in their shoes. How can support distinguish between a mistake and a decision that the player later regrets?
Some games have a confirm box on any transaction; others don’t. SGG has included Confirm boxes only for cash purchases; perhaps the best response to the OP’s situation would be to have a Confirm box for all puchases, cash or gems.
Also, FWIW, I think the gem costs for buying food/iron, rushing buildings, rushing recruits, etc. is high by at least one order of magnitude.
I think if the player has spent the gems/food whatever then there should be no reversing it. That is the only way I can think of to tell if it was a legitimate mistake or a regular ole regret. This system would have flaws too of course.
I also think it’s a legitimate business decision to not refund due to the time/cost restraints of investigating these cases. It’s not what I would do (he says confidently, having never run a software company), but I’m sure they ran a cost-benefit analysis and decided refunds would cost more than the good will would bring in.
EDIT: Also I agree with you that the gem cost for rushing is obscene. Every time I see it I remember that if people weren’t paying it, they would reduce the cost. So SOMEBODY is regularly paying 1000+ gems to fill their food…
Also consider that with the number of players involved SGG probably gets hundreds of similar requests daily. It’s hard to be charming and delightful all the time when responding from a script.
This is marketing speak for “We would be overwhelmed by requests and it would destroy our Customer service budget”.
BoH was a mobile MMO that ran for 5+ years and would reverse any transaction in the last 72 hours. But they never advertised it, so most people never knew it was possible. But to do this, an actual programmer had to go into the code and reverse the transaction.
So the whole truth is “If we did this, we will be overwhelmed. After we are overwhelmed, we would have to terminate this service. This would not be fair to new players since we did it for old players and we would then be swamped with complains and rage quits”
Maybe Devs could add some sort of game save point.
I don’t think rules and empathy are in conflict. You can really feel for someone and understand their situation and still hold a consistent line.
If SG support staff had make a decision on every request that came in as to whether it was fair to grant, they would be making a ton of inconsistent judgement calls.
What if someone feeds away a 5* hero and then uses the hero that got leveled in a PvE fight? How about in a raid? In a tourney? Do you reverse the feeding and let the results stand? Which one is a fair decision?
If someone does a summon and says it was by accident, do you let them reverse it? How do you tell if they just didn’t like the result or it was truly an accident?
Rules remove doubt and inconsistency. They’re fair to everyone because everyone gets exactly the same result in the same circumstances.
It doesn’t matter whether you get the nice CSR or the hard nose; it doesn’t matter if the CSR is having a good day or a bad one; it doesn’t matter if customer support likes you or if you’ve irritated them. You still get the same decision no matter what.
That decision sucks sometimes (and if I were @R0BlN or @JonahTheBard I’d be hating the result). But at least it’s consistent, and you know what the answer will be tomorrow, and the next day too.
I can understand where are you coming from; however after I started playing I made some mistakes along the way. I put it down to my inexperience with strategy and the mechanics of the game.
SG are quite right in not reversing from your mistake; if they dis they would then have to reverse all mistakes 1.2mil players had made.
Learn from your mistakes and if you’re unsure of anything visit the forums or talk to your alliance members.
It would be extremely unlikely they could even attempt adding a save point. There is so much interaction involved here; how would you go about rolling back to the save point other than resetting the server and rolling back everyone? Imagine the forums if they tried doing THAT.
I have had a few encounters with support. Nothing but good to say about them. Didnt always get what I was after, but got fair treatment of myself and the issues every time.
I think it’s not the same.
There were no randomness in my operation.
I bought food. That is a bidirectional transaction.
500 gems for food.
I made a mistake, I agree, but I am not asking free stuff…
And of course they are right refusing to undo the operation… But with amazon when I make this type of mistake, they help me to minimize my error… That’s why I always buy Amazon…
I will accept a fee for correcting my mistake, let say 75 gems to undo this operation where no randomness where involved.
On top, I have to say, that one person answered my request, he/she was polite, and spent se time writing an answer to me…
I must admit, that that is a very good thing.
I don’t like the answer, but I understand it.
But I think they could have many more happy users with slight changes on their policy.
I think it is not so fuzzy to know when something is an error and when not…
An operation with no randomness involved, may be a good candidate for being undo…
It’s the same that we do with the training camps to store food and recruits… As there is no randomness, SG allow to undo the operation of take back food and recruits from a training camp…
I don’t want free stuff… I don’t want my 500 gems back… Do you know what would I do with them with more than 90% probability… Get a 3*
I only wanted to improve the support policy so all the players are happier and more loyal, so SG gets more money and they can keep developing this great game…
We all have probably done the same or similar. I have accidentally accelerated finishing a building by tapping too fast. Cost me around 250 gems as I recall. Not peanuts for early F2P (most of what I had saved up). My first thought was “you idiot” and I self-corrected to ensure I didn’t do that again. Now I am much more careful when tapping in the game. Lesson learned. But I never even thought of going to SGG to ask for them back. I guess it’s a generational thing.
Best to learn from your mistakes and not minimize the consequences so that you don’t.
when all is set and done, it’s whatever to me.