Getting Annoyed

I have already sent a customer service request (and even a follow-up on it!) and have not received a response now after a full week. I had bought the Goblin Lines, which gave me ownership of North London Line, but the content for North London Line was not bundled with the route download. The sale has since ended and both Goblin Lines (which is fine) and North London Line are back at original price. Either way, since Steam thinks I own North London Line, I still need my content for the route. I sent the manifest with the initial request and it should have been fixed quickly by this point. What is taking so long on the support side at this time? Having to wait a week for a purchase to be properly completed is not cool, and I think a better customer service system is needed to allow for simple requests like this to be quickly handled.

It's worth noting this also happened with South Wales Coastal and we got that fixed quickly. I even praised DTG for that in my review of Battle for Sherman Hill. I had to send a second message with the manifest that time, and by two days after the request was initially sent, I had the content issue fixed. It's now been a week with no response. I hope DTG will properly fix the packages on Steam to properly allocate the content for the items that you are being given ownership for, as this would help mitigate these kinds of customer service requests (and also allow those who have them to be properly updated automatically).

 

It's been documented before that the ticket system is a "first come first serve" basis, so if they have a lot of tickets and with (I believe) some of their staff off due to the current situation then yeah, it may take a little longer than normal, sh#t talking them on their own forum isn't really the solution though I feel.

 

I should also add that it's been mentioned before (possibly in the Steam reviews) that you should buy the NLL BEFORE The NLGL to avoid this happening, it's unfortunate you didn't come across that yourself but afaik DTG do sort it out though.

 

Last I checked, I didn't "sh#t talk" anyone, I merely asked for an explanation of things. Note I mentioned praising DTG for a quick resolution last time and am hopeful for a quick resolution this time as well, but this is an extremely long wait and I'm surprised that customer service staff are not simply working from home to keep up. (If they actually are, then that would have to be a massive backlog to have already waited a full week and nothing.).

As far as the NLL remark, I actually had NLL in my cart, then I noticed that it was included with Goblin Lines (I located and bought several bundled items during the last sale, and think I've run out of those, so might be down to mostly singles now LOL). So naturally, the problem I'm now in is a result of noticing what appeared to be a complete bundle and expecting it to be fine.

 

I believe Reef was referring to a generic "you should" rather than you specifically...

Obviously you (personally) shouldn't be required to trawl every forum to find out every wrinkle and nuance of the buying process and given the lapse of time between issue, ticket and resolution I can see your issue

 

I thought your response here to Cyclone was extremely unfair. (Unusual for you...!). All of his points are perfectly valid and he's put them across quite eloquently and reasonably. I would also add that:

1. Failure to deliver a product after it has been paid for is a really bad Customer Service failure, and one that potentially occurs at first point of contact, making it very serious
2. Not responding to such a failure in reasonable time seriously compounds the situation
3. Although Cyclone did not know about buying NLL first (so that you also get the scenarios, which won't come with the double-pack), he has discovered a serious general flaw that should be looked at with Steam (to be detailed/hypothesised in my next post)
4. Often when you do get a response from Customer Support, the response will be "Have you searched our forums for an answer...?". They will do this even for technical faults and bugs that should be fixed, that maybe people have a temporary workaround for.

I would say that Cyclone could have used a different (more informative) title for the thread, giving a clue such as "Problem with buying Goblin lines on Steam".... which would have been more helpful.

 

I think that you have discovered a very interesting and serious flaw in the Steam service for the Goblin/NLL bundle, which might be only limited to this Goblin+NLL product.... but could be a general serious problem with Steam.

I was trying to work out how you lost the NLL DLC. It seems to me, from your explanation, that this is what happened:

1. You added Goblin+NLL, and NLL to your cart in Steam.
2. Your cart therefore had Goblin DLC, plus two copies of the NLL DLC
3. You removed NLL from your cart, but Steam removed both instances of NLL
4. You were charged for the Goblin+NLL bundle

This is quite serious. And it might affect all bundles on Steam. So you should probably let Steam know about it, as they will want this fixed ASAP.

I am assuming that you removed NLL before you were prompted to do so (Steam will alert you on duplicate purchases involving DLC that is included in bundles you have also bought), in which case Steam will "know" that you have two instances of NLL, and would expect you to remove one of them.

 

Although this is the sort of activity you'd usually only undertake when you have more headroom with your resource, as opposed to fire-fighting..... can I suggest that someone does a sampled review of the tickets closed by your outgoing Customer Service team-member.....?

I only suggest this because I suspect that you might find that a large number of closed tickets have been closed arbitrarily, without any "Service" taking place... or any appropriate second-line referral to devs/etc., potentially causing a spiralling amount of new duplicate tickets, and upsetting customers in the process.

 

Exactly this, It sounds like the op (and others) took it as me having a dig at him, but that wasn't my intention, I'm sorry if it came across wrong.

My bad.

 

Oh. Okay. That's okay then. It was a general comment. Aaah... Okay....!

Well, like Cyclone, I fell into the trap of looking at the apparent context of your "sh*t talk" comment, given the immediate proximity of it to Cyclone's original message (directly afterwards), in a thread where nobody else had previously promoted the idea of "sh*t talk" and because your anti "sh*t talk" response was the second posting in the thread, which was directly after Cyclone's initial OP, which contained very specific issues that Cyclone wanted to raise because he had previously got zero response from the official channels*.

Easy mistake for me to make. Sorry about that. General comment - applicable to other similar situations - not applicable to the post directly above yours - got it....! Fully understand now. No need to apologise.

*NB: Now completely rectified by TrainSim Steve's kind personal offer to assist.

 

Just a general remark: you have to be careful with how you say things. If you are the first post responding to a user, the user is 99% of the time going to assume that you are talking about their specific situation. When you make a comment saying someone is "sh*t talking" without any basis of evidence, followed by suggesting the user is at fault for giving money to a company in exchange for something that was not completed correctly, your post instantly loses any and all credibility and usefulness. I actually took it as combative in this situation.

I find it ill-advised to leave a customer service queue untouched while trying to hire someone to eventually start the job at least a week or two behind. That is something that should always be getting attended to even while waiting for a new person to start, as keeping people waiting even a single week while waiting two weeks for someone to start is going to lead to a lot of very upset customers, and some will stop being customers after that point. Indeed, some may have already stopped. If it can't be managed in the indicated timeframe, maybe the customer service hours need to be extended, at least to include weekends, and another person hired to help clear the queue. Previously I have had quick responses, favourable or not depending on the question, so this is out of the ordinary to have such a long response time.

I will go ahead and DM you as I think the issue I have contacted Support about is a contact situation that can be easily avoided and rectified for any current and new purchasers of the item in question. Therefore, it would go beyond just my own customer support ticket. I'll take a brief video to go with it before contacting you. It also dates back to the earlier one which was quickly handled, and is a more important one to handle because it's no longer available to purchase.

 

Well, probably best I keep my gob shut from now on then.

 

Ah. understandable. Basically down a body and therefore things are behind.