They Didn't Actually Listen
![[Deleted User]](https://us.v-cdn.net/6030345/uploads/defaultavatar/nL5515UJH9DYJ.jpg)
The precedent:
You may press a button that they put there. You may get banned for that.
They can login to your account at whim and take what they like. Stuff you paid for.
They will not apologise for being rude and labelling you a cheat.
The community is the glue that holds this game together, not the pixels, 'features' or the company. They have mistreated the glue.
You may press a button that they put there. You may get banned for that.
They can login to your account at whim and take what they like. Stuff you paid for.
They will not apologise for being rude and labelling you a cheat.
The community is the glue that holds this game together, not the pixels, 'features' or the company. They have mistreated the glue.
20
Comments
Ha ha, that was a joke because of your positivity in the face of so much misery. I thought we'd cleared that up? +1d your post.
If you're happy dropping money for stuff that they can just switch off. Great.
You're right. I'm unbelievably bored. Who knew I'd miss all that aimless tapping so much. 😬 Have to find a new hobby.
Take care, friend
LLAP
Which is why I won't be logging back in.
Just to emphasise - I did not multi-claim as they have stated. I claimed once and then was presented with a ' buy again' button which I chose to do, as I have many times before. For this my account was stripped and banned and an announcement made in the forums that accused me of breaking Terms of Service and accusing me of being a cheat. I have never 'cheated' or stolen and to be accused of such caused me great distress for the past 36 hours. I'm not sure that a game is worth that much even one I've stuck with over five years.
They claim that their feature broke because I bought again and to do so they have refunded some stuff and taken a bit more. It is no longer just about the new 'feature' - 36 hours (two full sleeps on my side of the world) away from this game penalises my progress in the Campaign, my progress in the Event that is currently running. It penalises my squadron as they may not get their rewards in that event and it penalises my fleet because of the dailies I've not completed.
So yes. TP pushed the 'nuclear button' with me 36 hours ago and I won't be back.
WRG actually pulled a masterful sleight of hand here by announcing a 72-hour ban then lifting it after 24 hours. If this had been announced as a 24-hour ban from the start and they carried out the full ban, people would still be livid. And that’s effectively what happened, so this is all too little, too late for me.
WRG took “disciplinary actions” against me for “exploiting” their own error.
They locked me out of the game for 24 hours in the middle of a mega event.
I lost my spot in a fantastic fleet.
And now they want to pretend they’re being charitable by “lifting” the ban? Without so much as apologizing for treating their most loyal players like criminals? I’m really not falling for it.
I liked this game despite its countless issues, I loved my friends in the Discord and in my fleet, but I won’t continue to support a company that treats its player base this way.
I hope they tighten up their messaging. It wasn't a ban, it was a suspension. And frankly, they should be more honest about it. Hopefully it wasn't a punishment, but a necessity to fix the error. If that's the case, those affected would have been much less grumpy about losing access to their account if they were told as much. Imagine this...
Scenario 1:
You're banned for 3 days. (We know how this played out, no imagination needed.)
Scenario 2:
You found tribbles in our system. Your ship now has an infestation. We are afraid it may take 3 days to solve this problem. If we can grant access to your account sooner, we will do so. Thank you for your patience.
I don't know how many accounts were affected or how much it took to fix them. They did it in a day. There probably wasn't room to do much beyond apply a Band-Aid. Hopefully we can be a little more patient with them. They have their work cut out for them on Monday. They'll need a whole nebula full of coffee.
Sorry, this is bothering me.... There is either more to this story or they are not a great fleet.
The folks starting a level or two above Shan genuinely do not understand the psychology of Star Trek fans.
That is a real problem when they are your gravy train and sole customer base.
I agree. But if what Shan wrote is true, then they realized that they would have to fix things manually after they had already tried a quick solution that messed things up. They had to make a quick decision and telling players "We're sorry, we tried to get our stuff back from you and accidentally messed up your account in the process. Let us block you for three days to try and fix it" wouldn't have been well received either.
I mean, since the full truth wasn't an option your wording would have definitely been better, but maybe it didn't come to their mind at that moment.
And I still think that the "disciplinary action" stuff may have been part of TP's requests and not something they got to choose.
I was able to log into my account at 3 pm Central Standard Time on Thursday as they were handing out the bans. At the time they had just rolled back everything to before I had hit the “Buy Again” button. Everything I had acquired on the first day of the crew retrieval feature roll out was still there. Which I was just fine with. It left me with the ability to craft Captain Braxton from the components I had acquired on the first day of the crew retrieval feature roll out. Shortly after the ban hit me & I was kicked out until yesterday evening.
Now my account in regards to crew retrieval components has been zeroed out. Bye, Bye, Captain Braxton. Obviously I am such a nefarious criminal that I had taken all my ill gotten gains & crafted a crew better than Braxton with it.... (This is sarcasm for those who need it spelled out.) Not only that but I haven’t received any special portal pack to help me, “get back to speed & experience this new feature on the right foot.” @Shan . I did however receive the in game mail with the Android & Crafty Polestars that everybody got. So lucky me, now I can recraft Data Q and nothing else. I am worse off than when they banned me for pressing a “Buy Again” button they put into the system. I have also seen a few other posts on these forums by people in the same position.
So not only was the ban unevenly distributed, they first were able to just roll back my account to where it should have been indicating there was no issue & now they are claiming there was and zeroed it out. And on top of all that, they have not compensated all of their affected customers evenly. I won’t believe a word that comes from any person in this company again.
Under option 1: TP saw this act as an act of malice and sought to set an example of these players. They had their accounts suspended for 3 days and were basically called thieves.
Under option 2: TP noticed that the data from the packs had reduced the stability of these accounts and so locked them out for 72 hours. They then told players that they had been banned, while TP tried to fix these issues. They made a public message saying that TP stood behind these account suspensions without mentioning the fact that these accounts were unstable. There is also the issue that fleets and squads were harmed by those actions.
Either way, TP made a huge blunder in communication and its own actions. They turned a molehill into a mountain and I don’t see how Timelines can (or even deserves) to recover from this.
I also presume that since their story changed, they’re either more incompetent than I thought or they’re lying to us. Neither option encourages spending by me.
This is exactly the issue. Don't call your customers criminals and then pretend that you didn't. Customer Service 101!
No, actually that's from the prerequisite course: Decent Human Being 101.
But they have banned accounts before. Have there ever been problems with those afterwards?
It was simply a self-preservation act in the face of the pitchforks. It was an entirely selfish act with zero regard for us, the players.
You know when you were a kid and you did something wrong and your mother made you apologize to whoever you wronged? And remember when you weren't sincere in your apology and you got double-grounded? Yea, that's kind of what happened here. Shan's non-apology was about as insincere as I can imagine it being. So TP is being double-grounded with the mass exodus, including several large spenders.
I still haven't logged back into the game. I'm not sure if I ever will again.
For the record I was banned, but upon logging in, I do not have the portal pack available. So a CS ticket has been sent. So at the moment all is not fixed, and my play will be limited for a time.
This is their standard operating procedure. Save face by making a quick blanket statement and shove the issue under a rug and then later release an updated statement thats contradictory to the first without acknowledging the first.
Example: Adira
1) We swapped the art, this is a good card too, no big deal. Stop acting like the art matters.
2) We weren't legally supposed to release this card yet.
And then add a couple statements about reviewing internal procedures for quality control to make sure it never happens again.
... and then ignore that last statement and repeat about 4 times in the last few months.
There was a screwup on their end. "FFS <DB Employee>!"
"Ok, lets see what we can do?" "Jesus our juvenile player base just makes these situations way worse by taking the piss out of bugs." "Ok, we have two problems to address here."
"OK, let's spend the $$ to start getting zendesk to clean up our mess by going into people's accounts and undoing things. We have a trade off between making 100% sure zendesk know what they are doing and making sure things are done quickly. Let's air on the side of alacrity." "How do we deal with players who are still playing, spending currency and making things more difficult to fix?" "Let's just reset them back to the start of the new feature, that's the simplest and easiest way for us to fix this mess. We might even be able to do it via automation. It would be better if we could lock them out temporarily while we fix this."
"Ok, I have an idea, this will give us time and help establish better behaviour from our idiot consumers going forward. Lets ban the people who did this temporarly, that'll give us time to clean up this mess and reset expectations on how they are supposed to behave in future. This will save us $$ in the longer term."
"OK, there is a full revolt going on. Reddit is on fire and even our 5th column on the forums is turning against us". "Ok, 3 days was a bit much, how are we doing on the account fixes? How much is this costing us?" "This is the $$s spent on the fix so far, this is the $$s we might lose if we fight our customers for too long." "That's a lot of $$s." "Yeah, the timing of this during a megaevent is making this very uncomfortable. Some of the players are making reasonable points. The rest are lashing out but we have to to tolerate them because they pay us to do so."
"If we pay zendesk more $$s we might be able to clear this up in 24hrs". "Ok, pay the mercenary army. Do you think the players have gotten the message about exploiting obvious bugs going forward? Has this traumatised them enough?" "I dunno, we're definitely going to lose some people over this and this has been a big strain on our frontline employees too." "Ok, lift the bans asap. Put together an apology that doesn't leave us exposed to any litigation."
Back to me now.
My expectation is that there will be some further response to this early next week after the weekend and the event. There will almost certainly be a follow up mail and possibly more free stuff. They need to take some time to have the discussions needed when their emotions have subsided too.
I am not suggesting that what they did was the right course of action, but I do think that they are not monsters or even evil capitalists, they are wage slaves like most of the rest of us just dealing with a crisis on what was supposed to be just another Thursday.
The game has problems, I have been outlining many of them for a long time, leave for that reason if you must. But don't throw away relationships you have made over something this small. Yes, TPs Q&A needs to improve, yes the response was heavy handed, yes, the precedents set in the past and the lack of clarity on what TPs response would be contributed, but some of this is on some players. I accept that some didn't know any better, but plenty of you did and you must have been aware on some level that it was potentially hurting TP. When I heard about the bug on reddit I logged in but I was really hoping that I wouldn't have access to the bug because I didn't want to face the moral dilemma myself, so I, at least was aware that this was a dubious situation even before it exploded into the mess it turned into.
You are weighing both sides of the equation and being far too even tempered. That is forbidden. This is the interwebs and you must turn it to ELEVEN immediately!