Paid Services

[pbelkin79]

Hi i was wondering if CarpeNoctem could please give us a update on when this will be reopened with the "new changes" that You posted on March 5th 2013? I have not seen that thread updated or any new posts? I would love to get some chars undeleted and some transfers done. Thank You for the reply in advance

[Treasurly]

Yeah, I actually had been wondering the same thing.
I've been waiting to change the name of our kinship for about a month now.
Does it really take this long to fix the paid service issue or are you still having an issue filling all the previously queued?

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Yeah, I actually had been wondering the same thing.
I've been waiting to change the name of our kinship for about a month now.
Does it really take this long to fix the paid service issue or are you still having an issue filling all the previously queued?

All the people that work on paid services were reassigned to deal with the massive number of tickets being submitted due to defects in the backend systems that were introduced during the maintenance - upgrade of the backend systems on February 14, 2013.

Problems such as:
1) I can't change, uprade my credit card or billing information.

2) My subscription expired because your system can't get money from my payment plan.

3) The system will not take my Game Time Card code, Turbine Point Card code or expansion pack code.

4) I applied my code and the system created a new Lotro account instead of adding the content by existing account.

5) I am not getting my VIP stipend - 500 Turbine Points.

6) I completed a deed. Got the notice saying 5 Turbine Points added. I did not get the Turbine Points.

7) I will stop now.

The first time that has to happen is that Turbine has to kill all the bugs in the back end system. Turbine is making progress. I does not look like all bugs are dead yet. There must be quite an army of Bugs - Star Ship Trooper time. Second thing that has to happen is that back log of accounting tickets has to be beat down.

[Haldiraen]

Any idea of when the service will be available again? Now two months have already passed, and I was wondering if I could get any idea of when I will be able to transfer a character from another server...

Thanks

[Penter-Kar]

From late last week:

Sorry but we don't have an update yet on when Paid Services back. We are working on some improvements to the Character Undelete and Transfer processes.

Same as they did last time, they will not reopen the Premium Services until the ticket queue is back to normal. They will not know when that will be until it happens, and the upper echelon give them the go ahead. Only then will the Premium Services people be moved back to working on the Premium Services.

[elderlygamer]

From late last week:
Same as they did last time, they will not reopen the Premium Services until the ticket queue is back to normal. They will not know when that will be until it happens, and the upper echelon give them the go ahead. Only then will the Premium Services people be moved back to working on the Premium Services.

Any "modern" ticketing system should be able to provide a statistic re: how many tickets are in the queue. Unless their ticket system consists solely of people filling out support forms which are then converted into email messages and sent to a central mailbox, the staff should be able to tell how long, approximately, it will take to get the queue to a manageable level based on the rate at which the ticket queue is decreasing, assuming that's even happening. If the ticket queue isn't decreasing, perhaps more resources are needed.

I am surprised they'd block people from paying money for premium services for 3 months. Seems like a lot of lost money to me.

/shrug

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Any "modern" ticketing system should be able to provide a statistic re: how many tickets are in the queue. Unless their ticket system consists solely of people filling out support forms which are then converted into email messages and sent to a central mailbox, the staff should be able to tell how long, approximately, it will take to get the queue to a manageable level based on the rate at which the ticket queue is decreasing, assuming that's even happening. If the ticket queue isn't decreasing, perhaps more resources are needed.

I am surprised they'd block people from paying money for premium services for 3 months. Seems like a lot of lost money to me.

/shrug

My personal opinion:

1) Shutting down the Premium Services. Assigning these human assets to Account Management tickets has allowed to get control over the ticket queue. The queue length is either stable or decreasing very slowly.

2) Reopening the Premium Services will cause the regular ticket system to collapse as more tickets pour in than they can handle.

3) Turbine was forced to lay off people especially in the Customer Service Department because Turbine's operating costs were too high for existing revenue stream back in October, 2012 (IIRC). Increasing costs by hiring temporary customer service people is not an option.

4) Assuming there is some leeway in personnel costs - that money is going to be spent on people to fix the back end systems.

Long term, I can't say what is going to happen. I worked at a big multinational not too long ago where the division got themselves into a very similar kind of mess. The home office (which in Turbine's case is Warner Brothers) was very displeased to say the least. The sent a few people from the home office to oversee our operations. The watchers made it clear they were not going to throw large sums of their good money to resolve our problems. Instead they made carefully adjusted internal spending to try and resolve the issues with current resources. The occasional contractor. Supplied small sums of dollars.

Over time, the Watchers identified folks that were assigned the "Gullty" of causing the problems. They got put on the street. The home office brought in replacements from outside our organization. These folks got put on the street were all 3rd tier or higher managers. Somebody like me that is a Senior software development person - the home office went after the supervisor or my supervisor's supervisor or higher.

My own personal experience over many years. You rarely get the luxury of adding people to resolve these kind of problems. Any major change like trying to move money requires the overseers approval.

I remember cases of manager coming to me to get more equipment than what their department allocated. I would ask them. Here is your org chart. Pick name. Fire them. I will talk to our director about transferring the balance of the salary to your hardware budget. I finally was able to broker a solution that nobody liked. These are usually the best solution. I got two managera to share the equipment. This situation required some of the engineers to work 6 PM - 3 AM. Instead of the normal day shift 8-5. We were close to 24 hour scheduling. We added weekends for people if they wanted to go that route.

As to what is going to happen in this case given that it is Turbine and Warner Brothers. No Idea. Totally owned companies like Turbine no longer have the flexibility they did back when they were self owned and independent.

[bennyw2784]

Yula, your logic works for the most part, BUT FOR the part where paid services can/will add up to a major source of revenue for them. As a lifetimer I don't spend ANY money on TP, and only buy expansions. Presuming that they cost the expansions out to so that they're making a slight profit, the only money they ever have/will make on me is from paid services. I know I'm somewhat in the minority, but moving the data of one toon from one server to another really doesn't require a lot of labor, and charging 20 bucks a pop to do it seems like a great way to make a lot of buck for very little bang...if the analogy works that way.

-Sholeh

[elderlygamer]

Yula, your logic works for the most part, BUT FOR the part where paid services can/will add up to a major source of revenue for them. As a lifetimer I don't spend ANY money on TP, and only buy expansions. Presuming that they cost the expansions out to so that they're making a slight profit, the only money they ever have/will make on me is from paid services. I know I'm somewhat in the minority, but moving the data of one toon from one server to another really doesn't require a lot of labor, and charging 20 bucks a pop to do it seems like a great way to make a lot of buck for very little bang...if the analogy works that way.

-Sholeh

I was looking into a transfer and saw that I could use TP for it, so even if they enable it eventually I'd still not be giving them money. Regardless, there are a lot of people, I'm sure, who would pay $ for transfers.

[bennyw2784]

I was looking into a transfer and saw that I could use TP for it, so even if they enable it eventually I'd still not be giving them money. Regardless, there are a lot of people, I'm sure, who would pay $ for transfers.

Good point, I did pay for my xfer to where I am now with actual real dollars cause I didn't have any TP at the time. I've since all but stopped playing, and have plenty of TP, so I'll prolly use those to transfer back, but the point is, lots of people would use paid services if allowed to do so. Not having the services up and running is just hurting their pocket book.

[Riru]

A couple of good points made above about the lost revenue streams Turbine must be suffering at the moment. Every time I think about this I shake my head; to actually make it impossible for people to give you money seems a very strange way to do business. Assuming that this is not Turbine being needlessly perverse, one would have to hope that the sound of heads rolling was deafening in Turbine Towers.

Hmm.....on second thoughts those rolling heads were probably the only resource available to fix this mess so I better be careful what I wish for.

More seriously though, I wonder if Turbine have figured out that their problem goes way beyond the simple unavailability of Paid Services, certainly in my case.

I currently play on a server that is, for the want of a better word, unplayable. This has come about for 2 primary reasons. Firstly, I picked a server that was clearly unsuited to my time zone. That was completely my fault and I am prepared to pay the consequences (i.e. $20-odd to transfer). However, Turbine are also culpable for the declining server numbers through the reasons documented in many other threads. I have come to accept that the long-term future looks bleak. To give you some idea of how bad the numbers are, when I log in on my prime time, I'm generally looking at 40 -50 people in GLFF and around 80 on the server in total. That makes any opportunity of end-game pugging unlikely at best.

Now, this situation leaves me with basically 3 alternatives :

1) Suck it up till transfers are available and continue to play as best I can,
2) Take a break till transfers are available, and hopefully come back refreshed to a new, livelier server
3) Call it quits and go play something else.

Before anyone writes this off as just another rage-quit threat, please note that my first 2 options are not quit threats. But, as options go they suffer BADLY from an inability to gauge the length of time they will persist. I am not demanding that Turbine FIX THIS NOW!!!!!!! I'm not even asking that they FIX IT SOON!!!!!! All I am asking is give me some idea of when you are going to fix it.

I am now very wary of hanging around, kicking my heels for an indeterminate period of time when I could actually be doing something more enjoyable.

I emailed Customer Support asking a couple of questions: when will transfers be available again, and would my choice of new server be available to transfer into when they did come back up. I got the usual "Check the forums" stonewall on the first and they completely ignored the second. That is NOT Customer Support, it is mindless bot-responding by Tier 3 people who neither know nor care about the game. I wonder if Turbine are even a teeny-weeny bit interested in why I want to transfer.

I realise that this has just turned a bit rant-ish but I am just so *&&$ed-off at the moment.

To sum up, if Turbine don't get their act together and either restore transfers, or give an indication of when this is going to occur, the chances are that my sad server numbers will drop by another 1.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Yula, your logic works for the most part, BUT FOR the part where paid services can/will add up to a major source of revenue for them.

-Sholeh

My personal opinion based on my own experiences when we got tangled this kind of issue. In order to resolve the problem faster we needed more money. The only place we could get it was from the big company that owned us. When we asked for more money we got the:

1) This is your problem. You folks have to solve it using your own resources. Or we will solve it for you. You are not going to enjoy us solving your problem.

2) The amount lost revenue isn't a big deal to us. Your proejct 2013 gross revenue for this feature is less than what we get in hour of operation across all units in the company. It is less than 1 out of (24) x (365) = 8760 hours in a year. It is a low profit feature. Our estimates show that it is fixable quicker by throwing more money at it. There is not enough profit dollars in the stream to pay back this pot of dollars. Forget it.

3) We feel the source of the problem is a people, process, bad choice issue. We are not going to get you out of this hole you dug for yourself by paying and building a ladder. You get yourself out. We will be watching you to decide what to do prevent this situation from happening in the future.

There is a fourth one that maybe in play or planning which I've seen in action:

4) Their systems are so screwed up. Their management in this area is not able to deal with. It is not fixable. We going to start developing a replacement system that is not speced out, designed, operated by anybody at Turbine. When it is ready for live time. We will migrate the database and functionality to the new group and center. All the existing equipment and personnel from the first line accounting people all the way up will be dismissed. Turbine will not longer be responsible for this functionality. It is a global service in this case Warner Brothers service provided to Turbine.

One issue that Warner Brothers has which is similar to a number of companies I have worked for. Turbine has one of these systems. Monolith has or could use one of these systems. NetherRealms has or could use one of these systems... None of them are compatible with each other. We got into the 'centralize the functions" for all owned companies in the USA.

IIRC - The new Turbine game that comes out this year is not connected to Turbine's systems for billing, authentication and accounting. It all being done on a new system developed by Warner Brothers. I have not paid much attention to it. I am not really into MOBA style games.

[bennyw2784]

All fair points, but essentially the cost is 0 for them. A monkey with a flash drive could swap 'Character X' from one server to another in a few minutes, after conducting the necessary checks (name not taken, assign to correct account etc) I can't believe that Turbine's back end system is worse than a monkey with a flash drive. Undelete is even simpler. Open account Y for today - (z) where z is the day you deleted your toon. I can roll back my computer 10 times a day to whatever time I wanted it to be at, account rollbacks (should) function similarly. I work with a USAF computer system on an almost daily basis, and we archive EVERYTHING. If one wanted to see what the system had in 1981, one could do that eventually (finding a functioning floppy disk drive would take more time than finding the records). These systems cost essentially 0, heck some of them are even free/integrated into other games (Character renames for example). Why is it so difficult for Turbine??

[IttleBubba]

Waiting 3 months to undelete a character. I have the $20 ready. (holds it out)
Will send as soon as paid services is back online.

-Pop

(Group hugs the devs)