PlayOnline’s so called “Customer Support”

The reason I’m writing to you today, is to warn FFXI players, or players of future PlayOnline services what they are getting into if they run into a problem. FFXI players will know what I mean, because more than likely you’ve made a GM call and gotten the dreaded “We’ll look into it” Aka, have a nice day while we go sip coffee, eat donuts, and laugh at the more unfortunate.

Here’s the story, recently my boyfriend had to use their Character Recovery service, that rolls your character back if there is a problem in game. He logged on to find 8 million gil missing off his account. Now… that’s a considerable amount in FFXI terms, you can buy nearly anything off the Auction House with it.

PlayOnline stated they can only do their rollback once, and if you personally do not know when the error occurred and it is rolled back but not fixed because it happened earlier than that, you are screwed. Not only that but they brilliantly dupe the lost items/gil instead of removing it from the character that stole it and restoring it to the original owner.

Attempt #1: He contacted PlayOnline and they requested a Photo ID and sent a forum to sign. Sent all of it in an e-mail, they lost it. They did not contact him to tell him that they did not receive it.

Attempt #2: Resent information, called back a few days later, they lost the e-mail it had been sent from. Again, no contact.

Attempt #3: After about a week they started the investigation, and told us it would take a week and that the chances of it being recovered were highly likely.

Attempt #4: Over a week had passed, he called to see what they were doing, they had no information and said wait for the automated e-mail. Finally someone told us it was being worked on by the Japanese division.

Attempt #5: Gave them considerable time, called back again. Apparently the report had been sent back to the NA division but they couldn’t translate it properly so they just let it sit there for a week and a half. After some prodding, the guy on the phone said he would personally give it special attention so it got pushed through.

Attempt #6: Finally a month and a half later he got his conformation e-mail that said they had finished the recovery… and failed it. He called to find out why. After talking to 4 or more different people all with different levels of helpfulness and rudeness some answers came out. The person who took it was in the same ISP, one guy accused him of stealing his own gil while the other said “Well check and see if your girlfriend has nicer gear than before.” which led to much rage. Now… an ISP is not an IP, so that means the same provider (comcast, roadrunner, verizon). They said they knew who took the gil and where it was now. Even that it was someone we knew. They requested IDs of accounts that we had logged onto before, and once we figured out who it probably was… they would not take the ID even though they asked us to call back if we had more IDs to add.

Finally… they announced the case closed while we were in the middle of trying to give them the ID. We hung up and did not call again. The next day he received an official C&D to not call again. There was no punishment for the person who stole the gil.

Before this happened a friend of mine in my Linkshell (guild/clan) had been having the same service done for his character, and it took them 4 months to do. Not only that but you have to pay for play time while you are locked out of your own account. If you try to cancel the payment, PlayOnline told us that it will interrupt the process and it’s possible to lose your character completely. This was not told to us before we started the process.

So PlayOnline, I dub thee, worst business practice I’ve ever heard of in my lifetime.