Consistent high latency & bigoted AGS employees

[Jamesy]

First, I almost couldn’t believe it when I read the following from AGS support:
“You have come through to US customer service, because you are not a US customer, we cannot help you.”
This alongside persistently spamming:
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
While totally ignoring everything is exceptionally poor customer service - and frankly it leaves a bad aftertaste when the entirety of the front-level employee base appear to be American, yet will not action anything unless you are a US Amazon customer, despite servicing a global audience. Put simply, do better.

As for the latency issues, most people I’ve spoken to haven’t had such problems (good for them), but ever since the first big maintenance patch I - and others from what I can see - have been hit with really high latency issues that are persistent. In my experience, this did not happen during the beta phase nor immediately upon launch.

All the general troubleshooting has been done. DNS flushing, winsock resets, firewall and antivirus troubleshoots, IPv6 disables, Router forward porting, reinstallation and verification of game files, etc etc.

I had asked again and again for AGS to provide me with a server IP so that I can perform a tracert in order to find out exactly where the hops are going (as its pertinent to the core issue), but instead that element is being totally ignored and rather - after many, many days - AGS would have a couple of logs and a dxdiag report sent in a ticket to the devs which is simply going to inform them of hardware information, but trying to locate the routing issue is still going to be a problem.

Between creating new characters on different regions, speaking to my ISP, and all other ways to try to resolve it, it is clearly an issue on Amazon’s end. Thankfully it does not seem to affect the majority of people, however for those that it does affect then the entire New World experience is extremely unenjoyable (nobody realistically wants to be playing on a pvp action-based MMO with almost 300 ping).

At time of writing, I have now spent almost 9 hours today being passed back and forth between Amazon Gaming Services and Amazon Digital Services, with each department saying that the other is responsible for handling payment topics for New World.

The interdepartmental communication within Amazon as a whole is extremely unprofessional and adolescent; it is wholly wrong that a customer should be used as the ping pong messenger to relay information back and forth - for hours on end - between differing departments (especially when they both share the same internal systems and access to internal e-mail accounts).

AGS self-nominated a 48 hour window for their devs to resolve the latency issue, but quite frankly after all the nonsense today and the sheer effort it has taken just to have a legitimate issue looked at has totally soured any shred of confidence I would otherwise have in Amazon to honourably address raised issues.

On the back of this, being told explicitly that if you are not an American amazon user, then they will not help you - well that is quite something. There is unfortunately a self-depreciative ego with some Americans where they fundamentally believe that the world begins at the US west border and ends at the US east border; everything else is alien. It’s an incredibly arrogant and ugly delusion that really has no place in customer service.

[HongKongDongBong]

I’ve contact AGS Customer Service via LiveChat on 3 separate occasions regarding this very issue. I’ve had 130-140ms since Launch, and a couple of days after the latest update my ping has been 250-255ms locked constantly, with significant rubber-banding.

I’ve enquired in the Global Chat with other players to see if it was only me or others, and many confirmed they had the same issue.

When I reached out to AGS for the first time about this, I got lucky and the agent seemed to be aware of it and said the team was working on resolving this ASAP, and soon after a red label was visible in the game’s Server List (in-game) saying that all servers were experiencing Poor Latency and Connectivity Issues.

The second time I reached out was about 5 days later after seeing no fix or official Thread/communication from AGS on the forum, I was on a queue for over an hour and eventually forgot about the window in the background.

The third time was the cherry on the cake for me. I got redirected 4 times to a new agent, having to repeat myself each time, then once I finally got an agent able to actually respond instead of ghost and redirect me, it turned out he had nothing to do with the AGS side of customer support and thought I was buying a product on Amazon, which then lead me on another spree of redirects.

In the end I got redirected 11 times, with the last agent literally asking me to send a dxdiag and GameLog to the following e-mail: no-reply@amazon.com. Yep, you read this right. It felt like the person on the other side didn’t even work for Amazon or knew what e-mail addresses were used for email communications.

My next option is I guess to ask a refund for this game since it doesn’t deliver what was advertised, and if they decline I’ll just have to charge back through my bank and uninstall I guess.

Pathetic and extremely disappointing, especially coming from Amazon, their own game, hosted on their own servers, and still can’t offer the bare minimum in terms of 21st century online gaming: decent latency.

The more frustrated I get with this game, the more it makes me think it’s just a Tablet/Mobile game that has been repackaged to be played on PC (looking at the UI and simplistic combat mechanics/spells). I feel ripped off through another Investor’s venture, cash grab and run.

[Jamesy]

Quite honestly I wish I could sing praises because I genuinely like the game - though I hate the problems I’m experiencing with it.

As for AGS, it has probably been one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had. I have had 4 separate tickets escalated now, largely because 3 of them were not done properly and did not in fact get sent by the AGS staff.

Later in the evening last night, Amazon eventually put me through to their escalation complaints department after I had one of their employees go into my account and cancel my prime membership (which I had just renewed for the year a week ago). I also had an order cancelled and another item refunded (none of which I had even remotely suggested or asked for, nor was I asked about it). I had to find out about it from the email notifications while speaking to them on the phone. The problem now is that it is going to cause a dispute with the seller because I had received the item and there was no justification or need for a refund to be put through.

Ultimately they’ve agreed to refund all payments made for New World and microtransactions, as well as my prime membership, and put on just about a £100 credit to my amazon account as a “good will gesture” for the problems caused yesterday.
That was all fine - though I’m now back to square one where nobody seems to know which team or individual in AGS is to process the New World refunds.

Constantly I was met with: “we don’t offer refunds for New World once it is activated, that is our policy”. Despite the fact I’ve had to school several entry-level employees on their own policy, specifically:
5.7: “You may also be entitled to consumer protection rights under the laws of your local jurisdiction.”, and “The laws of some jurisdictions, including jurisdictions within the European Union, do not allow the limitation of liability described in this policy for certain types of damages. If these laws apply to you, you may have additional rights.”

Essentially I’ve had to hold various peoples’ hands while explaining how a common business policy does not hold precedence over jurisdiction statutory rights - which itself is even reaffirmed in Amazon’s own policy that they quote (yet evidently do not understand).

In my case, I have genuinely exhausted every effort to have technical issues resolved - and the consensus and admission by Amazon is that they are aware there is a problem, but they have not yet identified why this problem is occurring nor can they provide a fixed date for when it is to be resolved; it is an indefinite ongoing issue.
With that in mind, I raised my refund (as a UK resident under UK consumer protection laws) via the Consumer Rights Act 2015, Part 1, Chapter 3, Sections 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42 and 45. (all of which relate expressly to ‘digital content’/intangible goods which are thankfully a refundable product in the UK).

AGS entry-level staff however are reading from a script, and I wish that they would take the initiative to realise that reading a script (and providing incorrect information from that script) does not qualify you as experienced or informed in certain fields in every jurisdiction throughout the world.

I had been passed around that many times, that I was even speaking to the same people on multiple occasions - considering the vast size of Amazon’s employee count, that should not be happening regularly.

If other people have had nothing but a smooth experience then I am absolutely thrilled for them, unfortunately I’ve had an utter sh*tshow, which has not been helped by having to deal with an incredibly low-quality calibre of employees.