If your support system was having problems coping with the load created by the IXEG release then perhaps something to that effect could have been added to the automated email that is sent out to the customer when they open a ticket?
The information was present on the contact page for the support ticket system. Sounds like you missed it, but we did our due diligence.
As you know I waited a week before contacting you and the email I sent you was polite and courteous. I surmised you may have been busy.
You didn't e-mail me, but you did post in the forums that you don't frequently visit. :-)
Whilst I may have paraphrased your reply in my post above the message is ultimately the same.
The tone is not the same.
Note the term anti piracy - it is supposed to hinder the pirate, not the legitimate customer.
And please note the fact that your activation behavior was out of the ordinary. Therefore, the system acted as intended and the other 99.9% of customers were left unaffected. It's not a bullet proof system, but it does work as designed and for the average customer it stays out of their way.
your support system can't cope with the demand placed on it by a major product release
It's not the support system. It's man hours. The SYSTEM worked just fine.
As a paying customer I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a certain level of service, and I don't think I am being at all unreasonable when I say I was less than satisfied at having to wait ten days to reactivate a product I have paid for.
Sure, that's fair. But what's NOT fair is your way of explaining how you were cared for. The way you portrayed the situation was that you received a very rude reply which essentially told you to get lost until we reach out to you. On the contrary, what you received was a pretty light hearted response that explained the situation and told you to please hang tight, or bear with us under those extraordinary times.
We're dealing with at as fast as we possibly can.
That's essentially what was implied!
Now you may describe me as being "not even close to a typical customer". When I look at the first page of your general discussion forum I see there are three posts from different customers asking for help because they have reached the activation limit.
And care to guess how many of these people who create such posts are actually involved in...piracy? It may stagger you. So, again, I consider your circumstance out of the ordinary for a legitimate customer.
Thanks for explaining your activation system a little better. Perhaps five activations in a six month period or three in a two month period would reduce the number of customers who hit the hard limit due to system upgrades, failures, reformats, etc.
Considering we have an insanely huge customer base where less than 1% of our support issues revolve around just this, I'd say we're well within the realm of fair. Most of our customers have never even had to contact us about this stuff.
Finally Cameron, I hope you can appreciate that maybe, just maybe some of my criticism is valid and circling the wagons at the first sign of an unhappy customer maybe isn't the most prudent course of action.
As long as things are stated truthfully and you don't leave words I apparently said (which I didn't) to be misconstrued, we don't have any problem. Be as critical as you want. It doesn't change my response here!
I'm very direct. Sometimes short, but that's often times the best way to get a point across without a bunch of fluff in-between. If you considered my above response as "circling the wagons" then I'd say you most certainly took way more offense to it than you should have.