Dear CPG,
I was excited when I heard the news of your partnership with Bandai Namco. I thought it would be good for the game’s publicity and help you focus your energy on the game while leaving the non-creative busywork to someone else. Win, win, win, I thought. But as the actual BN integration rolled out some things started becoming unsettlingly clear: Bandai Namco is not holding up their side of the bargain. I assume they’re getting a cut of the Duelyst revenue in exchange for doing the publishing and customer support side of the business, and so far it’s become clear that they haven’t bothered to put in the work to properly set up the customer support side of things. We’ve come across a smattering of issues that do get picked up by an actual human somewhere (which is good), but one that is seemingly unable to provide anything but the most basic of support. @locoblutaxt has their issues, mine have been quite disturbing to me and now we’ve reached new depths with @hulk12345/@alplod getting systematically locked out of their account seemingly for the crime of mentioning that they live in Russia (despite this never being an issue before).
Support pages for the EU and Russia haven’t been set up, account linking is malfunctioning by accidentally linking Duelyst accounts to BN-EU rather than BN-USA and password reset and BNAE account confirmation mails are unavailable or somehow get lost on their ways. Support seems to try their best but has no actual authority (as far as I have been able to tell) to get these issues resolved. Some of it I can begrudgingly bear as the annoyance of a modern age where a small games company needs to struggle to get a larger company to keep its end of the bargain, but alplod’s case is where I personally draw the line.
Curiously absent from my rant so far is how, you, Counter Play Games have been dealing with these issues. Put simply: you haven’t. No public statement, no mention of how you’re trying to deal with this, not even a word from the Discord chat afaik. As far as I can tell you’re leaving one of your customers hanging high and dry, washing your hands of all this presumably because it’s BN’s problem now. Maybe there’s a good reason for all of that, maybe there are strings I am simply unaware of, but as a customer and a community member this concerns me deeply. What kind of company would leave a customer hanging without as much as a ‘hang in there’ courtesy message? What kind of company doesn’t put out a statement that they’re aware of the issues and promise to remedy asap and compensate negatively affected customers appropriately?
I hope that there’s information I’m not privy to that will surface in the comments to this post, but if they don’t or are woefully inadequate I’m calling for a #BringBackAlplod campaign that resolves to stop spending any real-world money on Duelyst as long as alplod remains locked out of their account. If simple concern doesn’t prompt a response maybe a call to action will. Regardless of what anyone else does I’m personally not spending money to buy Orbs any more until I’m confident that customers don’t get locked out of this wonderful game for frivolous, random or incompetency reasons. BN owes you proper customer support and I expect you to actively take our side when they fail to do so.
So please CPG, #BringBackAlplod.
