Thursday, November 06, 2008

Support Experiment

I'm doing an experiment.

Today I cancelled my City of Heroes subscription because, well, I haven't played the thing for at least three months and don't plan to ever return. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't excellent. I play most single player games for a couple of weeks; City of Heroes lasted me about that long, so it's not like it was substandard.

Anyway, the experiment. The same day I cancelled, my subscription unluckily came up and I've been automatically billed for the next few months. I've sent a polite, reasonable request to PlayNC support asking whether it might be possible for that amount to be refunded and my access to the game blocked immediately. I've noted that they probably don't have any legal obligation to do that, and they'd essentially be doing me a favour because they're reasonable people and value me as a repeat customer over many of their games, including Guild Wars, City of Heroes and a brief flirtation with Tabula Rasa.

So, will I:

(a) receive an unhelpful automated reply and have no way to contact an actual human? (I call this the World of Warcraft option.)

(b) be told that I have to ring an international phone number at 3 am in the morning to discuss the matter further? Or:

(c) get a helpful and personal response, prompting me to do a gushing post about how excellent PlayNC support is?

Let's find out!

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