An MTGO customer support experience, part 1 of x
Me: Deciding to give online drafting a shot again.
Me: Going to the inbuilt MTGO store (while being logged in, obviously).
Me: Buying 40 tix, paying via PayPal.
Paypal: Notifying me that the transaction was completed and my money sent to Wizards of the Coast.
Wizards of the Coast: –
Me: Asking game support if there was a way to look up the status of my order.
Game support: Telling me I should have gotten a recipe for my order via E-mail.
Me: Checking on my E-mail account if such a recipe had arrived an hour later.
Wizards of the Coast: –
Me: Writing customer support that I hadn’t got a recipe for the order I placed and payed for, and of course no product.
WotC customer support: In an automatically generated answer, sends me five links to sites with content peripharically related (at best) to my issue and not helpful at all, among them a link to a PayPal site where I’m told that, with issues with transactions with Wizards of the Coast, I should contact WotC’s customer support.
WotC customer support: An hour later, sends me a mail containing the line “Once we have verified you as the owner of the account, I would be happy to look into your request.” Asks me for an email address registered with that account, claiming that the email address I’m using was not the one on their files. Asks me about the postal code registered with that account. Asks me the answer to a security question (“Haustier?”) Mail is signed “Daniel”.
Me: Frantically rack my brain for possible other email addresses which could be registered with my account, as well as for postal codes I’ve had during the last years since the creation of my account. Come to the conclusion that the only other email address I could possibly have used to register my account a decade ago is one not existing anymore. Tell customer support that, list a few older postal codes of mine, give the answer to the security question I would most likely have given. Ask myself, why the hell customer support needs to verify that I’m the owner of an account after I just placed an order at their shop using it.
WotC customer support: A day later, sends me a mail, containing the following lines: “Thank you for writing in with the answers we need to verify you as the owner of the account. Unfortunately, some of the answers you have provided do not match what we have on file for this account. Please understand, we take account security very seriously. The questions we ask and the protocol we follow are for the protection of the information in your account. In order to access the account and check the status of the orders you are inquiring about, we will need you to provide us with some further information” Asks for the answer of ANOTHER (!) security question: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Asks me how many cards, including lands, are on that account. Asks me for the first and last digits of a credit card used on that account. Asks me for the month and year I created that account. Asks me for my billing address. Mail is signed by “Steve”.
Me: Panicking. Going to my collection to find out how many lands are in my account. Gloss over the question when the account was created (I cannot remember exactly anyway). Go look up the billing address I have registered with that account. Doing that, stumble across a way to enter a new email adress for that account (but not telling me my current one). Have to answer the security question “Haustier?” Answer it the way I did when asked by customer service. Enter my current email address. It seems to be accepted, but is nowhere shown and I don’t get a confirmation via email.
Me: Answering customer service, explaining I am deeply confused that I have to answer two different security questions for the same account, and that I have to confirm to be the owner of the account by answering a question easily answered by just logging in, when the issue is that I didn’t get a recipe after ordering product, for which I was obviously logged in! Tell them I just changed the email address for that account to the very address they are writing to. Anyway answer the other security question in the way I’d probably answered it before. Tell them the number of lands on my account. Explain that I never used a credit card with that account, that I had purchased all my accounts with the purchase code you got when buying the old rulesbook and CD product. Give them my billing address.
Me: Half an hour later, realize that they wanted the total number of cards INCLUDING LANDS as an answer. Send them the corrected answer.
Me: Another half an hour later begin to guess what customer support’s strange behaviour might have been about. Still, if instead of sending me automatically generated mails and using makros someone would simply have TALKED to me, all that confusion might have be prevented! Right now I assume that what they SHOULD have said was: “Please, when logged in to your account, go to >description of how to get to the place where I could change my email address< and update your email address”. Instead, they assumed that I wasn’t able to login in with my account, proving they did not actually read my first mail!
WotC Customer support: Suddenly lists issue as “solved”, without giving me another answer, without sending me a recipe, and without sending me my product!!!!
Me: Complaining, about that, reminding them that the issue is not solved at all!
To be continued (probably)…
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Zeromagic 
November 25, 2011 at 11:57 am
Funny, i had the exact same problem with reactivating my old beta account some years ago. It took them 3 weeks to get it done. Good to know, they did not even change their standard replies :)
November 30, 2011 at 11:16 am
expert line: call customer support over skype (2 ct/min). i once changed my account password and was unable to log in again, so i called them and told them about my problem. they basically asked the same questions you listed above:
– credit card: i tried several cards i used in the past years, all numbers were wrong
– security question: didn’t know the answer
– mail address: no clue
– post address: some place in a 0% vat country, made up, so i only remember the city
– number of cards in my account: no idea
a few minutes later my account was unlocked…
btw don’t buy tickets via paypal in the official store. it works probably less than 30% of the time. there are some traders that sell tickets over different payment systems. i think the current rate should be between 0,97 and 1,03$ when buying with paypal – major difference to the official store: it works.
December 1, 2011 at 10:52 am
Well, my experiences back in the day(s when I last played a lot) were unanimously good with PayPal. I never had the slightest issue, although I heard some other prople did, and my orders arrived after less than a minute each time. Maybe I was just too naive to entertain the idea that, after 5 more years of development, these very fundamentals of their business would actually work WORSE than before…
BTW, the story unfolds further and further. In the meantime I was given a refund in form of a coupon which doesn’t work. Enter the next round of back and forth!
December 1, 2011 at 2:45 pm
There is an issue with umlauts in the adress which can cause (especially paypal based) orders to not be accepted properly. It may not be the problem in your case, but may be worth a try,
December 1, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Well, I was told the issue might be the “ß” in my address. One would expect this to be quite a common issue they should have solved years ago, though…
Anyway, my coupon has now been accepted. The next time I buy tix (if ever), I will probably not use the store, though…