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Contacting me

With Twitter not going great. I thought I just create and pin this on my blogspot so I can be reached if for some reason people actually wan...

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Being a customer and serving a customer

Hi

This is my last email to your team in regards to asking about updates for my account suspension. I also be writing this letter as an open letter and it will be posted here (http://kilvear.blogspot.com/2015/08/being-customer-and-serving-customer.html) for people to read. I would hope that you forward this email to your manager or even better to your directors to read.

You can take your time with the investigation and I will just leave this email trail open to monitor how long the whole process takes.

Thank you to the Support team for reading this email.



Hi

I thought I just want to start by putting a face to the name. My name is Kelvin Thor. I am 35 this year. My day job is an IT support executive of branch company of a MNC. My daily work includes of course supporting users with their IT related problems. I also deal with provisioning of user accounts and their hardware.

Occasionally I will have projects coming like migrating user to new software, re-cabling works for older parts of the building. When I started this current job I was tasked with my colleague of setting up a new building including new servers, racks, cabling and even the new Audio visual equipments.

You could say I am just the IT guy. One that deals with almost all aspects of the IT in the company


Last week 13 Aug 2015, I got home and it felt like a long day.

Powered on my PC and had my dinner quickly. Tried logging on to PSO2 and I got an error message.

"You account has been suspended"

So I thought there was some mistake. I raised a ticket for this issue. There was an email reply quickly asking me for my details of my account which I quickly answered.

End of the next day I notice there was no response so I send another email asking if they required more prove that I own the account. And there was another quick reply saying they are already looking to it.

So goes 3 days which was Monday 17 Aug 2015 I sent another email regarding if there was updates on my account. There was a quick reply to let me know that they are still looking at it.

20th Aug 2015 I sent another email asking if there was any updates, as by now I was getting kind of impatient and wondering what is happening. I got feisty with the reply asking how patient I needed to be.

The reply came quickly as well stating they are expediting the investigation and there is no time frame to how long they will take.

At this point I am frustrated and tired. It seems to be I will never know if I even be getting my account back.

The whole situation looks like this in my perspective:

- My account is suspended for some unknown reason I can never know
- The investigation can take any time needed as long as they needed to
- My time based cash services are running down even though my account is suspended
- I have no recourse to all my money spent in the game (I guess time spent as well)

For some folks reading this, it be like "Oh its just a game you can do without it". That's true. Though I just want to at this point highlight what I am going through with an example below.


Imagine you bought a smartphone from a company. I will call it company Alpha here for easy reference.

One day the smartphone you bought from Alpha stopped working for without you dropping or bumping into it. "No biggie I will just send the phone back to the service and get it fixed".

Now your phone have been sent to the service center and the slip you received says they will contact you once they are done with the phone. For now you have to use normal cell phone and get through the time when your phone is at the service center. Though most of the time you feel that you would definitely preferred to have your smartphone with you.

1 week later not receiving any updates from the service center you decided to call the service center up in regards to the status of the phone. 

"Oh we still need time to figure out what's wrong but we do not have a time frame how long this will take but we are working very hard to sort this out. Please be patient and we will contact you once the phone is done"


At this point, you logically would probably just stop waiting for the phone and get another smartphone and never get a phone from Alpha company again.

This is least for the smartphone you can get another one. I can't. I can't just up and say "I am going to Japan PSO2".

Second, legally from the agreement clause of PSO2 Asiasoft is allowed do what they want since I agreed to the agreement.

Hence above I stated I have no recourse to anything.


I like to end here with my last few points:

- From my position I have perspective from both sides of being a customer and serving a customer. I have seen things get ugly before in retail. I always remind myself not to antagonize service crew. It is not a well paying job and you get remanded for small mistakes often.

- Currently I am doing my best not to antagonize the support crew at the same time I feel like I am being punished for doing the right thing.

- This situation with no recourse I can only suffer in silence and just move on


My main point is how long should a customer wait? how long can a customer wait? Is it better just to be transparent with the whole issue?

I would not know since I am not a manager or director in any capacity to make decisions.

I like to end here being just glad I wrote all this out. It at least helped me coped a little better by writing down what I have in my mind.

Thank you for your time in reading this.


Regards
Kelvin Thor

Monday, August 10, 2015

Fighting games is a niche and demands you spend time to learn it


"It’s designed to be accessible to more people than most fighting games tend to be. This is being managed by getting rid of hefty inputs for special moves and assigning them to a button instead. This means that you don’t need to spends hours, days, and months learning button presses in order to play competitively."
Siliconera isn't the first game press to say this statement

I have been hearing this statement regarding fighting games for ages. Every newer fighting game that comes out that allows you to execute special moves with direction plus buttons. You will hear that statement without fail.

Let me get this out of the way. Removing special move executions do not instantly make you Daigo, Justin Wong or Ogawa. If directional inputs made things easier, everyone would be an expert in Smash Brothers. (Link here for the saltiest rage quit for Rising Thunder)
 
Removing special move executions exposes the fact when you lose, you just are not good in fighting games. I think most people is will find it difficult to face with being bad at a game. (Which is one of the reasons Mobas are more popular. Less emphasis of 1 person and the team. Regarding Mobas' popularity that is another topic altogether)

Even Extra Credits cannot seem to agree with themselves whether dexterity requirement is good or bad for a game. Link here (about balancing skill vs power) and here (about making a game for speedrunning).

It seems at one point people want a game to get good at quickly and at one point people want to be awe by the sheer skill needed to play certain games.

Here's the thing. People can easily learn how to play Tetris. They also seem to quickly understand the fact that getting to Grandmaster rank demands you put in time and learn the game.

Strangely this doesn't happen for fighting games. For some reason I cannot comprehend when people picks up a fighting game they demand to be instantly good at it. The fact that the game demands you spend time learning it doesn't seem to get through to them at all.
 
I had a conversation in #poverty about this topic:
 
"What does Rising Thunder really want to solve? So did it solve the problem?"

The conversation ended with no one is really sure what Rising Thunder is in there to solve about fighting games. We do know the netcode is really good. 

So till the next game that claims to be the next big fighting game cause it removes the execution barrier. I will go play some really bad fighting games.

P.S. The speed running community is cool. I like them.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

31 July 2015

My watch buzzes as I programmed it to do so around 6.30am. It was designed with a smart alarm to wake me up during my light sleep phase. Sat up on my bed and quickly checked the weather for the day. 29-32 degree Celsius with thunder storms in north and west parts of Singapore.

Washed up, got into my work attire and sat on my bed reading some news and social feeds on my smart phone. Mentally running through some of the stuff I need to do at work. Picked up my earbuds rather than my headphones today as I forgot to replace my headphone's noise cancelling batteries. Do love my noise cancelling headphone but I guess not today.

Had my music player playing on my phone I put on my shoes and headed to the location for my company's bus pick up. I am lucky. The pick up location is within walking distance from my home.

On the company bus I quickly checked my online order of a book I got from Books depositary to see if it is shipped. Sadly its not. Then it was back to checking some gaming news on my smart phone while the music player runs in the background before I decided to just listen to the music and controlling the music player from my watch.

4PM phone rang. Picked up the phone to have my friend confirming the time we are meeting later. Colleague found a good deal on flyscoot for all their destinations. Fury of text messages beeped through whatsapp talking about it which also buzz my smart watch like crazy.

5.30PM and both my colleague and I quickly got on the company bus to leave our office premises. Watch buzz'ed again telling me I clear today's goal for steps needed to walk.

Text my friend telling him I be late as I made my way to the trains after aligning from the bus. Prior I was checking on my phone about the deals for trips and checking hotels. It was difficult to get hotels during the Tokyo game show weekend. I was already thinking of dropping the idea and I would prefer channeling my funds to my March trip next week.

Watch buzz'ed again with my friend acknowledging my message when I reach Orchard MRT station. I repled "On My way"with a template using my watch without taking my phone out of my bag.

Spent the evening talking to my friends before finally heading home around 10.30pm. Showers before tuning in to Summer games done quick. Got to see some great runs before I hook my phone up to power checked if there are anymore messages or emails I didn't read on way back earlier. Put on my watch and have it record my sleep before I finally lights out for the day.



This is just a piece is mostly to remind me to appreciate how much I used tech and how much I got out of it. I often forget how much a leap in technology we had. 7 years ago I wouldn't even imagine having the ability of checking out information on the go or watches that measures sleep.

Oh and yes I do spend evening talk to friends over coffee. It is something I enjoy more as I get older.