Greetings from Westwood

[buttercup]

Hello to the quietest group of gamers I have ever met...My name is Mary, I work at Westwood in the Customer Service Department. I am also the ladder mistress (although some past cheaters have dubbed me "ladder lolita" since I've been known to cut down rank and points, even cut off their most prized nickname.) If you have any cheating or ladder issues, please feel free to email me at Contests@Westwood.com. Please include Dune 2000, and both players names. If you have anything else to report or chat about, you can either email me at mbeal@westwood.com, or post something. I'll be checking in to help in any way I can. Although I must say, I have heard barely a peep from this community. See you online!

-Mary/Buttercup

[Mahdi]

Well, partly westwood hears nothing from us because nobody ever listens to us. No e-mail I or anyone else that I've talked to has ever been replied to, and every report of d/cer or lagger we send in is ignored, so we stopped bothering to send them to you and started our own d/c list at http://hop.to/mb

[quoteboat]

Hello buttercup.

Greetings from D

[quoteboat]

Erm you have the ladder mistress taking to you. More than two posts would be good...

[Gobalopper]

Hey, thanks for posting Mary. I was wondering what the latest status was on the registration/autoupdate servers. I have had a few people saying they were having problems. Also is there a page somewhere at Westwood's site that tells you when there are problems with the servers?

[buttercup]

I will be looking over the D/C list you have going at that site, and compare it to my own. I realize you may have felt overlooked in the past, but we have reviewed and revamped our technical and customer support processes. Technical issues can be sent to TechHelp@Westwood.com, account/membership issues to AccountHelp@Westwood.com, and contest/tournament issues to Contests@Westwood.com. Virtual flowers and chocolate can be sent to MBeal@Westwood.com :)

The registration and auto-update servers were down temporarily, but are functioning properly now. There is no page listing server or other Westwood related problems, as we are usually on top of the problem as soon as it is reported to us. Currently the clan pages are down for upgrades, file shifting, etc. It is expected to be up and running soon. If anyone notices any other problems, please feel free to report them to MBeal@Westwood.com. You can also visit us during our weekly live online Technical Support sessions. These are held Tuesdays at 11:00 AM PST, and Thursdays at 6:00 PM PST. Just join the channel "Tech_Support". Thx.

-Mary/Buttercup

[Mahdi]

Employees at westwood doing something? Great, now I have nothing to complain about:)

By the way, do you think you can do something about MentatBot? It is the most annoying piece of software I have ever seen, I got banned once for an entire week just for returning to the lobby after a game. I just reconnected and it gave me the you have been banned from this channel by MentatBot message. I didn't even have time to type anything!

[Mahdi]

What do you guys do to confirmed d/cers anyway? Ban the nicks or ip's? Because banning nicks is useless.

[buttercup]

I will mention the MentatBot problem to those involved with it's programming. Should that type of ban happen again, email me AccountHelp@Westwood.com, with the nickname you were using and a summary of what happened.

Confirming D/Cers depends on a lot. What usually happens: I get a couple emails about "joeshmoe" disconnecting, send him an email "stop it or more action will be taken." If it continues, his points are dropped. If it contiues again, his name is banned (this is almost always done the last week of the month...explained below) and his points dropped to a shameful number (-300 seems to be pretty humiliating). If I recieve reports about him using another nickname to do the same thing, that is also disabled. It is VERY easy to cross reference accounts, only takes about 20 seconds to ban each account.

Why its done at the end of the month (usually). First, I like to make sure I have as much info as possible. If I wait til the last week of the month to remove points, ban accounts, etc., I have all the complaints logged. Secondly, it's been my experiance these cheaters hate wasting time. Well, they waste no less than 3 minutes of your time in one game they D/C on. It takes me about 1 minute to read an email, about 10 seconds to copy/paste nicknames into my database. Once sorted, it takes about 20 seconds to ban an account. That's if I haven't had my morning coffee....

Meanwhile, "joeshmoe" the cheater has wasted 3 weeks of his time playing. And where does he end up? At the VERY bottom of the ladder, a marked man. We will ban IPs if absolutly necessary. But it is rare. The cheaters seem to REALLY dislike wasting month after month of playing..oops, I mean cheating...to get absolutely nowhere. They either practice and get good enough to win with skill, or they move on. Either way, YOU will have a fairer game.

Hope that helps. -Mary/Buttercup

[Guest ExTec]

Very nice indeed someone from westwood actually says anything at all. Madhidla sayd it best, saying we don't say anything anymore because we get ignored.

I can advise anyone ever having the need to communicate with westwood to pick up the phone. If you call them, they cannot IGNORE you.

If you insist on sending an email, send and empty one with just the words 'test'. Thats because the westwood people will automatically return a faq telling you loads of crap you already know. So, if you just spend 10 mins, explaining in detail what your problem is, you get rewarded a bloody faq. How about being costumer friendly?

In that faq however, you can find another email address, which you can write to if the faq doesn't answer your problems. A real(!) person will read your mail, and in a stroke of genius he/she decides to send you, yep, you got it, the same bloody faq.

It really apears as though customers are 'only those thing that buy our games. Service? nah....'

This is not based on a single experiance, I own almost all C&C/RA/Dune2k/TS games, and I needed help with some of these games. I even reported a genuine install bug in red alert, but surprise surprise, they ignored that email too.

[niels]

I bought an other games and had problem with that and i emailed them and the next day i already got an reply and if it wasnt good please send more info.

Man that was good.

Sierra is the man!!!

[marcel]

Lots of companies have this policy. You send an email, you get a standard faq with hidden in it an email adres for if the faq doesn't solve it. You send an email to the adres after which you get another standard (somtimes even somewhat different!!) faq.

It can take ages to get through to a real person.

[buttercup]

We re-vamped our Technical Support system a couple months back. Yes, you still get the FAQ (solves about 90% of the technical issues experianced by our customers), but the email address included in the FAQ (if your problem was not solved) goes straight to a humans desk. And when you get an answer back (allow up to 2 working days), rest assured it was answered by a living, breathing, possibly over-caffinated person. -Mary, a real, over-caffinated human

[niels]

Sierra emailed back the other day. very fast. not saying that you dont work fast enough, maybe westwood needs more people.

[Edric O]

Ok, let's just get to the BIG question on everybody's lips... aaa, I mean fingers. Are you guys at WW gonna make another Dune game or not? If you won't, why not just sell the Dune license to someone who will? I'm not just a Dune fan, I'm also crazy about the C&C series. But what's so bad about having 2 RTS game series. Your greatest enemy, Blizzard (which I hate by the way) has 2 series (and we all know what those are).

[Gobalopper]

Dune is owned by the Herbert Limited Partnership or something similar to that. Westwood is able to licence the Dune title for a certain number of games, I'm not sure how many they are allowed to do at this point. This is also why they didn't create another Dune game for so long after Dune 2.

So Westwood couldn't really sell the licence if they did in fact have the option of making a Dune game. What they could do, which is what I think they will do again is let an outside company like IGL make the game for them.

[Falconius]

Hey Eric O, R U also a Ordos Techno fanat like me?

O, ahh, Buttercup, will you be breaking company policy to answer Eric O?

====================

When moving among thorns, never fear, they cannot sting you. But you can sting yourself with them.

-Falconius

[Edric O]

Ordos techno fanat? Yeah, pretty much...

And I'm sure Buttercup will answer: "We're not sure at this point" or "I'm not in that line of work, so I don't know".

[niels]

What does igl stand for? wanto check em out.

[Guest Acumen]

Intelligent Games Limited.

Their website is at igl.co.uk.

[kunekune]

If they sell the dune license to someone else then the whole game will change like form dune1 to dune2. ALso I don't think blizzard is a real rival there games are mainly the peopn style. What would you rathe play a dune game or a Warcraft/starcraft game?

[Edric O]

A DUNE GAME!!!! What else?

[buttercup]

True, I'm not in that line of work, so I don't know. I will do some nosing around, see if I can find out anything for you though. I usually don't get involved until the games are in beta.

[Falconius]

(grinning fiercely)

Three chears for Buttercup!

[hellsmaw]

all right! i have a bone to pick with westwood, and ill restrain from using profanity doing it. i will be honest, i borrow a friends copy of games i dont have to see whether i wnat to buy it or not. but i tried out Tiberian Sun a while after it was realeased and i installed it. the game started up fine, but when i got to the game screen (where you actually play) it locked up. every time. then i restart my computer and shut it down properly. a few weeks later, every game that i own stops working (note: these were all already installed). its been around a year, and i havent been able to fix the problem by deleting, reinstalling, or fiddling with the control panel. i found out a few weeks ago that the problem was an .ini file was disabling my video card and all display drivers for that matter. Hmm... coincedence?

Another thing, I've had dune 2000 since around the time it came out, and ive only been able to play it around 4 times. i absolutely could not get the program to run. it would lock up before i even got to the title screen.

Lastly (although this isnt a microsoft page), me and a few other people are having problems with microsoft games all the sudden locking up or exiting back to windows (!%^@#^). if anyone knows why my games are doing this, id like to know.

This is about the fourth time ive addressed the problem. ive emailed westwood tech support twice (never got a reply) and ive also posted asking what is the matter with my $%^@# game. all i seemed to get were changed subjects or no new replies were added to the string. this ticks me off. HAVE A NICE #$%^ DAY!