Hey GOG,
I thought you would listen to feedback and the general feedback for this crapbot you chose for support was negative - so why is it still alive? It is USELESS and FAULTY as HELL! I wonder if you still have some QA in your house? I give you an example: "choose technical issue" and then you can chose between a finite list of options of what's wrong with your game. Don't you really see that this can't work? You ALWAYS need a free text option as well since it is highly unlikeley that such a list will cover every possible technical aspect or problem. I give up. I obviously will have to accept that GOG support is dead and that I will have to refund problematic games because of missing support. Well, it seems as if this is what you want.

In case you still are interested in my "ticket" I am unable to post:

Succubus DLCs are outdated (the basegame is up to date) so that they can't be installed via offline installer anymore. Devs said they will have to wairt for your reply for whatever reason.

The bottom line is that it's a cost-cutting measure and sign of desperation, meant to weed out people from seeking support, and GOG is strapped for cash so they don't have enough money to pay for sufficient support staff.

So that's why it stays.

I'm not saying that's a good thing or a justifiable reason to keep it, but I'm just stating what the situation is.

Of course, GOG will never admit these facts in their PR pieces about why the chatbot is so great and wonderful and amazing. But you can't look to those PR pieces if you are expecting to understand the truth.

You are probably right but to be honest, I have problems buying in a store in which I can't be sure to get support whenever a game is not working correctly or - which happens more often here on GOG - is outdated. I need somebody to talk with and this "someone" should not be a crap bot which I could have programmed myself since he is more stupid than stupid. At least they could have purchased the pro version with actual "intelligence". What I want to say: they are trying to save money on the wrong end. Losing customers is never a good way to make more money.

You'd think someone, anyone at GOG would realize just how much of a PR nightmare that damn service bot has been, not a week goes by without some new user getting confused and asking why they aren't getting any service...

How can they not at the very least, consider how much of an atrocious first impression this crap leaves on people? When your cost cutting starts costing you customers, you have to be a special kind of stubborn or stupid to not course correct.

I swear they actively want to fail.

No, they probably have someone in management who thinks throwing one of the following concepts at a problem will eventually solve it: "chatbot, AI, machine learning, blockchain, data lake"...

It's probably not a "desperate" measure, but rather the only one that costs almost nothing. I doubt they got a budget increase to expand their support team... and Judas can't do everything by himself, he needs minions (yes, he's in support now :P). Hey, the chatbot would probably feel insulted! ...sadly that feature is only available in the "pro version" :).

The staff in these areas must just follow what ever's popular like changing login names to emails.
Chatbots are another example of this e.g

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/for-gods-sake-chatbots-let-me-talk-to-a-human-being-8rc7lt2d7
https://www.verdict.co.uk/latest-banking-chatbot/
https://thefintechtimes.com/how-conversational-ai-is-revolutionising-banking-as-we-know-it/

We should also be asking why aren't proper chatbots used properly in modern games. Are there any recent ones that make good use of this technology in a meaningful manner?

That made me chuckle. I'm, in fact, implementing a data lake right now.

Remember the days when we called it "pattern recognition" rather than "AI"? We were more honest then.

Now, when you see a customer, they tell you "we need big data". You ask "what you want to do with it?" They tell you "we have no clue, but big boss said so. Oh, and can you do something with AI?" You ask "what you want to do with it?" They shrug, "nothing yet, but boss thinks it sounds cool."

So you implement "big data" on 10 million data sets, give them an empty shell script and call it an "AI interface".

Folks hear "artificial intelligence" and think it is some magical fairy dust you just sprinkle on any problem to make it go away. Better even: "Natural language processing with artificial intelligence"--sounds way better than "chatbot", is just as useless as the crap you had back in 1999, except now five times the price, because "cloud".

Thanks for the heads-up. This has been a repeated issue in games where the base game installer gets updated but the DLC doesn't. For those who don't understand, this means the old DLC versions will not work with the new game installer and thus the user must choose to use either the outdated version where base game+DLCs work or the new version where only the base game works. Of course the workaround suggested would be to use the "optional" client instead in order to get what one paid for in a timelier fashion.

Hopefully the offline installers get updated soon. I had already resolved with this game and others such as Pathfinder, Chernobylite, etc., that are getting upcoming DLCs to just wait until all are released and download everything then. That is hoping they are all the right version then, of course, so maybe I should reconsider in case the last one or two don't get updated properly. It is really sick how we have to beg to access products we paid for, all because we don't want to use precious Galaxy which I will reiterate once again is supposed to be "optional."

... five times the price in OPEX, not CAPEX :P. And yes, agree with everything you said... happen to be involved in these things as well professionally, frustration included in the package.

Last week I've created 2 support tickets.

Yes I had to go through the support bot, but after a few choices that were obviously not helpful I was able to type in my problem and an actual support ticket was created. Both of them were addressed yesterday by an actual support engineer. So I don't mind having to go through this.

To some degree I understand why they took this direction. Cost cutting is one thing for sure and you can't blame a business for wanting to optimize costs. But the other important decision I am sure is related to the fact that actually a lot of support tickets are being generated by basic issues which are solvable by the bot (or will be in the future when the bot "learns more").

I work in the IT industry and I know what type of support tickets users can generate. There is a saying: "Don't underestimate human's ability to not understand something". So you will always have people creating tickets for all sorts of petty issue that could be easily solved by reading the rules/FAQs or googling.

I've posted in my OP why it is IMPOSSIBLE in several cases to create a support ticket. Whenever the topic is not covered in the list of possible issues suggested by stupid bot you will have to improvise. Giving customers (@GOG: the people who are paying you) the option to contact them directly and/or giving them an option to chose "other" would help here. But I said this in the other thread about this bot already and even though GOG said that they will improve this bot they did not. Like I said: QA seems to be completely absent or incompetent. I give another example: for EVERY technical issue you will have to attach a dxdiag.txt and when you try to do so the default filtering is set to not shof files with the ending txt so that you won't find it if you are bad with PC stuff (I know my way around so this does not affect me personally but it shows how much thought went into this bot). So congrats to you that you picked an issue the bot could actually stomach but the problems with the bot aren't personal but factual. I tried to explain and it is really logical so it puzzles me why they don't change anything.

You also should give your customers the option to tell you as many details about the issue as possible since it makes it easier to fix them. Also you should give every customer the feeling as if you care for their problems ... something GOG is failing so hard right now.

Cutting costs is all right but not if it leads to losing customers.

Better way: FIRST show the suggested workarounds the bot is showing. Ask if this could help and THEN let the customer create a support ticket. Problem solved and customer is happy.

If i could quickly find the comic i'd reference it on SSDD.

Regardless, the annoying AI to waste your time to prevent you from actually getting anywhere where you will give up and not get your refunds, will result in a long term net gain for the company.... theoretically...

The chatbot is still in place because it's being tested until mid-2022.
While removing it is on the table, GOG have boasted that it successfully answers 40% of queries. So don't be surprised if it's declared a grand success and it's here to stay.

I've been bypassing the chatbot with a user style. Perhaps I shouldn't, as my queries might theoretically help improve it. But on top of having to wait weeks for support to respond, I'm really not in the mood to waste my time with a bot instead of quickly filling out a form. I don't need to be directed to a support article (which are generally lacking anyway) when the issues I encounter are almost exclusively server-side.