I opened ticket 1525817 about achievements not working in The Uncertain: Light at the End and it was instantly closed. I was able to click create follow-up ticket and that one's still open.

About 8 hours later, I got a reply to the first ticket from an address I'd never seen before: help (at) gog (dot) com. There's no support agent name in either the From field or as a signature. It starts with,
"I have had a look at the system responsible for achievements on our platform and from the looks of it, our users are regularly receiving trophies in ,„The Uncertain: Light At The End ” and no issues with the database seem to be present at the moment."

Am I imagining things, or did they really just lie in a form response, to give the impression of actually doing something? And why not give me the chance to say whether or not the reply helped? I've never seen that before.

Are you looking at the HTML version of the email, or the plain-text one? The plain-text one isn't a faithful version of the HTML text, it misses the link. (Which is a bug, but knowing that doesn't help us.)

yep, that's me :)

I got a reply this morning from the same address, without any agent name or anything else. The ticket ID doesn't work on Zendesk, seems they dropped it in favor of email only tickets :(

Wonder if they're starting to use a bot there too, in that case...

Hello!

I got a reply, equally anonymous and equally link-less...

Hmmm... I have a bad feeling about this. Could it be that they have outsourced support?

They outsourced support to ZenDesk ages ago. So this might either be bringing it back in house, changing to another outsourcer, or putting a chatbot in the way to stop tickets causing bills from the outsourcer.

This seems by far the least likely option.

ZenDesk provides the software system, yes, but I was referring to the people handling support. Companies have been known to outsource their entire support departments in the past.

Given how obstinate GOG seem to be about only hiring people from within their country of origin, I don't think it is that likely that they'd be using outsourced staff. This reeks of more automation to me.

When I say the ticket was instantly closed, that's not hyperbole. I'm still using InkPanther's user style to enable the support form. The moment I submitted the form, it took me to the ticket page where it was already closed.

I don't know why it took 8 hours for that anonymous (probably canned) response to reach me, but the information was false. The current version of the game is broken.

As for my follow-up ticket, I closed it myself after about 2 days with no reply, because I'd worked around the issue by downgrading the game to version 1.5.

I opened another ticket using the contact form. The ticket number was 1529443. I received two automated e-mails from help (at) gog (dot) com, which said the ticket ID was 324679 and 324680, respectively. Once again, the original ticket shows up as Solved on the site. Trying to paste those other iDs into the link leads to a "not found" page.

Thinking the contact form might be the problem, I opened a ticket using the chabot. Again, I got one of those automated e-mails with a ticket number but no link. It looks like they killed off the last remnant of the old ticketing system. First, it was no longer possible to get an overview of all your tickets. Now it seems there's no way to check individual ticket status.

Between this and support agents that won't even change store page forum links from General Discussion to the game series, support is virtually non-existent.

My most charitable interpretation is that GOG is functioning on an overworked/out of depth skeleton crew, but there's a point when negligence starts to feel malicious.

Uh oh, please don't kill my precious forms...