I wonder if anyone found the bot useful. Its lack of awareness is disturbing.

1. While being logged in, it asked for my email address. So what is more pointless: the login feature, or being asked for my e-mail?

2. Zero lack of "awareness".

- What can I help you with?
I posted a screenshot...
- So what can I help you with?
I explained
- Can you post a screenshot?
sigh

All I wanted to report was having two issues that should not exist:
- notifications that don't make sense and that should go away after you clicked them
- GOG not saying I haven't posted recently, when I actually have

@GOG: Please do better. Make that bot smart enough to know the users posted a screenshot - which should be obvious when the user uploads an image with a resolution bigger than a Minecraft potato. Also stop asking for e-mail addresses. What year is this? One of those odd years when a website can't pass a user id/hash to a ticketing system, so a logged-in user doesn't need to identify to a bot? It's still early and I already don't like this year.

When I had to use it I just gave up and got people in the forum to help. I found the bot incredibly useless. contacting GoG now is super hard now so support is really a difficult process now I fear. Used to be much easier. GoG has always had excellent support, but with the current process it is super hard to get to that point.

Yes, the bot is annoying. (but why would you start a conversation with posting an image and expecting the bot to know what you mean?)

Reply notifications don't disappear on their own.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/heres_how_to_remove_permanent_forum_reply_notification/page1

My recent posts/replies page is useless and/or broken.


GOG knows this and does nothing.

While the bot is annoying, follow-up contact by support -- in my case -- was within a day or two. My experience overall was pretty good.

Here is my example (around the release of latest patch for Gladius), clearly presenting how utterly useless the bot is (comment - when you see "other", this means I choose one of the topics provided, it's just displayed this way., not sure why).

https://sharetext.me/uxpp81pjhb

As you can observe, at some point I gave up and just started to demand help of "normal" tech support.

(I had to translate Polish parts, so apologies for any grammar mistakes)

I've done it "wrong" only once (and the difference was minimal, just lack of comma and colon), second time I've done it exactly as proposed by bot... Yet the bot was still asking about the title

The real goal of the bot is to reduce the number of opened support tasks by discouraging the customers to go through the process. Then GOG can reduce the size of their support team, according to their plans to only spend money on Galaxy-related activities.

Once you understand that, you can see that the bot is very effective at what it is supposed to do. And it explains why you should not expect GOG to "fix" what has never been broken in their eyes.

Do you believe the number of people who need to reach Support is usually insignificant enough to where GOG management feel they can afford to upset said customers and lose at least a percentage of them? Because obviously GOG needs customers and income to stay in business.

Also are these "plans to only spend money on Galaxy-related activities" available to read about? Were they shared during a CDP or CDPR conference?

Have to nitpick, negligible is not a gradable adjective, so "negligible enough" is strange. Something can't be slightly negligible or quite negligible, it either is or isn't.

And I agree with vv221 as to the purpose of this. Facebook and Google are much worse. The bigger you are the more you can get away with not providing support. GOG does provide personalised support, you just have to jump through hoops to reach it.

Okay I tried rewording it though that is nitpicky imo. ;)

So correct me if I'm wrong but you believe GOG is big enough to where they can get away with not providing easy-to-contact support?

That’s an easy one:
- Did GOG turned their support into an unusable mess? Yes.
- Are customers still buying games? Yes.

So they can, and will, keep selling games while minimizing support.

--- Of course not, they even denied it several times (damage control is one of the activities they are not phasing out). But it is obvious by looking at their decisions since 2014.

I assume people are still buying games here despite the poor Support because they value DRM-free. Not sure why else they would buy them here. :)

You might be right, but sometimes it seems like people here can also have a bias and prefer to assume the negative because of bitterness. (and enjoying the anger like Spider-Man ;) I think it's worth trying to reason and strike a balance. (not saying you yourself haven't)

Ultimately I think people should just not get too invested in a single store, and shop around.

You nailed it, it’s exactly the reason why I am still buying games from GOG ;)

---

I fully agree here too. I buy my games from all DRM-free video game stores that I know of.

But sadly there are not a lot of them, hence my critics of all GOG moves taking them away from their old DRM-free principles. Pro-DRM customers would not gain anything if GOG turned into yet another Steam clone, while us anti-DRM customers would lose the ability to buy a big number of games that are sold without DRM here only.

For obvious reasons, they won't admit that, but I believe it is pretty much this.

Honestly though, the bot never deterred me from filing support tickets ever. I just go along until it lets me talk to a human (less than 5 minutes).

I don't view it as a huge negative in my user experience, but when I make a support request, it is usually for something important (ex: I can't download my games). I get a lot more irritated about offline installers getting less support than Galaxy ones.

If some people make support requests for stuff that is less important (enough so that they are discouraged by a bot that makes them wait less than 5 minutes), while the current policy doesn't look good from a pr perspective and it is not ideal, I can understand where they are coming from (ie, limited budget operation, can't afford to provide support with gravvy on top).

At the end of the day, getting drm-free games matters more to me than a top-notch user-experience (although the later would definitely be nice).