so everyone knows that before janice took office, making a support ticket was like blowing smoke into the wind; there was no point. and even now, it takes forever to do support tickets. i've had mine up for 2 weeks over a simple mvp upgrade voucher and i fully expect to wait another month. i think there should be a staff dedicated to resolving support tickets. either that or remove support tickets as an option on forums.

 

no support

some support tickets deal with sensitive information such as IP addresses, payment info and account details. It would not be wise to open these tickets up to be handled by just anyone on the staff team. Regular mods don’t have perms to distribute ranks, check payment history and to perform other administration duties. Janice is a highly trusted individual, with all of those permissions, it makes sense for her to be the one to handle tickets.

as for less pressing issues, players are encouraged to use the Help section on forums or the #help channel in discord for other staff to try and resolve the issue before saying to make a support ticket as a last resort. Other staff try to resolve issues as best they can, but when it comes to administration or payment issues we can’t, so we advise to make a ticket. All tickets get closed eventually.

I understand some people’s frustration with the time it takes to have support tickets closed and resolved, but keep in mind Janice is also a full time student and an administrator of this and Crews other servers as well. Usually, she is quite efficient in resolving tickets but keep in mind she is only human and is doing the best she can. Besides, most players don’t exactly make it easy for her. Giving the bare minimum of information in her ticket so she has to inquire further just keeps the ticket open for longer; that's not her fault. making pointless tickets such as “i want to report this player” or making joke tickets causing her to spend time resolving that ticket as well, and as a result taking more time to respond to others, is also not her fault. Players complaining about the time/effort it takes to make a simple ticket and so letting their issue go on for weeks before seeking help, is also not her fault.

Janice is the member best-suited to the role of answering support tickets. Having any other staff do it just doesn’t make sense; they don’t have the perms, they’d need to earn crew’s trust, and they wouldn’t have access to the right info needed to help each player. Giving just another person this access and permissions is a major risk to the server, one that I don’t think we should take. All tickets get solved eventually, I think everything’s fine the way it is.

Perhaps if people were more clear, concise and polite in their tickets they’d get resolved quicker.

 

I agree with Sabrina’s points. It takes some time but Janice will get to them.

If you need a staff, maybe head mods can have access to them? I don’t think we need someone dedicated to support tickets. If Janice does need a hand, I think Head Mods are a great option as they’re trustworthy (getting to this position took a lot of time) and they probably have administrative permissions so yea. I’m neutral, I agree with Sabrina on every point but maybe Head Mods can have permission to handle tickets?

 

support, but maybe only allow head mods to help too.

 

That's why I think it should be limited to a select group, say head moderators or administrators who have been with the server for a long time (i.e. sando, matt). I'd actually go a step further and suggest that there should be more admins in general but that's another story. Support tickets are rarely handled by crew unless it's through email (he hasnt even been on the forums for two weeks and at a certain point he hadn't logged on for almost a year or two). it used to be only cyp doing them all on his own. With the volume of tickets, I don't think it should be the responsibility of Janice exclusively because she's got other things to do.

Support tickets have been an issue for years, and I have known some to take up to 6 months to resolve. It just does not make sense for such a difficult task to be taken on by one person. I just think it's a bad habit of crew to simply put the responsibility of the server on one person and then disappear; laissez faire leadership is basically worthless.