Locked out of two accounts, final attempt

[kalatehas]

I have nowhere else to write to.

So this is going to be a long one. But I have two active Runescape accounts. I've been a paying customer for ~15 years (on and off of course, addictions come and go).

I mistakenly used a OTP generator method that was local to my phone. (Boohoo, stupid me- people make mistakes)

That phone broke, battery exploded when I was at home with it, it broke everything in my phone, rendering it unusable and unfixable.

I have a new one now. Wierdly, if their 2FA would have offered backup codes I could keep them locally separate from my phone and this would have never happened.

I've tried their forms, but I only got 1 automated password reset email in response. The emails for disabling 2FA are not coming through. I think i am in some sort of spam list now.

Resetting my password is not much of use to me, as I already know my passwords, I have a password manager. I still changed it hoping that would disable the 2FA, no dice.

I tried this process with my main, but haven't on my secondary account, as it's useless to waste my time clicking on endless looping links.

One of their support articles cleverly says to complain in RuneScape forums, but how, when my account's 2FA is still enabled.

I've tried most of their forms and self-support. I get nothing.

I will not make a Twitter or Reddit or whatever account to complain there, I have already enough accounts as it is. Nor I will ever use OAUTH methods provided by Google or Facebook or whatever else. I dislike these services and they're not for me.

In my mind, a customer should have a choice to use whatever OTP method they please.

I know Yubikey question is out of their scope, nor I never hope to see that kind of method ever there. But this is not needed anyway. Providing backup codes would solve this issue and would not require a lot of technical development hours. The development overhead would be minimal.

Even if I won't ever get my accounts back at least hopefully someone from their staff will see this and do something to provide their paying customers with some sort of hope.

Anyone know if JaGex staff reads this? I would like to get in touch with them.

I have a couple of gripes like the rest of the internet as well (a cold honest gripe coming up)

They should seriously consider hiring a Support staff or some implementing some Zendesk-like feature. Living in the 2000's doesn't look good on a company's resume.

Having not enough money or staff isn't an excuse in my mind.
Someone mentioned in Reddit that they have only 32x staff
I've seen on YouTube they openly admitting that money is an issue in one of the Q/A for somekinda feature or development or whatever (does not matter what it was, its irrelevant to this discussion)

These problems stem from lacking customer support among other things that I won't discuss publicly in the risk of offending them somehow.

I have worked in many types of IT industries as a sysad. In govt, in a large tech giant and in a startup.

When I joined a startup there was only 8 of us. It was hard and tough but we just powered through these hard hours(years really). Now were a multinational company and we have over 100 employees.

How did this happen? Customers are kings! Never forget that.

According to Wikipedia JaGex as of today is 22 years old company, they should have SOME experience under their belt. And they have 337 people working there. Unsure how true it is, but I will take that a face value right now, unless proven wrong.

Anyway coming back to my point, JaGex, please take notice. Your'e bleeding paying customers left and right and right!

This might not happen tomorrow or in 5-10 years but eventually you(addressing you JaGex) will fade into irrelevance and the power vacuum will be filled with some other company who manages to understand that customers are the king.

If I ever get in touch with them I have many suggestions, but look at me here, trying to get my accounts back. I seriously doubt that my suggestions would mean anything, i guess thousands of people have tried to suggest them things, but thing's aren't moving.

(Besides the point) I'ts kinda like why I stopped using GOG and re-bought some of my games on Steam, and will continue buying here. They've been "in progress" for GNU/Linux client since 2015 I believe.

I felt that I was being treated like third-rate lowlife and I am too proud of a person for that. For that the reward is 0€ to them until I see some sort of GOG GNU/Linux client.

JaGex, I am not the only one who is considering never using your products in exchange for money. This is your last chance. At least. From me.

Love,
Dissapointed and angry customer

[Friendly]

Your best bet whether you wish to or not is probably reddit or twitter. I don't think Jagex really look at steam - I did see a few mod responses recently, but it's not the norm.

A word of advice, if you want a meaningful response keep it short and to the point. This isn't an easy read.

[SleipnirS]

Yeah, the customer service lottery from reddit is probably your only hope .. as sad as it sounds.

Not sure if that would work but, if you can still change your email, do it and see if those auth' reset emails are coming through? I guess you can always switch back to the original email but I don't know if you actually need a code for those operations.

[kalatehas]

Thanks for your responses.

Originally posted by Friendly:

Your best bet whether you wish to or not is probably reddit or twitter.

A word of advice, if you want a meaningful response keep it short and to the point. This isn't an easy read.

I'll keep that in mind, I'd rather create a Reddit account than Twitter.

Regarding my e-mails; nobody wishes to read poetry, keep it brief. Thanks for powering through it though The long text was just out of despiration.

Originally posted by SleipnirS:

Yeah, the customer service lottery from reddit is probably your only hope .. as sad as it sounds.

Not sure if that would work but, if you can still change your email, do it and see if those auth' reset emails are coming through

I can just generate 2 e-mail aliases and the MX record would already change, their system would believe it's a new email account. As a matter of fact that's an great idea, I can get rid of my throwaway gmail.

Thanks for your answers. I will ponder on it a bit before doing anything. I am on a brink of giving up and putting RuneScape behind me.

Nice to see that playerbase is caring enough. Gives me some hope.

[kalatehas]

Originally posted by Tommy Wiseau:

I doubt jagex checks steam, you would have more luck on the dead steam forums.

Man this is the best thing that has come out of this situation. Now I need to have his DVD's

[Histfire]

I see Jagex are as useless with account handling now as they were all the way back in 2008.

[Dre4M]

WinAuth or any other 2FA software that keeps data locally not in some kind of server or cloud.

I'm pretty sure there was pretty decent password manager / 2FA software for Linux, but cannot recall the name of it, tho it was possible to use it in Raspberry Pi so you could simply have RPi connected in your localnetwork and access from PC/Laptop/Phone if you needed to get it.

Phones are pretty fragile and if something happens to phone and you are using such app then yeah rip, no way to backup it... and that's only for a game, imagine what happens if you have e-bank app :D that's even more rip...

[kingjames488]

I still don't believe people are being banned this much accidentally... I'm sure it happens but no.

had to have been doing something fishy....

[kalatehas]

Originally posted by Khai-FX:

I see Jagex are as useless with account handling now as they were all the way back in 2008.

I personally remember from my experience that it was a lot better back in the Gower days. Membership was cheap as chips because dollar had basically no value(financial collapse and stuff) and I could e-mail them to get any kind of issue fixed. It took a lot of time but at least as paying customer, I could get support eventually. Had a place to write to without causing any drama in some kinda forum or social media.

But sadly it seems that Jagex is mostly employing edgy college students. There's no thing wrong with it, but they should be lead by people with a lot of life-experience.

Originally posted by Dre4M:

WinAuth or any other 2FA software that keeps data locally not in some kind of server or cloud.

I'm pretty sure there was pretty decent password manager / 2FA software for Linux, but cannot recall the name of it, tho it was possible to use it in Raspberry Pi so you could simply have RPi connected in your localnetwork and access from PC/Laptop/Phone if you needed to get it.

Phones are pretty fragile and if something happens to phone and you are using such app then yeah rip, no way to backup it... and that's only for a game, imagine what happens if you have e-bank app :D that's even more rip...

Yeah I use kpcli for password management on GNU/Linux and some sort of keepass derivative on phone. I used a GPL version of OTP generator, I should have researched if I could back up that token generator locally. I dobut it would work, as it would work against the feature of token generator in the first place. Need to look into a virtual environment for these OTP token generators, what can be backed up periodically to my own cloud.

Possibly Android in QEMU. I personally think that a Jagex customer should not have to do these things. To keep their data safe and not on some X tech giant's servers.

I lost my e-banking capabilites but we have this thing called SmartID on phone as well, but I can access it with my national ID which expired but will get this week. I can reroll my SmartID certificates once my new ID Card is issued. All of my dues are paid automogically anyway, I signed a 2-year contract for that.

Thank <insert entity here> that Runescape is just a click simulator and there's much more games for that! And the bonus is i dont have to give them my money for their fruitless efforts any more. I can use my money somewhere else, where I get treated like a human person being.

Originally posted by kingjames488:

I still don't believe people are being banned this much accidentally... I'm sure it happens but no.

had to have been doing something fishy....

I did not get banned per-se, just locked out because I lost my OTP generator with my phone exploding.

But still...Yeah the underlying issue is the same for any kind of mishap == no support.

[Jagex Light]

We aren't able to help with account related queries here - you can try tweeting the Player Support team on Twitter @JagexSupport.

I would have passed it on to the team to investigate if they can, but you haven't supplied your RSN in your original post unfortunately.