Yes I read what you posted. You are clearly the one who was confused. Unfortunately for Global, the first couple of service reps did not understand what happened.

If you have been playing online as long as you have claimed, you should be familiar with synchronized breaks as well as knowing what the last level of blinds are before the Add-on break.

Instead of berating people trying to help.you, maybe listen to what they say instead of automatically accusing them of not understanding because they are not sympathetic to your problem.

Why do you think Global owes you anything here?

I only had one issue with Global years ago, I was in a $1 SnG and the site crashed and I was not refunded the $1, even after contacting customer support. My initial buy in was SC 20 and if I recall correctly my bankroll at the time was around SC 25 so at that time the SC 1 was significant to my bankroll. They did however offer me a bonus, if I bought x amount of Gold coins for $10, they would credit me with 20 SC. That was almost 10x the amount that was in question so I took the bonus and forgot about the 1SC.

It is unfortunate that you do not want to play at Global over a minor issue that was not their fault.

Indeed. It is just a floor. For example having a team that has played the game, they would all know immediately what synchronized breaks mean and how it affects players and tournaments. Of course you want problem solvers who can help with any and all problems. That requires not only a team who is capable and motivated but also a bridge to escalate bigger issues to other departments and higher up's. When I worked on a team that was world wide we also all required to be logged in to Discord so we could bounce questions off each other and help one another. Usually someone would know and in the rare case no one did it could get escalated. In any case I am glad it is on your radar and are working to get better. Building a world class customer service team is rare and would really set global poker apart.

So .. thanks .... it's reading comprehension you lack. Not going to revisit something you seem to completely fail to apply any critical thinking skills to except to point out it was 100% their fault. The problem is solved now I know. We may disagree on that but in all the years I played PS before black friday they never had synchronized breaks at least that I remember. Probably a reason for that. If they did I guarantee it was listed in the blind structure table and they took care not to put breaks in the middle of levels. I played tons of small MTT for entertainment and won many until they took everyones money. Never did see a refund. Maybe they have them now. Guess I will find out.

Yes it's a minor thing. That's the point. That was the whole point of this thread which you again seem to be unable to grasp If they can't handle a minor issue with grace and a simple trivial refund even after it takes you 6 not 2 reps to understand it ... if for no other reason than goodwill ... Why would I invest my time in a site and believe that they would be able to deal with any issue of significance? Especially when even the CS liason even says basically yeah we have issues. Sorry.

I get it. You've obviously invested years on the site according to you. Some time hard to see the forest for the trees. You really thought the appropriate response to a no brainer server crash refund my buy-in is gone and I didn't get to play is ooh really I can give you even more real money for even more chips! Seriously that has me in stitches.

Chips dumped moving on. Nothing left to say really and we all know there are better run sites with less gimmicks and more credibility.

Thanks to all that contributed and confirmed YES CS at Global really is this bad.

Moving on.

Sync breaks have been a thing basically everywhere (except Global until recently) for many many years. lol I could be mistaken on this but I believe it was even Pokerstars that first introduced them.

You do come off looking foolish a bit, sorry man. Essentially, you'd no idea what's going on, so although everything worked properly you didn't understand that so it's all Global's fault. And anyone who's tried to point this out to you is automatically branded some Global shill, which makes you look even more foolish imo.

In fairness, Global's front line support is at times mystifying in the responses they give. The responses you got were filled with pleasantly surprising relevant detail. I will grant you, they should have probably identified that the nature of your confusion was not understanding the sync break component and explained that to you. I agree that process (and front line support in general) can be improved on for sure. But also to be fair, coming in here and mud slinging, when the entire situation was created by you having no idea what's going on... and then continuing to mud sling once you understand the confusion was yours, well you could improve your own process as well. Your response is it was everyone elses fault and anyone who pointed that out is just a global shill. lol

I will add this about the sync breaks coming to global. It was rolled out without communication to the masses via email. They did beta test it in gold coins for a few weeks, and annoucned it on their discord, but imho they should have emailed their entire base, at least included in the Friday marketing email, about sync breaks being released, what they are and how they will be handled. I understand sync breaks are so entrenced in the online poker world now (and has been for years) that they probably just assumed players know what they are and how they work. While that's true in most cases, as evidenced by this OP that's not 100% the case, and I'm certain OP isn't the only one who isn't familiar with the sync break concept. Basically anyone who's not played online poker for the past decade and has now found global will be unfamiliar with them. More communication/education to the player base would have been good. Also I think it would make sense to add a standard 1 liner to the tournament lobby descriptions that says "All tournaments and satellites will have a 5 minute break at :55 past the hour" so it's clear to new players that find their way to the site.

Full Tilt introduced them in May 2009.
PokerStars introduced them in August 2009.

Good feedback. We can always do better. To be honest, we didn't want to make a big song and dance because (a) we rolled it out slowly, tourney by tourney and (b) there was some worry it would cause some unintended issues or edge cases, so we might have to roll back.

Fair. It's a bit of a double edged sword I suppose. There were players at the SC tables asking what was going on once the sync breaks were rolled out fully, and there was some level of confusion about them.

I do think it would be prudent to add a line to the lobbies now to the effect of "This event will go on break at :55 past the hour". The OPs assertion this should be built in to the blinds tab structure isn't practical obv with tournaments starting at a variety of times and the structures in the Blinds tab being standardized... but probably a good idea to add the note there as well. Perhaps right after where it says "Starting Stack: XXXX" the note about this event will go on break at :55 past the hour would help alleviate further confusion going forward.

It is very childish the way you attack everyone who tried to explain what happened here, even those who initially were being nice.

Global does NOT owe you anything!

The most likely reason Global did not understand what happened initially is your poor writing ability.

It is a shame I won't find you on Global anymore because you are no doubt an easy opponent bat the poker tables.

Dunning-Kruger is strong with you.

PS, I have invested $30 with Global, not a penny more.

David, this response makes me so completely tilted. And I say this is a player but is someone who back in the day was a product manager for a medium sized European face excite and rolled out sync breaks on his watch in 2012 (we were a little late to that party).

Saying we don't want to make a big deal about it but yet failing your customers and doing so is not acceptable. Again I speak to someone who's been there, and I knew back when, despite being a relatively crappy product manager, that communication was super really important. Not just the players but with internal departments.

Okay, so in a soft roll out that you did, that works fine as long as the tournament team is told to properly put explanations in a tournament's lobby and messaging that that tournament is subject to sync breaks. I saw a few of those at the beginning and it appears like they did. However once it went wide, where was the announcement to all players? Where was the adjustment to wordings in the lobby of tournaments? Where was he doesn't rewarding of the break announcements etc? again, I was a crappy product manager which is why I don't do it anymore, but I do know that at least I made damn sure that everybody who needed to know that a major change was happening knew!

Or more simply put, when the sink breaks when wide instead of soft, who screwed up and didn't make the choice to message the players change all the lobbies and change all of the break announcements? And if anyone wonders to you how do you do that, well I just invite them to go log into the PokerStars client and see what they do because PokerStars will forever be the gold standard of how **** gets done. I don't have the screenshots on hand at the moment but their lobbies make explicitly clear when brakes start and what types of brakes they are and when the revising add-ons and etcetera etcetera... There's truly no way to get confused with them.

Unrelated to your quote above I want to respond to the gist of your responses in this thread. You're asking for an allowance on building up a knowledge base in customer service. Well I got to call BS on that. if by knowledge base you mean a computer system where people can punch in a question and get back typical ways to respond to a customer, well yes it does take some time to add to that knowledge base. However, using sync breaks as an example, if there wasn't a knowledge base article written day one that any sync breaks or even in a soft rollout tournament, keyworded for #tournamentbreaks, then you're doing it wrong. Also while you don't have to make a big deal of a soft roll out in terms of player communication, it is incumbent on making it a big deal internally, so that if there is a question about it, especially given that it's a new subject, it's fairly likely that a customer service agent will find the proper response. So don't just add to the knowledge base but send a flash bulletin to your rep saying hey there may be issues with this because we've just released it.

It is truly maddening that by saying that you need time to build up a knowledge base you are effectively shifting the burden of your internal people knowing what's up on to the customers. In this case you're saying that you guys were slow on the ball for building up the knowledge base, you didn't properly communicate to the players, it wasn't clear in the client,... And never even offered the guy a refund for his measly seven bucks or whatever it was on a brand new feature. Beyond words seriously.

Additionally, your agents are not only unfamiliar with poker, but they aren't familiar with reading comprehension. As to the poker knowledge, you don't need to hire people that no poker as long as you have some number of people in your customer service group who do no poker and can help out others when there's a question of poker expertise involved. That said, it is very important that you teach all those people something about not only poker but the way your games work.

By the way my own example, we would have internal play chip tournaments in the offices once a month just for staff and we'd give like a $20 gift certificate in a silly trophy to the winner.we didn't do that just cuz it was fun, but because it let everybody have the opportunity to actually play the game and get some exposure to it. Also, when there was a new feature rolling out I would do demonstrations for at least the higher level folks customer service who could then pass on the knowledge to others, or even record videos over screenshots showing exactly what had changed and why so that we wouldn't have these sorts of problems. again, I'm not saying I'm God's gift product managers by any means but I do know that if people don't have information or knowledge they can't possibly help someone else.

Lastly, as I mentioned it's not just knowledge but competence I offer this. your folks on a regular basis when explicit simple questions respond with answers that have nothing to do with the original question. for example, I was wondering how long it was taking them to process sweeps coin requests these days, so I sent a email that said basically "hey global, can you tell me on average what your service standard is these days for the processing our sweeps coins requests? I've mailed a bunch of envelopes and trying to figure out when they might finally get adjudicated."

The response was basically "we're sorry that all your your requests have not been processed yet but we can nowhere guarantee that all the things you sent in the mail show up at the same time because that's up to the carrier".

call me crazy but I'm pretty sure their answer had nothing to do with my question. I didn't say hey you process some but not all of my requests. in fact I didn't ask them anything about my request in particular. I just asked what the freaking service time standard was.

I eventually got an answer that said something like 3 weeks, which turned out to be complete bullshit. now the reason I say it's completely bullshit is that in another series of emails and a lengthy thread I had said to customer service, "hey I'm glad that my 45 envelope requests were processed but can you tell me, since that's not all the things I've ever mailed, what is the receipt date that you finish processing requests through?"

Again, like eight emails later I discovered that the reason they say things like "We have received all rocessed all requests received by February 4th" (hypothetical date) when anyone will common sense would know that it's a horseshit answer... Is because customer service says the February 4th date because it's everything that the customer service department that processes the official postings of those that request has received. However once again, any normal person on this planet knows that when you ask a company hey what's the received date You're talking about the date the company got the stuff in the mail. And the geniuses and customer service when they say that February 4th they are ignoring all the time it takes from the time it hits the post office box until it's finished being scanned and sent in bulk batches over to the customer service department.

A bit of a rant here, I apologize but rather it it's frankly maddening. People either don't read what you ask, or they try and be a hero by answering something they don't understand, or they don't understand the knowledge base, or they don't have any common sense and whatsoever and think that a received by date means when did their department get it and not when did global get it since global has a whole other department before that department.

I'm happy to provide links to you in p.m. to multiple different email threads where I've asked a simple question got in a wrong response or a a response that has nothing to do with my initial question etc, and then showing that I have to literally write a doctoral thesis explaining how they don't know what the heck they're talking about and that I'd appreciate an answer to a simple question.

It strikes me that, on to the assumption you are sincere in your responses to us, you are not aware of just how poor many responses are coming out of that customer service group. Not to mention that giving all those terrible answers costs you money because it costs you more and more and more support time just to answer the consistent stream of stuff coming back in for needed clarification.

End rant. Hope you take me up on my offer.

Cool. We have something in common. 2012 I think WPN launched 'em, but they are not European. Maybe we know each other?

We're hiring in the product team right now too: https://www.vgw.co/careers/?gh_jid=5040783002

Absolutely.

Agreed, and perhaps this could be even clearer.

I've explained why this was not done.

You want to know who? Buck more or less stops with me, so feel free to blame me for that. However bear in mind we have had very very little confusion or queries about the new break cadences; you'd know with your experience that this is the acid test for any changed feature.

Myself and every member of the poker room team are all ex-Stars.

You think it was like this on day 1? It was not.

No, of course the CS team are fully briefed on the feature. Every one of them.

What they cannot anticipate is every type of query or misunderstanding created by a new feature. You can have all the responses templated, but when some special unique player has a particularly unique query you cannot anticipate that. Every single week I get a report of the most asked questions, most queried features, etc and synched breaks has never appeared on it. OPs particular confusion is - it seems - pretty unique.

OK maybe ignore above link.

On this of course we agree.

Nothing to add here.

Lots of improvement needed in this area, we agree.

David I sent you PM the customer service has been dreadful with me im trying to get my bank info registered and no one seems to help me just giving me the run around ive sent them numerous documents. my username is Sirbustalotz if that helps.