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PlayFab Support Overview - Now with Indie Support

Cross-posting from the blog.

PlayFab Support Overview

Hi, I’m Andy and I lead PlayFab’s developer support team. I wanted to take a moment to review the different ways in which developers can engage with our support team and find solutions to the problems they face. Astute observers may have noticed some subtle changes in the way things are being handled over the last year. For starters, it’s not just Brendan now! Below, I’ll outline the various options, how they should be used, and what to expect.

Ticketed Support

This is the area that has undergone the most change and I’m very happy with where we’ve landed. Gone are the days of sending an email to an inbox and hoping to get a response sometime in the next 2 days. We’ve connected PlayFab with Microsoft Support and now have a team of engineers across multiple continents able to provide private support 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. (We’re working on the other 2.)

To access this support channel, we’ve created a new form in Game Manager under (?) > Contact Us. Currently the form automatically tells us which title you’re contacting us about and allows you to include any useful information and attachments. In the future, you’ll also be able to see the history of tickets submitted for your title. Ticketed support is available for our Indie, Pro, and Enterprise tier customers. We see it as one of the core value additions of moving up from the free tier.

Since this is new, your feedback is going to be crucial in helping us shape the service we’re providing to meet your needs. After every ticket submission is closed, you’ll receive a very brief survey regarding your satisfaction with the support you were provided. Filling that out will help us determine how we continue to develop our support team and options.

Public Support

The two ways of obtaining technical help that every single one of our customers can utilize are our community forums and our public documentation. For more about that documentation and the set of changes and improvements it’s undergoing, take a look at this blog post. We’re trying to turn the new docs portal into a great resource for both new and experienced PlayFab developers, where everyone can contribute feedback and more.

Our community forums haven’t moved and continue to be a great place to go to ask a question, report something you think might be a bug, or suggest a new feature. We’ve increased the number of engineers from the support team that are actively reading your questions and providing answers. Our goal is that every question is answered to your satisfaction within about one business day. We also like that the forums are a place where you can search for past answers to your questions or even chime in with an answer to someone else’s question.

In case you were wondering, our community Slack workspace will continue to exist and will remain a great way for members of the community to stay connected and talk about how they’re using PlayFab in their games. Please do keep in mind, though, that we don’t consider it a formal way of requesting support. Many members of the PlayFab team will engage in conversations, but there’s no dedicated set of people whose job it is to monitor the community there. If you’d like an invitation, you can request one here.

Non-technical Support

Sometimes you’re having trouble logging in or you need to discuss your recent bill with someone. In those cases, ticketed support and forums are either not available or not a good option. For these non-technical cases, we have a form on our Contact page that allows you to submit Login or Billing issues. These questions will be routed to our account management team, who will be able to assist you. Please be aware that this method is not to be used for submitting technical support questions. If we do see technical questions show up via that form, they will likely be ignored. For technical support, please use one of the other options.

Enterprise Support

Very little is changing with the way we support our Enterprise customers. You will need to start using the ticketing system built into Game Manager for any issues as they arise. This is instead of the direct emails you might have sent in the past. We’ll continue to have private Slack channels (or Microsoft Teams!) that you can use to discuss things directly with the PlayFab team. You’ll also continue to be able to report emergency issues that require very quick turnaround. If you’re an Enterprise customer and you have concerns regarding any of these changes, please reach out to Brendan or me.

What’s happening to email support?

As part of the change to the ticketing system, we’ll be deprecating direct email support. You’ll notice an auto-response show up soon for any new email submissions. That response will encourage you to use the new system to prevent potential delays in turnaround. Eventually, once we’ve sufficiently spread the word and removed any stubborn links that remain scattered across our sites, we’ll turn off the email-based support entirely.

Our goal continues to be providing all our customers with the level of support they require for shipping great games on our platform. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the support options outlined here, please let us know on our forums. We would be happy to discuss and take feedback!

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Andy avatar image Andy ♦♦ commented ·

I wanted to bump this for folks and let them know that we recently opened up ticketed support for Indie tier customers. If you have an issue that you think needs one of our engineer's attention, open up game manager and send it our way.

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