My TSB Experience / Unjailing yourself

ACes247

Full disclosure - I'm jailed, with no parole.....and it's awesome.

I don't want to disparage how upset some users are with GLU, so by all means please keep losing it on them if that's your thing.

For the new user (i.e. not a Canadian test monkey like myself), this is what happened:

1) The entire "beta" process was a disaster. The game was awful to start, and everyone that purchased endorsements had them wiped out. It took weeks to get those reinstated at lower levels than they should have been. The canned response was "we only have two customer service people working overseas, so we suck and we're sorry". Then they chopped the event rewards to slow people down.

2) When they added the Club Loyalty mess, their lackluster programmers made a mistake. When hitting the Team Upgrade button, as one would often do to improve, once you ran out of the copious amount of cash or gold and got to the "You have Insufficient Funds" notice, they still awarded you the loyalty points as if the upgrade went through. Uh oh. Now Glu is embarrassed because they suck at Customer Service AND Programming, and that's pretty much a mobile app company. Naturally, they jail everyone and say they "cheated". The issue is: the button we hit was incorrectly programmed, so there was no cheating. If you hit "upgrade" and the team upgrades, that's called "intended use". They are embarrassed at how bad they are, and covering up as best they can. Own your issues.

So here we are.

I was an avid TSB addict in previous years. I spent a lot of real money. The first reaction is getting upset if you've put money in. TRUST ME, YOU CAN GET THAT MONEY BACK.

Now, I should say if you read your TSB Terms and Conditions, they say that they can limit you license for no reason. That leaves you with little to do when they say "we programmed poorly, and won't let you play anymore as a result"....BUT, Apple Store is awesome. Dig up your iTunes receipt in your email and hit "Report A Problem". I had by TV Endorsement fully refunded, and just got my Stadium endorsement refunded as iTunes credit. Glu can stop you from playing, but they can't keep your money.

For all you jailbirds, do the following:

1) Get all your money back

2) Leave awful reviews in the app store for both this game, and the other Glu apps (make it sure to put in another 1 start review each time the app versions change). It's turned into a fun a copy-and-paste game while I'm imprisoned. FYI - Glu bet heavily on the Kardashians, and they're suffering for it. Any money you pay into this game goes into the Kardashians' pockets. That's possibly why they can't afford a Customer Service team, or talented programmers (maybe it's because they paid their former CEO $8.6Million two years ago).

3) Delete TSB and download a better game. I've been pushed to MLB 9Innings17 (which is awesome), but I'm also looking forward to MLB Perfect Inning Live. These apps actually work. It's a new experience for this old TSB user.

Quick suggestions for Glu and TSB:

- You lost $87.5Million as a company in 2016. Yikes. I see why the theme of 2017 has to be "cash grab". However your projected revenue is looking worse for 2017. Chances are this the last TSB version. Lighten up the monetization push, and go for more frequent and smaller spends (this has been mentioned several times, so I'm sure you'll ignore it). Not counting your player upgrades, it's over 600K in gold just to do your team upgrades from 85% and up. Serious?

- The worst part of your company is app reliability and customer service (sorry Blue, you're not the best). If I were wondering why things were falling apart I might be prone to look at whether there was one VP in charge of both IT and Customer Care. If there was one guy doing a terrible job at both, I'd likely send him back to selling server racks (sorry Dominic, you're not the best either).

- How did you mess up Fan Rewards? I literally only ever spent real money when Fan Rewards kicked in on a Friday. Instead they did a lame version the first weekend you sign up, and that's it! I asked their stellar Customer Service about it, and poor Asim said that the Fan Rewards were sporadic and tied to team progression. Well, having upgraded to Diamond - I never saw any Fan Rewards. Other members of my Club saw several. The only difference was that I had enough gold to buy them (so they didn't show up for me), but the others that didn't have enough gold had them pop up to bait a spend.  

On a positive note - the graphics did look great. Despite my griping Glu hasn't done anything "wrong", they just do everything poorly.

Now back to MLB 9Innings17. I love that you can choose one touch hitting or pitching or both. What an app!

Washedup

This is the all time best post!  Well said aces!  Look forward to seeing you on MLB.

kingduckbutter

Preach on!  I'm going to go leave a 1star review right now.