You know it never used to be like this. A few years back GM's responded to pages and actuality tried to help. Anyone remember the advanced char service when it first came out? A GM would have to come and do the char manually, back then you actually saw GM's in game. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a GM in game. I know there invisible. But every now and then you would see one at a house helping a citizen. In this case it probably would have been easy to move the packies to the transferred shard and been done with it. This is truly sad.
I used to be a lead GM for a online game and we never responded to paying customers with canned responses and terrible service, because when you did subscriptions tended to suffer in the end.
I know exactly what you mean. When I was first making a tamer, back before soul stones... I had a GM mage with like 80ish inscription on my account, and I had no room for another character.. So I decided that I'd just add taming to his template. Well, after a few weeks of the torture that is taming, I decided it'd be easier to just totally remake the character and buy an advanced tamer char to replace him. And sure enough, a GM showed up in the pixles and made my char up for me from scratch. I didn't get the inscription or magery back of course, but it was still a great experience. It showed an extra level of appreciation that while maybe I didn't expect, I did feel I deserved for paying $20 on top of my subscription fee's for a few starter skill points.
When I came back to UO a few weeks ago, one of my characters was stuck in a portion of New Haven-- Where the Inn used to be in Old Haven. Its apparently a barricaded off area now. So I hit the "Help" option, ready to select the little Minoc or Britain button on the tele gump... And it actually makes me go through a full-out page.
Well, 45 minutes later, I'm still standing around in an area with absolutely no way out. This character didn't have any form of recall on him, as his runebooks were out of charges. So I log into another character figuring I may actually have to delete him since I can't get customer service.
Well, about an hour after that, a GM contacts me saying he can fix my character now. I told him I was in the middle of something just then, but would be able to hop back on the character in about 10 minutes. Well, I did, and it seems he fixed it without me having to change characters at all... But then I got a email for that standard feedback survey, and it said "The help option is not a free teleportation service. Please do not use it if you are not genuinely stuck." After the poor service time I got, the last thing I expected was to have the validity of my page questioned.
I've never done a character transfer, but I can say that for you to spend money above and beyond your subscription fee's, EA should offer that extra level of support as a courtesy like they used to. It seems its missing in action these days.
