[smulan]

I'm one of the adventuregamers who preordered and payed for Gray Matter from the publisher Lace Mamba as early as in august last year. As a part to support the publishing of a new Jane Jensen game. The game is on the market since one month. Still I haven't got my copy. What's bothering me more is that Lace Mamba doesn't even answer my emails regarding this. Despite me presenting verification for the purchase. This is frustrating to say the least. And indeed bad if not inexistent customer service.

[rayvio]

I posted about similar issues here
while I did eventually get the game, they never replied to a single email or gave any contact at all. I gave up on trying to return it (since I'd already bought it elsewhere) and gifted it to a friend

[Fien]

Sounds familiar. Lace Mamba doesn't have a very good reputation. The same thing happened on a rather large scale with Machinarium.

[harald]

Yeah, I'm having problems too. Gray Matter took ages to arrive, although I did get an e-mail about that. Not sure how much was actually explained in it, though. I pre-ordered the Casebook Special Edition at the same time and still haven't received it. I will most definitely not get Edna & Harvey or Machinarium CE from them. ...dang.

[smulan]

Still no Gray Matter today, and still no replies to my e-mails.
Funny, they were very quick to draw the money from my account.
In august, last year.

[Weare6]

Originally Posted by smulan

Still no Gray Matter today, and still no replies to my e-mails.
Funny, they were very quick to draw the money from my account.
In august, last year.

HA! Typical Crap Customer service... Just don't buy anything from them
In fact if we all stop purchasing stuff through them I'm sure they will soon get the picture. Good customer service is rare these days.

[mart]

Tell them in your email that you can pose your questions on their Facebook page (mentioned on their site), but prefer e-mails.
After this message the problem was solved for me within a day.

[Fien]

Originally Posted by Weare6

In fact if we all stop purchasing stuff through them I'm sure they will soon get the picture. Good customer service is rare these days.

InteractCD.com offers excellent customer service. I've bought over 25 adventures from them and everything went smoothly. Very fast delivery: US to Holland within 5 days. Email is answered promptly, often within hours.

You're better off ordering Gray Matter and other adventures from them, even when you're not in the US. Their price, including shipping to Europe = $39.95 If you order from Mamba Lace you pay 27.20 British Pounds, which translates to $43.88.

[harald]

Originally Posted by Weare6

Good customer service is rare these days.

Is it, though? I usually get better service from sellers at ebay. I doubt that an on-line store that doesn't put priority in customer support can be successful for long. There is always competition.

Originally Posted by mart

Tell them in your email that you can pose your questions on their Facebook page (mentioned on their site), but prefer e-mails.
After this message the problem was solved for me within a day.

That's actually pretty clever, although sad that you had to resort to a trick like that.

[laffer]

Good customer service may be rare these days, but judging from what I've read in this thread, I do believe this company to be abnormally bad when it comes to this.

I haven't experienced such lousy customer service in as long as I can remember, maybe I've been very lucky?

[Gabe]

Originally Posted by smulan

Still no Gray Matter today, and still no replies to my e-mails.
Funny, they were very quick to draw the money from my account.
In august, last year.

Scandal,sue them get your many back and get compensation for months you wait for nothing.

[aimless]

Originally Posted by Fien

InteractCD.com offers excellent customer service. I've bought over 25 adventures from them and everything went smoothly. Very fast delivery: US to Holland within 5 days. Email is answered promptly, often within hours.

I second what Fien said. If you want a boxed copy of a game, you can't do better than ordering from Dave at Interact.

[LMG_Claas]

Hi everyone,
this is Claas from Lace Mamba Global. Jack Allin was so friendly to give us a heads-up on this thread, so I've been just made aware of what you are discussing here.
First of all, please accept my and our apologies for any inconvenience. It seems that there is some problem with our contact form, which we're working on now. For the time being, may I ask you to (re)send your emails, inquiries etc to [email protected] - and we'll take care to get everything sorted as fast as we can. Plus, we're happy to send you a free surprise gift as well, to at least make up some of the inconvenience you have experienced.

Please let us know if there's anything else we can help you with.

Apologies again, have a great day,

Claas

Claas Wolter
Head of PR & Marketing
Lace Mamba Global Ltd.

[mrLOL]

haha when things are public for potential customers to see things surely change, the amount of times I've heard the broken contact form or spam-filter excuse makes me wonder if someone seriously need to re-invent the email-technology from scratch as 80% of companies seems to suffer that problem

Anyway what annoys me with the OP's post is that he PRE-ORDERED it, this is extremely important for game-developers when ppl pre-order it as it means earlier funding for the last crunch of the game, and is something I'm planning on asking customers to do myself when my game is almost done, but thing is why would anyone pre-order these days when there's so many stories like this one.

[harald]

Well, when it comes to these things I suppose I'm one of the few who are willing to forgive and forget. If all this was because of an honest mistake, I don't see why I should judge too harshly, especially if I will receive compensation. Only speaking for myself here, of course - and I still have yet to see if matters will be resolved. Good luck to everyone who has had trouble.

[mart]

Come on, don't be apologetic and keep ranks please. I am with mrLol here. Perhaps people - after months - may be a bit cynical about the reply and what you are willing to consider as a "honest mistake?" It's a bit unlikely. Problems with a contact form??? What has answering emails to do with that? And: those who have (pre-)ordered can check their order. And if they can, Lace Mamba can do so as well. Only because of threads like this - and at Gameboomers as well – it seems they begin to move a bit.
Apparently, sorry to say so, this "Head of PR & Marketing" is doing a bad job. My very arrogant advice: don't state reasons in damage control mails like this, just state things have gone wrong and apologize. We are grown-ups, you know. Moreover: the info at your site is in certain respects also abominable (e.g. news section), so customers have to write about simple issues. What amazes me too is that in the reply it is revealed that Lace Mamba was informed by Jack Allin (not very charming to mention that, IMHO).

[rayvio]

I've sent an email, however that's the same email address I previously tried and recieved no reply

[smulan]

Well. I finally got an answer from LaceMamba with about the same content as the above message from Claas. I hope everything will go smooth from here.
Thanks for the moral support from all adventurefans of Adventuregamers site that certainly seems to have helped and hopefully LaceMamba will come to terms with their emailservers and whatever that didn't work. I'm loooking forward to playing Gray Matter.

[harald]

Originally Posted by mart

Come on, don't be apologetic and keep ranks please. Perhaps people - after months - may be a bit cynical about the reply and what you are willing to consider as a "honest mistake?" It's a bit unlikely. Problems with a contact form??? What has answering emails to do with that?

Well, no. I said I was speaking for myself. *I* see no reason to get abusive towards them. Anyone can make a mistake. And I was using the contact form on their site when I tried to contact them, so if that was broken somehow then it definitely has something to do with it.

Originally Posted by mart

And: those who have (pre-)ordered can check their order. And if they can, Lace Mamba can do so as well.

This, however, I agree with. I still haven't received any explanation for why they didn't send all my games, although they will apparently send me a free game for compensation. I'm guessing I got the same response as smulan did.

[mrLOL]

Originally Posted by smulan

Thanks for the moral support from all adventurefans of Adventuregamers site that certainly seems to have helped and hopefully LaceMamba will come to terms with their emailservers and whatever that didn't work. I'm loooking forward to playing Gray Matter.

All PR heads are subscribed to automatic google search-term so whenever someone writes "LaceMamba" and the google-bot finds it it will automatically send that to the PR head of that company,
THAT's why you get a reply when you ask here publicly.

keep in mind that this horrible contact-form excuse (which doesn't make sense, because if it was broken they would immidiately notice not getting any emails) doesn't explain why you don't have the game in the first place.