EA Staff (Retired)
This could be very easily a UX issue. Perhaps it looks like one has joined but it requires further confirmation or clicks. The fact that there is no log evidence does not mean that the problem is not happening. If the interface is confusing that is still a game issue. The devs should look into this, because too many people are reporting this. Proper customer service would be to take these reports at face value and not put the burden on proof on dedicated players that are simply frustrated by missing one of the most rewarding events. If you can't reproduce the issue despite numerous reports from players all over the world, either you are looking in the wrong place or not trying hard enough.
There have been many threads discussing these similar issues, and the customer service feedback has always been the same: take the report at face value and investigate.
Given four conditions that I have observed:
1) The number of reports of this is very small compared to the total # of players
2) Every investigation has resulted in a conclusion that the players never joined
3) Every player who has come here and complained has begun scrutinizing their "join" and never had a recurrence.
4) I have asked multiple alliances to similarly scrutinize their guild sign-ups, and we have observed 0 instances.
The conclusion via Occam's Razor is therefore that each of these occurrences is actually operator error - the player likely forgot, or misclicked. (I think that the grayed out "Join" button is a likely contributor to tricking players into believing they have joined)
So the Developers can either spend a bunch of time and resource hunting down a bug that may or may not exist - or they can continue focusing their resources on game improvements and confirmed bugs & issues.
I *believe* that the possibility certainly exists that the Player Client and Server got out of sync - but so far it's just a theory because there is 0 evidence to support the theory. That's what the screenshot request is for in the original post - it would provide evidence to support that theory, which could drive Dev resources to work on it.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Let me offer some counterarguments:
1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This problem could be greatly underreported simply due to the fact that it is difficult to be sure that the join went through and a lot of people simply don't bother reporting issues. Additionally, this logic only further aggravates the frustration of the dedicated players who invest a lot of time in the game and actually do care enough to report the issue.
2,3, and 4: If, as it seems, you have concluded (and I actually agree) that the user interface is confusing and results in some players missing out in events, that seems like a design issue to me rather than user error, and should be addressed.
If this issue is considered too low impact to fix, which again is arguable since it clearly affects dedicated players, who are essential to the success and longevity of the game, at the very least it should be flagged as a known problem and documented so people can avoid running into it.
The way the bug report is currently documented is confusing and not helpful.
