SmiteWorks USA Reviews (%countItem)
SmiteWorks USA Rating
Address: 1911 Sykes Creek Dr., Merritt Island, Florida, United States, 32953
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I have been a very happy customer of SmiteWorks main VTT product Fantasy Grounds for 3 years now. As a business they have always been very open and supportive. Any customer service issues were resolved quickly with no fuss. They have also fostered a vibrant and active community of users who develop new content for use with their software.
Thanks for your feedback and for your continued patronage.
Nice well rounded platform for the three games I am playing. Support was fairly quick the few times I emailed considering it's free. Switched licenses (monthly to permanent) with no issues myself.
The Fantasy Grounds product is obsolete by design. Intentionally large holes are left in the base code so that the Devs can charge microtransactions via additional 3rd party patches under various aliases. A few of them have actually been called out on this. The product promises rulesets and support for a number of titles, however under closer review, the rulesets are incompleted and calculated incorrectly. The automation that was promised as a design feature is wrong. Thus new users have to starch from scratch practically repairing the entire ruleset just to play or pay for several secondary transactions.
In every attempt by the community to correct the source code the Devs have thrown up massive roadblocks. A customer can point out an error, the simple solution, and a clean way to implement that solution, but they ultimately get dismissed so that the Devs can maintain their third party microtransaction fraud. This would not be an issue if the base product did not promise to provide the features that you have to pay extra for.
The fundamental problem is that the Devs have no interest in involving their community in the development of their product. That community is the largest untapped resource that would make Fantasy Grounds viable. However, anyone who proposed such concepts in their forums is met with hostility, anyone who strives to unite the community towards universal updates is kicked from the FG college, and anyone who disrupts the 3rd party microtransaction market by offering free alternatives is shunned from the application entirely. There are free downloads, however, without knowing which are Dev sponsored traps it is a virtual minefield of trying to help the community. Not to mention they have made it so difficult that only a fraction of the community can participate due to skill.
All in all, I have never seen a design team so hostile to their patron's needs or desires. Since the advent of FoundryVtt Fantasy Grounds has fallen into third place (out of 3) for viable Virtual Table Tops, and there are rumors that Tabletop Topia is Developing Wizards of the Coast titles which would push Fantasy Ground further down the list. Fantasy Grounds was predicated on filling a need that Roll20 failed to provide, but they are no longer the only Virtual Table Top striving to meet this need.
This user posted a series of unpopular opinions on our public forum with 250K users and was upset that he did not get the agreement he sought. This customer is very divisive and dismissive of other users of our platform and has been removed from multiple communities as a result. This customer was allowed to share his thoughts and concerns about our platform, but we make no guarantee that you will be welcomed with open arms by other customers when you start off with hostile and rude comments.
Here was a post he started and you can see pages of responses from community members and some from staff thanking him for his feedback and providing some insight.
Will not respond to canceling my subscription. Reached out 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and no response from the "24 hour" support email. I've reported them to the FTC as well.
Outstanding service. There was an issue that ended up placing a double order on my account (both sides seemed to have a problem, myself and the website) When the payments cleared the company actually refunded both of my orders, while still giving me the initial purchase I wanted.
Thanks for the nice words Bo!
There was an issue with my order (completely on my end), but it was fixed within twenty four hours.
Thank you Kira for the nice words.
David
Contacted the company due to a rather small issue that I had and I promptly got a response! Really makes me feel valued as a customer, along with their incredible social media presence.
Thanks for the nice words Irvin!
Quickly and graciously honored their 30 day satisfaction guarantee. All in all a fantastic company that I hope to deal with again in the future!
I had purchased an under-supported gaming system and was granted a refund immediately upon my request. Looking forward to working with them further.
So far I am very impressed by the product. I am probably not alone with turning to virtual tabletop for the first time as the Corona virus is shutting down half the known world. I did a little research and found a few options for tabletop gaming but it really came down to two major options. After talking to a few friends that have tried both and trying both the demos for myself I am confident I made the right call by going along with fantasy grounds.
My computer knowledge is very limited and the learning curve of fantasy grounds is kinda steep for me. However the many tutorials I have found on y*** and a few forums have been very helpful and I do like the step by step explanations that make it easy to follow along.
I have only written about ten reviews total in my life because to be honest, I don't have allot of free time (until recently it seems with the pandemic). I accidentally entered my email wrong the first time I tried to purchase a subscription pass and wrote an email asking for help with the situation. I played around with the demo program for about an hour more and figured that I wouldn't get a response for a few days at best so I decided to go ahead and buy the pass again but this time enter the right address.
Well I should have practiced more patience because not twenty minutes later I got a response and they corrected my first mistake. I explained in another email how I had purchased a second subscription and if they would refund me for the first and again I got a quick response. Most impressively, and the reason for this glowing review, is that I actually got a response from a human being in addition to a automatically generated letter.
I don't know about you but I hate call trees and any company still responding to individual inquires has my respect. I will stop my review now before it comes too long winded but in closing I am very happy with this product so far and the customer service I have received.
Thank you so much for the nice words Justin!
David
Fantastic product, and fantastic support!
I had bought the product four days before it went on a 40% sale. A bit of a bummer, but things like this happen. I had heard elsewhere that the company's support was excellent and responsive, so I thought I'd try emailing them and seeing if they'd allow me a partial refund of the difference between the full and sale price. I wasn't sure if it was possible, but I figured the worst they could say was "no".
Less than an hour later I get the partial refund notification from PayPal, shortly followed by their response. Amazing -- I was so impressed, I used the refund to immediately buy my wife an Ultimate License to their product as well, just in case she would want to run her own games in the future. 10/10, would (and probably will) buy again.
Thank you for your support. We were glad we could help you.
-Doug
Great customer care, I had purchased the incorrect product and had the issue resolved by customer care, within 24-hours of my email being sent (on a weekend as well). I'm excited for the new product that will be released later in the year!
Thanks Daniel. Happy gaming!
I had an issue with some purchases not showing up in the software stemming from my misunderstanding of how to access them rather than a problem with the software itself. I emailed customer support and they quickly got back to me and cleared up the misunderstanding! It was an awesome customer service experience and makes me feel pretty good about choosing Fantasy Grounds.
Thanks for letting us know. We are always happy to help.
Over all the product is solid, but I have concerns about their staff and moderators of their forums. Their cyber security is lax and they do the bare minimum. When addressing these issues all I hear are excuses.
We strongly disagree with this review. Our cyber security is very strong. It is an extremely bad idea to post detailed lists of all steps taken for cyber security online in a public forum.
Our main competitor had a very large data breach that exposed records for 4M+ subscribers. We have had zero data breaches since the company was founded in 2004. At the time that the data breach happened from our competitors site (not ours), we posted some details that are safe to publicly share. Our competitors (R***) customer information was sold on the Dark Web. Our customer's data was not. This is publicly verifiable.
By providing additional information that the reviewer requested that we share, we would in fact be weakening our cyber security posture. Reviewer seems to conflate cyber security for our operation with that of banks and other entities that hold sensitive information or PHI. As a career IT consultant prior to owning this company, I was the lead and often sole resource assigned to correct, plan and/or mitigate deficiencies in cyber security for a wide range of companies for securing health insurance information, financial information and other sensitive material. SmiteWorks does not hold any sensitive or protected information (mitigation) and employs numerous tactics and resources to secure and mitigate exposure for the limited information we do hold.
The reviewer posted his demands for disclosing sensitive information on a public forum that is used by many different IT professionals. They pointed him to our official public statement and overwhelmingly rejected his call for additional information as a bad idea. The reviewer is now writing a bad review against our company because we (and people in a public forum) strongly disagree with his ideas on what makes up a strong cyber security.
My comments still stand that I wrote before. Yes I did ask for details in depth, but I was trying to see what measures, if any, were being taken to protect "my information" from being breached. The answers I got were that "what are you afraid of" by these so called It professionals. I was not looking for the exact tools they use in the process, but what I was looking for was peace of mind. I did not get either. I was told that they use c*** to help protect information and that is used to protect their website from ddos attacks and does nothing to protect my information or my account I have with smiteworks from being manipulated or deleted. This raised more concerns for me. My reason for writing this review was to state their lack of professionalism when requesting peace of mind about using their product. I have spent a good amount of money on this product and just wanted to know what was being done to protect the investment I have made. The lack of professionalism while trying to seek answers to give me peace of mind was rude and extremely lacking. in addition, my information is important to me as well as my account with smite works. Seeking the truth of what is being done to protect my investment should not result in "what are you afraid of?", or get real, sorry but you need to get real." or even "Reading comprehension and context went right out the window there, didn't they. just like a lot of what you're saying in this thread. Enjoy your little bubble of virtual unreality, I am sure it's amazing!". When dealing with a business, I expect professionalism and this is not that. Also, I will not do what smiteworks reps said for me to do, unplug from the internet, what I will do though is keep informing people that smiteworks reps are unprofessional and are not willing to give me peace when it comes to my acount information.
You asked specifically for "Defense in depth please".
Here was the info from the post on the 3rd response:
"Just some food for thought here and to ease people's minds:
- Passwords are hashed in our system and we can't recover them, we can only reset/replace them
- Our system stores emails, forum posts, blogs and purchase history.
- Our system does not store any financial data for customers or customer addresses. Those are all offloaded to P and don't enter our system at all. Even monthly subscriptions are billed directly from P and not from our end.
- Steam handles all payment, financial and other information for customers on Steam. We only get enough info to link a purchase to an account here.
- We contract out to a firm to regularly review and patch our servers and we apply the latest forum software updates for the stable version we are working with
- We maintain and archive server access and error logs that we periodically review with our outside contractor
- We utilize C as an extra layer of protection on top for protection against a wide array of attacks
I do encourage people to use different passwords for different sites."
You then incorrectly stated that the post was from 11 years ago instead of from 5 months ago (immediately after Roll20's data breach was shared). You were antagonistic to the people on the thread who were helping you from the very beginning. You then went on to demand that we show a 5 year and 10 year plan for cyber security and that we are actively testing our software for specific vulnerabilities. You later added that we needed to "have a budget plan, training plan, hiring plan, talent recruitment plan, and resource allocation plans for cyber security that goes forward 5 years or more looking towards the what ifs and trends of the field, you are going to fall behind." This was on page 3 of a public forum and at that time people started posting things like "get real".
I encourage anyone who is concerned to read the full public exchange so they can draw their own conclusions.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?50467-Data-Breach/page2&highlight=data+breach
Once again, my comments still stand. I do encourage people to read the public forums and draw their own conclusions from it. As a paying client, I should be able to ask the questions concerning my account information. Not once did I ever use the word "demand" in any of my comments. All I want here is to know this company is doing everything they can,with industry standards in mind, to protect my account. Fantasy grounds allows users to post extensions, modules, and other files to a public forum for clients to use with their software. Are these files scanned for virus, malware, and or other cyber dangers? They openly state they need a certain port to be opened for people to use the product and post many work arounds for doing so. Is a this a danger? In addition, I did post a comment that was incorrect (11 years ago post) but edited minutes after I saw my mistake. No one is perfect, but if I make a mistake I go back and correct it. Using that in this conflict just shows the level of professionalism of the company here. I for one, have never been treated by a company like this for showing concerns about the security issues that may effect me in the future. If you do go and read the forums, you will see that a few, non reps, did agree with my comments. The mods/reps did lock the forum so that more people couldn't post their concerns as well. All of the comments or questions I posted in the forums are real concerns that everyone should be asking from this company and I truly hope they realize the level of unprofessionalism they are displaying, for paying clients. Without clients, they wouldn't have a company. This whole entire thing could have been avoided with professionalism, taking the time to make sure a paying client felt secure using their product, and taking responsibilty for their actions. I would ask for a full refund for any purchased content, but from what I have seen from this company and the level of professionalism it has, I doubt that is even a possibilty.
First-rate company. Support channels are always prompt and effective. Superb customer care. Quality products that each receive ongoing attention, development, and maintenance. This company sets a business standard for excellence in a number of key areas.
Thanks for the feedback.
The company is great! As a very small company with hundreds of users, they're very helpful and responsive. Even the developers who would normally not get involved, do.
Thanks Cody!
Wow, I've only needed customer service twice, but both times they have done a great job of resolving my issue. Both times the issue was of my making during the order process, and both times they painlessly fixed my error. Great job SmiteWorks!
Thanks for the feedback and for your support of our company.
Fantastic customer service, answered my e-mail request for help within a few hours and had a simple easy to follow solution for my issue (an order issue) that totally fixed the problem!
I love this company!
Thanks for the feedback.
I have been using F for about 8 months. Never before have I experienced support as good as that of SmiteWorks. The company presidents are active and engaged with their user community through their Forums/Wiki, F Fridays, and email when needed. They were all over the FGU Kickstarter Forum patiently answering many of the same questions over and over. I had a problem (missed email?) with fulfillment from the Kickstarter and they fixed the problem as soon as they learned about it. To me, these guys are the gold standard for caring about their customers.
I had a concern about my upgrade that was purchased via K. I explained the issue via email and received a reply within 24 hours that completely resolved my issue. It's a testament to this company's product that I've never had to contact customer support over the 3+ years since I've been a customer. I'm very glad to find that the customer support lives up to the products good reputation.
Thanks for your feedback and for supporting us as a customer.