The current drama and issues surrounding Lost Ark can be boiled down to Amazon’s lack of investment in a robust customer service/support system. I get a sense that AGS support is too reliant/similar to the main Amazon support infrastructure, and you can see this because they seem to be using much of the same infrastructure, like using no-reply@amazon.com for their CS queries.
I do not know why this is the case, but I do know that reputational effects are a thing. AGS is not a monopoly in the video game market, and therefore consumer switching costs are low. Long term reputational harm will lead to consumers switching to other goods. There are so many games out there after all. This is quite unlike many companies with poor customer service like Comcast. Comcast for example does not need to care about reputational effects because it holds regional monopolies. Switching off Comcast can be prohibitively expensive for consumers - therefore the demand elasticity of reputation is low enough that it’s profit-maximizing for Comcast to not care about its poor customer service. However, AGS does not have this luxury.
I hope that AGS can convince whoever is actually calling the shots that they need more budget for customer service and support. Based on the argument I laid out above, which is well-documented in the economics/IO literature if one desires actual empirical evidence, it should be clear that it is in Amazon/AGS’s best interests to pour more money into a robust customer service/support system. The return on investment is probably much higher than most realize, and is not easily captured by conventional methods of data collection. After all, attrition due to bad customer service is hard to tease out as there is significant nonresponse bias in surveys asking why consumers are unsubscribing (and this is even harder as quitting Lost Ark does not require the user to visit any website to stop, unlike subscription-based MMOs). But long term reputational effects cannot be overstated and AGS needs a customer service system that works for video games.
Maximizing Amazon’s profit requires Amazon to spend more money in this area. This is honestly pretty straightforward economics. It’s in both the consumer and the firm’s best interests to improve in this area. I’ve seen so many products that are piss poor but sell like hotcakes because of the perceived strength in customer support (EVGA RTX cards for one). Lost Ark is a good product and it’ll do much better than those products if the customer support is adequate.