I mean, doesn't "support" by definition entail some sort of aid?

I see page upon page of people having issues staying unanswered.

Serious issues.

Gamebreaking ones.

We get no answers to our questions.

We hear no progress on the bugfixing.

We see no interest at all from the developers.

So what is the point of this page?

Some symbolic wailing wall where we can ask questions to...nothing and no one?

Seriously, how hard can it be?

Simply talk to us. You fans. Your customers.

We simply want to be informed.

And keeping a support page you just ignore, I interpret as pure arrogance.

I second that... Hear hear...

The developers are watching, but here's what makes stuff difficult for them:

The people on this forum.

There are about 30, if not more topics alone on "game crashes on startup".... instead of going into an existing topic and posting in there, so the devs know where to look (because huge threads)

Then, for the usual bugs there is the community itself. "We" try and help each other. Has been (to me) since F3, and hopefully will continue into the future.

The devs occasionally pop up their heads. Maybe not as often as YOU would like, but they can read without replying can't they? Sure, being informed is one thing, but don't expect a dev to come online just for every John and Jane Doe's question. This will take time, effort and money. Personally, I'd rather they spend that on actually fixing the problems, or better yet, focus on Fallout 4.

Basically this is just tea and a cookie at about 1530h. It's just there to keep people sane until diner arrives.

Yes, there are many topics. And in no way do I expect them to answer any individual post. That is unreasonable.

What I expect them to do, is what most other game developers do.

They keep their fans/customers posted.

One single post stickied on the top is enough. Simply what bugs they are prioritizing and how they are progressing.

That's it. And when the tiniest indie-developers are capable of doing this, so should Bethesda.

That we try to help eachother is not something I take for granted. Fans of the Fallout series have been helping eachother since the very beginning. I used to help classmates patch and mod Fallout 1 when it was released. While this is good, it is not a replacement for communication with the devs. And if the devs are not able, which I can understand. Delegate the communication to an admin.

It is not that hard.

I can somewhat agree to your last point, as I mentioned above. Even though their work on F4 is irrelevant in this situation.

I suspect it's not the same team doing both games.

You make a lot of valid points, and none of what I'm saying herein is meant to come across in anything but a friendly counterpoint, but: the throwaway "work on Fallout 4" comment sort of disregards the fact that this is a forum about Fallout Shelter, in which people are voicing problems with a product/service into which they've paid. I personally enjoyed Fallout Shelter, and chose to periodically reward the system with my money as I saw fit. Then it stopped working, and I'm left wondering if my save file is busted and I'm suddenly out of all that money invested with nothing to show for it.


The recent bug has seen a lot of people lose a lot of money, so to put the emphasis on another product that will also cost money without properly addressing us on this one is, It needs to be pointed out, hostile to a healthy consumer-producer relationship. I'm not saying Bethesda is guilty of this yet, and I want to have faith that those of us who paid into the game will either be reimbursed, have the lunchboxes carry over for when the game is inevitably fixed, or somehow have the original files recovered (though this last one seems highly unlikely for most cases). There are numerous interviews and reports about the financial success of Shelter, so it's not unreasonable to think a good chunk of that money should go back to maintenance and support since it's an ongoing-transaction sort of structure.


Moreover, a lack of a sticky here or some kinda public word from the team in almost a fortnight since these game-breaking bugs were announced also makes current users who have yet to encounter the problem more at risk of paying into something that may crash and leave them feeling swindled. I didn't go looking information for the slew of similar bugs until it happened to me (and I had just treated myself to a pack of lunchboxes only an hour before the fatal crash in which I seem to have lost everything), so Bethesda giving a response to its consumer base via here or elsewhere ("Heads up, errors x and y have been reported, so hold off on spending monies, but were working on it all the same") would look a lot more user-friendly.

Well I'm not even able to post a topic here so I can't even POST my problem which is a big one and no one else seems to have so yeah this is kind of a crappy 'support' area. the 'forum" tells em I do not have privileges to post a new topic here which is kinda the whole POINT of a forum. I LOVE this game but seriously, if you can;t get the damn forum right you REALLY need to take a look at your programming skills. I'd like very much to post my problem and have someone help me fix it but that doesn't seem possible for me, so again. 'support' has to be taken with a grain of salt here.

I have to revise my opinion. You are right, they could put up a sticky or something. I just didn't see that because I'm a bit of a F-really devoted fan (since F3..)

However, I'm currently butchering away at a very long savegame, to see if I can find the error in there that caused the "after 45 seconds crash"..

I'm not a programmer so this will probably take a while, but hereby: I'll keep you posted Praise the community, thank Atom!

Good stuff. For the State of Utobitha!

More people will download Fallout Shelter than will play Fallout 4, and while there's an overlap of players, there will be many, many people who only play the mobile game. Hell, it's one of the only games I've found on mobile that I actually like. If they give it just a little more content, and fix the major bugs, it could be the best game in the Google Play store.

Same here! I have no answers received :/ Also haven't found anything similar to my problem

And the bugs I found are still present.

This game is riddled with game breaking bugs and still has microtransactions. Even if the devs just make a thread that only they could edit and just said "we are aware and working on the following:" then that would be better than the complete silence we're getting now. These are support forums where no one feels like they're getting support. I was luckily about to spend more before the game started failing me every day and my explorers no longer collect anything. (and no, I didn't change my clock time) This game is pretty much sitting here extremely broken for a long period of time, and clearly some people like the concept of the game, they just can't play it... because once again, its broken. No one wants to start over after they spent money, and the fact that we can't back up our save and reinstall is a major road block to people fixing their own problems. What are we to do?

I was gonna say "you're wrong" but that just didn't seem to cut it.

If you want a refund because you didn't receive what you purchased or your savegame is corrupt, follow the trail Bethesda and Google left you, you'll end up here:

Thinking of "we need a fix" gets me riled up easily. Objectively though, looking at numbers, there is only a very small percentage of users that have a corrupt savegame or have errors otherwise. Giving those people their money back is probably a more cost-effective way to deal with the situation currently. Therefore, "threatening" Bethesda to not play it might be considered a calculated risk they are willing to take.

NOTE: That is my personal opinion on the situation as it is, I have no sources to back up that claim in this occasion, other than looking at history and economics.

This should help you a bit... have a nice day!

I completely agree. This is supposed to be a support forums, but it doesn't appear that anyone is getting any support. Like a lot of people it would be nice for them to at least let us know that their aware of the problem and that they are currently working on a fix, but nothing so I guess we'll be left in the dark...

I doubt the amount of players who need a fix is small. Its not like EVERYONE who play a game is a member on the forums. Most of the others could have just simply quit, cause that's what happens. Normally I never go to the forums for anything, but I was hoping to find some answers. But, now I have to risk my save data because there has been no patch in weeks, and the game IS RIDDLED WITH BUGS. Have you looked through these support forums or are you just functioning as an apologist? Its not just me, its not just the people on these forums. The game is broken, and I think its wrong personally for a game so broken to have microtransactions. That's my opinion.

Actually, you know what? Anyone have a trainer or hack for this game? Seriously, from what I understand, the issue in my game isn't a bug, its some sort of anti-cheat mechanism in the game, but it clearly went nuts. I never adjust my time, I have a job where I need my phone to have accurate time all the time, and I honestly never even thought of doing it to begin with. But I need something that turns off whatever switch in the game tells it to no longer collect caps or fight monsters while exploring and whatever is giving me 0% every day for my grade despite my base being at 90% every day. If you have something like that, where can I get it. Otherwise they need to patch their busted game. I don't want to cheat, but apparently at this point I have no choice. Data needs to be altered by force unless submitting a ticket can somehow fix the code inside the game which I doubt, but if it can, let me know that too.

I had a corrupt save game so I now back it up to my Google Drive account every couple of days. It would be nice if the game had this option on exit and saved each backup to a different name.

A couple of things that I noticed:

1. There are no log files. There is a folder for it, but it's empty. This would go a long way to resolving issues if users could sent this info in with the support ticket.

2. When the game crashes, the typical "Sorry, this app has crashed. Would you like to send a report?" popup never appears. This would also resolve a lot of issues as precise information would be sent instead of anecdotal info.

Sorry about the lock. Being in a hurry led me to a mistake. I've reopened the thread and thanks to the member who let me know.

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Please know that this forum is the main source for developers to identify and work on any issues they see here that they are able to duplicate. Every patch we get for our game is a result of all of you posting here.

So while they may not be able to help you here in the forum, they are reading and responding by working on patching the major issues reported here.

As for us moderators, we are just playing the game just as you are.

Actually I don't necessary need to hear from a developer. Sure the developers fix the bug but Customer service is the ones who smooth over ruffled feathers. Glitches happen in everything. I'm having the same issues game was working fine yesterday. Crashed on me 3 times today in the middle of the game and now can't get it to load at all. I've contacted Goggle for my refund of the Mr Handy's I purchased with the sell price. A support ticket with a real response from a CS rep would go along way in spreading good will. Most reputable companies have customer service because they know that bad news spreads 100 times faster and farther then good news. I'm going to reinstall the game and see if that works but I'm going to think twice at least before I make an in game purchase from the game again and that is simply because Bethesda doesn't seem to have a good CS system. I've looked on the forums to try and get my problem fixed and all I see is people having the same problem with no response from Bethesda. Maybe they should look into hiring some CS people to offer some real support? Just saying.