PlayMesh review: Fishies Itunes App 19

I request to share my experiences of the PlayMesh Company and their Customer Support. I hope that you will not make the same mistake as I did in supporting this company by purchasing their games, including titles of iMafia, Wizards, Race Wars, and Ninjas. This E-Mail conversation was on Aug 19, 2009 where I requested support as a great customer spending over $3000.00 already with this company. Nevertheless, I simply requested PlayMesh customer support to fix an on-going problem with my account within the game of Wizard and iMafia. This simple and legitimate request turned into myself feeling outraged due to being accused of possibly stealing without probable cause and additionally was spoken too very poorly without reason. Lastly, I brought my complaint to Apple Customer Care without any satisfaction of being resolved at the lowest level.

You be the Judge as a Customer; here is this E-Mail conversation between the PlayMesh Customer Support and myself.

PlayMesh,
You now accuse me of stealing playmesh points after I spent approximately $3000.00 with your company, nevertheless 1 playmesh point. I believe you have allot to learn about customer service, tremendously. I believe that I had a legitimate problem and you threw egg in my face. I will share this E-Mail with Apple Customer Care. Additionally, you lost me as a customer.
Congratulations!
Eric.

Hi Eric,

Contrary to what you may believe, customer service doesn't mean giving out free points just because a user thinks his points balance is "uneven". We have given out 2 points before, for downloading certain apps, and also for creating new aliases on a game that you haven't downloaded previously.

Also, be careful what you ask for, we monitor accounts very closely and do not tolerate any untrustworthy activity, as you know from reading our User Agreement-- I'm sure Apple would honor that as well. Thanks for the support, and best of luck.

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Eric.

Playmesh,
I do not believe this is very good customer service. My complaint, how can you get odd points such as four when every purchase and every download is based on 5’s? This is a legitimate problem.
I request PlayMesh to fix the problem or I will complain to Apple Customer Care.
Eric.
Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 19, 2009, at 5:26 PM, PlayMesh Support wrote:

Hi Eric,

That's funny, but lots of people have an odd number of points as well.

If it is a legitimate problem, with an app, then let us know. Hope you continue to enjoy our games, thanks.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 8:00 PM, Eric.

PlayMesh,
I have odd points meaning 19 vs. 20.
Please resolve for me by adding one PlayMesh point.
Thank you.
Eric of name BadDoDo.

Sent from my iPhone

playmesh dont give a ### about its customers, only their credit cards. they banned me for "cheating", i have sent them my reciepts and still no reply.

I have also had the same issues as the person above. The game has glitches, crashes, constantly has to resync, and has prolonged saving times. The worse part is all those points you work so hard for just disappear as well as the fish and decorations. Playmesh is not responding to the Forum complaints or anyone's email unless it is a cut and paste response. Shame on you Playmesh. Your customers keep your company solvant. I think your ship is fixing to sink. IMafia was your first mistake, then issues with IFarm, now Fishies...Need we say more?

Absolute sham of an app. The servers are far too slow to be offering the game at this point. I say upgrade your servers or take it off the market. To top it off, the Playmesh staff is unresponsive. Currently there is no way to sell fish without the game crashing, at least on IOS 4, and the backgrounds have gone black.

There are bugs I find less difficult to deal with, but still a concern:
--I've heard reports that using a gift lowers one's experience points
--It takes far too long to load just about everything (again, due to the slow/inadequate servers)
--Due to the server issue, points given after training or feeding a fish do not show up right away, leading most to think they haven't been credited at all. I use the strategy of quitting the app and restarting it to make sure one of my actions "took." No one should have to do this on a game app.
--When one clicks on the treasure chest, it says "+9, " even though one hardly ever gets +9. Good god, such a simple fix--fix it already!

Not bugs, but stuff built into the game play that I find annoying:
--It takes forever to work up to having coins for beginners. I think some sort of attenuated approach would be better.
--Please, dear god, remove the whole "sorry, mating didn't work" crap. It costs money to mate, and luck doesn't really seem to affect things at all. I don't find iffy mating to be "fun" at all.

Anyway, there's a lot more. But consumers, if you're going to play this game, at least please don't spend money on it. Check out Tap Fish as an alternative, which I've found to be 100% bug free, far more detailed, and likely to be the app Playmesh knocked off to make Fishies anyway. The main thing I find better about Fishies is the social interaction, but that's irrelevant if the app crashes every 2 minutes (and no, reloading/restarting doesn't help).

There is no LUCK involved - why else would fish worth 600 coins have a roughly 50% success rate - costing me about 300 hard earned coins - errors always occur when I am about to get any kind of pay off for playing this game

I feel like such an idiot! This game has so many great qualities - so much fun and I have made such nice friends but it is being run like a low end pyramid scheme. I would LOVE to spend my hard earned money on a nice enjoyable hobby with a company I can trust and would have spent said money happily - Playmesh did not need to SCAM it out of me!

Run the company HONESTLY and the wealth will follow - your greed is totally out of control. I am not a 'gamer' as such - but this was a nice relaxing hobby I could use to distract myself waiting for buses or appointments or when my kids fall asleep on me. I dropped more $$$ on this 'game' than all my other iphone apps combined (I would usually pay no more than $5 or $6 for a big name app) and I regularly drop $6 here or there on this app for additional features as a little treat to myself and this game crashes worse than the most basic, free kiddie apps that total novices have made.

STOP advertising, fix what you have already put out, ANSWER your emails and forums (seriously - you could put a staff member on to READ your feedback forum) just for the $$$ that I have spent and when you %$&! up REFUND what is rightfully the consumer's money.

We are a large community and we are not going to take this laying down!

I too have had the displeasure of dealing with this company. I agree with everyone of the posters here. The cynical side of me thinks they design their games with the sole purpose of duping people out of their money without having to put in the effort to design a functional and quality product. I have sent numerous emails and have submitted numerous posts on their forum asking them to fix the game or please refund my money. Their response to my inquiries were to disable my account without giving a valid reason. I would advise anyone to not get involved with Playmesh. The sooner they are no longer allowed to operate as a viable business, the better.
Shame on Apple for allowing them to exist in their application store!

Fishies always stops for no reason and always when selling a fish or gift, most frustrating. I would have purchased pearls but decided not to because of the bugs in this asp, otherwise it has the potential to be a great game.

Playmesh doesn't monitor the forums in the game. If you have a problem, email them; support@playmesh.com and they will respond. I have the OS 4 problems as you describe, and emailed playmesh. They have completed a fix and are currently testing it, and it will be posted on the app store soon. (hopefully)

I have not spent one cent on Fishies, but may eventually buy something. I would sooner complete the game first, and then decide if I want to purchase any extras.

dukieBC (on fishies)

someone needs to monitor the chatroom, its offensive, young kids listing their phone numbers, names.. Very dangerous and an attraction haven for pedeophiles or other weirdo's.
These kids are chatting in this chatroom at all hours of the night on their iphones when they probably should be asleep.
Keep an eye on your kids parents, as this application is totally uncensored and makes kids extremely vunerable in these chatrooms thinking their swapping their details with other 14 year olds.

 I can understand lowering the resale value of rocks... I can even understand the concern of players progressing too quickly due to purple rocks bringing 100 gold, BUT... They don't even have the common sense to lower the cost to purchase the rocks from 8 pearls! I think Playmesh was absent the day Economics was taught. What idiots! Obviously they are beginning to prey on the younger players, who have no knowledge of economics, to spend pearls/REAL money for these items. And has anyone noticed that if you choose to quit a training session they ask for conformation, but if you accidentally tap continue thinking you have another clock there is no conformation to "USE" a pearl/real money! Business practices such as these show the true car salesman mentality. It just makes me want to jailbreak so I can rip them off for a while! It's not rocket science to hack your way through the in app purchase. The sad thing is that Playmesh/Charles Ju really doesn't care about what their consumers think as long as they spend money. And, they could care even less about being practical/fair to us either. To top it all off, those of us who patiently waited with blind faith for the update and hoped for just a morsel above and beyond from Playmesh to show any sort of gratitude to us in the way of some sort of gift (i.e.-pearls or gold or a free goldfish for goodness sakes) were completely disappointed by... You guessed it, NOTHING! I don't know, but I'm sure some law firm will be chomping at the bit for a class action lawsuit for unethical business practices. Maybe, just maybe, those of us who spent our hard-earned money may be able to recoup what we spent due to a faulty product. I know when I purchased pearls I was doing so with the understanding that I was buying a fully functional product... It wasn't. But then again... Who really cares, Right?
 Playmesh = FAIL...

i can not log in since 26/8 night, what happen ? is the saver down ?

i agree with all the comments above. the game constantly reboots, you lose progress, and the save times are unbearably long if it does save. even worse, over the past week, it has been impossible to load the game. the boot screen just freezes. they need to upgrade their servers or take the game off the market. and return everyone's money who was scammed into buying pearls. they had a gold mine here if they treated people right and scaled the servers right to handle the volume. give a way a free application and then have people pay for pearls, etc. they would make more money in the long run, but they are not treating their customers right. Apple should look into them and get them off iTunes. they are ripping people off.

This is a complete scam and and a sham! itunes should be ashamed of themselves for allowing it. My 6 year old inadvertently spent 300 bucks on the weekend for jack! What a joke!

I completely agree with the complaints! I spent 400 gold getting the icy wallpaper. When i tried to transfer it, it just disappeared! Prices of add-on features are so expensive that I wouldn't give a thought about buying them. Quit scamming people PlayMesh!

As far as I have heard Playmesh is done. Has been done a while ago. All their servers are dunzo.

I just started playing Fishies a month ago, in October 2010, and I am having all of the problems mentioned above.
The game constantly closes without warning. It freezes a lot as well. Sometimes it doesn't reload when I try to start the app again. In the training sessions, you often need to touch a star multiple times before it collects it, and this wastes so much time that it's impossible to progress past Level 7 without spending real money on pearls. When you transfer gravel or wallpaper between tanks, they disappear and you lose them forever. I also don't like the fact that mating your fish isn't always successful - regardless of the amount of luck in the tank. When you clean friends' tanks, it says "10 coins + 1 extra coin", but you only ever get the 1 extra coin, instead of the 11 coins you're supposed to get.
I was going to send an email to Playmesh about these bugs, buy it seems they've been around all year and many other people have been complaining about it - yet the bugs still exist. So it appears contacting Playmesh would be in vain. I'm very disappointed in this fact, as this would be such a great, fun game if it worked the way it's supposed to.

I played fishies for months, spending hundreds of dollars on pearls to buy fish and other things. I got to level 30 but in the end I deleted the game. I was sick and tired of it dropping out and taking forever to log on. Playmesh did add some more ponds to fish at but the number of experience needed to progress to a new pond was outrageously high. So what was the point of continuing? Save your money and time is my advice. The chatroom is x rated, full of sleazy types using disgusting language and making all sorts of suggestions and comments - and this is a kids game? Parents beware!

I have too say zombie fish is fun but fishes is a waste of time every time I try too buy something it crashes and i'm only part 3 of the tutorial because i can't get the treasure chest and the pearl prices should be lowered... please playmesh make our lives better...

My daughter downloded this free program over the week end, for some reasons we have been charged 2 x $99 with this. This is totally a scam shem, is there anyway I can revert this transaction? How can this cost $99 to add credit, how could they charge twice? I am very dispaointed and feel that I have no ressources. I went on Itune and check for complaint, but its soooo hard to get hold of the right places.

Please help.

Thaanks