PIA is almost useless now

popthestack

I have both written in this forum and to the support. For the last two month PIA servers - no matter which, but some are worse than others - continuously drops out and the OpenVPN connection has to be restarted manually. This is NOT due to port restrictions and band with restrictions or other ISP related problems (we, several users, have tested this). We have also tried the different possible setups with different ports, but the problem persists and ITS GETTING WORSE! Currently I have to restart PIA on ALL the boxes in my house at least every 30 minutes or so. We have also noticed a clear drop down in speed! I suspect PIA is getting more users than they can handle and as such we're feeling the pressure now. However, this is nothing but mere guessing. A miss-setup might as well be the cause. Regardless, the issue is serious and it demands serious attention from PIA instead of the usual copy/paste reply from support! For the first time i 2 years I am VERY close to cancelling my account! PIA needs to understand that the VPN community only need ONE bad experience in order for the company reputation becomes at risk. Fix the issues, reply with something else than copy/paste solution about using other ports and blaming the ISP for blockage problems.

syph3r

I agree its bad, and the support is getting worse. prolly ran by the feds now...

popthestack

I can't believe this! I have been on with PIA support since the 8 nov. and all they do is copy/paste the same email replies! They don't notice because the correspondence has been going on for days. They have absolutely no clues what so ever! That's it! PIA is useless!

sjhamburg

Oh shit and I thought all along it must have been my fault and that my new phone and tablet are just not propperly 

Guess its kind of useless to contact support???

Max-P

@popthestack I think I may already have replied to you on Reddit (and will check the log tomorrow when I work and reply), but for tracking purposes what's your ticket ID(s)? I'll look into this personally, as this definitely should not be happening. While I'll openly admit we do copy and paste a lot of replies (I mean, when it's the 30th time I type the same reply in the day, I naturally get tired of it, even more so when it's 200 a week), that is not a substitute to reading the ticket history and finding the correct solution. Sending the same instructions twice with no explanation as to why it is requested a second time is also a pretty big no-no, so if you indeed get the same email reply multiple times something is wrong and I'll make sure to get that fixed for you.

@sjhamburg I wouldn't say useless, but not all support agents are as good detectives as others. Patience is key. There's some situations where we ask for something seemingly unrelated but there is a logical reason to it, which sometimes causes unnecessary anger or jumping to conclusions. Just be patient and respectful to the support staff, and your case should quickly get escalated once they have confirmed it is not a common issue. As a quick example, I know a lot of people absolutely hate when we tell them to try different protocols and ports. But it is a necessary step, as both UDP and TCP behave very differently in a lot of aspects, but it also truely easily solve 90% of the cases. Also, even if it doesn't work or change anything, at the same time we still get several clues out of it. Trying to resist or argue with the support team most of the time will only make it longer for you because it delays the time at which your ticket will be escalated to my team for deeper analysis.

I understand the frustration, after all, we all want a solution that works right away. But we don't have access to your device, and in some cases we truely are just as clueless as you as to why it won't connect, or why it is slow. This is especially true with Android devices, as it seems all manufacturers have their ways of breaking things in unexpected ways: ranging from the tun driver being completely absent to the firewall not working properly and stalling the connection. Android devices are also particularly hard to troubleshoot because they often offer little to no logging to the application, and requires the whole Android developement environment to even get a bit of logs. So sometimes, we really do have to go with trial and error. Remember: we only know what you tell us. While some details may look obvious to you, a lot of times we can't guess it. If you have a ticket ID, I will gladly have a look at yours as well!

To everyone else, when situations like these happens, please don't be afraid to ask for a supervisor to review the ticket and leave the appropriate feedback on the ticket. We do read these. I have them emailed to me on a weekly basis. We take our support quality very seriously and do everything we can to improve things.

popthestack

@Max-P, thank you very much.


The support ID is 100380.

popthestack

Max-P, I have just checked my mail and I can see that my complaint has been taken seriously. The issue has been forwarded to the advanced technical team.

popthestack

I have been extremely happy with PIA the last two years. Before that I used several other VPN's, but none has been working as well as PIA, both regarding stability and speed.

The problems lately is not what is normally associated with PIA and I believe they will be dealt with now. I have also received an apology. 

itsmefloraluca

I.ve been with pia going on 3yrs and they have been the first vpn provider i have ever used.I have noticed the difference in the service they have been providing starting from support and issues with there vpn client and also with speed on the servers.It would be nice if pia had on there home page or add to the pia client were we can see the status of there servers so we can pick a server to the country we are connected to that is not overloaded.Even when i connect to the country i live in the speeds are horrible.

Max-P

@itsmefloraluca Server capacity is actually quite rarely an issue, but if you notice an unusuallh slow server the best way to get it resolved quickly is to open us a ticket. That way we can make sure to look into it, as we don't have nearly as many people checking social media as we have taking email tickets (which we can also dispatch to the appropriate people internally).

We will have you go through the usual troubleshooting as 99% of the time issues lies between you and us, and not the servers specifically. If you cooperate and give us clear answers it will go fast and your ticket will be escalates very quickly. I understand the basic troubleshooting can be annoying at times, especially when you know something won't fix it... But trust me, it's better to give it a try anyway than find out days later that simply reinstalling would have done it under 5 minutes! Most support confusions and lenghts comes when we get "didn't work" as replies, as we have to guess what you mean and do even more tests to know what is the situation. The more details we have the easier it is for us to make an educated guess!

itsmefloraluca

It Still would be Nice to have a status page. Pia has an option to send on there client to let them know about speed problems.Thats what i do