Chess.com is a great app and has lots of great qualities although there are some problems that forced my overall rating to be lower. My brother and I play a lot of chess online and have always worked together to build our skill levels offline (my rating is roughly 1300 and his is about 1350 usually). A great way to learn on chess.com is completing the daily puzzles which are supplied based on your skill set.However, the negative experience that I in particular had with this platform is the customer service. Unfortunately my brothers account was closed due to him cheating on two games and his account was banned without warning. He understood his wrongs and emailed to apologize, received an online form to fill out but he had some account questions that he wanted to ask prior to filling out the form and he never received an answer. He sent a follow up and I also reached out on my own to inquire about his email(s). About a week after his account closure my account was also closed. I was shocked. Since that day I had only played the computer bots and completed the daily puzzles - I read online that it would be because of our online address? (I’m not great with understanding how technology works). This made me pretty upset as I had online friends from around the world that I would connect with and it was stopped. I attempted to reach out but I never received an email back about this issue either. I also reached out with questions regarding getting a membership prior to all of this happening to the support staff but I never received any information back. Though me and my brother both have accounts on Lichess, I would like to be able to still have an account on chess.com for the features that it has. I am open to having a conversation with any contact support staff members. In terms of my brother’s account, he would like access to an account also but has said he wants to talk to the support team first about the questions he sent - I don’t know them specifically so it would have to go through him. I understand the integrity of the game is of importance but some communication is also important. I believe if a platform is going to control account accesses they should also be available for communication. I am not sure if this is from design or if there is a lack of support staff but with the increased number of players they should be able to hire more employees for solely contact support. Since my account remains closed but my information can still be accessed without my consent I may have to take a legal approach since there is no answer from the support team. This is not something I would like to do but the absence of communication is not justifiable under the GDPR requirements.Thank you.
