Reading the forum lately has me worried.
I am currently waiting for dispatch on my order I have been super excited to get my stuff delivered and getting into sim racing for the first time.
But all the talk of units breaking and customer support not responding has me very worried tbh
Is it really that bad? Or is this a case of people with issues report issues kinda thing.
Comments
I know how you feel Franke. I'm waiting for the DD pro bundle to come back into stock but seriously considering the Thrustmaster TGT2 now after reading the forums. Its knocked my image of the brand that I thought was premier , bad customer service , faulty items , zero stock. Worrying
Maybe I'm one of the exceptions but I've had my DD Pro since the end of February, got the load cell in March and I've had no issues at all. I love it.
What you're seeing on the forums is only a small portion of people that have purchased the product. Most people will not come here to post that their hardware is working fine without any issues. People love to complain, it's in our nature. This is similar to what happens on car forums as well. While there is always a chance/risk that you may end up with a defective product, I am willing to bet that it's only a very small percentage. You have to take all of these posts with a grain of salt.
I have also had my CSL DD since January and have not experienced any issues *knock on wood*.
I cannot agree that its just an absolute minority with problems read my (and others) posts to see my experience as a new customer etc. Also because they are currently so overwhelmed with support tickets at the moment they shut down their hotline and a few times even their customer support inbox was full. you will wait 2-3 weeks for support to respond to your email IF you have a n issue with your hardware. They are totally overwhelmed with support requests so there is a deeper problem with the units that are currently being shipped.
Read the warnings from others experiencing receiving broken units etc and repairs and replacements with exactly the same issue as before. There is a lot of info on these forums, use it to make an informed decisions about whether you want to go into a relationship with Fanatec at this moment. My recommendation is that you should either wait until the QC and customer service situation at Fanatec has stabilised or consider buying your gear elsewhere if you need it immediately.
I disagree, people don't like complaining at all. They only does this when she is not happy, while would rather be happy instead.
I solved my problems with Fanatec equipment thanks to this forum, while the official Fanatec support kept me blocked for at least two months.
I have never complained on the Logitech forum, in fact, after 20 years of being a Logitech customer, I don't even know if there is a Logitech forum to complain.
Fanatec has struggled with support for years, it's clearly an area they need work on. I think the frustration with the support department more than the actual raw count of issues is what drives the volume of discussion both here and in other locations. I would not worry about receiving bad hardware. I've purchased many products from Fanatec and the majority of them have worked without issue for their entire lifetime. When I have had issues, or needed out of warranty repair, my interactions with Fanatec support take a bit longer than I'd like but have always had positive outcomes and never resembled the drawn out stories. Many of those stories do revolve around people that don't alway follow the process to the letter.
TLDR; don't sweat it.
I had to go through customer care like many here. Received a faulty DD Pro and they exchanged it for a new one again with the same issue which I am tolerating and monitoring until customer care is normal once more.
I will remind you again, we are not talking about the past, Fanatec is playing more and more in the consumer market and they are struggling. If they were struggling with support before, today there is no support.
The mailbox was actually filled up several times in the past weeks and their hotline has been taken offline the average wait time for support now is between 2 and 3 weeks, that is a fact and it is also the current trend of direction they are going. Don't look at what people are saying, look at what Fanatec are doing......or not doing. Others can say what they want about not having problems before etc but did they buy products in the last 3 months and crucially did they need support?........they will tell you a different story and you need to think do you feel lucky?
So I say again take the information as you see it today not from 1,2 or 3 years ago when Fanatec was managing their QC properly and they had a coping customer care.
Good luck with you decision.
Repairing a fault and giving customer service are two completely different things. Fanatec fails to give customer support, which is why their customer service is clogged.
The customer of a particular device may have trouble getting it to work, even if it is not broken.
I have had EMI problems. I could play a maximum of 10 minutes, so my PC's USB port went crazy. I had an email a day with Fanatec, prior to this situation, and I sent maybe 10 videos at their request. I referred to my problem as "crazy electrical input". Then I got a month's worth of RMA and received the wheelbase without repair. Obviously it was not broken, but I have not received any indication.
When a guy from the forum explained to me that it was EMI. I felt stupid. It is a big electric motor, it is normal that it can produce eddy currents. DD Fanatec customers have been suffering from EMI for years, but Fanatec's technical support hasn't given me any indications. Damn, Fanatec even has an official page dedicated to EMI issues!
Honestly, as a customer, I didn't know that DD wheelbases had to have their casing or rig connected to the ground system with an electric wire to work properly. I don't know how many of you have grounded their wheelbase. Yet this solves many of the problems that are clogging up customer service.
A lot of people here on the forum have received a replacement wheelbase and continue to have the same problems. It is clear that the wheelbase is not broken. But Fanatec should give assistance, know its own product and provide useful information to solve problems.
I wonder why Fanatecs CEO Thomas Jackermeier don´t come and tell problems with technical support, ask sorry from their customers and tell plans how this issue is going to be fixed.
About grounding problem, I would like hear more about that.
How you should do it?
What is "ground system"?
Here at older apartments ground is only at few wall plugs, bathroom and kitchen.
At electrical center there may be not at all groundin rail if only four (L1, L2, L3, N) wire system. Zero is grounded at main electrical center.
we are talking about fanatec entering the mass market. Here, customers expect a plug and play solution and for some it works like that, in the troubleshooting section emi is listed as a solution and I would guess that stranded customers would check that as well but that solution is ruled out for many who receive units with other issues. The fact is that there are people with a variety of problems all pointing initially to quality control and even if we are the so called vocal minority, it is the frequency or trend of the complaints and problems that are rising with no word from fanatec on how or if this will be resolved.
as a Customer of fanatec I really would prefer and hope that they can get on top of all these issues, the customer and fanatec would benefit the most from a properly working dynamic.
I mentioned EMI issues for 2 reasons.
First, I struggled with them for a long time and Fanatec had the solution in house. An experienced technician would have provided me with the solution in the time of 2 emails, maybe 3. The technician who then received my RMA will surely have been an expert, but he will not have read my emails, and perhaps it is not his job to provide solutions, but just repair. So my wheelbase helped to saturate the Fanatec service center. Bad management and poorly trainer staff.
Second reason. In Italian EMI sounds like "electromagnetic disturbances". Disturbances, noises, spite. Something that happened when I was a child, of which I had lost the memory. When we watched TV, if someone turned on an household appliance, jagged lines could be seen on the TV screen.
It can be a button or shifter that are activated by themselves. Or brake or accelerator that works intermittently. A more or less bearable malignant mischief.
In addition to my serious problem, I experienced strange sensations on the steering wheel. An electric current running around the wheel circle describes it well. Even roughness, especially on ACC, which I thought was the sim with the worst FFB ever.
Now, after doing the anti-EMI rituals, these sensations are gone too and I like the ACC FFB quite, not my favorite, but it looks good.
I could be wrong, it's just sensations, but my CSL DD not only works now, but I'm convinced it works better.
I don't want to influence anyone, if you have unused electric wire, and you won't spend anything, you might as well try.
This is the Fanatec solution if you don't have a good ground system.
An old stripped electrical wire wrapped around a screw on your rig, and a radiator pipe that goes into the wall.
Alessandro, I will try this me and others are having the vibrations sometimes more sometimes less. I tried a rudimentary version of this but it didn’t bring anything. I’ll report back if it changes.
Thanks for information 😊
I think I don´t have any EMI issues with my rig, but heard that when you have DD and VR ( I have Valve Index) it may be also EMI issues if screen goes to gray when touch headset with your fingers.
Maby I´ll try that trick, grounding to radiator, because there´s is one just behing my set.
I've been on Fanatec since last fall (DD Pro Mid December) and I have to say this is just not true.
The reason I even reply to your statement, is that it is statements like this that drove my decision to go with Fanatec in the first place. I know since the CSL DD and GT DD Pro that there have been way more claims of issues, but I personally seem to have had half of them.
Most issues I've seen on the forum I have experienced and I have been trouble shooting things since the day I joined the ecosystem.
Here's a list of my issues on Fanatec parts, and you can find these issues repeatedly across these forums and others as well as how to fix them yourself since getting things fixed is soooo slow.
There are fixes for all of these, many of them include disassembly and cleaning or re-seating of parts. And the driver support has been awful. Driver 440 is great so far btw.
But Fanatec even claimed that the driver issues were developer side issues and they were not. 440 eventually fixed them, after 5 months of claiming them to not be driver issues.
At this point I would have to say there's enough evidence to show that there is something seriously wrong. I would even go as far as to wonder how Fanatec is doing fiscally, as their customer support is falling apart right in front of us.
And the worst part of it all is that I actually love my gear. When it's working...
But I have countless hours troubleshooting this stuff. It's just silly.
Unfortunately grounding didn’t help for me even directly to the radiator. I disconnected my wheelbase from my rig and tried it on wooden table as well took it outside to ground it there and still vibration occurs. I continue to debug and troubleshoot since at least I might discover a solution but in the meantime still have the use of my wheel. Who knows when the backlog of support will be cleared and I don’t want to wait another few weeks without a wheel.
Please don't (seriously, just don't) solve grounding issues like this, besides that it can be dangerous (you could potentially set every radiator in your house under current) it generally gives more issues than it solves.
Then maybe you should tell Fanatec that, since that's what they recommend in their FAQ:
Hi everyone!
First... no, I don’t agree with Igor either, people do not “love” to complain for nothing, imagine your brand new gear...faulty right out of the box, what I should do, call a party to celebrate? C’mon, there are plenty of us customers in this situation, left stranded by almost no customer service.
Second.... yes I agree, we’re talking about the present situation and not the “usual” service handed by Fanatec in the past... reasons seems pretty obvious... sales growth... no ‘parallel’ customer service department expansion, production and QC issues and bla bla bla we all know I guess.
Third.... grounding... I personally did it in my new rig, using the thread in the profile structure, collecting several points and using one wall plug with the earth pin only (removed the other ones for obvious reasons).
Radiators....I would not advise to do that unless they have their own ground circuit (it’s common sense/common practice to ground the radiator itself)...and even in this case I’d rather use the electric la ground of your house.
(maaaany years ago was not-so-uncommon to ground amplifiers hi-fi stuff on the radiators to get rid of noise ....barbaric? Maybe.... effective? Oh yes ! ) 😅
ciao!
True, I did not, in my country, Italy, it is prohibited by law. Personally I pulled a yellow and green wire from a screw on my rig, down to the ground of the electrical outlet. I should have connected the pedal plate as well, but just by grounding the wheelbase plate I eliminated the last remaining EMI jokes.
In reality, from an electrical point of view, we are not using the radiator as an electrical ground, but only to discharge any electrical charges accumulated by a non-electric metal mass (the rig), isolated from live parts. At most this mass can receive small induced currents, but not discharge the phase voltage to earth. You could discharge your electrostatic charge on a radiator by simply touching it, but this does not create danger for other people who are touching another radiator in the system. Let's say that connecting the rig to the radiator is a border-line behavior.
The idea is to do a low cost test, if it works, provide for a real definitive grounding. If you don't have a good ground system, there are other solutions.
I wanted a full fanatec rig, but I will buy thrustmaster full rig, they have rare issues, it works in every games, sorry, Fanatec reputation is now lost.
It’s such a pity I had such high expectations from fanatec and these were totally misplaced, I feel like I was cheated by what it says on the box versus the actual product and company. Feels like a kind of fraud if I’m being honest and I don’t know if trust will ever be regained. By the way properly grounding my unit to the wall outlet did not solve my problems.
This is a bit of a stab in the dark as I'm not sure the exact type of issues you're having, Faizel, but have you tried adding some ferrite beads to your cables (specifically the USB cable that goes to the wheelbase?) I was having issues with my controls locking up and the wheel becoming unresponsive, and it seems to have been caused by EMI. I've wound up putting 5 or 6 beads on the USB cable, along with 1 or 2 on the cables for the brakes, power cord, etc. May not have solved things completely, but it's definitely cut way back on the frequency of the issue occurring.
Maybe a similar solution could help in your case as well?
Hi Gregg, I have the constant vibration, rough, scratchy feeling issue in my wheel/wheelbase. There are constant vibrations that shouldn’t be there. I did try a few ferrite beads on different cables which brought nothing and was thinking to buy some more from Amazon to try. At this point I tried quite a lot of different things: disconnected all electrical devices including WiFi, tried different wall outlets, different usb cables, separating cables from each other, bought boost kit to see if maybe it was the power supply and grounding the unit. None of this brought anything.
anyway I’ll try some more ferrite beads and see if this changes the issue. In my case if this scratchy behavior is coming from interference then the wheelbase is receiving rf or em interference.
my journey of collecting data and troubleshooting continues.
Now I'm going to say something stupid.
Have you tried raising INT and NDP? By default they are 11 and 50, but in the recommended settings they often say to set to INT = 1 and NDP to 10. These are values that don't work for me. I have to keep INT at 5, but also 11 on some games. NDP 20, but also 30. On some games even 10 but I raise NFR to 10. Lowering FEI and SPR also helps sometimes.
I wouldn't listen to those who say filters kill FFB. They are there on purpose to make FFB experience more tolerable.
Yes messed with every setting doesn’t make a difference to these vibrations. They come and go sometimes extremely aggressive and sometimes very light. The settings cannot influence this.
I think maybe my comment wasn't clear or is being misinterpreted.
I was simply stating that, while there may be many people experiencing issues with their Fanatec gear, there are probably more people out there that are not having issues. If someone has an issue with their product of course they will come to these forums and post about the issue. Most people with working units won't come on the forums simply to write "mine works." My comment was simply to say that, if you are only paying attention to what is being posted on the forums, then those results will be screwed and not an ideal representation of whether Fanatec gear is a good or bad purchase. There is always going to be risks associated with purchasing their product, the same as with any other manufacture, and it's up to the OP to determine if they are willing to risk it.
I would love to see the data on this. A comparison of total units sold world wide vs how many have been found to be defective. If the number of defective units is greater, then Fanatec is in big trouble.
MY issue is not so much in the data but the frequency of issues........it is getting more frequent. That is also clear because customer support just cannot cope anymore. The one date point we can focus on is how long it takes for customer support to get back to us........at the moment 2-3 weeks= they are not coping due to too many support requests=more defective units than expected. When the response time for support tickets get back to 24-48 hours then we can assume a lower rate of failure and the normal assumption that the people on these forums complaining is the vocal minority.
Also how it can be that so many people after getting replacements or repaired units suffer the same or different problems getting a new unit. I couldn't believe this also happened to me, I really thought like you the replacement would just work like it should and was absolutely shocked when this was not the case. It has never happened like that with any other company where I needed support. So my attitude was exactly like yours before experiencing and learning more about fanatec. Two units with issues in a row should already send warning alarms.
The arguments you are using are based on normal course of business like it can be if I buy a LG OLED TV there is a chance it could be dead out of the box etc. or fail within the guarantee period. But if they send a replacement or repair, 99% chance that replacement will work. Seems not to be the case with Fanatec.......at least not at the moment. I understand the arguments and points you are making but I don't believe they apply to the current situation at fanatec unfortunately.
So to me the risks to myself, the OP and new customers are higher than with what you would expect from another consumer company especially due to the fact that customer support is basically dead in the water and the risk that IF you have a problem which is happening more and more frequently when they do eventually get to support you, they might not solve your issue the first time around. It is not a risk I would have taken knowing what I know now.
I really wish this was a different situation and I could share different advice but its impossible right now.
Wait till you get an issue...which will happen.
Shocking customer support.
Well least for me so far my story with this company has been a good one. I placed my order 21st of April and got my delivery last week.
I have been playing about with it for the first full day of owning the setup and I am blown away! The delivery packaging was in top quality condition infact all the packaging was well done.
Build quality if the CSL DD is something my rig total weight is 40kG my back wont be happy in the long run so will need to work on wheeling this about when setting up :D