Well, they don't have to worry about competition. At least not untill Valve enters the law-enforcement market.

I don't see anywhere in their support page that says they don't work weekends.

Have you ever noticed that the majority of people who bitch about other people not working on weekends, are doing it duration the weekend....while they aren't at work. :P

They do work on weekends, that was even explained in a post from quite a while back:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/state_of_bcustomer_experience_b_9a7bd/post1
(last paragraph).

But I'd guess that there are fewer people than during the week, since they deserve weekends too :D

I understand this, but that's the default excuse for miserable slow GOG support. Phaolo, to whom I was responding stated this:
"2 days were in the weekend, though.
Btw the support speed & usefulness varies.. you have to be patient here on Gog."
As though that should explain everything. It doesn't.

That's true, and I hope some (a few) of them do actually work on weekends but I would also count two weekend days not really full in considering if something is late. His 4 days waiting including two weekend days might for GOG support be equivalent to say, less than 3 weekdays. That's already a time one could tolerate. Do we really need a 24 hours maximal response time for GOG support? 2-3 working days maximal guaranteed waiting time would be okay with me.

Just saying they should stipulate that if they are going to have a lighter load on the weekend. How many people come here complaining and how many people use the weekend excuse like it's an official position? It's not. Their official position is they will get back to you, usually within 24 hours, which is a fallacy. They almost NEVER respond within 24 hours anymore. Need to hire more people or rethink their ticket workload structure.

Well, I got a response. Weird how an hour after posting this thread suddenly I'm top of the list.

Have to say though, to anyone considering ordering on the back of a money-back guarantee, beware. Despite me following the troubleshooting steps they're trying to palm me off with store credit, despite the guarantee saying I can actually get a genuine refund.

I've said I'd prefer a proper refund to my Paypal account but I'm waiting now for another response to see what they say.

It's a shame, given how completely effortless Steam refunds are.

Played game for under 2 hours, get your money back. No fuss, no messing about, no reasons needing to be given. It's a shame when I've played this game for less than 2 hours and am actually having genuine issues and I still have to jump through hoops even after waiting 4 and a half days.

I'll update the thread when they get back to me.

They might be swamped with support questions because of the problems with Rebel Galaxy not being added from the start of the sale. Your best bet is to look up Firek (search in the forum, as bad as it works, it still should throw some results) and PM him, since he's in charge of the support team :).
That is actually due to DRM. On steam if you buy a game and they give you a refund, they simply remove it from your account and you can't play it anymore in most cases. Here, however you can download the game and keep it since nobody can stop you from doing that. So in this case DRM helps them. I'm not sure if GOG is prepared to offer such types of refunds since it would open all sorts of possibility of abuse.

Granted, it's open to abuse, but surely you have to take into account the history on the account. I mean I've never asked for a refund before, I've had a GOG account for years and made over 30 purchases.

Hardly the profile of a prolific software pirate.

Also, they state specifically on their money-back guarantee page that they will refund to Paypal. I always bought with confidence in the past. Now, I'm not so sure.

I mean if they are only going to offer store credit even if you follow their instructions and attempt to get your game working, then...why not say that in the first place?

What are your system specs and how well is your case ventilated? That sounds suspiciously like an overheating issue. If you're on a desktop, have you cracked it open and dusted lately?

Do you have a way to monitor your CPU / GPU temps after you crash?

Same goes for me - I got a response as well.
Well, the request was filed on Thursday (late afternoon), and I got a response on Monday (middle of the day).
Considering how many requests Support team probably has right now, I would say it's a very acceptable timing.

BTW, is anyone aware of any way to close a duplicate request I've made? Or is it GOG staff only who can do this?

My specs are well above what is required for the game. I've been building PC's for years, mate. It's not an overheating issue. I run Speedfan + ASUS Probe and my CPU temp never gets above 40C. GPU never above 69C. That's under heavy load i.e. running something like The Witcher 3 on max settings for 4 hours.

I regularly dust my case with Airduster. It's a HAF 932. It can't help but be well ventilated.

Appreciate the response, though :)

For cheaper games I can imagine why they prefer store credit, because for a $2-5 game the fees might cost them more than it's worth, but for a $30 game yeah, probably a proper refund would be in order if they can't help you to run properly.

Not sure how you know that they almost never respond within 24 hours? As far as I know no numbers have been released and just judging by the number of complaints here could be severly misleading, the people with a speedy reply are probably quite unlikely to report that. Still it might be, but I would like to see some sources to back that up.

Even more, they seem to specifically exclude the weekends from the 24 hours.

"We will do our best to respond as quickly as possible. On weekdays, we normally reply within 24 hours, but during weekends we can only respond that quickly to high-priority, time-sensitive cases. All other cases will be looked into first thing next week." (https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/categories/201526109 at the bottom)

So, they never said, they would reply on weekends and on weekdays they want to reply usually within 24 hours. Now nobody knows what the real response times are. The only thing we know is that for some people it obviously didn't work out. I guess that can probably happen occasionally with a fluctuating number of incident support requests. Maybe they are swamped with problems to solve and/or at the same time face staff shortage due to illness/vaccations. Or maybe they are indeed understaffed and the response time is always much longer than a day. We probably cannot judge that.