The main reason I log support tickets is to bring a specific issue to official attention of Mikrotik support, so that they have a tangible record of the issue on file. If you just complain about something on the forums then there's a good chance it will be overlooked or forgotten..
So the hope is that by logging a ticket through the official channels for support and providing as much specific information about the issue/fault (while trying to keep the report as concise as possible), that it could maybe receive prioritized attention for fault acknowledgement and fixing...
In terms of response times, it seems to vary... Some faults I logged took several months just for a simple acknowledgement response... others were replied to within minutes of logging the fault.
When answers/replies eventually arrive, they tend to be very short & succinct, with not much informative details by way of feedback, which can seem disappointing if you've waited a long time for a response and the issue is significant and affects many people. For instance, the last reply I got was just a simple:
Hi
Thank you for contacting MikroTik Support.
Thanks for the report will be fixed in the future.
Best Regards
But most responses came from senior support staff (at least in my experiences so far) and include some positive feedback or acknowledgement, which is reassuring.
Users must keep in mind that support staff are also humans trying to best manage their time. With RouterOS v7 being in a crucial stage of development right now, customers should understand and appreciate that support resources may not be operating as optimally as usual in the customer's interests, despite best intentions to the contrary. Developers are under more pressure to ready the OS for enterprise-level stability in a constrained time frame, and support staff are also dealing with an influx of tickets relating to stability issues and bugs with v7 (over and above the usual day-to-day and v6-related issues which I'm sure are plenty). That was not normally the case before. Also, just because you logged a fault, doesn't mean that developers will stop everything they're doing just to pour all resources into fixing your fault and keeping you up to date of every detail along the way. Be patient, you've done your part, it is (hopefully) appreciated, and will be seen and taken into consideration at the very least.
Support staff, in turn, must keep in mind that users give up a lot of personal time, money, and patience/resources to not only stick with MikroTik products/platform during turbulent times when faced with things like crucial missing features, failed upgrades, or incidents of config loss... but we also to spend a great deal of our time investigating issues and logging detailed faults and supouts when problems arise. So it is important that support honors their users' contributions in return, by ensuring fast and detailed replies where possible. When replies don't come, or they eventually come but with little to no new information, it sends a bad signal to the customer that they are wasting time logging faults and that their business as an individual customer is not valuable to the company. This could persuade some users to think that they would be better off seeking other vendors and ecosystems. That is only worsened further when support ignores genuine concerns/issues for several months, or blatantly denies that it is a problem (such as the SXT 5HnD first revision water ingress problem or CCR2004/RB3011/RB5009 port flapping issues, just to name two such cases)...
So in summary, a functioning and well-reputed support system depends on complementary & mutual input. Users should take care and effort to ensure that tickets are logged properly and about real/important issues only. And support could do better in response time, response details in the initial acknowledgement, as well as frequency of updates. At the moment you're lucky when you eventually get a reply, unlikely to receive any technical information relating to the issue, and unlikely to receive further updates until you maybe see the issue magically fixed in a new version or show up in a changelog. Not very reassuring, but probably understandable given the current situation
I don't think your question is provocative. I think it is pertinent and helps to know that you are not alone in perceiving that the support system gives an impression that there's some room for improvement.. It's the one place where communication should be fast and efficient. In reality, support ticket systems suck and are a pain to manage, maintain, and keep up to date, especially in busy times like now. Fact of the matter is that it's an extraneous process (just like documentation & changelog preparation) which takes time and resources away from furthering the actual software which is ultimately the leading priority for all of us... So best advice I can give you is to keep that in mind . If you've done your part submitting a ticket, try to forget about it and not take it personally when support are slow to respond because after all it's no longer your problem anyway right? If Mikrotik care about their product and brand, they will surely honor your ticket within a reasonable time frame. If not, then you have the power to take your business elsewhere and let fate handle the rest.
I'm sure a lot of users who expect unrealistic levels of perfection, have shot themselves in the foot doing precisely that because they are too impulsive or impatient. Such users are actually much more commonplace than we might think and I've seen it with my own eyes how a small issue can cause a user to ditch an entire platform and then they waste more time and money looking for alternative brands and products which invariably turn out to be inferior and even more cumbersome to work with. There's a reason Mikrotik are recognized as a leading brand & industry standard on the global scale. Yes it's not perfect (remember, nothing really is) - especially not for everyone, such as users who expect it to be as "user friendly" and interactive as unifi products for instance, but that is for good reason, and some unfortunate users have learned that too late, after short-fused temper tantrums were thrown and hardware was disposed of as a result. Those users could probably benefit in the long run from doing some serious self-reflection & introspection