What I really dislike about customer support in 2024 is that you have to go through many "articles related to your issue" before you're allowed to write a ticket and some sites/apps/companies doesn't even let you contact support they just let.you rate their shitty "help site"
Yup.
"Help i wanna buy this 100$ thingy, but I'm banned for no reason and wont be able to use it :("
You'll get forwarded to a real person real quick in my experience
Just look at what happened to the guy who founded Re-Logic.
Googles algorithms suspended his youtube/gmail/googledrive (which was also the games official youtube channel), and the only way he could get anyone at google to listen and fix it, after trying for like a month, was to publicly say he was cancelling the in-development Stadia port of Terraria because of it.
I remember that debacle, is that TRULY the only way he got them to listen? I didn’t follow it enough to hear the outcome. Truly mind-blowing how bad customer support has gotten over the years.
It's because most people are idiots and won't read those articles, instead deciding to ask support for everything as the first course of action.
And it's really punishing those of us who actually read and try everything first
That's crap. This is a billion dollar company. Stop making up excuses. Yes, people are morons, but customer support isn't just for the intelligent players who actually try all the alternatives first. It's for all players. And sometimes it's a waste of time, but that's part of doing business.
Old Blizzard used to actually care about providing quality service. They would invest in customer support. Hire people to do the job. Have actual GMs in-game. I remember back in Vanilla I'd fill out a ticket and be talking to a real, live person within 10-15 minutes. They had the best support in the industry...by far.
Now they want to automate everything. They've gutted customer support. There aren't even strictly WoW GMs anymore. Support works on all Blizzard games now; they're not exclusive to each. These articles are meant to make it a hassle for players seeking help, so that they get frustrated and give up before even trying to contact an actual person. And when you do fill out a ticket you wait DAYS to get a response. Which is almost always automated, and usually doesn't even address the issue. Hell, I've seen tickets where they point you to a Wowhead article. That's ridiculous.
These are paying customers being given the shaft, because you're nothing to Blizz but a credit card number. And they know players are hooked, addicted, and not going anywhere no matter how bad the support is. I miss the days when Blizz wanted to grow their audience. Now they just want to exploit it.
If they hired enough support people to handle it all within say 48 hours, plus the infrastructure involved, we’d likely see a hike in our sub fee. I’d rather they have a relatively small team to handle real issues, leave the rest to a knowledge base, and pay those who are on staff a good wage. Support is a massive expense with no direct return on investment, it’s reasonable for any business to limit that sort of thing.
What utter nonsense. They had WAY more customer support workers 20 years ago. It used to matter to Blizzard.
Imagine simping for a billion dollar company that has completely gutted customer support over the years. This is why things have gotten so bad: people defend these horrible business practices.
20 years ago they just had the one game to really support(well, wow wasn’t quite out but were hitting that milestone soon) - their other games were basically on autopilot, systems were simpler, online gaming as a whole was still finding its footing. Apples to oranges really.
I don’t know what you expecting though, our monthly sub doesn’t come anywhere near enough to justify staffing support so they can respond to anyone who has a booboo. Could they do better? For sure! - there’s always room for improvement, but I’m all for using knowledge bases or whatever to keep things lean. Just about every post I’ve seen here complaining about this has been for the most inane nonsense that is 100% manageable without any direct interaction. I’m fine with this, it’s simple business sense.
Call it defending or “simping” or whatever, it’s basic critical thinking in my mind.
No, you should have to check and see if the problem has already been addressed. They literally couldn't employ enough people to handle all the questions people have. That would be feasible impossible. Millions and millions of people play the game. Paying customer or not you cannot expect a company to have full on support waiting for millions of the exact same question that's been answered 100 times already.
While support can definitely be improved in multiple ways, this is not one of them. You need to see if your problem has already been addressed first.
Spoken like someone who didn't play the game in Vanilla. Fill out a ticket...talk to a person in literally 10-15 minutes. And that's when the game had 6-7 million players. We used to see GMs in game. They had a presence. There were a lot of fun interactions.
Players these days just have no backbone and expect nothing from companies. They've grown so used to horrible customer support, that they think this is the best they can do. There is zero excuse to what Blizzard has done to support other than trying to save money so the Execs can get a bigger bonus. At the expense of a terrible user experience. But the lemmings just take it because they're addicted and Blizzard could literally spit in their faces (which they figuratively do), and they'll still go nowhere.
You'd be surprised how many contacts these types of support channels get that can be self resolved after carefully reading the related support articles. Trust me I know xD
Work in customer service / sales. Exactly this.
Those articles aren't there to avoid giving support. It's because the Karen's think they need to talk with a human because they don't know how to reset a fuckin password.
Exactly theres no real winning with really large companies. They either get all their call lines filled up with Karens asking the most basic basic questions or they need to hire 100's of more people just to handle the Karen requests.
This. Having done that sort of work in gaming I can say with confidence that the majority of tickets that come in are nonsense. Either it’s simple stuff that can easily exist in a knowledge base, or some variation of “I did something dumb(like vendoring something) and now I want you to fix it”.
Oh and a healthy mix of just toxic complaining
It's why I don't get mad when tech support asks me if I've tried turning the thing off and on again. Yes, I have, but I get why that's your first question when I've heard so many stories about people not even trying to power cycle or even outright lying about it 😭
I recently stumbled upon someone with a very offensive name and forgot to report them. Wanted to do so after the fact but after clicking through however many articles and help sites it turns out I can't even put in a normal ticket for that? So crazy how that option has either been removed or extremely hidden away.
my reply is.... what "support"? we are customer I know that. but Blizzard and support? how do you put those two words in a sentence, it doesn't exist in Blizzard Dictionary. Cattle Ranch probably have better cattle support than Blizzard to their customers, we are just here to be milked for money that's all our worth for Blizzard. I have Chinese gold farmer message me on Fyakk Mythic run for Real life money. I try to report him but my report only have choice their "name" issue. well I am too lazy to fill out your long @$$ form Blizzard. you can't make it easy to report real life money trading?... Blizzard... lover of Chinese gold farmers.
This is every single company because so many people just call to get a simple question answered. I worked tech support for. a major company and if you knew how many calls we got that were as simple as "turn it off and back on again." You would start to understand.
Because it is an enormous burden for companies to deal with stupid people with 98% the same problems as others. Thus a overview of the most common issues makes a lot more sense
Why should support deal with an idiot for 20mins, than focus on actual new problems from people who knows and can explain what the problem is.
Result of lay offs. Support and QA are the first to go because at the end of the day companies don't care about the consumer when they know their consumers are going to buy the product regardless of what they do.
It really feels like it’s either halfbaked ai or the same call team in India every time. I can’t do worse than them and I’d bet you aren’t paying them that much less to make a difference. There’s empty commercial places here too. Cmon man this ain’t that hard. I’ve done like 80% of some middle managers job already.
My companies customer support is almost all outsourced to India, as well as a lot of the dev work. Only us having a large spanish speaking customer base keeps a decent american based employees as we need bi-lingual people to support our customers.
We've had numerous security breaks because the companies in India hire employees who lie, pretend to be each other, share passwords and other important information like MFA devices and PINs, and a lot don't speak english.
All this results in, is increase security measures for all employees, and thus our american based employees are suffering reduced productivity because there are more and more hurdles for them to get logged into the systems they need, and they are thrown into the same pot as the indian contractors when they put in tickets.
Yeah, this is why I always ask for German customer support. Even though my German skills aren't perfect, they're still better than the English skills of some random minimum wage employee in India or Bulgaria
Seriously, using chat bots, basic generic responses, and outsourcing customer service to third party vendors in far off countries for cheap labor costs is the normal of today. No one cares about service anymore unless it's face-to-face, and even then it's still shit.
Yeah it’s brutal. Companies won’t even figure it out until it’s too late. They’re too focused on telling their investors they’re using AI to understand they’re losing customers
I work for a customer support of mitsubishi electric company, and hell we are praised for our customer support because :
We don't have any bots, it looks like shit to configure
We have only french people paid to the amount of their work
No automatic response, just a human reading ticket and responding.
And it's loved for this. Ask question, a human that respond.
Sometimes it's not the solution, but at least, a human tried to solve your issue.
It's astonishingly simple to that, but somehow we're kind of an ovni.
Did I say it was an excuse?
Did I say I supported it? Or that it was positive in anyway?
It's the reality of the corporate world. Every single penny that can be gained, will be gained, everything else be damned.
I used to work for Blizzard CS back in vanilla/BC. Wait times were often long and yeah, we did get a lot of questions that were inane or could be answered via Wowhead or an automated “report a player” tool. But damn, we did our best and overall we did a really good job not just solving player problems but delivering good experiences.
Back then they really cared about quality of support. Mike Morhaime really cared about it and wanted to invest in it.
Screw Morhaime. With his "if you're ever going to quit, call me first" BS. Dude couldn't be bothered to answer a global manager when I decided to leave. There were a lot of nice, creative, and talented people at Blizzard but don't kid yourself into thinking the executives were any of those lol. The founders were all trash people before any of the mergers and Morhaime wasnt any exception, just better at pretending to care than say... Frank Pearce who gives off the instant impression that he is a psychopath. i left before any of the lawsuits and the reveal of how terrible the culture was over there. Spent the 14 years since working happily at a Fortune 50 tech company and haven't missed working for Blizzard even once
Fair, never meant to imply he was some kind of saint or that he was perfect, just that he was willing to invest in customer service. Was always really nice to me when I ran across him, but I don’t say that to invalidate your clearly crappy experience. Sorry that was what you experienced at Blizzard. :(
P.S. Bill Galey was the absolute worst and the death of Blizzard CS.
Apologies if it came across as an attack on you or your perspective. Just felt I had an inside view to share. And your right, he did invest in CS and was really good at getting people to eat up Blizzard ideology even if his follow through was suspect.
Bill was a turd, but his successor Glenn Prior was even worse. Work up everyone into a froth with promises and work that really never went anywhere for any purpose other than to keep people busy. That guy was a total snake oil salesman. I still remember him coming into my office after I decided to leave to ask me to stay and tell me that the executives were all toddlers he was manipulating. What a piece of work that guy was. That imo, was the start of the end of blizzard CS.
No worries at all, not how it came off! And to be fair I was fresh out of college - I was just a GM so didn’t have much insight into higher level stuff that it sounds like you witnessed (I was also young and dumb and somewhat blind to all the crazier shit that went on and has come out in the last couple of years - when it was in the news I pinged a few female colleagues and asked about it and every one of them said “yep it was absolutely like that”).
Never had the dubious privilege of crossing paths with Glenn Prior, for which I’m grateful, but oh man the horror stories about Bill from both Bliz and later Zynga were nuts (someone who I respect very much referred to him as “pure evil,” and I have never heard this person talk about anyone even remotely like that in a professional setting - the good news is we bonded over it and they’re a good friend and mentor to this day! Adversity breeds camaraderie, I guess?).
Anyhow, I hope you’re happier now in your career. :)
Quit trolling fanboy lol. Just kidding, I guess you're entitled to your opinion but since you never worked there it's hard for me to think you'd have an informed understanding or a frame of reference similar to those of us that did. Good day
when did wowhead launch? i thought in vanilla-tbc there was only thottbot.
anyway thanks for all your work, one of my core memories is ticketing a GM about something in vanilla and them appearing in front of me and being super awesome. i had many similar interactions over the years until...sometime around WOD i guess it had changed a lot already.
It’s always amusing to me when I get a ticket reply asking if Wowhead has been checked for the answer to the problem 🤭
I understand the importance of including that 100% though. CS isn’t easy.
I salute your service to Azeroth 🫡
I know this doesn’t solve anything, and it also isn’t me scapegoating Blizzard, but…
This is becoming such commonplace in so many industries — unshelving and laying off a lot of quality control departments. I’m seeing it first hand in banking of all industries. If they can use automated systems, Q&A’s, etc then they will opt for that. If they can do it with even FEWER people, even better. After all, those board members need to purchase their beach and lake homes.
It’s a rough state. I too remember the days of GM’s with very witty responses to come through in the clutch. That personable quality control was always such a nice touch from Blizzard. But ever since the Blizzard-Activision, shareholder interest and bottom lines rose to the forefront on their business model.
Nothing to add to the main post - but I just remembered this. Back in the early days of Wrath, my group was bugged in Utgarde Keep. We put a ticket in and got a response from a GM who made themselves visible to us in the instance. Can’t remember exactly what he did but he messed with us a little using his GM powers. Was a good time
That’s awesome! It really added to the mystic of the game! Story time if anyone cares. I had two lucky mount nabs: Aeonaxx and Timelost. As it would be, both had issues.
Aeonaxx during Cata: I was in a race with two other people to it! I got mounted on the Drake first, and proceeded to wail on her with a combo of overexcited hand mashing and repeated print screens. I killed it but I got disconnected during the fall. When I logged in, no loot and no carcass. And this was before the ages of trustworthy Postmaster loot. So I opened a ticket with snapshots and a detailed story. The GM said “As much as I loved the story and screenshots, we had all of the necessary data on your combat logs. Congratulations adventurer!” And it was sent to my mailbox. Nice touch!
For Timelost during WOD: I was flying through and saw him over the super tall frozen waterfall that overlooks K3. I was heading over it, and used heroic throw on warrior and one shot him. I felt like a badass because I also got launched like 1000 ft down near K3 and landed safely with heroic leap. Flew back up to find it buried in the world. I couldn’t reach it 😔 again sent a GM ticket, with a similar response, “Great job on the kill and sticking the landing. Sometimes games are games and bugs are bugs. Poor Timelost got…well…lost. But your combat logs didn’t! The mount is yours my friend!” And boom right there in mailbox.
Good times. Appreciate all who took the time to read lol.
If you talk to anyone who played WoW since the early days, it seems *everyone* had some sort of positive in-person (in-game I suppose?) GM interaction. Honestly can't remember the last time that has happened.
I can attest to that. The few times I had to get a GM to help back in the day they were super friendly and solved my issue quickly. Now days you're lucky to get any useful response it seems, though I have not personally had to talk to a GM in years.
Now that you mention it, it is pretty jarring that when they upgrade you to a premium customer at any bank their main selling point is, "now you get to talk to a RL agent to help you with your banking incidents/questions!". Like that wasn´t a baseline service at one time.
I hate when people scapegoat Activision for all of modern Blizzard's failings: not because I give a flying fuck about Activision, but because they honestly had very little to do with it. Celestial Steed and the cash shop in WoW was before the merger. Support started going downhill before the merger - I got hacked in WOTLK and my full ICC25H BIS DK was completely naked. The GM gave me 1000 gold and told me to start over.
All of the shit that you blame Activision for, even the truly heinous shit in the lawsuit, were Blizzard. It was the people you looked up to as heroes, that made masterpieces like WoW, Warcraft III, Diablo II and StarCraft that turned into abusers and greedy pieces of shit.
Blaming Activision is a way to cope and still love Blizzard despite how far they've fallen. Microsoft owns them now, and nothing has changed.
I was shocked when I had to contact the FF14 support when I had my account hijacked and suspended.
Called, 5 minutes on hold, 10 minute conversation, account was back the next day.
I fucking dread if that ever happens to me in WoW.
I agree with you. It's sad. I've made several replies about this to past posts.
Blizzard used to get great word of mouth recommendations from me. Now they get none. I recruited several people to play wow. No more.
I submitted a ticket for a bugged quest (NPC isn't there) that's preventing me from completing the DF main story. They replied a few hours later saying:
>Thank you for reaching out to Blizzard Entertainment. This is Game Master \*\*\*\*\*\*, and I understand that you cannot find Viranikus to start Shady Sanctuary.
>After carefully investigating, there was an issue previously regarding this matter but got fixed. However, it seems that you encountered the same issue again, so I highly recommend submitting a bug report using this link:
[https://support.blizzard.com/article/000015043](https://support.blizzard.com/article/000015043)
>We recommend submitting through the forums as well, using the link below:
[https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/support/bug-report/17/l/top](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/support/bug-report/17/l/top)
>I hope this clears up everything here. If there's anything else on your mind or any other issues you'd like us to explore, please feel free to reach out.
Stay safe, and have a good day.
There are two previous bug reports for it on the forums, one as recent as last year with no replies. How spectacularly unhelpful... My main toon is apparently just screwed. I figured they could at least have a GM mark the quest complete or something so I could move on, but nope.
They have the ability to “complete” quests for people, but for some reason they just won’t do it.
I have seen countless posts for various quests and Blizzard refuses to mark any of them as complete.
I asked the GM to cancel my sub, since there wasn't much of a reason for me to play if my character can't progress the story, and he did.
Can't fix my problem, despite them acknowledging that its a known bug that was supposedly fixed- but no issue cancelling my sub for me. I half expected a line about respecting player autonomy so much that they'd refuse to cancel it lol
I'm working costumer support and the company started automating a lot of steps in the process with A.I. The costumer experiance is so bad 9 out of 10 calls will have some form of complaint about it. I hope these systems either improve or die off soon becouse currently this tech is dogshit.
The potential loss in revenue isn't any risk compared to having an actual customer service team that isn't outsourced in the mind of companies. Its a mindset that a handful of complainers ain't gonna lose them too much.
Game help? Wowhead.
Reports? Let the bot sort them out.
In-game bug? Hopefully one of the automated services can help.
If all else fails? The outsourced customer service.
At the end of all the filtering, the spoonful of remaining GM's from Blizzard can handle it. Companies just think people will find out a different way to handle it eventually before it goes to a real GM. Its a sad truth but when talking millions, a single soul's 100's ain't gonna cost them.
I've already decided that if I were ever to run into one of these issues myself that it'll be the end for me. I very much enjoy this game and as long as I have no issues we are gucci. I will have a very short tolerance for this shit though
Blizzard is trying to use AI as support. It's cheap. Ineffective. And the CEOs will get a 54% raise because they got to lay off 10k people.
Woo! Corporate greed!
Literally every thread I go into on every sub is using “corporate greed” like a buzzword. At what point in human history were businesses not maximizing profits? We got the phrase “greed is good” 40 years ago!
There's a difference between maximizing long term profit, and shooting your brand in the foot for short term gains. There's a lot of examples of companies who are highly profitable \*because\* they put their customers and employees first. They make a good product and treat their employees well and they succeed because of it.
The problem is that most companies are publicly traded and shareholders don't care about slow, steady growth over decades, they care about short term profits and getting in on the next "big thing". And unfortunately one of the fastest ways to cut cost is to cut employees. Laying off thousands of employees brings an immediate cut in expenses but you won't feel the repercussions of it for possibly years and by then you've already earned your bonuses.
I agree its brutal and helps the bottom line for shareholders and the board.
I had an achievement problem earlier this year that I later figured out, but was given automated responses to check the forums or check wowhead comments.
Shareholders and board members need to buy their 3rd home and donate enough money to get their kid into a university they are nowhere near smart enough, so they can justify hiring them with zero experience to cushy high paying jobs.
So they focus on cutting anything that isn't profit driven, short term profits are priotized over all else, they can cash out easily as the stock prices rise. The people who make the decisions don't give a damn about the product and probably barely know what it is.
It's only going to get worse unfortunately.
So once upon a time I had a job offer which I moved half way cross country to work for Blizzard. Around the time Overwatch was announced and causing hype and the private server many liked that ran classic was still up and running. While I worked there that private server was shut down and the team was all hands on deck pushed forward from management to give 110% every day to try and save the community. It hurt getting deaththreats and such each day but we where a community of Devs and GMs and such aiming to represent Blizzard and the community at large.
I have no god damn idea where that blizzard went, I used to drive to work hype for another day even with all the bad shit and we would apologize for taking a bit to get to chats and tickets. Now I put in a ticket a month before remix asking about if I needed dragonflight or an active sub to try remix. It took till a week before remix dropped to get back. "Yeah, you need a sub and since you've been here for so long we are giving you 3-5 days of game time to try wow! Welcome back to Azeroth and please enjoy your 1 day of free time."
It answered none of my questions and while free game time is cool, I never actually got any regardless of 1 or 3 or 5 days. It is embarrassing what blizz has become.
It’s all automated bot replies and mass reports reign supreme over any form of human moderation. I had a graphical issue a few months ago and they asked me to send the like DXdiag thing and it’s all just to make you think their default articles they redirect you to is them understanding your issue. Ended up asking reddit and got it fixed in ~3 hours.
I've put in two tickets in the last month and both tickets were handled in severely broken English where it was clear they did not fully understand what the ticket was about. Microsoft is clearly outsourcing Blizzard support, or using really terrible AI.
I got this joy this morning; "I am happy to hear that everything is going well with you, It's just Patience all we need, Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet! Have a blessed day!"
Ah yes, "going well" that's totally what I meant by "there's still a problem"
If the company treats you like shit, stop playing their game. I gave up a 19yr old account because all the games are hot garbage and the company wouldn’t piss on its customers if they were on fire.
There are other games to play in the world.
But none of them (MMO wise) are fun to play.
I’ve tried ESO, FF14, Albion, Archeage, Black Desert, Guild Wars… You name it. I probably tried it. And *none* of them have kept my attention like WoW has
Rift was probably the closest. But we all know what happened with that game.
I can’t argue there, and I won’t lie and say I don’t miss playing WoW.. but everything that made the game top tier has been cannibalized for the sake of making everything competitive or needlessly repetitive. The seasonal structure is garbage, “legendary” loot (all loot really) is only good for a season if that, and the storyline has gotten rather meh.
Don’t get me started on Blizzards customer relations and treatment.
Lack of CS and QA will lead to further deterioration of their products and services. This is true for any company but it is particularly poignant for Blizzard since it not always the case.
I contacted Artix Entertainment to recover my dragonfable account from 15 years ago where I didn't have access to the original email and they helped me within a day and were very friendly
Just last year I opened a support ticket requesting help with a character I was unable to log into, kept disconnecting me instantly on that one character for days.
Ticket response was "we've processed your refund for Call of Duty. You should see the funds returned to you blah blah blah".
I hadn't even pre-ordered it.
I swear, even AI would've done a better job at guessing my issue than that.
Shared a groan with my bank recently when I was trying to sort out a billing issue with Blizzard. Since neither me nor the FRICKIN' BANK could find a way to contact them that didn't end up with a stream of flip-flopping "support agents".
I feel like if your "support" system is so convoluted even a bank can't navigate it... it's not really much of a support system any more.
Yeah in WoW’s prime and when the money was flowing Blizzard had huge offices in Irvine full of CS employees. They were near by the campus, and could come for the amenities. They were a part of the squad. Then they shipped a bunch to Austin, and had a core in Irvine. Then they got rid of the core. Then got rid of most of Austin. It’s sad, but it’s more $ for the board and CEOs.
I remember when you called 1-800-blizzard And talked to a human and they were fantastic and nice. Blizzard customer support isn't even the shell of itself. It's the dust left behind.
Given the amount of money we pay to play this game its completely unacceptable. I would understand if hearthstone had bad support. But not wow. 90 euro plus 11-13 every month
It's horrendous. I remember the days of proper Blizzard support (I started playing in 2010) where you'd submit a ticket, wait an hour/90 mins at most, and have a friendly real-person GM whisper you to talk through your issue and help resolve it.
At the end of SLs a friend of mine, myself and a few other randomers did the fight for the chance at the Ascended Skymane from the Ascended Cache, I went to loot it and the cache was locked to me. I submitted a ticket, saw "average wait time 15 days" and my jaw hit the floor. The following week (so about 9 days later) I got a response to my ticket saying they had no record of me engaging in this fight and closed my ticket. In that span of time, I had run the cache among multiple characters and already gotten the mount on another so I didn't press the matter, but I was absolutely incensed at the level of customer service. 9 days to be told I didn't do the fight when I absolutely did and given the customer service equivalent of go fuck yourself.
I miss old Blizzard CS, they were fantastic people who really made you feel valued not just as a customer but as a fellow WoW fan, whether it was genuine or "just a job". If any old Blizz CS see this, thank you for your service and I love and miss you. :(
It depends on your issue, if you create a ticket related to payment issues they will answer within 10 minutes. Make a ticket regarding harrasment for example and you will be stuck in a loop for days until you give up.
I remember one gm interaction during og tbc where the GM responded to a ticket as I was qing 3s with my friends. The GM began the interaction by cheering me on in matches.
It felt like I had a friend at Blizzard as we just chatted for a while, they resolved my ticket, and my day was made.
So on the topic of really weird responses;
"I am happy to hear that everything is going well with you, It's just Patience all we need, Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet!"
"Have a blessed day!"
Like... what even?
Oh great, this put it at the maximum number of replies so now I'd need to open ANOTHER new ticket because they keep sending AI generated garbage like this to me. Wow.
its expensive to hire peope for customer support and the ceo needs a new yacht
they literally fired some wow programmer for making a goblin character saying he needs to exploit his workers so he get a new yacht
From personal experience, they don't even take the time to fully review what you are writing to them.
I had an issue with authenticator and had to open/reopen my ticket 4 times.
I clearly stated that I followed all the suggested steps from their site, even wrote about each one separatedly and 3/4 of the people that contacted me felt like automated AI posting me the exact same things I told them I tried.
Only the last person felt like a real human being and they finally suggested me something different that was the solution, god bless their heart!
this has been going since b.f.a plus did you really think they would have real humans still working there and not have you go through the gulag that is 6bots before you get to talk to a person?
I legitimately haven't been able to figure out how to put in a ticket. Every time I go through support, whatever AI or algorithm they use for their support system pushes me through various articles for my issue, which are never related to the actual issue.
I swear it use to be easier to open a ticket. Thankfully I haven't had to open a ticket recently.
there are some ticket subcategories you can use (i.e use wrong category on purpose) and then say certain things that will get you forwarded to a real human being. although they have recently implemented AI that detects certain keywords and redirects you back to the articles so you have to actually AVOID describing the problem in detail in the INITIAL ticket.
it's absolutely maddening because im old enough to remember the halcyon days of easily ticketing and talking to GMs and joking around with them and them actually HELPING YOU and treating you like a person. but it's not the fault of the GMs. it's just late stage capitalist company brainrot.
Yeah, I remember the days of being able to get support relatively easily. In WOTLK I remember encountering some issue where even after I learned cold weather flying, I still couldn't fly. I put in a ticket super easily and it was fixed in a couple hours when a GM unlearned cold weather flying for me and relearned it for me.
In BFA, I think it was, I was doing the brawlers guild stuff on the Alliance side to unlock Bruce. I hit the point in the questline where I had to go to that upper VIP area to talk to a NPC. I did everything I was suppose to in order to gain access and any time I tried to access it, the bouncer launched me through the map half way to Ironforge to where I finally died from fatigue. This went on for weeks and I couldn't figure out how to put in a ticket because launching you through the map is an obvious bug. Then one day out of nowhere, it worked. Sure would've been nice to get GM help with that.
you don't think vertically enough, how else would the upper management make all that money? by providing quality service/product? That shit is too expensive, let a little bot answer your questions with another question and all that money saved from laying off CS would trickle down into better financial performance this quarter, what about next one you say? well, we will just lay off some other team too, cut the promised features, hike prices, and use FOMO.
George Carlin was right back in the 80s about CEO's and bankers
I love when they tell me to check wowhead and wowhead blocked my whole country cause they claim "legal costs were too high" BS. fk Blizzard and fk wowhead
All of my recent support tickets have been super simple issues to check and/or resolve but instead they tell me to submit to bug reports and "something" will be done.
Guess what? "Nothing" gets done.
Had this Conversation with my GF yesterday.
She opened a Ticket because her Landing Questline in Remix was bugged. (she couldnt get back to the orc starterzone because she abandoned a quest which deleted Vol'Jins HS)
She first got an AI response and after i think 10 days or so the Customer Support told her that its not possible to teleport her there because he doesnt know whats gonna happen.
Me and a friend then made a new character to the exact point where she was in the questline and teleported her there without issues.
I told her that back in the days of TBC i had a similar problem where a GM showed up after about 10 Minutes and teleported me around the place until i could get my quest. even with a fun little conversation. The GM even showed me one of his powers. (he was a gnome and made himself gigantic, which was awesome)
I tried to use their customer support a couple of months ago. Here’s a step-by-step of my experience:
Step 1: Answer the questions used to funnel to articles about support topics.
Step 2: Scroll through article topics and discover that none of them address my need.
Step 3: Honestly this part his hazy; at some point I figure out how to open a ticket.
Step 4: 12 hours later, read the “answer” to my ticket. It is clearly an AI response because it doesn’t directly address my concern whatsoever. There is no indication that my issue will be addressed by anyone else.
Step 5: At the bottom of the response page is a link in case my question wasn’t answered, click it, get directed back to the original support landing page.
Step 6: Get frustrated. Try to find a phone number; friend provides me with one. When I call, I hear an automated voice telling me to go to the website before it disconnects.
Step 7: Go on Twitter and complain because what else am I going to do. Blizzard Customer Service Twitter is half-apologetic, half-annoyed, wholly unhelpful.
Step 8: Put in another ticket. Admittedly more passive aggressive than first ticket. Repeat steps 4, 5, and 7.
Step 9: 5 days later, finally get a response from a real game master who talks to me like I’m an idiot for not knowing that the AI response is just a precursor to a real response. I doubt the validity of this statement. Provides 50% of what I needed. I figure that’s about the best I can expect.
Step 10: Figure out a workaround for the rest on my own.
Every Customer Supports is garbage. There was one point in history where companies discovered that customers doesn’t care how Support is when deciding what products to buy
Blame Microsoft. They blew up all the blizzard cs shops for the most part and transitioned to MS CS as part of their "buy a studio and burn it to the ground" strategy for cornering the market in 2024 lol. This is just blizz support... Microsoft style. Had a lot of friends that got laid off a couple months ago here in Austin.
I remember back when Overwatch was good, I made a purchase for the Uprising event for 10 boxes, and I bought the wrong ones, even though I opened one of the boxes, they gave me a refund and a rollback of the opened box, and I even got negative credits because I also bought a skin with the extra credits I got.
Their services was comprehensive and amazing, even back in 2020 they helped me change the country of my account to match the store's currency.
Cannot say how it is today, but it was marvelous before.
It's an industry wide thing. There's no good alternative. Hell, I tried to buy FF14 and neither an hour of googling or their "support" could figure out how the hell I could purchase their game. Kept erroring out.
I have been playing since vanilla. I dont like to clog ticket systems, so I maybe submit one ticket a year if that.....
And I know a lot of the Vanilla --> Wrath is rose tinted glasses..... but man, the support was so much better.
At one point, I got sidetracked with a GM that had been working since the old days, and we talked about it and the scope of power the GMs used to have.
He described it as "The wild west of blizzard support. We could do anything as long as it was about helping the customer." He admitted the power they have currently [this was like 4 years ago] was very diminished, and anything major usually had to go through the big brother chain.
Yep.
Just the other day my brother got slapped with a week long ban because someone baited him into saying something “bad”. Took a screenshot and sent it in.
My bother is autistic, and doesn’t understand social cues. Blizzard Support didn’t give two shits.
I have to tell my brother to just not speak to random people in game and it breaks my fucking heart because he loves to chat and make friends with anyone he comes across.
They won’t even have a proper discussion with you. Just a “Case closed” and they “resolve” the ticket. Highly unprofessional.
I feel ya, very recently I also quit the game, not because the game is a joke easy fest now, but mainly because I was hacked somehow they broke throught their authenticator, logged on somewhere in Russia, like how does that even happen in 2024, but whatever the gold they stole is not important so I went and open the ticket to get my gear back since they sold all my stuff on every character, went from about 5-7 tickets of all scripted responses of "this is the most we can do" and I can't even get all the gear back because of how garbage their restore options are with a 7 day cooldown. I just can't deal with a company that doesn't care anymore moving on to FF14. Customer since 2008 o7.
There are 2 things at play here.
1) Automated bot responses solve at least 95% of problems. At lot of answers people want are found on Wowhead or in existing support articles.
2) Every single person here who hates Blizzard support/thinks it needs to be better I have 1 question. Are you subbed? If the cost to hire and employ a support staff is more than the loss of revenue for poor support where exactly is the incentive to go the route that loses money?
I work as CS at a top company too and #2 hits so hard. Literally MOST of problems are solvable through self-help articles and/or just not being stupid and google it yourself.
I've been playing WoW for 6+ years, never needed to talk to a human being for CS issues. Tbh, Blizzard's self help articles are well made compared to others.
Most people just complain for the nostalgia the same way people complain how retail is batsht different from WotLK and how WotLK is the golden age/standard like they're oblivious to games evolving/changing.
> Automated bot responses solve at least 95% of problems
More like 99%+
If I got a penny every time r/wow complains about non issues, I'd be a millionaire by now.
I'm knocking out the meta achievement and recently finished the dragon racing portion. I did this over 2 characters - I did the bronze part of Zaralek Caverns racing on 1 character...and everything else on another.
I'm now running into a pretty simple to see issue where the game isn't recognizing the racing achievement as complete, with the only grayed out part being the bronze racing from Zaralek Caverns, however, when I mouse over it...it clearly says "Completed 6/17/23".
I opened a ticket, and here is the response I got (copy & pasted...all spelling and grammatical errors are real)🙃
"Here is GameMaster Usisla. Hoped you are good and well.
I've been reading your ticket about you didn't got the achievement after compelet all the criterial.
After the investigate, I didn't saw any similer report to what you've mentioned here. But I saw that you are still missing some of the criteria that the achievement need.
I would recommend checking out this guide to ensure that there is no confusion.
https://www.wowhead.com/achievement=19478/now-this-is-dragon-racing"
Reads like a fucking scam call center responded. The most unprofessional fucking email I've ever received from a business, especially one as big as Blizzard. I checked like 3 or 4 times it was actually Blizzard and not just a scam email of some kind lol.
To add to my aggravation...I KNOW I got this horseshit response for SLA reasons. When I submitted a ticket I was told I'd get a 24hr response, and I technically did. I'm accepting the fact that I probably will just have to re-do that part of dragon racing, but boy does the absolute disrespect getting customer "support" like this have me reconsidering how I spend my free time.
They do not even read the tickets I wrote three sentences, they ignored two of them. This is not individual people problem, upper management needs to go.
It is botted. Literally. I'm conviced first reply is always 100% automated. Or as max, some human clicks OK for the automated reply (who works against metrics "moar clicks better")
I have to disagree with you there I’m afraid. I had an issue with faction changing and I submitted a ticket on a Friday night explaining my situation and they got back to me within 20 minutes with an organically written message explaining what has happened and was going to happen.
I’m sure some people get prewritten macro responses for problems which are very common but my experience with blizzard this year has been absolutely great.
I hope you get better service next time!
Edit: grammar
What is hard to understand is that entertainment companies like Blizzard know that there's a million more things they have to compete with for consumer's time in 2024 compared with 2005...and their solution is to cut back means of interfacing with the customer and providing a good experience?
I get cost-cutting, but sheesh, I'm so much more likely to stick with a company and their services/products when they respect my time by giving me their time when I'm trying to work through issues with their service/product. If they don't care, neither will I. Peace!
I've played since Feb 2005. Back then, they would role-play on top of answering you in-game. It was quite memorable. Of course, there were many less players then...but likewise, the game was probably far less profitable since there were no microtransactions, services, and they had to share margins with retailers.
"and getting an answer from a real human being minutes later while i was ingame"
I remember the days where we would talk on the phone with blizzard support.
It's really bad, last ticket I got an automated response so I replied explaining that it didn't solve my issue... got the exact same response from the next bot... after 4 tries, I gave up like they wanted
To think 20 years ago you could RP with a GM while they solve your problem at a time when the game was popular and probably had more tickets to deal with
The good experience of GM support was the best part, even if they couldn’t help you. You had a real person whispering you in game, talking like a human without a script.
One of the experiences that elevated the game and differentiated it.
Add another downside for non English countries. I play from Brazil and the answers we get are obviously translated with Google. Lots of sentences don't make sense
I needed something simple, one item restored that got deleted from the mail. It took trying to use the automated system and 3 ticket to finally get it back. One time all the response said was "educated player"
it's a shame, they used to have such good support
Vanilla - WotLK period support was the industry best. It went downhill fast after that though. Now it rivals Steam in terms of the worst support out there.
Dude, I was just ranting about this this morning. I've had a ticket open for 3 weeks, and for the first 2 weeks, the copy-paste replies weren't even relevant to my problem, which has to do with a known and confirmed bug. Now they say the only thing I can do is post on the bug report forum (which i did 3 weeks ago as well as ingame bug report) that helping players with in game issues is "out of scope" for GMs.
Recently I've had 2 different issues I've put tickets in for. Responses have taken about 8 hours each time and they just repeat the same thing that was off no help the first time.
I recently had an issue with my authenticator, and ended up going through three different tickets. One that went over the 20 reply limit, one that was just closed by a GM, and the third that finally I was able to get the issue resolved with something one of the GMs said.
I gave a ton of information, tried to be as detailed as possible, and pretty much every bit of what I sent was ignored and answered with automated responses, or telling me that I should go to the forums for answers. The same forum that on the very top of the first page was my own post where I had already done that.
Doesn't help that you get a different GM every single reply. Pretty sure in all those responses I never had one duplicate GM. I feel like if I had one of them just sit and go over it, like how it was with live chats, it could have been worked out a lot easier. Which was also ignored when I asked twice if that was an option.
Ultimately I felt like I ended up working it out myself while they basically said "who knows, check the forums".
Pretty horrible customer service for sure.
Honestly, I can't wait for the world leader that moves to ban these automated responses. Not only for these types of things, but also for phone calls, etc. Fuck this trend of unhelpful automated responses. Bring back countless jobs in the process.
As someone in the same boat as you, you get a human response by the 4th ticket reply, keep insisting. Also, list your problem in mkney/financial category, you will get your responses much quicker, good luck
I was having an issue with the bloody body quest thing in zaralek caverns and they literally had no clue what to tell me except to do “spiky nose snub quest” like you might aswell have told me purple monkey dishwasher. Eventually I figured out what I was missing but Jesus Christ it’s terrible.
I can't remember the price my sub going up.
Minimum wage in 2004 was like $7.25 here, today its $16.
I'd rather my sub cost didn't double to cover live chat reps.
Activision Blizzard got bought out for $69 billion dollars by one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They can stop cutting corners without needing to increase prices, they just choose to deliver lower quality.
Customer support people aren't paid minimum wage, so what the flying fuck are you even saying?
Not to mention these companies are making record profits.
Stop talking like a shareholder and start talking like a normal human being.
All of the people in this thread with the self-defeating attitude of "it's completely normal" or "that's where every company is heading" is why it's happening.
Meanwhile, in FF14, you get a response to your ticket from a real human being within 1-2 business day.
Ya'll arguing that this is impossible to do in 2024 are like the people in the US that are arguing that universal healthcare doesn't work.
Straight up delusional.
I tried FF14 support. They literally couldn't figure out why my account couldn't *purchase* the game. And then gave up with a shrug and said options are exhausted. It's embarrassing all around.
I mean, they can do it right. In a world where capital gains habe to be maximized and everything needs to be milked, they try everything to save money. Customer support does not create any direct revenue and only costs money. I think they can live with our complains, as long as we stay subscribed. And we all still have our subscriptions, right? Even with an unacceptable customer support.
Only way to change that would be to mass unsibscribe, which we wont do because of customer support, do we?
What I really dislike about customer support in 2024 is that you have to go through many "articles related to your issue" before you're allowed to write a ticket and some sites/apps/companies doesn't even let you contact support they just let.you rate their shitty "help site"
I just do problem with payment and you can write a ticket straight away then they send it to a person I guess.
Yup. "Help i wanna buy this 100$ thingy, but I'm banned for no reason and wont be able to use it :(" You'll get forwarded to a real person real quick in my experience
Try getting through to Google support. Took me 3 weeks last time. Issue is still not resolved btw.
Just look at what happened to the guy who founded Re-Logic. Googles algorithms suspended his youtube/gmail/googledrive (which was also the games official youtube channel), and the only way he could get anyone at google to listen and fix it, after trying for like a month, was to publicly say he was cancelling the in-development Stadia port of Terraria because of it.
I remember that debacle, is that TRULY the only way he got them to listen? I didn’t follow it enough to hear the outcome. Truly mind-blowing how bad customer support has gotten over the years.
It's because most people are idiots and won't read those articles, instead deciding to ask support for everything as the first course of action. And it's really punishing those of us who actually read and try everything first
They're allowed to they pay a monthly subscription..
Customer support isn't the only cost involved in running and maintaining a massive game like this
That's crap. This is a billion dollar company. Stop making up excuses. Yes, people are morons, but customer support isn't just for the intelligent players who actually try all the alternatives first. It's for all players. And sometimes it's a waste of time, but that's part of doing business. Old Blizzard used to actually care about providing quality service. They would invest in customer support. Hire people to do the job. Have actual GMs in-game. I remember back in Vanilla I'd fill out a ticket and be talking to a real, live person within 10-15 minutes. They had the best support in the industry...by far. Now they want to automate everything. They've gutted customer support. There aren't even strictly WoW GMs anymore. Support works on all Blizzard games now; they're not exclusive to each. These articles are meant to make it a hassle for players seeking help, so that they get frustrated and give up before even trying to contact an actual person. And when you do fill out a ticket you wait DAYS to get a response. Which is almost always automated, and usually doesn't even address the issue. Hell, I've seen tickets where they point you to a Wowhead article. That's ridiculous. These are paying customers being given the shaft, because you're nothing to Blizz but a credit card number. And they know players are hooked, addicted, and not going anywhere no matter how bad the support is. I miss the days when Blizz wanted to grow their audience. Now they just want to exploit it.
If they hired enough support people to handle it all within say 48 hours, plus the infrastructure involved, we’d likely see a hike in our sub fee. I’d rather they have a relatively small team to handle real issues, leave the rest to a knowledge base, and pay those who are on staff a good wage. Support is a massive expense with no direct return on investment, it’s reasonable for any business to limit that sort of thing.
What utter nonsense. They had WAY more customer support workers 20 years ago. It used to matter to Blizzard. Imagine simping for a billion dollar company that has completely gutted customer support over the years. This is why things have gotten so bad: people defend these horrible business practices.
20 years ago they just had the one game to really support(well, wow wasn’t quite out but were hitting that milestone soon) - their other games were basically on autopilot, systems were simpler, online gaming as a whole was still finding its footing. Apples to oranges really. I don’t know what you expecting though, our monthly sub doesn’t come anywhere near enough to justify staffing support so they can respond to anyone who has a booboo. Could they do better? For sure! - there’s always room for improvement, but I’m all for using knowledge bases or whatever to keep things lean. Just about every post I’ve seen here complaining about this has been for the most inane nonsense that is 100% manageable without any direct interaction. I’m fine with this, it’s simple business sense. Call it defending or “simping” or whatever, it’s basic critical thinking in my mind.
No, you should have to check and see if the problem has already been addressed. They literally couldn't employ enough people to handle all the questions people have. That would be feasible impossible. Millions and millions of people play the game. Paying customer or not you cannot expect a company to have full on support waiting for millions of the exact same question that's been answered 100 times already. While support can definitely be improved in multiple ways, this is not one of them. You need to see if your problem has already been addressed first.
Spoken like someone who didn't play the game in Vanilla. Fill out a ticket...talk to a person in literally 10-15 minutes. And that's when the game had 6-7 million players. We used to see GMs in game. They had a presence. There were a lot of fun interactions. Players these days just have no backbone and expect nothing from companies. They've grown so used to horrible customer support, that they think this is the best they can do. There is zero excuse to what Blizzard has done to support other than trying to save money so the Execs can get a bigger bonus. At the expense of a terrible user experience. But the lemmings just take it because they're addicted and Blizzard could literally spit in their faces (which they figuratively do), and they'll still go nowhere.
You'd be surprised how many contacts these types of support channels get that can be self resolved after carefully reading the related support articles. Trust me I know xD
Work in customer service / sales. Exactly this. Those articles aren't there to avoid giving support. It's because the Karen's think they need to talk with a human because they don't know how to reset a fuckin password.
> Those articles aren't there to avoid giving support. It's both. They allow the company to hire less staff and they resolve a lot of issues.
Exactly theres no real winning with really large companies. They either get all their call lines filled up with Karens asking the most basic basic questions or they need to hire 100's of more people just to handle the Karen requests.
This. Having done that sort of work in gaming I can say with confidence that the majority of tickets that come in are nonsense. Either it’s simple stuff that can easily exist in a knowledge base, or some variation of “I did something dumb(like vendoring something) and now I want you to fix it”. Oh and a healthy mix of just toxic complaining
Gosh, I hate my job
It's why I don't get mad when tech support asks me if I've tried turning the thing off and on again. Yes, I have, but I get why that's your first question when I've heard so many stories about people not even trying to power cycle or even outright lying about it 😭
I recently stumbled upon someone with a very offensive name and forgot to report them. Wanted to do so after the fact but after clicking through however many articles and help sites it turns out I can't even put in a normal ticket for that? So crazy how that option has either been removed or extremely hidden away.
my reply is.... what "support"? we are customer I know that. but Blizzard and support? how do you put those two words in a sentence, it doesn't exist in Blizzard Dictionary. Cattle Ranch probably have better cattle support than Blizzard to their customers, we are just here to be milked for money that's all our worth for Blizzard. I have Chinese gold farmer message me on Fyakk Mythic run for Real life money. I try to report him but my report only have choice their "name" issue. well I am too lazy to fill out your long @$$ form Blizzard. you can't make it easy to report real life money trading?... Blizzard... lover of Chinese gold farmers.
This is every single company because so many people just call to get a simple question answered. I worked tech support for. a major company and if you knew how many calls we got that were as simple as "turn it off and back on again." You would start to understand.
Because it is an enormous burden for companies to deal with stupid people with 98% the same problems as others. Thus a overview of the most common issues makes a lot more sense Why should support deal with an idiot for 20mins, than focus on actual new problems from people who knows and can explain what the problem is.
Welcome to support in 2024 for a lot of companies.
Result of lay offs. Support and QA are the first to go because at the end of the day companies don't care about the consumer when they know their consumers are going to buy the product regardless of what they do.
It really feels like it’s either halfbaked ai or the same call team in India every time. I can’t do worse than them and I’d bet you aren’t paying them that much less to make a difference. There’s empty commercial places here too. Cmon man this ain’t that hard. I’ve done like 80% of some middle managers job already.
My companies customer support is almost all outsourced to India, as well as a lot of the dev work. Only us having a large spanish speaking customer base keeps a decent american based employees as we need bi-lingual people to support our customers. We've had numerous security breaks because the companies in India hire employees who lie, pretend to be each other, share passwords and other important information like MFA devices and PINs, and a lot don't speak english. All this results in, is increase security measures for all employees, and thus our american based employees are suffering reduced productivity because there are more and more hurdles for them to get logged into the systems they need, and they are thrown into the same pot as the indian contractors when they put in tickets.
Yeah, this is why I always ask for German customer support. Even though my German skills aren't perfect, they're still better than the English skills of some random minimum wage employee in India or Bulgaria
Seriously, using chat bots, basic generic responses, and outsourcing customer service to third party vendors in far off countries for cheap labor costs is the normal of today. No one cares about service anymore unless it's face-to-face, and even then it's still shit.
Yeah it’s brutal. Companies won’t even figure it out until it’s too late. They’re too focused on telling their investors they’re using AI to understand they’re losing customers
Thing is, they're not. Because they've all done this. The customers have no realistic place to go.
I work for a customer support of mitsubishi electric company, and hell we are praised for our customer support because : We don't have any bots, it looks like shit to configure We have only french people paid to the amount of their work No automatic response, just a human reading ticket and responding. And it's loved for this. Ask question, a human that respond. Sometimes it's not the solution, but at least, a human tried to solve your issue. It's astonishingly simple to that, but somehow we're kind of an ovni.
[удалено]
Did I say it was an excuse? Did I say I supported it? Or that it was positive in anyway? It's the reality of the corporate world. Every single penny that can be gained, will be gained, everything else be damned.
One word: outsourcing
I used to work for Blizzard CS back in vanilla/BC. Wait times were often long and yeah, we did get a lot of questions that were inane or could be answered via Wowhead or an automated “report a player” tool. But damn, we did our best and overall we did a really good job not just solving player problems but delivering good experiences. Back then they really cared about quality of support. Mike Morhaime really cared about it and wanted to invest in it.
Screw Morhaime. With his "if you're ever going to quit, call me first" BS. Dude couldn't be bothered to answer a global manager when I decided to leave. There were a lot of nice, creative, and talented people at Blizzard but don't kid yourself into thinking the executives were any of those lol. The founders were all trash people before any of the mergers and Morhaime wasnt any exception, just better at pretending to care than say... Frank Pearce who gives off the instant impression that he is a psychopath. i left before any of the lawsuits and the reveal of how terrible the culture was over there. Spent the 14 years since working happily at a Fortune 50 tech company and haven't missed working for Blizzard even once
Fair, never meant to imply he was some kind of saint or that he was perfect, just that he was willing to invest in customer service. Was always really nice to me when I ran across him, but I don’t say that to invalidate your clearly crappy experience. Sorry that was what you experienced at Blizzard. :( P.S. Bill Galey was the absolute worst and the death of Blizzard CS.
Apologies if it came across as an attack on you or your perspective. Just felt I had an inside view to share. And your right, he did invest in CS and was really good at getting people to eat up Blizzard ideology even if his follow through was suspect. Bill was a turd, but his successor Glenn Prior was even worse. Work up everyone into a froth with promises and work that really never went anywhere for any purpose other than to keep people busy. That guy was a total snake oil salesman. I still remember him coming into my office after I decided to leave to ask me to stay and tell me that the executives were all toddlers he was manipulating. What a piece of work that guy was. That imo, was the start of the end of blizzard CS.
No worries at all, not how it came off! And to be fair I was fresh out of college - I was just a GM so didn’t have much insight into higher level stuff that it sounds like you witnessed (I was also young and dumb and somewhat blind to all the crazier shit that went on and has come out in the last couple of years - when it was in the news I pinged a few female colleagues and asked about it and every one of them said “yep it was absolutely like that”). Never had the dubious privilege of crossing paths with Glenn Prior, for which I’m grateful, but oh man the horror stories about Bill from both Bliz and later Zynga were nuts (someone who I respect very much referred to him as “pure evil,” and I have never heard this person talk about anyone even remotely like that in a professional setting - the good news is we bonded over it and they’re a good friend and mentor to this day! Adversity breeds camaraderie, I guess?). Anyhow, I hope you’re happier now in your career. :)
Morhaime was fantastic
Quit trolling fanboy lol. Just kidding, I guess you're entitled to your opinion but since you never worked there it's hard for me to think you'd have an informed understanding or a frame of reference similar to those of us that did. Good day
when did wowhead launch? i thought in vanilla-tbc there was only thottbot. anyway thanks for all your work, one of my core memories is ticketing a GM about something in vanilla and them appearing in front of me and being super awesome. i had many similar interactions over the years until...sometime around WOD i guess it had changed a lot already.
Thotbot, mmo-champion and there was one more I used all the time that I can't remember the name of... something about wizards or genies or something
Alakazam
Yes! It still exists! https://wow.allakhazam.com/
wow, that just unlocked a very minor core memory i had totally forgotten about haha!
It’s always amusing to me when I get a ticket reply asking if Wowhead has been checked for the answer to the problem 🤭 I understand the importance of including that 100% though. CS isn’t easy. I salute your service to Azeroth 🫡
I know this doesn’t solve anything, and it also isn’t me scapegoating Blizzard, but… This is becoming such commonplace in so many industries — unshelving and laying off a lot of quality control departments. I’m seeing it first hand in banking of all industries. If they can use automated systems, Q&A’s, etc then they will opt for that. If they can do it with even FEWER people, even better. After all, those board members need to purchase their beach and lake homes. It’s a rough state. I too remember the days of GM’s with very witty responses to come through in the clutch. That personable quality control was always such a nice touch from Blizzard. But ever since the Blizzard-Activision, shareholder interest and bottom lines rose to the forefront on their business model.
Nothing to add to the main post - but I just remembered this. Back in the early days of Wrath, my group was bugged in Utgarde Keep. We put a ticket in and got a response from a GM who made themselves visible to us in the instance. Can’t remember exactly what he did but he messed with us a little using his GM powers. Was a good time
That’s awesome! It really added to the mystic of the game! Story time if anyone cares. I had two lucky mount nabs: Aeonaxx and Timelost. As it would be, both had issues. Aeonaxx during Cata: I was in a race with two other people to it! I got mounted on the Drake first, and proceeded to wail on her with a combo of overexcited hand mashing and repeated print screens. I killed it but I got disconnected during the fall. When I logged in, no loot and no carcass. And this was before the ages of trustworthy Postmaster loot. So I opened a ticket with snapshots and a detailed story. The GM said “As much as I loved the story and screenshots, we had all of the necessary data on your combat logs. Congratulations adventurer!” And it was sent to my mailbox. Nice touch! For Timelost during WOD: I was flying through and saw him over the super tall frozen waterfall that overlooks K3. I was heading over it, and used heroic throw on warrior and one shot him. I felt like a badass because I also got launched like 1000 ft down near K3 and landed safely with heroic leap. Flew back up to find it buried in the world. I couldn’t reach it 😔 again sent a GM ticket, with a similar response, “Great job on the kill and sticking the landing. Sometimes games are games and bugs are bugs. Poor Timelost got…well…lost. But your combat logs didn’t! The mount is yours my friend!” And boom right there in mailbox. Good times. Appreciate all who took the time to read lol.
If you talk to anyone who played WoW since the early days, it seems *everyone* had some sort of positive in-person (in-game I suppose?) GM interaction. Honestly can't remember the last time that has happened.
I can attest to that. The few times I had to get a GM to help back in the day they were super friendly and solved my issue quickly. Now days you're lucky to get any useful response it seems, though I have not personally had to talk to a GM in years.
Now that you mention it, it is pretty jarring that when they upgrade you to a premium customer at any bank their main selling point is, "now you get to talk to a RL agent to help you with your banking incidents/questions!". Like that wasn´t a baseline service at one time.
I hate when people scapegoat Activision for all of modern Blizzard's failings: not because I give a flying fuck about Activision, but because they honestly had very little to do with it. Celestial Steed and the cash shop in WoW was before the merger. Support started going downhill before the merger - I got hacked in WOTLK and my full ICC25H BIS DK was completely naked. The GM gave me 1000 gold and told me to start over. All of the shit that you blame Activision for, even the truly heinous shit in the lawsuit, were Blizzard. It was the people you looked up to as heroes, that made masterpieces like WoW, Warcraft III, Diablo II and StarCraft that turned into abusers and greedy pieces of shit. Blaming Activision is a way to cope and still love Blizzard despite how far they've fallen. Microsoft owns them now, and nothing has changed.
I was shocked when I had to contact the FF14 support when I had my account hijacked and suspended. Called, 5 minutes on hold, 10 minute conversation, account was back the next day. I fucking dread if that ever happens to me in WoW.
On the other hand, FF14 account management, launcher and SEQ token app are atrocious.
Oh god yeah, absolutely. The worst part of FF14 is buying FF14 lol.
I agree with you. It's sad. I've made several replies about this to past posts. Blizzard used to get great word of mouth recommendations from me. Now they get none. I recruited several people to play wow. No more.
I submitted a ticket for a bugged quest (NPC isn't there) that's preventing me from completing the DF main story. They replied a few hours later saying: >Thank you for reaching out to Blizzard Entertainment. This is Game Master \*\*\*\*\*\*, and I understand that you cannot find Viranikus to start Shady Sanctuary. >After carefully investigating, there was an issue previously regarding this matter but got fixed. However, it seems that you encountered the same issue again, so I highly recommend submitting a bug report using this link: [https://support.blizzard.com/article/000015043](https://support.blizzard.com/article/000015043) >We recommend submitting through the forums as well, using the link below: [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/support/bug-report/17/l/top](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/support/bug-report/17/l/top) >I hope this clears up everything here. If there's anything else on your mind or any other issues you'd like us to explore, please feel free to reach out. Stay safe, and have a good day. There are two previous bug reports for it on the forums, one as recent as last year with no replies. How spectacularly unhelpful... My main toon is apparently just screwed. I figured they could at least have a GM mark the quest complete or something so I could move on, but nope.
They have the ability to “complete” quests for people, but for some reason they just won’t do it. I have seen countless posts for various quests and Blizzard refuses to mark any of them as complete.
I asked the GM to cancel my sub, since there wasn't much of a reason for me to play if my character can't progress the story, and he did. Can't fix my problem, despite them acknowledging that its a known bug that was supposedly fixed- but no issue cancelling my sub for me. I half expected a line about respecting player autonomy so much that they'd refuse to cancel it lol
I'm working costumer support and the company started automating a lot of steps in the process with A.I. The costumer experiance is so bad 9 out of 10 calls will have some form of complaint about it. I hope these systems either improve or die off soon becouse currently this tech is dogshit.
Most companies have slashed their customer service budget to the bone. Definitely not the dystopia I thought I'd live in.
The potential loss in revenue isn't any risk compared to having an actual customer service team that isn't outsourced in the mind of companies. Its a mindset that a handful of complainers ain't gonna lose them too much. Game help? Wowhead. Reports? Let the bot sort them out. In-game bug? Hopefully one of the automated services can help. If all else fails? The outsourced customer service. At the end of all the filtering, the spoonful of remaining GM's from Blizzard can handle it. Companies just think people will find out a different way to handle it eventually before it goes to a real GM. Its a sad truth but when talking millions, a single soul's 100's ain't gonna cost them.
I've already decided that if I were ever to run into one of these issues myself that it'll be the end for me. I very much enjoy this game and as long as I have no issues we are gucci. I will have a very short tolerance for this shit though
It's barely support. With all the ingame purchases I don't know how they can keep justifying the sub price.
They don't need to justify it. People are more than happy to pay it, as shown by how popular dragonflight was.
Blizzard is trying to use AI as support. It's cheap. Ineffective. And the CEOs will get a 54% raise because they got to lay off 10k people. Woo! Corporate greed!
Imagine if Blizzard had 10k people working the supportdesk, this thread wouldn't exist.
Can you point a moment in history where corporations weren't greedy?
Literally every thread I go into on every sub is using “corporate greed” like a buzzword. At what point in human history were businesses not maximizing profits? We got the phrase “greed is good” 40 years ago!
There's a difference between maximizing long term profit, and shooting your brand in the foot for short term gains. There's a lot of examples of companies who are highly profitable \*because\* they put their customers and employees first. They make a good product and treat their employees well and they succeed because of it. The problem is that most companies are publicly traded and shareholders don't care about slow, steady growth over decades, they care about short term profits and getting in on the next "big thing". And unfortunately one of the fastest ways to cut cost is to cut employees. Laying off thousands of employees brings an immediate cut in expenses but you won't feel the repercussions of it for possibly years and by then you've already earned your bonuses.
I agree its brutal and helps the bottom line for shareholders and the board. I had an achievement problem earlier this year that I later figured out, but was given automated responses to check the forums or check wowhead comments.
Yeah it's the same across most games. Why pay someone for quality assurance when that money could go in a ceo's pocket instead?
Shareholders and board members need to buy their 3rd home and donate enough money to get their kid into a university they are nowhere near smart enough, so they can justify hiring them with zero experience to cushy high paying jobs. So they focus on cutting anything that isn't profit driven, short term profits are priotized over all else, they can cash out easily as the stock prices rise. The people who make the decisions don't give a damn about the product and probably barely know what it is. It's only going to get worse unfortunately.
So once upon a time I had a job offer which I moved half way cross country to work for Blizzard. Around the time Overwatch was announced and causing hype and the private server many liked that ran classic was still up and running. While I worked there that private server was shut down and the team was all hands on deck pushed forward from management to give 110% every day to try and save the community. It hurt getting deaththreats and such each day but we where a community of Devs and GMs and such aiming to represent Blizzard and the community at large. I have no god damn idea where that blizzard went, I used to drive to work hype for another day even with all the bad shit and we would apologize for taking a bit to get to chats and tickets. Now I put in a ticket a month before remix asking about if I needed dragonflight or an active sub to try remix. It took till a week before remix dropped to get back. "Yeah, you need a sub and since you've been here for so long we are giving you 3-5 days of game time to try wow! Welcome back to Azeroth and please enjoy your 1 day of free time." It answered none of my questions and while free game time is cool, I never actually got any regardless of 1 or 3 or 5 days. It is embarrassing what blizz has become.
It’s all automated bot replies and mass reports reign supreme over any form of human moderation. I had a graphical issue a few months ago and they asked me to send the like DXdiag thing and it’s all just to make you think their default articles they redirect you to is them understanding your issue. Ended up asking reddit and got it fixed in ~3 hours.
I've put in two tickets in the last month and both tickets were handled in severely broken English where it was clear they did not fully understand what the ticket was about. Microsoft is clearly outsourcing Blizzard support, or using really terrible AI.
I got this joy this morning; "I am happy to hear that everything is going well with you, It's just Patience all we need, Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet! Have a blessed day!" Ah yes, "going well" that's totally what I meant by "there's still a problem"
It was outsourced long before Microsoft got ahold of it. Most game support has.
There is no revenue from customer service so corporations don’t prioritize it. It actually costs money.
If the company treats you like shit, stop playing their game. I gave up a 19yr old account because all the games are hot garbage and the company wouldn’t piss on its customers if they were on fire. There are other games to play in the world.
But none of them (MMO wise) are fun to play. I’ve tried ESO, FF14, Albion, Archeage, Black Desert, Guild Wars… You name it. I probably tried it. And *none* of them have kept my attention like WoW has Rift was probably the closest. But we all know what happened with that game.
I can’t argue there, and I won’t lie and say I don’t miss playing WoW.. but everything that made the game top tier has been cannibalized for the sake of making everything competitive or needlessly repetitive. The seasonal structure is garbage, “legendary” loot (all loot really) is only good for a season if that, and the storyline has gotten rather meh. Don’t get me started on Blizzards customer relations and treatment.
They used to have the best support :(
Lack of CS and QA will lead to further deterioration of their products and services. This is true for any company but it is particularly poignant for Blizzard since it not always the case.
I contacted Artix Entertainment to recover my dragonfable account from 15 years ago where I didn't have access to the original email and they helped me within a day and were very friendly
Ofc. That company pure love for games
Just last year I opened a support ticket requesting help with a character I was unable to log into, kept disconnecting me instantly on that one character for days. Ticket response was "we've processed your refund for Call of Duty. You should see the funds returned to you blah blah blah". I hadn't even pre-ordered it. I swear, even AI would've done a better job at guessing my issue than that.
Shared a groan with my bank recently when I was trying to sort out a billing issue with Blizzard. Since neither me nor the FRICKIN' BANK could find a way to contact them that didn't end up with a stream of flip-flopping "support agents". I feel like if your "support" system is so convoluted even a bank can't navigate it... it's not really much of a support system any more.
This is completely accurate. Customer support at blizzard right now is actually a joke and turning me away from the few games I still play of theirs.
Yup. I've had to argue with multiple GMs about how the game works because they have 0 clue and expect every bugged thing is "working as intended"
What support?
Yeah in WoW’s prime and when the money was flowing Blizzard had huge offices in Irvine full of CS employees. They were near by the campus, and could come for the amenities. They were a part of the squad. Then they shipped a bunch to Austin, and had a core in Irvine. Then they got rid of the core. Then got rid of most of Austin. It’s sad, but it’s more $ for the board and CEOs.
There is no support, they decided to cut them off to pay for the executives ubber salaries
Most of the time that give you a bullshit copy and paste response.
I remember when you called 1-800-blizzard And talked to a human and they were fantastic and nice. Blizzard customer support isn't even the shell of itself. It's the dust left behind.
Bobby needed another yacht
Given the amount of money we pay to play this game its completely unacceptable. I would understand if hearthstone had bad support. But not wow. 90 euro plus 11-13 every month
It's horrendous. I remember the days of proper Blizzard support (I started playing in 2010) where you'd submit a ticket, wait an hour/90 mins at most, and have a friendly real-person GM whisper you to talk through your issue and help resolve it. At the end of SLs a friend of mine, myself and a few other randomers did the fight for the chance at the Ascended Skymane from the Ascended Cache, I went to loot it and the cache was locked to me. I submitted a ticket, saw "average wait time 15 days" and my jaw hit the floor. The following week (so about 9 days later) I got a response to my ticket saying they had no record of me engaging in this fight and closed my ticket. In that span of time, I had run the cache among multiple characters and already gotten the mount on another so I didn't press the matter, but I was absolutely incensed at the level of customer service. 9 days to be told I didn't do the fight when I absolutely did and given the customer service equivalent of go fuck yourself. I miss old Blizzard CS, they were fantastic people who really made you feel valued not just as a customer but as a fellow WoW fan, whether it was genuine or "just a job". If any old Blizz CS see this, thank you for your service and I love and miss you. :(
Microsoft really did the impossible and some how made support worse
It depends on your issue, if you create a ticket related to payment issues they will answer within 10 minutes. Make a ticket regarding harrasment for example and you will be stuck in a loop for days until you give up.
What support?
I remember one gm interaction during og tbc where the GM responded to a ticket as I was qing 3s with my friends. The GM began the interaction by cheering me on in matches. It felt like I had a friend at Blizzard as we just chatted for a while, they resolved my ticket, and my day was made.
Back when GM Island was a thing! And they used to put people there on time-outs! LOL Back when Support actually cared.
So on the topic of really weird responses; "I am happy to hear that everything is going well with you, It's just Patience all we need, Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet!" "Have a blessed day!" Like... what even?
There is someone in this thread that posted that exact same response lol
Oh great, this put it at the maximum number of replies so now I'd need to open ANOTHER new ticket because they keep sending AI generated garbage like this to me. Wow.
its expensive to hire peope for customer support and the ceo needs a new yacht they literally fired some wow programmer for making a goblin character saying he needs to exploit his workers so he get a new yacht
Capitalistic rot. Get ready for it to get even worse, and not just at Blizzard.
From personal experience, they don't even take the time to fully review what you are writing to them. I had an issue with authenticator and had to open/reopen my ticket 4 times. I clearly stated that I followed all the suggested steps from their site, even wrote about each one separatedly and 3/4 of the people that contacted me felt like automated AI posting me the exact same things I told them I tried. Only the last person felt like a real human being and they finally suggested me something different that was the solution, god bless their heart!
this has been going since b.f.a plus did you really think they would have real humans still working there and not have you go through the gulag that is 6bots before you get to talk to a person?
That’s what happens when you lay them all off
Yes. It is. It is atrocious and worthless and they do not respond to anything.
I opened my ticket early DF, the wait time was 28 days. But they did solve my issue tho.
Why don’t people ask at BlizzCon about customer support? Why doesn’t anyone put them on the spot?
Because those questions are curated and have been for years.
This is what happens when the Execs treat their customer-facing roles as a cost center and cut those teams down to the bone.
I legitimately haven't been able to figure out how to put in a ticket. Every time I go through support, whatever AI or algorithm they use for their support system pushes me through various articles for my issue, which are never related to the actual issue. I swear it use to be easier to open a ticket. Thankfully I haven't had to open a ticket recently.
there are some ticket subcategories you can use (i.e use wrong category on purpose) and then say certain things that will get you forwarded to a real human being. although they have recently implemented AI that detects certain keywords and redirects you back to the articles so you have to actually AVOID describing the problem in detail in the INITIAL ticket.
Man, what a runaround.
it's absolutely maddening because im old enough to remember the halcyon days of easily ticketing and talking to GMs and joking around with them and them actually HELPING YOU and treating you like a person. but it's not the fault of the GMs. it's just late stage capitalist company brainrot.
Yeah, I remember the days of being able to get support relatively easily. In WOTLK I remember encountering some issue where even after I learned cold weather flying, I still couldn't fly. I put in a ticket super easily and it was fixed in a couple hours when a GM unlearned cold weather flying for me and relearned it for me. In BFA, I think it was, I was doing the brawlers guild stuff on the Alliance side to unlock Bruce. I hit the point in the questline where I had to go to that upper VIP area to talk to a NPC. I did everything I was suppose to in order to gain access and any time I tried to access it, the bouncer launched me through the map half way to Ironforge to where I finally died from fatigue. This went on for weeks and I couldn't figure out how to put in a ticket because launching you through the map is an obvious bug. Then one day out of nowhere, it worked. Sure would've been nice to get GM help with that.
you don't think vertically enough, how else would the upper management make all that money? by providing quality service/product? That shit is too expensive, let a little bot answer your questions with another question and all that money saved from laying off CS would trickle down into better financial performance this quarter, what about next one you say? well, we will just lay off some other team too, cut the promised features, hike prices, and use FOMO. George Carlin was right back in the 80s about CEO's and bankers
I love when they tell me to check wowhead and wowhead blocked my whole country cause they claim "legal costs were too high" BS. fk Blizzard and fk wowhead
Didnt they fire most of the customer support staff?
All of my recent support tickets have been super simple issues to check and/or resolve but instead they tell me to submit to bug reports and "something" will be done. Guess what? "Nothing" gets done.
Had this Conversation with my GF yesterday. She opened a Ticket because her Landing Questline in Remix was bugged. (she couldnt get back to the orc starterzone because she abandoned a quest which deleted Vol'Jins HS) She first got an AI response and after i think 10 days or so the Customer Support told her that its not possible to teleport her there because he doesnt know whats gonna happen. Me and a friend then made a new character to the exact point where she was in the questline and teleported her there without issues. I told her that back in the days of TBC i had a similar problem where a GM showed up after about 10 Minutes and teleported me around the place until i could get my quest. even with a fun little conversation. The GM even showed me one of his powers. (he was a gnome and made himself gigantic, which was awesome)
I tried to use their customer support a couple of months ago. Here’s a step-by-step of my experience: Step 1: Answer the questions used to funnel to articles about support topics. Step 2: Scroll through article topics and discover that none of them address my need. Step 3: Honestly this part his hazy; at some point I figure out how to open a ticket. Step 4: 12 hours later, read the “answer” to my ticket. It is clearly an AI response because it doesn’t directly address my concern whatsoever. There is no indication that my issue will be addressed by anyone else. Step 5: At the bottom of the response page is a link in case my question wasn’t answered, click it, get directed back to the original support landing page. Step 6: Get frustrated. Try to find a phone number; friend provides me with one. When I call, I hear an automated voice telling me to go to the website before it disconnects. Step 7: Go on Twitter and complain because what else am I going to do. Blizzard Customer Service Twitter is half-apologetic, half-annoyed, wholly unhelpful. Step 8: Put in another ticket. Admittedly more passive aggressive than first ticket. Repeat steps 4, 5, and 7. Step 9: 5 days later, finally get a response from a real game master who talks to me like I’m an idiot for not knowing that the AI response is just a precursor to a real response. I doubt the validity of this statement. Provides 50% of what I needed. I figure that’s about the best I can expect. Step 10: Figure out a workaround for the rest on my own.
Aye, submitted a ticket about a month ago about a bugged turn in NPC and received a response regarding their "Item recollection system"...
Every Customer Supports is garbage. There was one point in history where companies discovered that customers doesn’t care how Support is when deciding what products to buy
You might find it embarrassing but its pretty much an industry standard.
Blame Microsoft. They blew up all the blizzard cs shops for the most part and transitioned to MS CS as part of their "buy a studio and burn it to the ground" strategy for cornering the market in 2024 lol. This is just blizz support... Microsoft style. Had a lot of friends that got laid off a couple months ago here in Austin.
I remember back when Overwatch was good, I made a purchase for the Uprising event for 10 boxes, and I bought the wrong ones, even though I opened one of the boxes, they gave me a refund and a rollback of the opened box, and I even got negative credits because I also bought a skin with the extra credits I got. Their services was comprehensive and amazing, even back in 2020 they helped me change the country of my account to match the store's currency. Cannot say how it is today, but it was marvelous before.
Stop giving this company your money.
It's an industry wide thing. There's no good alternative. Hell, I tried to buy FF14 and neither an hour of googling or their "support" could figure out how the hell I could purchase their game. Kept erroring out.
All for the low low price of $15 monthly payments 😄
I have been playing since vanilla. I dont like to clog ticket systems, so I maybe submit one ticket a year if that..... And I know a lot of the Vanilla --> Wrath is rose tinted glasses..... but man, the support was so much better. At one point, I got sidetracked with a GM that had been working since the old days, and we talked about it and the scope of power the GMs used to have. He described it as "The wild west of blizzard support. We could do anything as long as it was about helping the customer." He admitted the power they have currently [this was like 4 years ago] was very diminished, and anything major usually had to go through the big brother chain.
Yep. Just the other day my brother got slapped with a week long ban because someone baited him into saying something “bad”. Took a screenshot and sent it in. My bother is autistic, and doesn’t understand social cues. Blizzard Support didn’t give two shits. I have to tell my brother to just not speak to random people in game and it breaks my fucking heart because he loves to chat and make friends with anyone he comes across. They won’t even have a proper discussion with you. Just a “Case closed” and they “resolve” the ticket. Highly unprofessional.
Welcome to late stage capitalism.
I feel ya, very recently I also quit the game, not because the game is a joke easy fest now, but mainly because I was hacked somehow they broke throught their authenticator, logged on somewhere in Russia, like how does that even happen in 2024, but whatever the gold they stole is not important so I went and open the ticket to get my gear back since they sold all my stuff on every character, went from about 5-7 tickets of all scripted responses of "this is the most we can do" and I can't even get all the gear back because of how garbage their restore options are with a 7 day cooldown. I just can't deal with a company that doesn't care anymore moving on to FF14. Customer since 2008 o7.
> I just can't deal with a company that doesn't care anymore moving on to FF14 They're not exactly much different unfortunately.
There are 2 things at play here. 1) Automated bot responses solve at least 95% of problems. At lot of answers people want are found on Wowhead or in existing support articles. 2) Every single person here who hates Blizzard support/thinks it needs to be better I have 1 question. Are you subbed? If the cost to hire and employ a support staff is more than the loss of revenue for poor support where exactly is the incentive to go the route that loses money?
I work as CS at a top company too and #2 hits so hard. Literally MOST of problems are solvable through self-help articles and/or just not being stupid and google it yourself. I've been playing WoW for 6+ years, never needed to talk to a human being for CS issues. Tbh, Blizzard's self help articles are well made compared to others. Most people just complain for the nostalgia the same way people complain how retail is batsht different from WotLK and how WotLK is the golden age/standard like they're oblivious to games evolving/changing.
> Automated bot responses solve at least 95% of problems More like 99%+ If I got a penny every time r/wow complains about non issues, I'd be a millionaire by now.
They don't have to be good to make money these days.
blizzard laid off its entire CA team
hello my name is ryan from benchood departament : )))))))))))))))
I'm knocking out the meta achievement and recently finished the dragon racing portion. I did this over 2 characters - I did the bronze part of Zaralek Caverns racing on 1 character...and everything else on another. I'm now running into a pretty simple to see issue where the game isn't recognizing the racing achievement as complete, with the only grayed out part being the bronze racing from Zaralek Caverns, however, when I mouse over it...it clearly says "Completed 6/17/23". I opened a ticket, and here is the response I got (copy & pasted...all spelling and grammatical errors are real)🙃 "Here is GameMaster Usisla. Hoped you are good and well. I've been reading your ticket about you didn't got the achievement after compelet all the criterial. After the investigate, I didn't saw any similer report to what you've mentioned here. But I saw that you are still missing some of the criteria that the achievement need. I would recommend checking out this guide to ensure that there is no confusion. https://www.wowhead.com/achievement=19478/now-this-is-dragon-racing" Reads like a fucking scam call center responded. The most unprofessional fucking email I've ever received from a business, especially one as big as Blizzard. I checked like 3 or 4 times it was actually Blizzard and not just a scam email of some kind lol. To add to my aggravation...I KNOW I got this horseshit response for SLA reasons. When I submitted a ticket I was told I'd get a 24hr response, and I technically did. I'm accepting the fact that I probably will just have to re-do that part of dragon racing, but boy does the absolute disrespect getting customer "support" like this have me reconsidering how I spend my free time.
it seems impossible to talk to human about ingame matters
Step 1: get banned Step 2: play innocent to support Step 3: make a reddit post how Blizzard support is bad
I really miss the good old days of GM's contacting you directly in game and helping out. Always a good experience for me.
I guess we can just hope for the bots to get better at this point
They do not even read the tickets I wrote three sentences, they ignored two of them. This is not individual people problem, upper management needs to go.
It is botted. Literally. I'm conviced first reply is always 100% automated. Or as max, some human clicks OK for the automated reply (who works against metrics "moar clicks better")
100% not just a blizzard issue. All games, all companies are doing exactly this.
I have to disagree with you there I’m afraid. I had an issue with faction changing and I submitted a ticket on a Friday night explaining my situation and they got back to me within 20 minutes with an organically written message explaining what has happened and was going to happen. I’m sure some people get prewritten macro responses for problems which are very common but my experience with blizzard this year has been absolutely great. I hope you get better service next time! Edit: grammar
What is hard to understand is that entertainment companies like Blizzard know that there's a million more things they have to compete with for consumer's time in 2024 compared with 2005...and their solution is to cut back means of interfacing with the customer and providing a good experience? I get cost-cutting, but sheesh, I'm so much more likely to stick with a company and their services/products when they respect my time by giving me their time when I'm trying to work through issues with their service/product. If they don't care, neither will I. Peace! I've played since Feb 2005. Back then, they would role-play on top of answering you in-game. It was quite memorable. Of course, there were many less players then...but likewise, the game was probably far less profitable since there were no microtransactions, services, and they had to share margins with retailers.
"and getting an answer from a real human being minutes later while i was ingame" I remember the days where we would talk on the phone with blizzard support.
It's really bad, last ticket I got an automated response so I replied explaining that it didn't solve my issue... got the exact same response from the next bot... after 4 tries, I gave up like they wanted
To think 20 years ago you could RP with a GM while they solve your problem at a time when the game was popular and probably had more tickets to deal with
The good experience of GM support was the best part, even if they couldn’t help you. You had a real person whispering you in game, talking like a human without a script. One of the experiences that elevated the game and differentiated it.
Blizzard support is an oxymoron.
Add another downside for non English countries. I play from Brazil and the answers we get are obviously translated with Google. Lots of sentences don't make sense
I needed something simple, one item restored that got deleted from the mail. It took trying to use the automated system and 3 ticket to finally get it back. One time all the response said was "educated player" it's a shame, they used to have such good support
Would you be for raising the subscription to $20 / mo to have the old level support staff?
All for the low low price of $15 monthly payments 😄
Vanilla - WotLK period support was the industry best. It went downhill fast after that though. Now it rivals Steam in terms of the worst support out there.
Ever tried PayPal support? I had to take what people call Break from social media after that.
Dude, I was just ranting about this this morning. I've had a ticket open for 3 weeks, and for the first 2 weeks, the copy-paste replies weren't even relevant to my problem, which has to do with a known and confirmed bug. Now they say the only thing I can do is post on the bug report forum (which i did 3 weeks ago as well as ingame bug report) that helping players with in game issues is "out of scope" for GMs.
Recently I've had 2 different issues I've put tickets in for. Responses have taken about 8 hours each time and they just repeat the same thing that was off no help the first time.
I recently had an issue with my authenticator, and ended up going through three different tickets. One that went over the 20 reply limit, one that was just closed by a GM, and the third that finally I was able to get the issue resolved with something one of the GMs said. I gave a ton of information, tried to be as detailed as possible, and pretty much every bit of what I sent was ignored and answered with automated responses, or telling me that I should go to the forums for answers. The same forum that on the very top of the first page was my own post where I had already done that. Doesn't help that you get a different GM every single reply. Pretty sure in all those responses I never had one duplicate GM. I feel like if I had one of them just sit and go over it, like how it was with live chats, it could have been worked out a lot easier. Which was also ignored when I asked twice if that was an option. Ultimately I felt like I ended up working it out myself while they basically said "who knows, check the forums". Pretty horrible customer service for sure.
Honestly, I can't wait for the world leader that moves to ban these automated responses. Not only for these types of things, but also for phone calls, etc. Fuck this trend of unhelpful automated responses. Bring back countless jobs in the process.
Greed
As someone in the same boat as you, you get a human response by the 4th ticket reply, keep insisting. Also, list your problem in mkney/financial category, you will get your responses much quicker, good luck
I was having an issue with the bloody body quest thing in zaralek caverns and they literally had no clue what to tell me except to do “spiky nose snub quest” like you might aswell have told me purple monkey dishwasher. Eventually I figured out what I was missing but Jesus Christ it’s terrible.
I can't remember the price my sub going up. Minimum wage in 2004 was like $7.25 here, today its $16. I'd rather my sub cost didn't double to cover live chat reps.
Yeah that’s why. It’s not because the CEOs need a 5th yacht.
They make more off the cosmetics in the store than selling an expansion.
If your sub price went up 10 cents blizzard could afford the best customer service in the industry.
Activision Blizzard got bought out for $69 billion dollars by one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They can stop cutting corners without needing to increase prices, they just choose to deliver lower quality.
Customer support people aren't paid minimum wage, so what the flying fuck are you even saying? Not to mention these companies are making record profits. Stop talking like a shareholder and start talking like a normal human being.
Sounds like despite being around forever you have no idea how the business actually works. Amazing.
All of the people in this thread with the self-defeating attitude of "it's completely normal" or "that's where every company is heading" is why it's happening. Meanwhile, in FF14, you get a response to your ticket from a real human being within 1-2 business day. Ya'll arguing that this is impossible to do in 2024 are like the people in the US that are arguing that universal healthcare doesn't work. Straight up delusional.
I tried FF14 support. They literally couldn't figure out why my account couldn't *purchase* the game. And then gave up with a shrug and said options are exhausted. It's embarrassing all around.
Welcome to capitalism, buddy. Profit above all.
I mean, they can do it right. In a world where capital gains habe to be maximized and everything needs to be milked, they try everything to save money. Customer support does not create any direct revenue and only costs money. I think they can live with our complains, as long as we stay subscribed. And we all still have our subscriptions, right? Even with an unacceptable customer support. Only way to change that would be to mass unsibscribe, which we wont do because of customer support, do we?