This post isn’t about any one single game, this is about Blizzard. I’ve been playing blizzard games for near 19 years now. Since the release of WoW. Over the years I have had very few occasions to get help from blizzard. Back in the day during TBC and WoTLK blizzard from what I had seen was pretty on the spot with helping people that had issues. The game was at its peak, most people were quite happy. Fast forward a little over a decade and Activision fully takes the reigns from Blizzard and everything goes downhill. Fast forward further and you arrive to today. Today you can’t even see the Blizzard of the past, only the name. Blizzard support? What support is there except for other players posting about a similar topic as yourself? By some miracle you’re lucky enough to land a GM in WoW you might have a fix but even then that can sometimes take like 3 days. Not always but I’ve seen it enough. Blizzard’s idea of support is when you try to contact support you get redirected to a forum to see other people posting about issues of where Blizzard dropped the ball. I tried contacting Blizzard today about a issue I was having with Overwatch 2. Saw that I don’t get to interact with anyone, have to describe the problem just to get to post about it on a forum where it will most likely never be seen by anyone at Blizz unless I start throwing out incredibly offensive stuff in order for it to get flagged so they have to see it. Being redirected to a forum to see other people complaining about Blizz or Blizz game issue seems to be their idea of support… So let me get some support on this issue Blizzard.
I understand. I started playing Blizzard games in 1996 with the release of Diablo on PC. Had a blast playing it then and made a lot of friends. I still play it at times even today because I can try out what other people have made with mods and if for nothing else but the nostalgia of the memories.
Then came Diablo II. An even better version that was more complex than the original with four types of online play (TCP/IP, LAN, Open, and Realms Battle.net) and a single player mode. Which was one of the best products of it’s time and still is today. . but with a few exceptions. Then an expansion to it. After the team that created these titles had been dissolved in 2005-2008 because Activision/Vivendi didn’t like the development of Diablo III, I noticed that across the board their support seemed to be failing and stopped buying any future releases the company announced. The realms I played on still had a steady player base for some time, even after the Support Representatives were removed and they declared that all support had been dropped for Diablo II in favor of other projects.
At that time of the support drop, they were producing what is now WoW to (I assume) contend with Mythos’ Dark Age of Camelot and OSI’s Ultima Online for the Pay-to-Play sector of the gaming spectrum. Even then their support kept failing on all their titles to the degree of what it is today, if it can even be called support. Not even close to what used to be reliable support back in the old days. All they want to do now is upsell.
I see steady reports of botted characters across all of their titles which to me indicates that they just flat gave up, because they either lost or fired their best people that could have done anything to combat it and they have no intention of making things right so they just direct you to a forum where the “Customer Support” is nothing but a forum moderator and what they would call developers is “Engineers”.
This is no surprise, considering their executives think that a Diablo II: Resurrected release that’s nothing more than a “Clone”, with the same issues as the Legacy version if not worse, will generate millions and Diablo Immortal where you can only reach max potential if you give them your bank account are the greatest ideas they have.
After all these years, I believe this company has no customer support any more. . . only the illusion of what once was and is now clouded by greed.
I actually had one of my appeal tickets where the person took to Mocking me by changing the only text in the response to “GMINPUT” and nonsense. Since I suggested the first response I felt was not looked over by a person.
It is insane how awful it is now.
I’ve been playing since about as long, with this account created in 2006. From my experience, and what I’ve seen from others, it seems that will just result in a scripted response to address you as a long-term player. But I’ve yet to see action to reassure me they value us as much as they claim, or that the company has truly changed for the better after all the lawsuits covered by the media.
In my case, I was acutely ill and didn’t process an unintended/unused digital token within 14-days for a standard refund. So I requested for a refund with Battle.net Balance instead. A reasonable business person would just process a refund for store credit, especially for a long standing customer with multiple products ongoing.
That was my first attempt at a refund, my account has been in good standing. I was told that they were ‘unable’ to process it, and that they would if they could. But I was also told that it could have been processed with approval. This left me confused, and I was threatened with ‘disciplinary action’ for any attempts to discuss further in my ticket.
My last commentary on the ticket was expressing confusion and seeking for reassurance that Blizzard had indeed changed for the better. It really appears not from my personal experience, and the claims of ‘really willing to give everything possible’ was not supported with evidence.
Yeah, I recently got banned for “hacking,” on Overwatch and I wrote several appeals but all I got was an automated message saying that the penalty will be upheld. They didn’t even give me any evidence at all, they just vaguely said that I breached the “terms of service.”
However, several years ago I used to play Starcraft and after a false ban, an actual person was responding to me and I was able to get my account back up and running. Overall, I think Blizzard support nowadays is becoming a lot more automated and non existent.