Yep. I’ve seen that same bot for over a month. I don’t even bother to report anymore.
I saw three today in EPL and one in Silithus doing the same thing. I’m keeping my eyes open for a good private TBC server. This is just inexcusable.
1 Like
The natural consequence of deleting most of your support staff. But its more important that they show good numbers for shareholders and Wallstreet loves it when you cut payroll expenditures. Its their favorite thing.
1 Like
This never happened, stop propagating misinformation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2019/02/12/activision-blizzard-to-layoff-nearly-800-employees/
One of the more recent ones.
In addition over the years, we’ve seen the loss of their very active telephone support, far lowered GM presence, move to automated systems, and many others.
I’ve been part of multiple companies “restructuring” and every single time those things are code for, we’re getting rid of support staff to make our controllable expenses look better on investing reports.
5 Likes
“why pay a person when i can invest a fraction of their pay for a program that will do their work almost as well?”-management
2 Likes
This is the official legal document for the reduction in force that Blizzard experienced in February of 2019. There are two columns, the left column is number of positions selected for termination and the right column for positions not selected for termination; page 7 is the CS department. The only two positions cut from the CS department were a Bliz. IT Analyst and a Blizzard BI Programmer, zero actual CS.
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/401389950/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-Dh96i2zsTyPm8t95vdMf
They have more support staff now than they ever have before. You can see the number of CS staff in the WoW credits.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/absolutely-zero-customer-support/243795/51
They likely have more GMs now than they ever have. If you’re talking about the change in policy to moving away from appearing in-game, I saw it explained in a blue post that the ticket system was being massively abused by people wanting GM “appearance events”. Basically, people were wasting their time.
People do realize that the office they have in Texas is almost entirely CS/GM staff, right? They don’t even outsource their CS.
Most gaming “journalists” aren’t interested in boring ol’ facts, btw.
1 Like
Classic is all about easy $$$ revenue for Activision-Blizzard, with minimal effort. They only care about subscription numbers & bottom-line $$$, & apparently not enough paying “legitimate players” are canceling their subscriptions over the rampant cheating & botting being conducted by the paying “illegitimate players”.
Yea I just watched a dude fly hack in burning steppes to pick a lotus. It happens literally every day on my server and blizzard does absolutely nothing. Its just ridiculous how absolutely pathetic this company has become. They dont even have an anti-cheat
1 Like
So basically you’re saying the reason is Gross Incompetence then?
Also, what the legal documents say and the real effects are generally not the same. Ive seen it first hand. Entire departments gutted that weren’t slated for such. Not saying that’s what Blizzard has done, because I don’t work for them. Just my experience in Corporate environments. And Activision is about as corporate as it gets.
I had to fight for almost 6 months to get my job title and pay changed to actually reflect my new role after one such restructuring, where they reassigned me to other duties after laying people off and then didn’t change my pay or title to reflect those new responsibilities.
The work done by those who get layed off doesn’t magically disappear. It just gets reassigned.
2 Likes
Keep in mind that private servers had a micro-fraction of the total amount of players participating in the game.
That also means there’s less incentive for botters to make real-world cash selling in-game currencies. There’s less incentive because there’s less demand for that service. And with lower demand, it’s harder to have higher prices or active buying and selling of in-game currencies.
So that means the problem is much larger in classic than private servers.
I’ve heard this before. Where there’s thousands of people there’s a potential for profit. When a private server launched there were plenty of bots and RMT spam. For a very short time.
Many private servers had as many if not more people playing than Blizzard has on any of their servers. Granted, that’s just ONE server to monitor as opposed to several dozen. But the better private servers consistently detected and eradicated bots in starter areas, banned bots IMMEDIATELY as well as hacks and anyone exploiting.
REAL LIVE GM’s responded quickly to tickets, monitored chat and kept an eye on the game.
This was all accomplished by volunteers. And yet Blizzard - a multi billion dollar corporation - is unable to even manage processing reports in under a month because they just don’t have the staff.
Warden is garbage, they don’t have enough people to review tickets and they have no eyes in the game. Bobby Kotick raked in over 30 million dollars last year. Yet Blizzard can’t hire in game GM’s???
1 Like
I like the dichtomy of this thread and
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/blizzard-wants-to-get-rid-of-bots/832050
That word… I dont think you know what it means.
No i think it works well here. You trying to say that blizzard is doing what i can and people here fed up with blizzard not doing enough seems to be the correct use of that word.
OP is saying botting is a problem. I’m saying botting is a harder problem to fix than people realize. There’s literally no dichotomy there, but nice try after looking it up.
The sad thing is… if you had actually known what the word meant at the time… theres a perfect example like 2 posts down where someone is literally saying the opposite thing I am… If only you’d looked it up 5 minutes ago… Ah well, missed opportunity.
Not that i need you to belive me but i did know what it means and i see it as the difference. You can say oh its hard for blizzard because of X but your covering for them and there lack of work done on botting. Here i see people angry with botting and saying the systems they are using do nothing.
Covering for blizzard vs telling blizzard the systems are not working seems like a division to me. So i stand by that use.
Me: Solving world hunger is a nuanced problem with a number of obstacles that make it a more difficult problem to solve than simply “giving people more food.”
You: WELL WHY DONT YOU JUST GIVE THEM MORE FOOD. THEY WANT THE FOOOOD
Me: Well as I said, there are many factors. Logistics, distribution issues, socio-economic clim-
You: JUST GIVE THEM THE FOOD MAN. ITS SUPER EASY. JUST MAKE FOOD AND GIVE IT TO THEM.
Me: No I understand. And I want them to have food too. But you see-
You: STOP COVERING FOR THEM MAN. WHY DONT YOU WANT PEOPLE TO HAVE FOOOOOOOD??!!?!
And that’s why we cant have nice things
1 Like
Blizzard is either incompetent or complicit, plain and simple. I don’t understand why anyone would defend them for either one.
4 Likes
Except for the fact that the conversation went nothing like that.
Yes because people defend billion dollar companies then equate that to wold issues like hunger.
JUST GIVE THEM THE FOOD MAn!