Blizzard CS always blames addons for every problem, so they close tickets without actually reading

Support Customer Support
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Hey everyone,

Is it just me, or does other players always have this kind of experience when dealing with Blizzard’s support?

This time (not the first similar one), I was reporting a problem I had about a basic official WoW feature that everybody should know — the “Show on Backup” option on currencies list in the character.

I explained that my “Residual Memories” currency is stucked in the backpack tracker with 0 currencies and since they removed this currency from the game when the pre patch event that was giving it ended, there is no such currency in my character menu.

Because of that, I simply can’t unmark the option to don’t show it on backpack anymore what let me stucked with this in my backpack. I was super clear and c’mon, this isn’t anything much complicated to understand (is it?).

For the first response, they simply said that my problem was related to a third-party addon tracker, and told me to remove all my addons, reinstall them one by one, and reset my entire UI. They completely ignored the fact that I was talking about an official WoW feature, claiming it was a third-party feature they couldn’t help with.

You, fellow player, must already know that I tried to disable and or even delete all my addons. And of course it didn’t resolve my problem. Even it did made me do all these changes just to do a lot of rework after to put everything I needed after check there obvious wasn’t the problem.

So, you go on and reply the ticket saying about how they just are automating responses and you already said that it’s not about an addon, it’s a native and official feature in the game, and you even already did all these things with your add-ons and it didn’t work.

And they come again with the same excuse. They even tell that “there are no know issues in their side and after checking it, they recommend me to disable all addons to eliminate the display issues”.

Dude, they didn’t even read my ticket again.

And even lied about there are no know issues in their side since there are posts in the official Forums about this and it is a known problem for a long time .

Is this a common thing in your experience?

Does Blizzard really just use “addons” as a default excuse when they don’t want to dig deeper for you all? Or did I had bad luck? I could say they’re always making up excuses, but actually, they just keep using this same third-party addon by default.

It feels like they don’t properly read the tickets and just keep sending the same generic replies to waste our time instead of actually doing their job. Honestly, being constantly jerked around by Blizzard is more frustrating than the issue I had in the first place.

All I wanted was to know if there was something I could do, if they could manually fix it, or if I just had to wait until the bug gets patched.

And to Blizzard, if you’re reading this:

Please stop using the excuse that everything is caused by addons just to stall the players.

At least be honest. It’s fine if the ticket takes longer to be resolved, but stop wasting players’ time lying.

EDIT:
Just to prove the point, I actually had two problems:

First, a minor bug in the game — which I ended up solving within minutes after posting this topic, thanks to a very kind random player who told me to use a specific command (“/run C_CurrencyInfo.SetCurrencyBackpackByID(3089,false)”).

And it worked! Just that simple, a single command line. (Also, thank you very much for the help!)

Second, and the real problem, is that Customer Support resolves tickets without even reading them.

My issue wasn’t related to any third-party addon, nor was it caused by addons at all. But sure, it’s fair to ask us to try the basic troubleshooting steps first.

However, after that, why keep giving the same default response that clearly shows the CS staff didn’t actually read what I wrote?

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Deleting or disabling addons doesn’t work, have you tried a full UI reset?

To fully reset your World of Warcraft (WoW) UI, you can delete the Cache, Interface, and WTF folders within your WoW directory. Alternatively, you can rename these folders to add a suffix like “Old” before relaunching the game. Launch the game, log in, with the default UI.

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That is because unless you do a full UI reset they can cause all sorts of issues. Some addons can cause lag and make you get booted offline. So unless you do the trouble shooting like the full UI reset you might never know that you could possibly fix the issue on your own.

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Unfortunately, the CS forum is not a feedback forum. For feedback on a ticket, you’ll want to complete the survey attached to your ticket once marked resolved. Alternatively, you can post constructively in the General forums or use the in-game suggestion feature.

A UI reset is the first step in trouble shooting and resolves the majority of issues. If there is indeed a known bug, GMs are not developers or part of the QA team, so they’re unable to help with those either unless the devs have provided a work-around.

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It’s fault finding 101.

By eliminating a very common cause of many issues, the first thing to do is a full UI reset to rule out a bugged or out of date addon, or corrupted UI causing the issue.

No different to any other tech support situation - it’s a series of steps that will eventually pinpoint the cause of an issue.

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Thanks for the feedback.

The issue is both an in-game bug and feedback about how CS is handling players’ tickets.

Could you help by pointing me to the correct subforum for this thread?

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Doing a full UI reset is how they can know for certain if it is or isn’t an add-on issue. I’m sure they’ve been assured by players many times that something’s not add-on related, only for it to later turn out that it was.

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General feedback goes to general forums quests go to quests forums i think u get the idea otherwise use the ingame suggestion feature.

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I would add to one of those posts assuming that they’re in the Bug Report forum. You can also report bugs in-game.

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First, I want to say that I’m not trying to be harsh or passive-aggressive, but it seems like you probably didn’t fully read the topic. And that’s okay, because you’re not the one working in customer service for people who have paid for your product and service — which is a much bigger problem, considering tickets are often handled without really being read.

The problem is they often blame addons without actually reading the ticket. It’s okay to respond saying we need to go through the usual steps to rule out causes, but after that, why keep giving the same generic answer? If they were really reading, they could just say, “It’s a bug, you need to report it and wait, move on” and that would be totally fine.

EDIT:
Just to prove the point, I actually had two problems:

First, a minor bug in the game — which I ended up solving within minutes after posting this topic, thanks to a very kind random player who told me to use a specific command (“/run C_CurrencyInfo.SetCurrencyBackpackByID(3089,false)”).

And it worked! Just that simple, a single command line. (Also, thank you very much for the help!)

Second, and the real problem, is that Customer Support resolves tickets without even reading them.

My issue wasn’t related to any third-party addon, nor was it caused by addons at all. But sure, it’s fair to ask us to try the basic troubleshooting steps first.

However, after that, why keep giving the same default response that clearly shows the CS staff didn’t actually read what I wrote?

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As much as you want to thing otherwise, the vast majority of issues found with WOW are caused either due to add-ons a corrupted user account, or a combination of both, and often the best answer is to disable add-ons, then if that doesn’t work rebuild the UI. Now obviously there times where this isn’t the issue but overall thats a relatively small percentage of the population. The reality is thats mostly what it is, and often people haven’t tried without add-ons or resetting their UI, and lie about having done it, since they assume it wont work.

Thats why it’s always the first thing recommended, since it will solve almost everyone’s problem. It’s very similar to why the first step of troubleshooting for almost every software package no matter the developer is the same, have you tried rebooting? They aren’t saying this because they just want to punt you down to the next person in line, it’s actually almost always the solution.

So can it be frustrating to get what you consider silly advice? Yes, but here is the thing, do everything they say, then follow up and respond back on the same ticket documenting what you did and advising that you still have an issue.

By the way, that command someone gave you likely updated a setting to fix an issue with an add-on.

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GMS cant fix bugs arent suposed to intervene because it can usualy do more harm then good.

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As I already said:

The problem is they often blame addons without actually reading the ticket. It’s okay to respond by saying we need to go through the usual steps to rule out possible causes, but after that, why keep giving the same generic answer?

If they were really reading, they could just say, “It’s a bug, you need to report it and wait, move on,” and that would be totally fine.

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They use templates to keep things in order and uniform because it’d make ticket times shoot through the roof. Even then, anything related to bugs or other issues, they can do so much. They don’t have magic wands to suddenly fix stuff.

As Kynsa said, resetting/removing the add-ons is a first step to fixing issues as things can break, with and without addons, because old info can mess with the game. Reason why they ask to reset such to know what may or may not be happening that part and go from there. THey’re not mind readers and can’t know what you have in there.

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“They can do so much. They don’t have magic wands to suddenly fix stuff.”

Did you read my post? I think you did, but clearly, that’s not what I was asking.

As I stated:
It’s okay to respond by saying we need to go through the usual steps to rule out possible causes, but after that, why keep giving the same generic answer?

If they were really reading, they could just say:
“It’s a bug, you need to report it and wait. Move on.”
And that would be totally fine.

Also — I got help from a random player who actually could do magic, it seems:
The “magic” was just a simple console command that worked and fixed my problem.

Again:

The issue was (1) a currency stuck in my backpack — but what really frustrated me was (2) the fictional customer service experience, where they didn’t read my ticket and just sent generic replies, seemingly waiting for me to give up instead of properly answering it.

Even if the answer had been “we don’t have a solution for that right now, please report the bug and wait,” that would’ve been okay.

But as you can clearly see, there was something very simple that could fix my problem. It’s not magic. It’s a paid service.

If anyone else is facing the same problem, here’s the magic trick that WoW Customer Service can’t perform - because if they can’t even read, imagine them doing magic:

/run C_CurrencyInfo.SetCurrencyBackpackByID(3089,false)

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Well, overall it is entirely possible that a Game Master may miss or misread something in a ticket. As much as we try to avoid it, human beings make mistakes.

To cover this particular issue though.

Your initial ticket was like you mentioned here, reporting an issue you were having untracking the Residual Memories currency. The Game Master looked into it and found that we did have an issue that we had been aware of which may prevent you from removing the currency and that we didn’t have a workaround to untrack it.

For full transparency, this was an old report from August of last year which was resolved with a hotfix shortly after, so technically speaking, there weren’t any known issues so the Game Master was mistaken.

Note, they did not ask you to reset your User Interface or blame any addons. They asked you to submit a bug report… Which we like to have folks do because even if we are aware of the issue it helps to get a sense of volume for our QA team to help in prioritization.

The second ticket you asked if that response was automated, which is strange because it does seem to answer the question. It seems you had assumptions on what a Game Master is able to do though, and assumed this is something that our staff could manually fix - it generally isn’t, no.

The second Game Master wasn’t able to confirm if this was a verified bug since there was nothing active. Bugs can resurface from time to time, even if they were previously resolved.

So, with that in mind they provided basic troubleshooting advice and asked you to reset your User Interface.

In your third ticket you claimed it wasn’t related to any third party addons, though you never stated that you reset your UI. So, since the Game Master wasn’t able to verify that this was a known issue they asked you to try disabling your addons and/or resetting your UI and if the issues persisted after that, to please submit a bug report.

So really, it doesn’t appear that they ignored what was said and continued to ask you to reset your UI. It’s that they couldn’t confirm that you did so and wanted to make sure you got that step out of the way.

I know it can seem that we always ask for folks to do that step. It is because it is the single most valuable piece of troubleshooting there is. Addons can cause any number of issues, many of which you wouldn’t think were related to the addon in question. It can impact a single character or all of your characters and not always consistently. Even if you don’t use addons the UI may be corrupted at some point and it helps return things to default. It doesn’t fit all the issues, but again, in our experience… and remember we see hundreds of these contacts a day, it helps more often than not.

I am glad that you found a script command that worked for the issue.

If you wish to provide feedback about our staff, you should receive an option to answer a survey when your ticket is marked closed.

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