Indeed. Contrary to the common mantra often spewed here and on the CS forum, GM’s can, on occasion, work around bugs by manually awarding items. Usually things like quest items or achievement related stuff. They typically won’t do bupkis for anything gear treadmill or currency related however. It really just depends on the type of GM you get.
I had one GM back in Legion manually mail me the secret paladin artifact quest item since it was bugged and wouldn’t drop. But I also had another GM who flat out refused to send me the missing item I needed for creating a pet that wasn’t in the game world for my character. Both were examples of bugs. But one GM worked around the issue and resolved it for me, while the other just said “tough luck” and told me to file a bug report. Take a guess which of the 2 GM’s was actually useful to me.
Yes, it is very very poorly done and confusing. I agree with that.
The best option is to head to the Customer Support forum first. That forum serves as an Information Desk to help guide people through the ticket system, explain policies, explain account services, etc. It can save you a lot of time and aggravation if you just tell them your issue, and ask what the best way (if any) there is to deal with it. Most of the time someone helpful will give you the direct ticket link you need from the menu if a ticket can help.
If a ticket can’t help, they can at least explain why.
There are also Blue Forum Support Agents there who can see more about accounts, although they are not GMs. They can also help with guidance and status of tickets.
I think most of the folks on the CS forum are very clear about this. There are RARE times the Devs let the GMs handle a bug or achievement. They do it intentionally with specific instructions. Most of the time though the answer is a link to Wowhead and being told to do the achievement again, or wait for a big fix and repeat it. They are especially hands off on Achievements most of the time.
This is an example of a character breaking bug that they were given instructions to fix by the Devs. Your other is an example of something were the GMs were not given instructions and permission to touch it. It may not have even been on the QA list of bugs yet. They would have told you to report the bug or linked you to Wowhead for game hints.
Yep… But that’s also not Blizzard exclusive. Most companies anymore make it increasingly hard to actually ask for help and instead put you in loops or knowledge base topics. Saves money on actually paying customer support if you can flood people with knowledge bases and make it incredibly hard to reach any one so most people give up.
Honestly, I can’t fault blizzard here, this is a general corporate America thing at this point. That, without getting into politics, really needs to be dealt with by the government and standards on what a company can and cannot do. Kind of like the ruling that unsubscribing from services needs to be made easier and not deeply hidden.
The inability to actually get ahold of or easily reach out to businesses support teams, such as making it incredibly convoluted to make a ticket, is something that consumers wont be able to do anything about and really should be directed to your local government officials whatever country you are in as a serious problem.
Not really character breaking. It was for the secret artifact cosmetic skin. So it was in no way an impediment to using the artifact itself. Much like the pet was a cosmetic. But as I said, it could be down to individual GM’s or as you say the instructions given to them by the devs.
Moral of the story is, sometimes you can get a GM to help you work around a bug or two. Sometimes you can’t.
The reason is not because the GM is just being mean or lazy though like some folks think. They are following very specific instructions based on what the Devs and Policy let them do. They would much rather FIX something if they can. It gets it done and the customer does not open more tickets on it, and it may get a good survey score. What GMs want to do, and what they CAN do, are two different things.
Also, have you told folks I am the only AI bot at Blizzard and you built me in your backyard? That was the story right?
Today is also Solstice! The most important day of the Winter calendar. First day of Winter and the turning of the year! We get longer days from here on out.
I wouldn’t know about the CS forum anymore. I quit going to that cesspool when I started seeing a lot of incorrect answers being pushed and the clique there hearting their own comments with their alt characters.
But people have a tendency to say Blizzard or GMs cannot do something but when you prove then can, they backpedal to “well, there are some circumstances” as if they knew the whole time.
If CS is bound by rules…what is the solution…change the rules. When I first started at burning crusade CS was awesome. What caused these new rules…$$$$
People abusing the system to get stuff they weren’t entitled to.
People taking up GM time with things they couldn’t help with, either by policy or physical limitations in the code and data.
People calling up the GM line on the phone to get angry about the game lore, or PVP matches, or ninja looting, or just hurl abuse at them.
People being lonely and wanting a GM friend, and keeping the conversation going long after their issue was resolved.
Better internal tools being developed that allowed GMs to help without having to be logged in and there in person to talk to you by chat.
Better self-help tools for the most common things you’d need a GM for like item and character restoration and unsticking a character.
It can be argued that Blizzard should spend more on their GM team to have a higher amount of staff, I imagine. But also they shouldn’t be obligated to staff to the level of having each person have an individual GM to go watch for bots everywhere in the game, or proactively monitor every chat on every phase of every server, or review every dungeon run to make judgment calls on loot and kicking, or have enough time on their hands to shoot the breeze with players, or press a button to just grant achievements and items based on the player’s word that they should have them. Because that’s basically what people seem to want.
Back in TBC you could wait a week or two for even just an average ticket, by the way, or longer. So I’m not sure how much “better” it was back then aside from the fact that you got contacted through chat in-game with a copy-paste as opposed to by ticket by copy-paste.
My complaint is vague responses, warnings and such and general being unehlpful on top of some pretty crazy wait times. Difference is night and day between Epic Games and Blizzard to me. Epic games tickets have always been quick and helpful.
