Hello, Council members.
Thanks for your feedback here. Customer Support usually just watches the Customer Support forum, so I apologize that it has taken a little longer to respond to your post here.
I’ve been with Blizzard Customer Support in various roles for 14 years. While I don’t agree with the framing of our global team above, I recognize that experiences vary from person to person, depending on the sort of issues you encounter and how often you contact Customer Support (CS), seeking help.
Regarding communication between CS and devs, while there are some issues presented here (which I’ll explain), we feel very good about the state of things. Back in 2008 when I joined as a Game Master, the communication lines were not as strong as they are now. Back then, as a Game Master (GM), it would have been considered unusual behavior for me to reach outside of my department for information about a game mechanic or bug.
Today we have dedicated channels where GMs and QA/Development teams constantly talk about issues affecting our players. During World of Warcraft content updates, multiple CS teams look for issues reported on our forums, the in-game bug report form, tickets, and a variety of sites such as reddit and Wowhead. We compile all of those conversations, and we help the QA team prioritize the work that follows.
As you know, a great deal of inquiries from players can be answered by our knowledge base. The knowledge base is large (over 1200 articles for World of Warcraft, all localized into many languages!) and it’s a pretty epic job to keep it up to date for World of Warcraft and all the other games and updates we support. We empower our frontline CS teams to create and update our support articles—effectively in real time—whenever they get new information. Ideally, this means other GMs and other players can get details or help without needing to open a ticket. It also empowers us to link players to support articles wherever we believe one exists that contains relevant information.
Of course, that’s in a perfect scenario where everything is right 100% of the time. That’s not always going to be the case, and with the specific article linked above, we didn’t hit that target.
That article was inaccurate. Looking at its history, one of our authors misunderstood some mechanics around loot tables, and the misunderstanding made it into the public article. We’ve corrected that article and made sure internal feedback on it reaches the right individuals and teams.
I’m sorry we had this error and that it affected you. Overall, we believe the benefit of quickly getting information in front of players is worth the risk of an error making it through. We do regular audits of our support articles and prioritize those that deal with major contact drivers or concerns. As I mentioned, the knowledge base is large, and it’s localized into more than a dozen languages. It takes time to audit everything, and that’s a process we are actively improving so that we can catch articles like this one more quickly.
Customer Support routes player reports of bugs and game mechanic feedback to the forums for a few reasons. While we have solid communication between departments, we’ve never been a manual feedback response team. We don’t want to position GMs to speak on behalf of game designers. Going to the forums is also a better way to spur the kind of ongoing player-to-player discussion that helps give our community and dev teams insight into collective player sentiment. To reduce wait times for players that have critical issues preventing login/play, we place references to the forums and support articles ahead of opening a ticket, because often, that’s the best way to save someone that time.
In the specific situation outlined above, the information available to the Game Masters was incorrect, so the recommendation of providing feedback about the game mechanic was also not the right course of action. That’s something we’re addressing with internal follow-up.
All of our teams: Customer Support, QA, Community, Design, and Publishing have grown a lot over the years, and we’re here because we want to be here for you. We’ll continue to evolve and look for areas of improvement going forward. We do wish we could be everywhere that players raise issues. There’s no silver bullet that solves all of the problems a customer support organization faces, but our role is to advocate on players’ behalf and importantly: to reduce your reliance on us, so that you can maximize your game time. Our goal is, as ever, to supply fast, accurate, and helpful information, and we’re getting better at that all the time. We’ll continue working on it and considering feedback such as this.
Thanks for being part of our community, and for caring about how we help.