Experience with Blizzard Customer Support

[Trustlvlfour-zuljin]

@Silkymilkerz-wild-growth

I used to find it tolerable to write a ticket, and then an actual employee would talk to you.

“Hello, this is Game Master (insert name here), do you have a minute to chat?”
“I see you’re having an issue with (random problem), how I can be of service?”

Then you could actually have a convo with them for a minute or two, and it’s like you were talking to an ACTUAL person.

These days it’s “The Game Master Team” and the most generic responses you can think of. I don’t write tickets now if I don’t absolutely need to, and you still have to wait a day or two for “Here are some directions to WoWhead” then they share a link, “Hope that helped, now fill out this survey”.

I used to get this experience back in legion. Namely the GM was able to post me a quest item that was bugged and impossible to get.

[Myzrym-area-52]

@Nobully-blackrock

it’s not rocket science.
it’s coding.
the two aren’t very far apart.

[Toddorbert-thrall]

@Sendryn-sentinels

@Toddorbert-thrall

what this means is they did not even read the ticket, it was automatically responded to.

Incorrect. It means they triage tickets and they want to make sure all possibilities are exhausted first by the information already out there— especially if it’s not something they can even help with, like quests, which fall under game hints.

it does not mean they triage tickets. if it was actually triage, there would be far more options to get a hold of someone for assistance. instead the options were severely reduced forcing players to pick one of the options that sorta resembles what they need help with. It was automatically responded to without a human actually reading it.

sending a player to a 3rd party website is not “helping” anyone. also you seem to be assuming when all tickets are created is asking for a hint or help. by auto-replying they are just creating more of an issue than simply replying after actually reading it.

some time ago, there was a contact option to online chat - that was removed as was the 800 number for customer support.

@Mirasol-mannoroth

When you ask for something they can’t do, the generic reply is to check Wowhead for how a quest works/item works/boss drop works, etc.

see the problem here is this type of generic response is the auto-reply answer for most tickets sent in, regardless of the type of ticket and it shouldn’t be.

[Mirasol-mannoroth (Mirasol)]

@Toddorbert-thrall

see the problem here is this type of generic response is the auto-reply answer for most tickets sent in, regardless of the type of ticket and it shouldn’t be.

I agree and find it frustrating. It does not actually help the player understand why they got the response they did.

I think during really high traffic times that response is sent to tickets with certain key words as a first line of reply. Then if the person re-submits the ticket for “needs more help” they get a GM.

It is really not helpful in educating folks about what GMs can and can’t help with. It ends up being super frustrating for everyone. I have been griping about this for 5+ years. Heh.

CS exists, but it certainly is not perfect, and during high volume times is is very frustrating. I have only put in a couple tickets in 20 years, which were easily handled, but I also know what NOT to put in tickets for which saves me time and annoyance. I am also really good at google-fu first on thotbot and then on Wowhead.

[Sendryn-sentinels]

@Toddorbert-thrall

it does not mean they triage tickets.

Yes it does. Everything I explained was told to us by CS.

@Toddorbert-thrall

It was automatically responded to without a human actually reading it.

Templates aren’t bots.

@Toddorbert-thrall

sending a player to a 3rd party website is not “helping” anyone.

Yes. It is. Because half the time, that’s where the answer ends up being.

@Toddorbert-thrall

some time ago, there was a contact option to online chat - that was removed as was the 800 number for customer support.

Live chat still exists only for certain issues. The phone number was removed as players abused it for dumb stuff.

[Orctang-area-52 (Orctang)]

Welcome to World of Bugcraft!

[Yae-dentarg]

Not for years. Probably last time was back around Legion. Now they have been passive aggressive and down right rude sometimes. I use to expect a high standard from them as we pay a monthly. But all Activision did was cut back their budget and reduce what they can do for customers.

[Tooshii-moon-guard]

Yeah, service isn’t good. Not very good GMs, with not so good managers, with not so good devs that hamstring them. Culmination of ‘who wants to work at Blizzard, anyway?’

[Joonhwa-stormrage]

@Nobully-blackrock

the reason they used to be able to do it faster, is because there were far less things to break when the game was smaller.

And I’m supposed to care about this and feel sorry for the department? I’m a customer. It’s not my job to make excuses for why a company can’t resolve issues that affect my gameplay. Maybe they should hire more people.

[Jalanili-moon-guard]

I’m trying to think of times that I’ve had to submit tickets before. There haven’t been a lot!

• One time in Vanilla I was stuck between rocks. They contacted me in-game and reminded me that I could hearth
• In MOP my Priestess couldn’t move after she zoned out of a LFR. It turned out to be a symptom of leaving the raid while in Spirit of Healingspiritthing form and they said to try staying logged out for a while. I did and it didn’t fix so I reopened my ticket and they got me all fixed up in a couple of hours.
• In BFA some of my in-game mail with items on the AH that didn’t sell and were being returned expired with some valuable items in it on a server I hardly went on. I asked if it could be restored, unfortunately it couldn’t be.
• I bought a mount for a friend one day before it went on sale for half off, asking if it was possible to have part of the cost refunded. I never got a response for this, but I also don’t have it in my ticket history and didn’t get a confirmation that I went through, I don’t think it fully submitted.
• I got a 1000-year ban (no, really) on the forum after writing a long post on one character, switching characters and pasting it in to post on another character, so I put in a ticket for it. This turned out to be an anti-spam feature of the forum that automatically triggered and as soon a it was looked at later that day it was overturned.
• I reported a few people over time with truly awful TRP profiles through a ticket, I got templates back saying they couldn’t tell me the result but thanks for reporting.

Overall? All good experiences. Even when they gave me answers that ran counter to what I was looking for, it was understandable.

[Nobully-blackrock (Nobully)]

@Joonhwa-stormrage

And I’m supposed to care about this and feel sorry for the department?

not sure how you came to that conclusion.

@Joonhwa-stormrage

Maybe they should hire more people.

if you can do better, they’re hiring.

[Khyberian-wyrmrest-accord]

Is CS people who actually speak English as a first language or is it now like outsourced to wherever they could hire the cheapest people?

[Norinila-moon-guard]

@Sanghelli-dunemaul

Anyone had Blizzard CS actually able to resolve their problem?

if you have a standard problem it’s super good and easy but beyond that it’s a total nightmare say with stuff like harassment or getting scammed they just get very rude and short about stuff like that, and i dont rely even seek help any more its goten so bad
at this stage if i have an issue i just write it off as im sol because they just really can’t help

[Mirasol-mannoroth (Mirasol)]

@Khyberian-wyrmrest-accord

Is CS people who actually speak English as a first language or is it now like outsourced to wherever they could hire the cheapest people?

I don’t know what Microsoft has planned, but Blizzard CS has always been part of the company directly, not outsourced. In the US most are at the Austin, TX office along with some in Irvine, CA at HQ. In the EU they are at the Cork, Ireland office. Asia I would guess they are in Seoul, South Korea. I don’t know that for sure though. I don’t speak any of the Asian languages and have never asked really.

[Ughash-sulfuras]

I agree they should readjust in game harassment. They really need to educate players in the game that reflects what they’ll say in a ticket or from CS in general.

Scenario A: you’re being harassed, if you’re not on the forums or savvy with how things work, if you ever respond to someone in whispers/or public channel whose harassing you daily, your case may be thrown out because you responded. Unless they’re going around the ignore feature. People who want to ruin your day will go extreme lengths, say bad things in public channel about you and start awful lies and gossip, and interrupt what you’re doing with your friends in game.

A lot of other MMO’s have an in-depth guide on reporting when you open the report screen, there is more info, so you can educate yourself on how they would like you to asses/address the situation on the player end. Just a “thanks for the report here are your options in the mean time.” That would be awesome.

I have 0 stake in this, just from observation.

Scenario B: Apparently at least for SoD we’re responsible for trades having clean gold, that is just widely unrealistic for players to see the ledger of others, or read minds. Or we get mailed random illicit money if we accept we can be marked as a gold buyer.

If you’re faced with this, they expect you to know what to look out for. But there is 0 education in the game at all, about common scams, how to watch out for receiving illicit gold, send back unwanted gold/copper if you accept open a ticket asap.

Just such a flaw, not everyone who brings this up is innocent of course, I don’t believe anyone at first glance. I’m just going by the responses I’ve seen.

Hopefully as they push forward these things are reevaluated.

I’m just saying, other MMO’s do a great job at educating you on what’s expected and pretty proactive. I wish the same for Wow.

[Joonhwa-stormrage]

@Nobully-blackrock

if you can do better, they’re hiring.

So the onus is on the consumer to fill in for the producer? That’s not how this works. Customers don’t go to work for companies so that the customer can have a better experience. They voice their complaints, and then just leave and find a better substitute if nothing changes. If the company can do better, then they should do better - otherwise customers will be correct in saying that CS is bad – which it is. That’s my entire point.

I worked in customer service in retail for three and half years. Nothing on my end or the company’s end matters when the customer is not receiving the caliber of customer service that they know they can get from a competitor, or even worse - from the past version of the very company they are talking to. It’s not the customer’s job to care about where my company is coming from, or whether the CS department is understaffed, etc. Those are the company’s failures to meet expectations set by competitors or past, better versions of themselves. Make all the excuses you want about how Blizzard can or can’t do something - but at the end of the day, it’s not my job account for those excuses and company decisions about where Blizzard puts its dollars. At the end of the day, it’s just bad CS.

[Nobully-blackrock (Nobully)]

@Joonhwa-stormrage

I worked in customer service in retail for three and half years

so… you should know that the customer isn’t always right.

right?

[Tooshii-moon-guard]

The customer is always right, in matters of taste :3

[Tharna-frostmourne (Tharna)]

gotta trick the system into speaking to a human, the automated stuff is just there to filter you out so you stop complaining

[Joonhwa-stormrage]

This sounds an awful lot like false equivocation. Of course sometimes the customer is incorrect. They can slap an incorrect price tag on merchandise and hope I won’t notice, but I wouldn’t do the price adjustment. And neither would a past version of the same company, or a competitor.

What does this have to do with this discussion? No one here is complaining that they are being falsely billed or that prices should come down “just because.” Blizzard’s CS is terrible. They stopped doing things they could do in the past - that other CS can currently do in other MMOs - so there’s really no excuse for it, and neither should the consumer care. I’ve been in plenty of situations where I’d tell customers that company policy doesn’t allow me to do certain commonsense things to put the customer at ease, or that unfortunately wait times would be longer because we are understaffed. Technically the customer would be “incorrect” for asking, but at the end of the day, it’s dumb company policy, and therefore terrible CS. The customer’s expectations are not misguided; the company’s incapability of meeting them was just myopic and incompetent. (Gotta love huge corporations.)