Genuinely curious why there is no Active customer support

Hello, i am wondering why there is no active customer support for ticket appeals, silence appeals, any sort of reason at ALL that a ticket needs to be opened. 9 times out of 10 you get a generic copy and pasted message response that you can tell was never actually looked at by a GM (if those even exist still). OR, you get a response 24 days later. I just dont understand what the 15$ a month is going twoards when blizzard clearly does not care about its playerbase at all. Im not asking for a blue to respond to this because i know technically that is against “cos” but it sure would be nice if one randomly responded to this, but i think we all know thatll never happen. Blizzard do you just refuse to allocate a single dollar to customer care in any way or what? I could somewhat understand longer than normal ticket responses during the launch of wrath, but its been out well over a month and its still ridiculously long response times, with 0 substance, and hardly ever helping anyone. If it takes 20 days to respond, why is it a generic copy and pasted message? Why is there not a call line to call and speak with represenatives anymore? why are we not allowed to speak to game masters in game anymore reguarding issues? Why have you taken every last bit of funding out of the one thing that needs it most, customer SUPPORT.

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There is active support across all regions and games.

Appeals simply pull the logs a second time, look at the penalty, and these both agree with the original assessment the penalty is upheld. If not it can be lessened or overturned.

Templates are often used then the answer is the same. There really is no need to come up with a different version of “We reviewed our actions and have upheld the penalty.”

Game access, for wow access to the servers. The subscription does not allow for the rules to be changed.

Right now because web tickets are a bit backed up, but appeals were never taken by those contact points.

Hopefully I did not come off as accusatory. Words can be mis-interpreted. Just a simple assessment.

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Because an appeal is not for the player to yell and scream at a GM or try to plead their case with a GM. An appeal is simply to ask another set of eyes to look at the logs to see if the correct punishment and action was taken. That’s it. There doesn’t need to be any kind of active support for that. You put in an appeals ticket and someone goes back over the logs and says that it was correct or not.

Most of the time an appeal is very easy as it is usually a black or white thing, either a rule was broken or it wasn’t. They are not their to look into whether or not a player thinks the punishment was excessive or not. For example, if someone appeals a suspension for language, the Blizzard employee looking at the appeal is going to look at the logs that are attached to the original action; if they see that unacceptable language was used, they are going to simply send out a template answer that the action has been upheld… not a lot of work involved in those.

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I didnt say only for appeals, I said for ANY reason that a ticket needs to be opened. I like how you pick and choose 1 single part of a sentence to respond to. We used to be able to interact with customer support when we had ANY type of issue, and we also used to be able to interact with game masters within 24 hours of any issues we have in game. Now we have to wait 20 days to receive a ticket response for absolutely anything (appeals and also other things NOT appeals). I am just wondering why they did away with all the support they used to have. Its not like they make less money now then they did originally. and Kozzae there is no active customer support anywhere at all. A forum agent who has no ability to do anything with your account or help with any in game issues what so ever is no support. Its moral support if anything if thats what you want to call it, theyre just here to tell you sorry theres nothing we can do.

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tickets used to be around 24-48 hours than a whole series of events occurred causing current ticket times to blow up to what they are now. They didn’t do away with anything, they have gotten overloaded with tickets

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I’m sure the forum SFA’s will correct you.

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So your telling me they didnt do away with game masters responding to you in game? and your telling me they didnt do away with the 800 customer support line we used to be able to call? Hm i must be imagining all that then.

They did cull staff in 2012 - and the “support” staff were mostly NOT from customer support or customer service - they were administration staff.

Support as in not front line.

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its been a very long time since GMs have interacted with people in game. They now have the tools to do much from their computer that they used to have to go into game for.

The phone number went away YEARS ago because people used it for issues they weren’t supposed to causing hold times to be insane. And GMs answer tickets for all Blizzard games. there aren’t WOW gms and Diablo gms and Overwatch gms, etc. Just Blizzard gms

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Let’s see what I can cover.

The majority of the time our Support staff use templates because we generally see the same issues over and over again and it just isn’t feasible to write a custom message for each one.

As for if a Game Master has looked at it or not, it usually depends on the situation. During times of high ticket volume, we may send out a generic response designed to direct players to appropriate self-help options, Support Articles or other locations they may be able to get assistance.

You see, a great number of tickets we get are often about issues that our staff cannot help with (Bug reports, in-game feedback, requests for game hints, etc…), so in order to try to clear those out as best as we can, while still trying to provide what advice we are able to, we send those out. The response you receive may depend on the category you used when submitting the ticket, or some key words/phrases you used in your ticket.

These responses usually allow you to reopen the ticket if you are still having trouble, which overall allows us to get to you faster.

Response times are extremely high right now. We are working to get to everyone as as we able to, while still trying to get to priority issues as soon as possible.

Your subscription doesn’t provide a guaranteed level of support, it grants you access to your account and the game content. Of course we try to provide the best support we can, and we have response times that we try to adhered to, but things happen and we deal with them as best as we can when they do.

I think you are missing a great deal of what has been released. Yes, we had the launch of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, but we also have the launch of Overwatch 2, the pre-patch for Dragonflight with new updated systems introduced. There are tons of folks returning to the game trying to recover their account, no longer having access to their email, their authencator, phone number, etc… That is on top of the normal contacts that we get every day.

We do what we can to account for normal fluctuations, but these releases have been anything but normal.

It doesn’t take 20 days to write the response, it is how long it takes before a Support Rep may pull the ticket to look into the request. The response you receive still follows our normal procedures and in most cases, we have a template response that has been developed for whatever the issue is.

The direct phone number, when we had it, was a mess. First, it was only intended for Billing and Account related issues, and some Tech Support. What ended up happening is anyone with any issue would use it, including to report a bug or to provide feedback about the game. That often took the phone lines to capacity. Those who could get into the hold queue, they waited for 45-90 on average. For those that couldn’t, they played the fun game of hang up and dial again in the hopes of maybe getting into that hold queue. It was a terrible experience.

Game Masters mostly like engaging with players, they like talking to them in-game, RPing appearing in a puff of purple smoke or arriving on dragonback, but most of the time that contact wasn’t necessary. We couldn’t always catch folks online either, and it encouraged tickets with little to no information other than “help” or “talk to me”.

In most situations we have what we need in a ticket, if filled out properly. If more information is needed, and if they are online, we may be able to speak with the person directly, but often we just ask for the needed information in a response.

That is simply a fallacy, you have no insight into funding, budget or staffing, don’t use your made up thing as an argument to try and sell your narrative.

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No they had a poor decision made by the money people who decided it would be a good idea to have a bunch of things launch all at once. With all those launches comes the inevitable problems that software launches usually have, as well as a huge amount of returning players who are coming back after years of not playing who need help finding characters or accounts that they forgot about.

That led to a huge deluge of tickets that the GMs are having to work through. The times are starting to get back to normal (normal being around 24-48 hours for most issues, shorter for some), they were taking around 2 weeks a few days ago. There are issues that have had to be passed up to the Devs that had to be placed in a holding queue until the Devs could come up with a fix. Those are making the ticket time that shows up on an open ticket to show the average wait time as over 30 days. That number is NOT a countdown and is NOT tied to a single ticket. It is an average of the longest ticket in queue.

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There were also ban waves occurring at the same time making it even worse

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Now I understand the motivation behind this post… as your other post helps to point at your original one on a different account. You were penalized on that other account for using inappropriate language. You were reported and penalized, which you feel was automated and unfair.

The answer to your question, Gratzitko, is yes. Violating our Code of Conduct by using inappropriate language, and other name calling… is deserved. The length of time for a silence or suspension depends on the violation and the history on the account.

As I mentioned in the other thread, that wasn’t your first penalty. There was one in March and one in May.

While most folks are frustrated with our wait times, justifiably so, based on the chat that I see, it wouldn’t matter if we got to your ticket within an hour, you violated policy. You were reported and you were penalized… within the scope of our policies.

I am sorry that such a penalty was necessary, but our In-Game Code of Conduct is there for a reason. I hope that going forward that you can abide by those policies while in-game and most especially when interacting with others.

It should be pointed out that, if the language isn’t appropriate in-game, it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate on these forums. The penalties on the forums will escalate as well, please keep that in mind.

Lastly, the previous voice line by Garrosh was rated by the ESRB, which allows some content. It is regulated, as we’re able to limit that kind of content. You are required to follow the Code of Conduct and EULA, and it specifically has rules against that behavior.

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