Didn’t know Austin Texas was in India. The more you know.
I’ve had both canned responses and actuall conversations with GMs since Classic started.
The canned responses feel less personal, of course… But my issues have always been resolved.
It depends on what specifically you’re seeking assistance with. Some things are now covered with self-service tools: Item Restoration, Mail Return, or moving a Stuck Character.
Other issues aren’t covered by the Game Master team so you’ll be directed to the correct avenue: Bug Reports, Game Feedback.
You can often find answers on a number of topics if you search our Support website: https://battle.net/support/. There may be articles that cover your issue and provide you with what next steps you need to take (if any).
But if you do need to open your ticket you can click on the “Contact Support” link which will take you to a landing page with all of the games we support:
https://battle.net/support/help
Selecting one will bring you to an input form where you can describe the issue you’re having and our support site will try to locate relevant support articles while still offering the option to open a ticket.
If you would prefer to skip the form, you can click on the “I would rather categorize the issue” link, which will allow you to narrow down what you need help with. You’ll still be offered some relevant support articles that we find often help but you can continue to open a support ticket if necessary.
You would be incorrect in this regard. For the Americas region, we have Game Master teams based out of North America and Europe. To provide service around the clock, European GMs may take Americas region tickets when North American GMs are out of the office. The reverse is true for European tickets.
Not everything, but we do automate what we can because it’s more efficient. Why should you have to wait a day to recover an item you lost? The Game Masters could also be assisting others with more impactful issues. So, when there’s a good opportunity to automate simple requests we’ll try to do that.
On occasion ticket times can climb to several days. In those cases, a lot of issues are reported that end up falling into a couple categories:
- Confusion - There’s a new system, and users expect one thing vs another
- Bugs - There’s actually a problem that the dev team needs to fix
So we’ll gather tickets up about a specific topic and send them all a response to let them know the bug has been fixed or giving them resources to help understand a game system (like links to guides on wowhead). From the reports I’ve seen of incorrect replies, they tend to be tickets that used similar language, or were accidentally picked up during a collection of tickets on other topics. We try to avoid that as much as possible, but we also want people to receive information as quickly as possible.
What tends to be forgotten about those times is that ticket waits for almost always several days or in some cases over a week. When I first started as a Game Master in 2008 (towards the end of BC), there was a small number of tasks I was trained on. Everything else needed to go up to “Specialists” GMs. So you’d wait 1-2 days for a GM to reply, and they’d tell you that your ticket was going to need another 3-4 days (or more) for a Specialist. It wasn’t the best experience. Also, hope your account didn’t get compromised during this period. Back during those times, the wait could be up to a month. You may be asked if you’d rather receive a “Care Package” of gear and gold instead of a full restoration.
Sure, sometimes you got to chat with a Game Master but asking a GM for a joke at the end of your conversation also meant delaying help to another player.
As a GM I had a lot of fun telling jokes and chatting with players but it wasn’t the most efficient way to provide support to a quickly growing player base like WOW (additionally, the library of Blizzard titles was growing around this time).
Every ticket is followed by a Survey that lets us measure how we’re doing in terms of support and I can guarantee you that the responses to those surveys are not as one sided as you assume. That being said, if you do have a support ticket and you’re not happy with how it was handled please fill out the survey. It’s easy to be frustrated and just dismiss the incident as “no one cares” but the surveys are important and helps our teams identify areas of improvement. On the flip side of that, if you had a good experience you should also fill out the survey. That is just as important, and lets us know the things we should keep doing or expand on.
For sure, this is fair feedback. It goes back to that efficiency I was talking about. When I was a Game Master I had a handful of messages I’d send for a specific topic. For example, if someone was requesting an item restoration (before it was automated) I had 3-4 version of a “restoration granted” that I could use. My goal with them was to always have fun, but they were by definition “canned”. I don’t need to write a custom reply every time I restore a piece of gear… That takes a lot of extra time I could spend helping the next person 
Anyway! I’ve rambled on a bit, but I wanted to make sure the OP knew how to open a ticket and hopefully dispel some of the myths about Blizzard Support.
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While I appreciate the response and clarifications, if the generally community perception, is GM’s don’t even exist anymore, there is room for improvement.
This is fair, and I’d agree. But I also want to point out that you’re more likely to remember the bad compared to the good. I’ve had countless times where a player has complained that support has never helped them and when I review their support history I see that they’ve received multiple exceptions and more often than not received what they wanted.
If you go to a movie theater, then hit the restroom - a clean restroom is forgotten but a messy restroom can make you feel like the whole theater is a mess. (I know this is an odd way to express that, but one of my first jobs was at a movie theater and the managers really drilled this point)
Customer Support for an online service is ever evolving. So I’ll never call it perfect. There’s always room to improve and we’ll continue trying.
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As this thread appears to have been moved from the General forum, allow me to share this thread that should hopefully clear up the GM role in game:
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All of the back and forth aside, since this has now been moved to the proper forum - what is it that you needed assistance with? You’ll find the CS crew to be greatly knowledgeable, and if it’s something we don’t know how to help with, we can definitely get you pointed in the proper direction to get your issue to the proper place.
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I understand you may have been having issues with the help request system, what was the particular reason you were trying to contact a GM? Perhaps then we can best advise which ticket branch you need to use, or explain why you received a specific answer.
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Your most recent posts seem related to battleground queues, specifically with classic TBC.
You probably are having issues contacting a GM if this is why you want to open a ticket, simply because this might not be an issue a GM can advise on. Queues for battlegrounds depend solely on players joining and your level range.
If you are referring to why a employee (GM) has not answered your posts, GM staff actually do not monitor the forums, only answering in game tickets.
Developers and QA only answer posts if additional information is needed for a particular issue. And mostly not on the weekend, as your last fee posts appear to be in the last day.
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Hey looks I’m wrong, tho it may be time to add a bit of a personal touch so people believe you guys actually exist.
Funny thing is that people who don’t believe facts, likely would just write off any “personal touch” as some sort of AI. Tinfoil hats are cheap after all 
But my favorite is that tickets are not instantly answered (so people complain) and then when it does take a real person time to look into the issue, they’re still considered a bot/automated/etc. People need to make up their minds, are tickets instant and as such automated? Or are they handled by real people, thus the totally obvious queue, which takes real people time to get through.
If you’d like to provide feedback to any tickets you’ve recently had answered Khlause, you’re best to use the survey attached to the ticket. That survey goes to the employee’s supervisor for feedback.
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I can’t join a BG with some of my characters, I can join a que(next available only) but they never pop>
It could be no one is playing that bracket or not enough people are playing.
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Swifteagle likely has the right of it. In that case? There isn’t anything a GM can do, as the issue is a player-based issue. If there is no one else or not enough people queueing up? Then there is no queue to pop. Assuming these characters are not maxed? And are they Retail, TBCC or Classic?
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That would be a development issue, gm staff could not have answered for you.
However, development was working on it, I’m not sure how much longer it will be.
It’s often over looked, but they do add some personal touches when possible, people solely seem to focus on the template used when providing feedback. Templates are not bad though when addressing similar issues.
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I can see why they might use a template response, but too frequent of use is also not a good thing because the response is incoherent often when related to the ticket.
I work doing online chat support. 60% of my responses are either macros or copy and paste because it makes no sense to type the exact same thing 100s of times a day.
Impersonal responses does not mean it’s not a real person on the other end.
High volume CS requires to streamline things to keep the queue times down.
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I understand your point, but the customer (ME) sees incoherent answer number 31 and says “this is a crappy bot”.
Some of us interacted with the in game GM of the past, and contrary to the claims by the above blue my experience with the GM’s of the past were both swift and good. That same quality level of service is not present in game now, the copy and pasted responses might seems like a good idea, and I understand why you might do that, but it’s not a good look for the company you represent.
In a world becoming more and more automated and operated by automatons it’s wise to be a human and show every day you’re human because humanity is a fleeting thing.
I’m glad to hear that Khlause, truly. I know there were periods where wait times were very short, and chatting with a GM during those periods was a nice bonus interaction. But when people ask “why did that change”, it’s because more often than not the wait time was not that short 
If you ever feel that is lacking from the responses you receive, please do fill out that survey. There were so many times when I was trying out new messages that a survey helped me see “no that’s not really working like I thought it would” and change it up.
I know I’m kind of really beating the “survey” point but soft skills are very helpful in support roles. I can’t over state how useful the surveys were to me in developing those as a Game Master.
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I get this is you trying to drive in a point, but the OP is who we are trying to focus on here. We have no control over how they operate CS. We can provide our feedback in the appropriate forums, of which this is not one of them. The surveys, GD. If it’s in reference to dungeons or PvP or whatnot, then it can go there.
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