GM power in Classic

[Drlocktopus-bonechewer]

Hey everyone.

I tried looking up information from the forums about this issue but I couldn’t find anything concrete. Has Blizz said anything about the relative power of GM’s to solve problems in classic?

I know that GM power has been considerably curbed during the longevity of the game. The amount of “sorry I can’t do anything about that” responses have skyrocketed. I even recall reading that because of abuse of power GMs were kind of neutered in what they can do to try and solve problems. I’ve heard that there are no longer “wow gms” but every support person is a blizzard game master that is not game specific. Some people credit it to the population boom, but I would doubt that. WOW subs peaked in wrath and they were just as helpful. In Cata they imposed restrictions, but the playerbase was declining and has continued to do so.

Do we know if Blizz will have separate GM infrastructure in place for classic vs. retail or will classic be merged into retail support?

[Williams-akama (Williams)]

Unfortunately my friend I doubt it given they fired 800 customer service oriented jobs in Blizzard.

Very sad days my friend.

[Eloraell-moon-guard]

I tried looking up information from the forums about this issue but I couldn’t find anything concrete. Has Blizz said anything about the relative power of GM’s to solve problems in classic?

Loot Trading in Classic *updated*

We saw some confusion about a specific part of this post so we want to be clear that Customer Service will NOT be transferring items in WoW Classic and the system that we outlined will be in the players’ hands. If we were to go down the road of developing a policy on item trading, we believe it would end up allowing the exact same kind of abuse that we are trying to minimize with the 2-hour trade window system which we outlined in the original post.

Do we know if Blizz will have separate GM infrastructure in place for classic vs. retail or will classic be merged into retail support?

There is no such thing as WoW Retail support. GMs work across all Blizzard games using interfaces etc. They have the power even now to step into WoW if necessary, but most of their systems are a unified interface that allows them to do things in Overwatch, Hearthstone, Retail WoW and all their other properties. Classic WoW will just be an extension of that.

[Ristra-suramar (Ristra)]

I have to question what it is you are hoping GM’s will have the power to do. There are tools for the player to handle much of what we used to have to ask a GM to do.

Maybe some specifics are in order.

[Tricksyhyena-arathor (Tricksyhyena)]

Glossed over your post but your name tickled me proper, OP.

[Cyberteamsix-azgalor]

Unfortunately my friend I doubt it given they fired 800 customer service oriented jobs in Blizzard.

Very sad days my friend.

I think they want to stream line classic as much as possible. It will pad numbers and keep investors happy, and at the same time it will make the player base happy. The fact that they haven’t actually confronted right click mute shows that they are playing on a line trying to min max cash spent on wages with cash received from happy players.

[Sabetha-turalyon (Sabetha)]

Activision wants to minimize the cost of support staff, so it’s likely that the cutting down and automation will only increase.

They recently got rid of ~800 support staff. Classic support is going to be merged into the mainline support structure they have.

[Williams-akama (Williams)]

Lets look at this logically for a moment.

This is Classic WoW, essentially it’s Vanilla.

We will be playing Classic WoW not watching some one else play it because the game is so fun that why would you put it down just to watch another do what you could be doing?

Because of the nature of Classic WoW I would be very surprised if if streaming is as popular for Classic as it is for other less interesting games that Streaming artificially inflates the value of.

Example Modern WoW benefits from streaming because it’s not really a gamers game any more, while Classic WoW is 100% a gamers game.

Because of that, it’s very unlikely that streamers will get a lot of traffic.

[Aryxymaraki-earthen-ring (Aryxymaraki)]

Because of that, it’s very unlikely that streamers will get a lot of traffic.

Eh, that’s not really the biggest part of streaming. The biggest drive of traffic for streaming is that you can watch it for much less effort than you can play a game yourself.

You can’t really do work and play WoW at the same time, but you can do work and throw a stream up on the second monitor or some such. Can’t read and play WoW at once, but can read and watch stream. Etc.

[Eloraell-moon-guard]

I think they want to stream line classic as much as possible. It will pad numbers and keep investors happy, and at the same time it will make the player base happy. The fact that they haven’t actually confronted right click mute shows that they are playing on a line trying to min max cash spent on wages with cash received from happy players.

Well, given that the alternative is no Classic, I’m ok with them doing whatever they can to keep shareholders happy while giving us Classic.