Maybe this is new, but I was staggered to see this.
I won’t name names so as to not endanger the person’s account, but I know someone that received a false RMT Arena ban, very similar to what happened to Asmongold.
Upon asking for a follow up on it, the GM told said person they would terminate their account if they asked about it again.
Is that normal? Is that what Blizzard CS is now? You guys made an obvious mistake with the account, refused to look into properly, and are telling said person (17+ year player) you’ll kill their account if they ask about it again?
I’m asking here because, surely, that’s just a lazy CS rep not wanting to help? I’m honestly really confused, and I hope I can get some clarification.
Generally speaking, as I don’t know the account you are referring to nor would I really be able to comment if I did, we have the appeal process in place to help verify if a mistake has been made or not. When someone appeals, that account is reviewed in accordance with specific criteria that our staff needs to follow. If the evidence indicates that the correct action was taken, and no false positive found, the action is upheld.
Part of the standard reply is that once an appeal is completed no additional reviews will be done. That isn’t a hard rule though, we often will accept additional appeals and take a look, just as before.
There is a limit though, as some folks bombard us with tickets and will not accept the responses they were given. At a point there is no other answer we are likely to give. It is generally at that point we warn against additional contact on this matter as it may result in account penalty, including closure.
As I said, I don’t know what this other person was told specifically, but in my experience it is usually something similar to that, which often gets put through the translator of frustration and anger and comes out as “They said X!”.
If it were an obvious mistake, Calacius, the action would have been overturned.
It is not our goal to suspend or close accounts. It is our least favorite task that we do as a company, but it is a necessary part of online games. If your friend was suspended and after a number of appeals was not overturned, I’m sorry, but the evidence we have indicates that the actions that we took were accurate.
I have had a similar experiences with Bliz, like you describe. Back in-- I think-- 2008, my account got banned for gold trading. Thing is, I hadn’t played the game in almost 6 months… Tbh, I kinda didn’t even care that they banned me-- Until I saw my monthly bank statement. Blizzard had charged me $50 for character xfers AFTER I was banned. You can be sure I cared then… I was working a minimum wage job while going through college, so $50 was a LOT of money to me.
I called Blizzard’s phone line (yes, they had a phone line, despite what the CM/GMs will tell you these days) and waited on hold for 2-3 hours, on my flip phone. The first thing I noticed was that the guy who eventually picked up had a distinct Indian accent. He took my basic acc info, but before I could say anything IMMEDIATELY went into the whole (I am paraphrasing here) “you’re banned, you’re a bad person, you got what you deserved. etc etc”
At 20 years old, I had never gone full Karen on anyone before or since. Never truly wanted to knock the teeth out of a Blizzard employee until that moment. So I gave him a piece of my mind, which is saying something, because even now I am soft spoken. Eventually, he relented, and heard me out. They fixed my account, gave me some game time, and some items as compensation.
But to this day, it is the worst CS experience I have ever had with anyone. So, yea, Calacius, I can totally see them treating you that way.
Sounds more like your account was hacked and used for gold trading. They must have had enough information from you to be able to do access the payment method on your account which is unfortunate. But ultimately, account security is our responsibility as players.
And yes, Blizzard did indeed have an inbound phone like back then. They eventually switched to a call-back system as the phone line was greatly abused by people asking for things like game hints or for a GM to tell them a joke when it was primarily for Billing and Tech Support issues.
When Covid hit, the outbound option eventually went away. I’m hopeful that it may return someday myself.
I’m not sure what your point was about the person’s accent, other than to be inappropriate. All support for Blizz is done in-house. And yes, people come from all walks of life and speak multiple languages even.
I’m sorry you felt you were treated badly back then. That is certainly unfortunate.
OP asked if his experience was normal. I was just confirming out of a sense of brotherhood. I notice a few of the regulars have chimed in. I would reply further, but outside showing solidarity with the Op, I don’t want to derail his thread, if he comes back.
You seem to be attempting to hint that CS is outsourced. It is not, and never has been. Believe it or not, many people who are US residents have accents. CS is handled out of Austin TX and/or Irvine CA for Blizzard Americas. Always has been.
Appeals have never been handled via phone. Phones and live chat are for Billing, Account Access (emails/passwords, etc), and some tech support. They should have told you to put in an appeal via ticket.
So you screamed at an employee until they did something outside the scope of their job.
I hope you did not get them fired. You very well might have.
If you were not playing at the time, Tenchu, it is very possible that your account was compromised at the time. It wouldn’t have been Blizzard charging you out of the blue, but they would have been charges caused by whomever had access to the account and enough information to initiate those transfers.
Looking at the notes on the account I don’t see anything in 2008, but I do see a compromise at the end of 2009, which included some transfer abuse, which was reversed.
I’m not certain what kind of revisionist history you believe may be happening but we’ve never denied that we have had a phone number that was used to contact Customer Support.
Yes, that is one of the reasons that we moved to other methods of contact. The hold queue just to get into another hold queue to talk to someone was often extremely lengthy. Just getting in that queue was a challenge and folks had to try to get through the busy signal to get that far. Even though the contact number was specifically for account and technical issues, it often filled up with other matters that our staff couldn’t address or was better addressed via a ticket.
I’m not certain how that is relevant, other than you seem to be implying that our Support was outsourced. It was not. America is full of a variety of folks, some of them have accents.
This is where you lose me. Appeals aren’t handled via the phone, I don’t have any record of such a contact and what I do see is a lot of clean up from an account compromise. Those kinds of notes don’t indicate that we blamed you for the penalty on the account, other than account security is your responsibility. We would have, and did, provide what corrections we could, including addressing the transfer abuse. I am sorry if you felt whomever you spoke with said anything of the kind though.
I don’t believe there is anything productive that can be gleaned by leaving this open so I’m going to close it up. Thanks, all.