What are you talking about? Blizzard has not cut support staff since 2012 when they laid off 600 people.
The 2019 layoffs were esports, promotions, publishing, marketing, etc. Out of the 200ish laid off from Blizzard, only 14 had job titles in the GM range.
You can read the list submitted to the CA govt, as required by law, here. The PDF for it is at the end of the article.
Was there some secret support layoff that nobody has made public? If anything, they have more than they used to seeing as they support ALL Blizzard games and services, not just WoW.
No, the confusion lies with people who don’t understand how employees are labeled. They see “support staff”, and somewhat understandably, they think it’s Customer Support staff. Support staff are people like secretaries, part-time/intern help. Basically, people who support essential employees in doing their jobs.
Oh yes. Because a YouTuber/streamer who doesn’t work at Blizzard and relies on making wilder and wilder claims to gain subscriptions totally knows what’s going on.
Stop believing random videos you see on YouTube. Period. And not just WoW-related videos. In ALLLLLLL aspects of life.
Eh, the guy is not totally off on some of his discussions, I have not gotten to the part about support yet.
Customer Support is not part of the WoW team though - and this video seems to be discussing the WoW team changes. It started with addressing the replacement of the folks laid off in 2019 out of marketing, social media, publishing, etc.
See that is the problem. Customer Support is not part of the WoW staff. They are a separate team who work out of the Austin Texas office and support EVERY game and service Blizzard has.
The “Support” part of each game team is admin. They support the game devs, artists, producers, etc. who make each game. For example there is an opening for an admin assistant for the OW team right now.
Yes, the ticket wait times are dreadful for ALL Blizzard games right now. It is not WoW specific
During high volume that is a first step because many issues are not something a GM can do. Others now have Self-help tools for a player so they don’t need a GM. The idea that they ONLY have that as a tool though is false.
Again, the Customer Support team is not part of the WoW team and was not part of that analysis. The WoW team “support” are admins who support the WoW devs. There were only a handful of them to start with so even a reduction of one would be massive as far as percentages.
You may feel that the Customer Support team in Austin Texas is not doing a great job right now and you have the right to feel that way. Just don’t mix that up with false statements that there were staffing reductions there when there were not. Changes to the WoW team that the streamer talked about, have NOTHING to do with CS.
I have actually been to Blizzard HQ a few times. Met with multiple games teams and also met with Support. There are NOT integrated or the same at all. Not even in the same buildings. Not even in the same State for most of it.
You might want to read the article Vrak wrote on what GM staff are allowed to do, it helps set some of the expectations. GMs are not allowed to do many things people THINK they should do.
Please look up the definition of harassment. A long wait time does not constitute intentional infliction of distress on you personally. The number you see is the longest in queue, not a specific time for YOUR ticket. That number may go up or down, but has no impact on yours specifically. It is not a count down. Depending on priority, your ticket will likely come up in queue way before that. More like 1-2 weeks.
Policies do change over time, but a lot of the things people thought they were allowed to do, they were not. They can’t just give people items, redistribute loot, resolve player disputes, complete achievements for you, complete quests (in most cases), etc. If something is a bug it normally has to be fixed by the Devs for everyone, not by the GMs. There are rare exceptions the Devs will authorize.
If something can be done again, especially, GMs don’t get involved. That might be a pet, achievement, or quest. You would repeat it after the Devs fix it, if it was actually bugged.
Correct. Not getting a drop you want is not the same as having the item allocated to you by the game but being unable to loot it. If the “roll” to distribute the loot does not happen via game mechanics and there is no designated recipient, GMs don’t arbitrarily make that decision and hand out loot.
Example of where they can help - if I am solo farming a raid mount and it drops, but I can’t loot it and it is not mailed to me - they can help. I can tell them the char name, server, raid, time, date, boss name, and item name. They can look at the boss table and see that I am the only one on it, that the item did drop, and that it is not in my bags or mail.
Correct. You need to slow down. If the boss does not drop loot at all there is no loot table for a GM to review - hence they can’t distribute loot. They are not going to let the GMs get involved in that. Ideally the Devs would be the ones to modify the boss mechanic to ensure that the no loot from a fast kill glitch does not happen. That is not on GMs though. They do not let GMs do anything with raid IDs, resets, etc.
I don’t work for Blizzard. However, if you authorize a transaction, receive the goods or services, then file a charge back then yes, that can result in an automated hold until you repay the funds.
Uh, yes? If you do a chargeback, they have every right to lock your account until you pay that chargeback back, And I’ve seen more and more where they won’t let you pay back your chargeback with your credit/debit card because you could just do another chargeback if you chose. You may have to go out and buy a Blizzard Balance card to apply to your account to get it set back to rights.
Which is a problem. A customer shouldn’t be disadvantaged for a week through no fault of their own. It would NOT be a difficult task to give GM some simple tools to reset a boss for example. If you have a kill lockout and no loot log, let a GM reset it ffs. This can apply to a lot of things where Blizzard unlike most businesses choose to let the customer suffer so they don’t have to pay support staff to actually do anything but send auto responses with a button.
Honestly this could even be a tool for a user where you report a boss kill with no loot and the game does a quick check that you didn’t get a loot log but are saved and it could reset the boss.
Don’t get too hung up on this one specific example though, in general the customer support staff need tools to support players instead of annoy them with copy paste useless things like “check wowhead” and wowhead is 20 other angry customers that got the same copy paste response for a BLIZZARD problem.
That is a Developer decision. They don’t want GMs doing that. There are things a GM can do, but what those things are are limited by policy and the proprietary tools they have. Devs only give them tools to do what Devs want.
You would have to ask a Dev for the specifics of why they don’t want GMs resetting raid bosses. I would assume it has something to do with it being abused by people who want second chances at loot so is a blanket policy. A boss not dropping any loot due to the speed it is killed is technically a bug that the Devs would be responsible for fixing. However, with older content they don’t tend to prioritize it.
In Mists of Pandaria I transferred a bunch of characters across several realms, and a GM noticed I had in their words: “a lonely DK on spinebreaker” and the GM offered me a FREE transfer for my final DK to have all my characters in one place. This is how you treat a long term customer. Human interaction. Something above and beyond. Old Blizzard is dead sadly.
If one rogue GM abuses the tool and feeds people loot, punish the rogue GM. Don’t remove the tools from ALL GM’s forever because of a rogue actor. This logic would see knives removed from society because they can be used as weapons, when really we need them to prepare and cut up our food.
The player has nothing to gain in bugging the boss, getting no loot, only to reset the boss, and still have an identical RNG roll on loot. They would just kill it the first time lol…
I am not sure GMs ever had that tool to reset raid bosses though. It is something a Dev or specialist could do maybe? I have not heard of it ever happening though outside of some super rare early WoW stories.
Correct.
The right answer is to fix the bug that causes a boss not to generate loot in the first place, not make a band aid tool to deal with the bug.