No Real Help for In-Game Issues

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So, I was on my DH today. First, the game was having a great deal of difficulty loading my character where I logged him out, on the Isle of Thunder. When the game finally loaded, I used my Legion Dalaran Hearthstone and was disconnected. I logged back in, still on the Isle of Thunder, yet my Legion Dalaran Hearthstone was on cooldown. So I had to take the slightly longer way via going to Stormwind and using the Mage Tower portal room.
Then, while trying to find the location of a Suramar World Quest, I ended up down in the Falanaar Tunnels. Wasn’t the right place so I wanted to leave. I ran my character up the web ramp. At the top where I was trying to exit onto the rocks above, no matter how I ran, walked, or jumped at it, my character was bounced backward several yards. I don’t recall having this issue before, but it’s been a long time since I quested around there. I tried to use my Flight Whistle, but no luck because the tunnel area, even at the top of the ramp, is considered an indoor zone. I thought it was ridiculous to have to use my hearthstone to leave the place, seeing as I was trying to quest in that part of Suramar. I couldn’t understand why the ramp would be designed to bounce a character backward and prevent us from leaving…
I decided to try the ‘Character Stuck’ feature in the Help Menu. It recommended using my Hearthstone or porting to a graveyard. Again, I didn’t feel I should have to do that. I should just be able to run out of the darn tunnel via the ramp provided in game.
In the end, I wasted several minutes working my way through the Help Menu Character Stuck feature until I arrived at the point where it was supposed to move my character to a safe location. My character was ported to the Sentinel Hill graveyard in Westfall.

Sigh… yeeaaah.

I really wanted to speak with an actual person, so I tried to navigate my way through the Contact Support page to find the Callback service. It seems it’s only available through the Performance Issues category. So I was left with only the forums here as my means of communication. I have been having so many in game issues with WoW over the last couple years - glitches and bugs and poor terrain design; my BM Hunter’s Animal Companion talent has been malfunctioning for nearly a year. My Mage’s purchased Arcane Language un-repaired for two years or so. Now my in-game Friends list isn’t working correctly. The in-game /who feature isn’t working correctly. The Login Character Screen isn’t displaying characters with the correct gear. Bosses glitching out on me in old content dungeons. Then my issues today. This list of minor and major things goes on and on. And trying to get actual help through the Circle Jerk style Help Menu is like trying to pull teeth from an un-sedated rhinoceros.
After sixteen years supporting Blizzard as a paying customer, that’s really frustrating.
These compounding glitches and bugs that never get addressed anymore, is why I stopped purchasing Expansions. I refused to buy Battle for Azeroth, and I won’t buy Shadowlands. And of course, I cancelled my subscription this afternoon. I realize that only money talks. I hope more customers begin talking to Blizz Management in the same financial language, so that maybe, just maybe they’ll let their technical staff start fixing what’s broken rather than focusing on just pushing new content.

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Live chat and callback are not for your particular issue of the moment, hence the recommendations. Especially as these lines of support are also curtailed at the moment due to the pandemic, with staff actually working from home. The stuck system is a system of last resort, in case you have absolutely no other recourse.

If I recall the area you were in, there are two ways in and out of the area, with the web ramp being the first, and going further into the area to an underground tunnel being the second.

If you find bugs and glitches like the rest of your post mentions, GM staff are not going to be able to help with those, that is what the bug report system is for.

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For most of this - like the display issues, I recommend a full and proper reset UI.

Many of the other things on your list aren’t bugs - and Game Masters don’t deal with bugs as a rule - and never with game design.

You can report bugs, and make suggestions in-game, or here on our forums. Those are for QA and our Developers.

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Yes of course I’ve reported issues through the in game Bug Reporting system, I’m very much aware of it and I do use it as things crop up. As well as the Technical Issues forums. It’s the whole issue of having to report the same issues multiple times over the span of a very long time, months and upward, that gets frustrating.
I’m certain my issue today with the terrain problem, (yes Kozzae I was using the web ramp), being a design issue not a glitch, should have been within a GM’s capacity to help with.

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But, you also have to consider the wait time for said help, when automated systems, and in game things such as the heartstone, would have been in the 24 to 48 hour wait range for tickets.

Live chat and callback are only for billing and technical help, and again, are limited currently due to the pandemic and the need to keep people safe, not to avoid tickets.

https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/breaking/23341822

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I could be wrong, but I believe to exit that way, you need to have done the questline. The other exit is through the tunnels to the exit by the river. There is also a portal, but again, you have to have completed some of the zone’s questline.

Quite frankly, this is exactly what a hearthstone is designed for. Your refusal to use it does not make it a bug, or needing a GM’s help.

Again, if I’m remembering correctly, this has to do with the questline. But I also could be confusing different things. I have been wrong before.

Yes, if you use the move character feature, this is where you are ported. By design.

That is not how Support works. It’s how they used to do things, and it was extraordinarily inefficient and frustrating. People would clog the phone lines with issues they couldn’t assist with, and many more couldn’t even enter the queue.

The evolution has come to ensure that you get the help you need right now. If you could call, and wait on hold for eight hours, just to get a person who will tell you that they can’t help your issue…well, now you’re out eight hours and no closer to your issue being solved.

Most of what you list will likely be solved by a full UI reset. Not just disabling addons or restarting, but a full UI reset.

Terrain design is often intentional. They spend massive amounts of time designing it for specific purposes. That doesn’t mean there aren’t mistakes or bugs or untended consequences, of course. But often, when a player thinks something is designed poorly, it’s just because they aren’t interacting with it properly. The terrain is designed in a certain way for many possible reasons.

As for boss encounters, again, bugs do happen. But in old content, often times killing them too fast will cause issues with scripted events/abilities/etc. So try to kill them a little slower.

There are surely minor bugs that are not priorities, or would cause bigger issues by fixing them. But by and large, if something is “not getting addressed”, then it’s fair to extrapolate that they do not want it changed.

That is certainly your choice. But I would caution you that there is really no other game company that will just do what you want without considering every consequence.

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Phone callback and live chat are also for Billing issues and issues accessing an account.

I do see you have a long list of issues, but those are not things a Customer Support agent/GM could help with other than to:

  • tell you to do a UI reset
  • tell you to report using the bug report tool (GMs don’t handle Bug reports or make individual changes unless the devs tell them explicitly to for a particular issue).
  • hit the move char button for you that would do the same thing.

Talking to the GMs to vent your frustrations is really not the way to accomplish anything useful besides making you feel you talked to a human. Those humans can’t help though because they have nothing to do with bugs, game design, art asset design, etc. That would waste your time and theirs.

If they allowed phone calls just to let people vent and complain about things they can’t help with then nobody else who they CAN help would get service. People locked out of accounts, having billing issues, needing to file name change documentation/country change documentation, etc. etc.

The people who get paid to collect exactly the feedback you are giving about the game and your issues with it are the Community Managers (blues) who are paid to read the Discussion forums and round up feedback to pass to the Devs. That is the means they prefer so that your feedback goes to the right place.

Edit - I see you don’t have the current expansion. Please keep in mind that over time with all the game changes sometimes older areas end up with glitches. Priority for fixes goes to the new content, not the older content which may be why you feel so frustrated with the lack of updates. One of the better resources to deal with it is to read up on Wowhead. Players very often explain missing quest lines, work arounds to various boss mechanics that glitch, etc.

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This definition is why I came to this particular forum:

Customer support is the range of services a company offers to help their customers get the most out of their product and to resolve customer’s problems. Customer support includes things like answering customer questions, providing assistance with onboarding, and troubleshooting.

But I’ll go through this.

Yes, Kozzae.
I’m aware that GM’s come with wait times. I do recall that fact. But I could no longer even find a way to bring up the option of contacting a GM through the Help Menu.
Hence why I started working my way through the Contact Support page to see if it was possible to get in touch with an agent.
And again, yes, I wrote in my original post that it seemed callbacks were only available via the Performance Issues category. So I found that fact on my own. (In relation to ‘technical’ stuff, not ‘billing’ stuff etc. Obviously, my issue wasn’t billing.)

Hey there Melaesia.
• I have completed the questline(s) in that area. Quite some time ago, in fact. The whole tunnel system is completely empty of mobs now.
• I think you missed my meaning. I meant I thought it seemed ridiculous that a player could not leave a fully accessible open questing area, and would have to leave it via using their hearthstone.
• I still maintain a GM could have helped me with the terrain issue. Not in regards to wait times, in regards to knowledge of the game. I ended up looking it up - found a post on Youtube. Surely a GM would have known that answer.
• Then I guess they just need to rewrite the phrase: “…your character will be moved to a safe area…” to, “…your character will be transported to the Sentinel Hill graveyard…” That would work.
• Yes, there are a lot of minor bugs. But even the minor stuff, it’s like tossing nickels in jar. That jar is pretty well full. And it’s the little things that become the most annoying, because those little things get ignored and never go away.
• “…no other game company will just do what you want…” You mean, fix bugs and glitches that aren’t related to PvP and have piled up? Oh. Right. I must sound really unreasonable. My bad.

Hi Mirasol,
• Yes, those are few out of a longer list. But I used those few as examples to highlight my greater issue.
• For the record, I wasn’t wanting to talk to a GM for the sake of venting at one. I wanted to talk to a GM to get help. It was when, after a fair bit of searching, I found out it wasn’t possible, that I got in the mood to vent. And yes, I did it here. My only available means of communication with customer service.
• I guess I’ll have to try the UI reset, of course. I’m presuming that means I’ll have to go back through each one of my characters on each server afterwards, to reset all the User Interface / Chat color / Keybinding / Action Bars etc etc settings, because they’ll all be back to defaults. Obviously that’s very time consuming, so I’ll just have to get around to it when I’m ready to put in that time.

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You can do the reset by renaming the folders instead of deleting them. If the issue is cleared then do the settings again. If the issue isn’t cleared, deleted the new versions of the folders and rename the original ones back to restore your old settings.

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In this case, this forum is not a direct contact point for GM service, but a player to player discussion forum, as pointed out in the last sticky post on this very forum.

Which is technically as pointed out, exactly what we did when we mentioned the various methods to self help, a lot of them were put into place in case you get into an issue you did need more immediate help then opening a web ticket would allow, while acknowledging the systems you were seeking were not really available for your case, as it did not involve the billing staff.

And as may have been pointed out, your particular issue of the moment may very well have been a questing issue, but there should have been means to self help, which you stated you did not like.

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Ah…this is a common misconception. Blizzard does not allow GMs to give game hints and tips. If you ticket for one, they will send you to youtube or wowhead.

Even for issues GMs can help with, they very rarely need to talk to the player unless they need more info. Players certainly want to chat, but the GMs handle all the Blizzard games and have tons of support requests. They don’t have much time.

Back in the day, they had a call-in line. It was supposed to be for Billing, Account Access, and Tech issues. However, everyone called it for EVERYTHING. How to do a quest, complaints, bug reports, account appeals, being bored, etc. The queue was almost always busy and even if you got into the HOLD queue, it could take 2 hours to get an agent. With cell phones becoming popular people were running up minutes on hold and cell phones DC often. Most of the calls they were getting were ones the phone folks could not help with anyway. It was a mess. These days they call you if it is an issue phone or Live Chat can help with.

The old GM tools also used to require them to enter the game and it did result in more player contact.

Updated tools no longer require that. They can fix things form their tool set outside the game.

It is kind of sad to lose that connection but I also understand why, with so many more games now, they have to be efficient with support.

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There are two other ways besides the web ramp to exit those tunnels. There is a “backdoor” tunnel that exits by the river, then there is the usual front entrance where the temple is. Either of those would have gotten you out without having to hearth.

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I am notorious for getting lost. I have no less than 3 hearthstone options at any given time in my bags + amulet + cloaks, etc. If all else fails the Last Relic of Argus to the rescue!

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Thank you Ruffle and Tindomerel.

Your posts are very helpful and considerate, I appreciate it.

Anyhow, even with all the above being said, (thank you Mirasol you’re very diplomatic), it just isn’t enough to change my overall impression.
Apparently I’m the only player in the game that has gotten frustrated to the point of anger over the increasing amount of persisting bugs and glitches I’ve encountered that has affected my gameplay. (No, the terrain issue isn’t a bug). And for this very reason I chose to only go as far as the Legion xpac, which as you say:

Customers like myself are categorized as a low priority, because clearly, my concerns aren’t considered important.
So, that being said, this topic can just die on down the list.

You all have yourselves a fine day and enjoy the game.

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Heh, same here. I many hours as we spent running around that area, I still get turned around.

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This is a fine suggestion. I could even see an expansion for this, possibly allowing you to choose from 2 or 3 places on different continents. But this would probably also need to be on cooldown to prevent people from using it like an extra hearthstone. It’s really for people who are stuck with no options. Having a hearthstone available, even in an area where you should be able to find an exit, is an option.

Regardless, you can always suggest more specific wording in the General Forum. Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad idea.

All those “minor” things can’t just be fixed with the snap of someone’s fingers. They need to be able to reproduced, confirmed, researched, tracked down in the code, then fixed. All while making sure that minor fix doesn’t cause something else to break.

And above all, all companies are wary of cost vs. benefit. The benefit of fixing a minor bug vs. the cost of manpower to do all the things listed above. I totally understand the frustration, but it’s not as simple as saying it’s a minor bug, so it’s easy to fix.

I don’t think you sound unreasonable. I think you are expecting that if you report an issue, that instantly means it needs to be fixed. Understandable, but that’s just not how things work. As this very thread shows, sometimes what a player initially think is an issue that needs to be fixed, is really just a player that needs to find the solution through gameplay.

Yes, this can be frustrating to redo. But following the Blizzard instructions, you can preserve those settings. You don’t just delete the three folders, but you rename them. The client will rebuild a fresh set of folders, and then you can re-add your addons one by one to see which is causing issues.

Hopefully, you won’t need to reset all of your settings. Maybe just one.

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