Umm… no. I am not familiar with that incident, but just no.
- Blizzard policies are company wide. They don’t care what your individual views are, you follow the policies set forth.
- Most of the CS folks are still in Austin, TX. A not so conservative place.
- Any GM incident had nothing to do with the change regarding GMs being in game. They did NOT automate GMs.
The old primitive tools required them to enter games to do nearly anything. As the GM tools were re-designed and improved they could do almost all their work from the tool interface, and not enter a game directly. This meant a MUCH faster means to help more players.
They still answer with real people - although sometimes with templates depending on the topic.
What is sort of automated I guess is the self help tools. We now have:
- unstuck tool instead of waiting on a GM
- item restore tool instead of waiting on a GM
- various other things I am not thinking of …
They are there to make common requests easier for players to handle themselves by giving them access to the GM tool to do it.
Blizzard has NEVER outsourced CS/GM support. They have two support locations in the US. Austin, TX, and Irvine, CA. Both on the Blizzard campus.
Recent CS forum post relevant to outsourcing. Friend trying to remove Authenticator and recover account - #4 by Vrakthris
We don’t have much control over what the response times are when they suddenly jump from within 24 hours to well over that, Aventis. We do not outsource our staff so any increase in contact takes time to address. If such contact volume isn’t temporary, it takes time to hire and train additional staff.