There’s a hierarchy for handling problems within most IT organizations.
At Blizzard, the devs tell the GM,s what issues they can address and how to resolve them. GM’s produce metrics regarding what they have done which, along with QA, let the devs know what the current problem areas are.
In the past GM’s had more latitude but, Fixing a given issue quite often caused additional problems for the end user.
So GM’s evolved to address an issue only after the Devs had sanctioned that a given solution wouldn’t break other things (at least theoretically). Often much more time needs to be put in for some issues to verify that the fix hasn’t broken something else that the actual time need to create the fix.
I don’t know of any significant IT organization that lets just anyone address problems that without managing the workflow involved and the people doing that work while collecting the metrics needed to just make their product better.
The Support Forum Agents (blue posters) in this forum, along with the forum regulars, serve as sort of a help/information desk to assist players by directing them to the ticket categories most appropriate for their issue and to relay what the current status of that issue’s resolution may be.
Ultimately, having GM’s here would be used by folks to jump to the head of the line in front of others who reported their issue first.
Recently, for the first time in my memory, the SFA’s here were allowed to clear out mailboxes that were preventing transfers due to the exceptionally high volume of tickets.
Mailbox clean-out was very low hanging fruit. Didn’t take much time at all compared to typical issues that would go to a GM. Even then, the SFA’s worked their butts off for 2-3 weeks in addition to performing their regular duties.
