Unbelievably Ugly Guild Ad

Support Customer Support
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Because the name-and-shame thing is forbidden I can’t give specifics as to who but there’s a guild advertising in the cluster that Blood Hoof is in that is equating Down’s Syndrome with degeneracy.

I spoke with the guy spamming the ad and he’s unrepentant about pulling it.

I reported him but the reporting window doesn’t allow for any detail at all and since there’s no actual profanity there and he’s circumlocuting around the actual words “Down’s Syndrome” I doubt that’ll have any effect.

Can the powers that be search the trade chat logs for “chromosome” and “degenerates” in the same message? (30-odd years in IT - that’s how I’d approach it if it were handed to me as an assignment).

This sort of demonization of Down’s Syndrome victims needs to stop and it needs to stop now.

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Your only option is to right click and report the advertisement. Posting on the forums won’t lead to a review or action

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So “Customer Support” means nothing? No actual responses to customer problems? Typical…

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All naming violation reports get reviewed sooner or later. The more reports, the further up the name moves in the review queue.

They will likely look at both the character name and the guild name but if you want to be sure, report the relevant details via email to hacks@blizzard.com.

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Perfect. I’ll do just that. I Screenshotted the ad just in case. :slight_smile:

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This forum is primarily for players to assist other players. So, Mairek and Nok were just letting you know that right-clicking and reporting the message in-game were the correct steps to take to ensure this gets seen by the Game Master team.

I do want to call out that this is not really the purpose of this email inbox. The Hacks team investigates reports of cheating, not inappropriate language use. So this would not be something to send to them.

If you encountered a player in a exploitable location in-game, and wanted to provide a screenshot in addition to the right-click report for cheating - that would be something more appropriate for that inbox.

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So “Customer Support” means, not Customer Support, but is a low-rent clone for the community support which already exists in another forum?

Again, for Blizzard, typical…

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Just to elaborate - if you right-click and report, you don’t need anything else. You don’t need to submit a nuanced essay or screenshots or anything of the like. When you right-click and report, it collects the time-stamp data and everything relevant that Blizzard needs. They will not use anything but their own data when it comes to these things. Just right-click them, and be wary of interacting with the offending person. They can report you for harassment if they so chose, depending on the language and however heated the exchange went.

So yes. Please continue to right-click and report anything like that, and the GMs will take a look at it and decide how it should or shouldn’t be handled.

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Seems to me that you got support from multiple people in this thread. You were hoping that someone would look into the inappropriate chat and that’s done by right-click reporting the chat (which you said you’ve done). They do not, nor have they ever taken these sorts of reports via the forums.

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Customer Support is not Customer Service. Berating our SFAs for something like this is rather pointless and rude besides.

Our Blues here exist to provide advice, insight and to moderate the lot of us. Us as your fellow players, we’re always glad to help out where and when we can, either directly helping to solve an issue or point a player in the right direction if it’s something that only a GM or Dev can handle.

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To add to Leilleath’s comment above, these reports are evaluated by human beings, not a computer. If their ad was as obvious as you claim, Blizzard staff will not be fooled by attempts to get around the actual words. If they determine it to be inappropriate, they will take action.

That doesn’t mean this guild will stop, so continue to report if you believe the content to be against the rules. If that is the case, the guild will continue to climb up a ladder to harsher and harsher punishments.

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Just to add onto the other two - mainly because it needs to be pointed out - the CS forum isn’t a means of reporting stuff nor it’s use to send in the troops on someone/some folks. The blues here, as pointed out, watch this forum. They can’t pass anything along, nor can they go in game to action someone or go to another forum and action folks.

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This is a bit of a side tangent - but…I see this said a lot, and wanted to touch on it.

It’s less that we can’t and more about Scope. Scope is the defined responsibilities of a role. Those of us on the forum team also oversee our Support twitter accounts, we monitor Reddit and keep an eye on Wowhead for Customer Service related discussions. Our purpose is not to act as Game Masters in those spaces but to provide information/guidance.

Anyone who has worked in project management will understand. “Scope creep” is real and you have to be really careful about it! Otherwise, your current workload spirals out into something unwieldy.

Players report a LOT of things, and if the forums were known as an avenue where that could be done then it would quickly become all that we see here.

As an example of this:
A few years ago, we did not have a way for players to remove Starter WOW accounts from their Blizzard account. It required players to submit a ticket and wait for a Game Master to do that for them.
At the time, a member here on the forums answered a post from someone asking for that service. It was easy enough for that forum agent to do - so they did.
That thread became very popular! And that forum agent spent a lot of time doing that one thing because they had already established that they would. While not initially “in scope” it became part of the role because of that decision.

The developers worked with our support website team, and now players can do that themselves. But that’s an example of how scope creep can sneak up on you.

The WOW team spent time and resources on building the in-game reporting system and they continue committing time to improving it. So, we want to make sure players feel confident in using it. It allows us to track language, trends, and repeat offenses for individuals/accounts. It’s doing a lot of work on the back end after you right-click.

I have the same tools at my disposal that a Game Master does. I started as a Game Master almost 13 yrs ago, and I’m trained up on all the work. :slight_smile:

But my job here on the forums is different. I’m here to provide guidance, information, and to help keep conversations moving in a helpful direction. It’s important to keep that line clear.

Thank you for coming to my KalvTalk :laughing: Sorry for the tangent!

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I like this clarity alot of people take you guys for granted and assume u can do everything so even us regulars could use this knowledge.

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Nothing against you or the other blues, I know you’re not implying it, but I just hope folks don’t troll through the blue post saying something like this to use say the blues can and should do X because another said y in another post.

Again, not trying to start anything with you or the other blues, just wish to point this out and hope I’m making myself clear on the matter.

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Totally understand, and I was hesitant to elaborate because I know “can’t” is often used as shorthand for “out of the scope of support offered by this role”. The concept of scope is not always super intuitive.

That said, we are always looking for opportunities to serve more efficiently. Whether that means expanding scope or introducing game services/features to make that process better. (ex: Starter Account removal, Item Restoration, Character Undelete, Mail Return)

So if someone does dig through Blue posts and sees this - we can accept feedback for what they think should be added to our scope :slight_smile: It doesn’t mean we’ll always be able to do what they’re suggesting, but the feedback is helpful regardless.

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And the feedback would belong in General Discussion?

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It’ll depend on the aim of the feedback.

Suggesting game system changes?

  • In-game form, or related forums (Think rogues should get a new ability? Post in the rogue forum)

Suggesting Customer Support services?

  • In-game form, or related forums (Think CS should be able to reset raid bosses? Post in the Raid forum)

Providing feedback on how we respond to topics here in the CS Forum?

  • As long as the feedback is constructive, I don’t mind it being posted here. However, that can be a little intimidating for some so there are other avenues:

Edit: I’ll add, feedback can be positive or critical. If you like what we’re doing, feel free to share. If you have thoughts on things we could do better - we like to hear that as well.

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I want to touch on this too.

I work in an IT department. We have a lot of duties. These duties include helping people experiencing problems.

We have had major issues with people contacting us directly outside of the appropriate methods. It’s just an easy question, they say. It’ll take a moment. There are major problems with this:

  1. It’s almost never a 1 minute question. 1 minute turns into 15 minutes. People hear that I’m happy to help them and suddenly I have five people bothering me for 5x1 minute issues and it turns into 75 minutes of my time. PLUS even if it is a 1 minute question, this interrupts what I was already thinking about and now I have to get back into the zone.
  2. Someone contacts me outside the proper channels AND requests help through other channels. I already completed the work but now some other person is going to spend half an hour to research the topic, contact the appropriate parties, and find out they wasted all their time.
  3. Because I don’t actually have a paper trail, now management thinks I’m slacking off for 75 minutes of my day. Instead of having (for example) ten people slacking off for a combined 750 minutes a day, we can just fire one person and the rest can spend a little more time working.
  4. I get asked “out of scope” questions all the time. Yes, I can go on Google, spend ten minutes looking up the solution, and help you. Or, you can contact the people who are expert resources and whom will do a better job because they see the same questions day-in and day-out.
  5. While I’m working on this out-of-scope issue, I’m not actually doing my real job. This means people who’re depending on me need to wait longer. Theoretically I’m supposed to be fixing issues my helpdesk can’t. If I’m doing basic helpdesk work, does that mean the helpdesk is going to come help me do tier 2 work? No, it does not.
  6. Because there’s no paper trail, there’s no trends to report. This is a major problem because then management doesn’t realise that we have a dozen people with issue X.
  7. When you try to queue-jump, you’re basically saying your issue is more important than everyone else’s issues.

Specific to this forum, if it turns into another queue (which won’t work - see #2), it stops being a resource people can come to to ask questions. Even in the best case scenario, that’s extra time the support agent is going to need to waste just searching all of someone’s accounts for any recent posts to see whether they’d posted regarding their issue, then integrating all that information.

We’d need a whole new forum just to handle the communication which is in here right now.

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I think I derailed the topic, so just to nudge us back on track :bullettrain_front:

Thank you, Ehiztari, for using the right-click reporting system :slight_smile: And thank you to those of you that hang out on the customer support forum and help lend confidence to those methods.

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