Eh, no. The ticket system is not perfect in any way. Nobody thinks it is. It is a necessary evil I suppose that with all the players across all the games that there are categories required.
When someone is polite, the CS regulars are more than happy to help guide them through what we all know is a bit of a confusing system.
Nope, the last gm actually presented me the logs he has found and offered me to restore the item or wait until the wowteams fix.
The other 4 claimed they looked up the logs and all was good (meaning they didnât look at the logs at all).
Interesting, I wonder if you got pushed up to a specialist. It also makes me wonder what level of log access diff GMs have. I still suspect if the GM knew the Devs were working on it, that they were told where in the logs to look and were given the option to fix it manually or tell you the Devs were working on a larger fix. Again, communication there is abysmal at times.
TY for the update and insight.
Yes it was âSpecialist Game Master Ritorackâ. (thank you good sir:D )
This is partially correct. I know a GM personally and he made it clear that some GMs are just incompetent and lazy. Theyâll give standard replies just to fill a quota.
Thatâs why all those people who live in the CS forum and heart every comment a blue poster makes have stated several times how amazing the ticket system is and how much of an improvement it is over the original system.
How are automated/robot replies better than talking to an actual person? When we got to talk to an actual person, my issues were resolved every single time I requested help. Now, itâs very rare that I get a resolution.
I submitted a ticket once about having a semi-stuck issue and kept getting back replies saying âWeâve reviewed the ban and found it to be accurateâ when I was never banned. After my 4th ticket, I asked for a manager and one replied, apologized and took care of my issue.
i havent had to open many tickets, but the last 2 in game issues, i was met with canned responses and had to open the tickets atleasts twice each to be told they cant do anything.
first one, on an alt i basically clicked to enter a BG a second after i clicked a portal to ashran from my garrison, and i got stuck. i was in like a lag spike. i could run around, but not interact with anything, or cast spells or even log out. i opened a ticket and next day got a response telling me to check wowhead or icyveins for a fix. reopened the ticket and 2 days later i got a response saying they cant do anything, maybe the weekly server reset will fix it. it did, but seriously?
2nd one, it said i completed all the steps for the garrison mounts, the kill these guys while riding this mount, all of them said completed, but the meta one for the mount would not complete. i opened a ticket and first response? go check wowhead or icyveins⌠2nd response basically just said we cant complete achievements for you, go do it yourself. but according to this I DID??? 3rd response again said we cant complete achievements for you, check the achievements for what needs to be done. but it says i completed each one, but the meta wont complete!! so i gave up. why bother trying to talk to them if they arent even going to read tickets. in a later patch, one of the achievements changed from being completed to needing one more kill. i feel like had a GM actually looked at my account, he maybe would have seen there was a glitch and told me what needed to be done, but that is not what they did. i was not looking for it to be completed, or hints on how to complete it⌠it said i had completed it, it was bugged but the GMâs didnt bother to look.
since then, i dont believe Blizz GMâs are competent. maybe i just got bad luck in WoD, but i dunno. i dont have faith in this companyâs CS at all, i used to and thought they were the best, but now⌠as Garrosh said âTimes changeâ
My experience with GMs has run the gammut from ones that are just interested in closing the ticket and despite a clear situation that even the CS forum says on a GM can fix direct you to wowhead. To ones that go above and beyond and make sure everything is fixed properly. This is why the CS post ticket survey is important. Because without that⌠the ones just interested in making closed ticket numbers will always get away with it.
Also Iâve found the CS forum to many times be more helpful than opening a ticket. The means to open the proper ticket (usually half the battle) is arcane in many cases because the system doesnât do a good job leading you where you need to go. Whereas the MVPs (such as yourself) and the CS folks can often point you in a single post. That alone can save days of frustration.
<insert Captain America meme here>
If you use firefox, my suggestion is
and since you know about web design Iâd also suggest
I donât normally like suggesting NoScript because it can brick a website that makes heavy use of JavaScript but if you design websites Iâm sure it wonât be too much trouble for you to figure out 
I still want to get around to trying out
some day
In the past few years Iâve gotten the feeling that there are more or less tiers of how experienced the GMs are, and tickets most often seem to start out at the bottom of that tier. I donât presume to know anything of their inner workings, but I have also had numerous situations where needing help required me to resubmit a ticket 3-4 times until I got what felt like a real person who seriously looked into the problem.
Itâs more than a little offputting when multiple GMs insist that everything is fine, and attempt to close your ticket for you, only for the last person to be like, âOh, this is definitely not fine. Let me fix that in two seconds.â
All about that money money! Used to value customers more back then. Many many companies this way now. It starts with somebody who cares and eventually falls into the laps of people who care less.
I think âsomeâ do care but rather than paying a bunch of people salaries to help gamers, itâs much better for the bottom line and shareholderâs pockets to pay minimum wage employees to click the auto-reply button all day.
The cable company is infinitely more helpful and will actually escalate you to higher up people who can solve your issues when itâs serious in my experience (Iâve called various cable companies several dozen times in the past 6 or so years and although they go through a script at first you can get real help with a little persistence and about 30 minutes of time). If Blizz GMs were as helpful as the cable company and if I could call them and get a live person the experience would be much, much better.
Theyâve cut support costs to the bone. Theyâve cut QA costs pretty deeply too. Activision-Blizzard doesnât care about maintaining this game anymore so much as milking the people still playing it and it is outrageous that they still charge a sub. At least with a sub on FFXIV you get real support for your money.
It isnât even just outsourcing to people with no power (unlike the previous support specialists who had actual tools to access the game and that was true of the vast majority of GMs not a select escalation dept). They plain donât care and donât want to talk to you and so have these diversion strategies to tire you out and save money. In a game where something could go drastically wrong and ruin or make unplayable a character or thing youâve potentially worked on for thousands of hours after years or a decade and a half of loyalty that is unacceptable. Heard of people lately who have had their accounts actioned because they wouldnât go away after refusing to accept that the GMs were not going to solve their issue (and it wasnât a case of them needing the devs to do something and conveying that but simply a âwonât fixâ case).
That only happens if they are abusive to the GMs at which point Blizzard essentially fires the customer. There have been several cases of people spamming the ticket system daily for the same issue over and over and over and over. Often a bug that the GMs canât personally fix or a game design decision the GMs have nothing to do with. Same goes for bans - if it has been reviewed multiple times and the final answer is no, then no is no.
They will warn people to please stop putting in tickets for that specific issue and that if they keep doing it, it will be considered GM harassment. Not to mention most who get to that point are also using profanity, threats, etc.
I get that people are passionate, but beating up on the GMs and asking a million and one times wonât change the answer.
So yeah, Blizz can and will action accounts if someone keeps abusing the GMs after getting an answer. It takes quite a bit to get to that point, but some people just canât take ânoâ for an answer.
This thread is a short example of someone who got suspended or banned, appealed, then got really nasty over and over with GMs. This is what was left after the mods cleaned up the inappropriate language, additional spam threads, threats, etc.
I highly suspect Blizzard is outsourcing the GM duties to other countries. Unable to speak or read english they use google translate and then copy paste an answer.
Itâs horrible! Remember when you could call? Now they direct you to wowhead which really upsets me because I go there first. I only contact support when I am truly desperate so donât tell me to go where I have already been!
No, those are Blizz staff. What they have started doing is cutting the night shift hours then having the EU folks cover the US when it is night here.
They ARE Blizz staff, but you are right they are located in other Regions where Blizz offers support. I assume players there are equally confused if they get a ticket answer from the US side that does not do a great job with their native language.
That was really nice. I remember it well. I also remember having to spam redial to get into a 2 hour queue to talk to someone 
It also ate up cell phone minutes back when we paid for them - and cell phones tended to DC when just sitting on hold. It was a bad experience.
Part of that was people calling for anything and everything - live chat was supposed to be billing, account access, and tech support. But people called to hear GM jokes, complain about game design decisions, ask for game hints, etc. It meant those phone lines were constantly tied up.
Even so, they only supported WoW back then so it was sort of ok, if you did not mind the long phone wait.
Then all the other Blizzard games released and Support has to cover everything which means a LOT more support requests.
That is why they triaged it. They try to get tickets into buckets to get them to the right people. They have also automated several functions like character un-delete, mail restoration, item restore, un-stuck - so that players can try the automated system first and get an instant response, instead of waiting on a ticket.
I find it impersonal and donât like it myself. BUT I do get why they do it. I just hope they LISTEN and continue to improve the system.
Pandemic taking away Live Chat and Phone Callback sucked a lot. I think that is back in a limited capacity at least.
Makes me wonder if they just pushed GMs to stop interacting with the community in favor of a ticket quota.
HmmâŚthat is not exactly how it works, but yeah volume over quality has always been a thing.
Nevalistis, former CS, Forum Support Agent (CS forum) - laid off when they cut 600 from CS in 2012. Re-hired as Assistant CM for the Diablo franchise.
She shared her thoughts recently and there are comments about the CS ticket environment. Yeah, quantity over quality. Thread posted with her permission and the link in it is to her blog statement.