I feel this is true after seeing Omar during the stress test.
We’re probably standing right next to them. No need for a title or robes.
My reason for this comes from my first day playing and someone coming up to me offering a lot of help. Being patient with me figuring out how to whisper and then said something like welcome to the game, have a great adventure
Just seems so odd. Maybe it was just a random player noticing my achievements. Maybe not.
Had a live chat during the bugged Alliance Pandaria intro. Must have been high on the priority list. My tickets now go automated/closed or days before response.
Yup. I’ve met some overtly bitter folk who hate on everybody else since they have to work 70 hours a week just to survive. "I hate everyone who works less then 70 hours a week! " Says no one, ever, except people stuck in crap dead end jobs with no future.
I think its a little bit of both, as in-game GMs were specifically mentioned.
Yeah but min wage is 15.50 in Cali. Where its pretty easy to find something getting more. And we already love to bash Blizzard for lowpaying its employees.
It is to a degree. Because in order to have people take the job that we would find acceptable…they’d have to pay well over the min wage. This would cause a domino effect in everyone probably getting a raise. Which I am not against. But I do think its a factor.
I just don’t think that’s the issue… but even if it was, I’m certainly of the opinion it would be worth it, especially in this day and age where Blizzard’s reputation is under harsh (and well-deserved) criticism. The least they could do is improve their customer support to make people happier and make some real attempt to improve the game and its community.
Sorry, not to sound overly cynical either, but everything Blizzard does comes off as fake and non-committal, so when there are core issues like a lack of GMs in game still ongoing in such a dramatic way it’s very difficult for me to see any positive outcomes from Blizzard’s choices.
As for the minimum wage being 15.50 in California, they have the option to move their customer support center(s) elsewhere, and even in California I am sure they could hire enough GM staff there as needed. Maybe I’m wrong–I’ve never lived in California so I don’t know for certain how things work there, but I am just a bit skeptical the issue is remotely as simple as this.
Also low pay means high turnover. I’m sure there’s a million tickets asking for unrealistic requests. That would make the job monotonous.
Also, the difficult to navigate customer service page is indicative of people asking for hints, quest stuff that is well documented in WoWhead or perhaps is a known issue that doesn’t have an existing solution.
Their job description is easier to do now that they don’t need to be logged into the game and message you in-game to contact you
One can like it or not but the reason they were “removed” is because they simply just “moved” to working on tickets online, as they no longer needed to apply the stuff in-game directly to your character
It wasn’t “hidden” content, it was literally just where GMs logged in and had their characters waiting to help address people
Like sure for us it was this “hidden” and “secret” thing but in reality … it was literally just a house with some art assets stuck onto it because they needed a place to keep GM characters so they could do their work without getting harassed and be, easily, seen teleporting all over the place
Two things:
The rise of bots was HEAVILY combatted by the fact that GMs were now able to work with data rather than be forced to actually go to the place to do their job, so this is you making stuff up to fit your narrative
You can claim “automation” all you want, everything again and again has indicated that the system is not automated - and yes, I know of the cases that ya’ll love to spout as “proof” that it is
I don’t remember a time in the history of the game where a ticket would get you a response in minutes, whether it was a live GM or otherwise. Ticket times in Vanilla were ATROCIOUS, and people having to interact with GMs in chat was one of the reasons why.
I want to emphasize as well that if the question is “Why aren’t GMs in game” basically meaning to “why aren’t GM’s literally appearing as characters in the world” then the question is very simple to answer: because they don’t need to.
While playful and fun at times (and I’d probably prefer to see it from time to time) the simple fact of the matters is that Blizzard doesn’t need people to do this, and it’s even possible that it might make people uncomfortable if done unexpectedly.
Basically, there’s not much real benefit and Blizzard rarely had GMs doing this even in their “good” years. So if it’s been entirely eliminated that’s fine. It doesn’t really need to be a thing.
My issue personally is that there are not enough GMs active. We likely need hundreds more, though more than that the core issues that cause players to continue to report need to be solved at the source. Bugs need to be fixed. If hundreds/thousands/etc of players are reporting a bug, that might be a sign it needs immediate attention. If people are reporting players for harassment because of the social contract, perhaps it should start being enforced, or at the very worst, failing that the social contract should simply be removed if Blizzard genuinely doesn’t intend to use it, as it’s just going to clutter reports with tickets that will get intentionally ignored.
To be fair it was not all that common, but it did happen. Getting a response within a couple hours was more likely and more normal. I believe the period of time where I got responses in minutes (which surprised me even then) was during TBC or WotLK. A long, long time ago.
Some issues do not require direct GM interaction though, for sure. And in cases like that, that’s fine. But some issues literally require it, and having tickets get reopened/repeated over and over is simply inefficient–it’s better to solve it once and move on.
Reponding to GMs in chat though has been a thing since at least Legion/Battle for Azeroth (they all blend together, so give or take a couple years) and GM response times have actually gotten far worse since then so I don’t think it’s the core issue, or at the very least it’s not the core issue currently.
Why was this flagged im aware gharmuck trolls 90% of the time but this seems genuine.
Anywho the answer to the question is that they were removed because alot of gms liked their position too much and would constantly show off in front of players to a ridiculous degree causing them to be disruptive towards the game so they were removed because alot of gms just didnt have the self control needed for the job.
To be honest, I don’t think any company (outside of EA) would realistically handle the problems Blizzard has been dealing with worse than Activision had. Not even Microsoft. To say Microsoft would be an improvement is only speaking relatively though and we’ll likely have all sorts of brand new issues to deal with. I’m not excited for the acquisition, and I’m barely playing this game as it is.
I can’t really comment on why Microsoft is buying Activision/Blizzard though and honestly I really don’t care at this point. I highly doubt Microsoft plans on squandering Blizzard’s franchises though, there’s no reason/value in buying them if they don’t plan on getting value from it. So while I’m certainly cynical about this game and its future, I’m not quite that cynical.
We need a petition to remove flagging. Absolutely nothing is wrong with this thread yet some snowflakes decided is worth the flag. Please blizzard let us see who flagged
It’s not really worth worrying about. People may be trolling, people may be assuming this person is a troll (I am not remotely active enough in this forum to know who is noteworthy of being a good or bad person, nor do I really care outside of the context of the specific discussion since I can’t ignore people I don’t want to see anyways), this kind of thing is almost inevitable and it just doesn’t really matter that much.
I agree though, and there really was no reason for GMs to appear in game and most of the time it was silly/fun–unnecessary at best, and disruptive at worst, sadly. Also there were some really questionable situations that may have even been directly caused because of this. Like when someone got mailed that item that one shot raid bosses so long ago, and I remember hearing stories of GMs doing other bad things. I have no idea how much of it is true, but the fact it’s common enough to have heard stories about it definitely leads me to agree that’s a big part of why GMs are more limited now.
And again I am fine with this. I just wish there were enough of them to actually get through the tickets without waiting days/weeks for a response, though.
There are so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. There are so many ways this would be abused in cases where the flags were warranted. This is why I think the upvote/downvote thing of the old forums worked better–if a post was hidden you would be able to counteract it. If more people agree than disagree with it, then it would fix itself, in theory. Though with this community that’s not always a good thing, I guess…
I do however think that people who abuse reporting/flagging frivolously should have the privilege of doing so taken away, for what little that’s worth.
i have to ask what people are even ticketing blizz support for? i’ve been a customer of theirs for iunno…since 2000? and i haven’t had an issue yet that requires cs intervention. Pretty much everything you could ticket them for has an article or a self service for it at this point.
If the ‘data’ can not detect an army of gibberish-named gnomes buzzing around no-flight zones that are visible to the naked eye 24/7, then their algorithms are missing an inherently human attribute.
Ive created multiple tickets, threads, and in-game reports about exploitative behavior is Classic Era realms for the couple years that I’ve played it. The cheating is still ongoing.
Genuine game breaking bugs at times, maybe severe harassment. I know I’ve had to contact Blizzard plenty of times from extreme cases of harassment from people who are purposely avoiding ignore functionality or even bringing in friends.
I even had a situation once where a dungeon finder party was using a rogue to teleport people into the dungeon and get killed instantly (literal griefing/harassment) for the sake of it, and that kind of thing should be reported.
That said, you would be correct in assuming that the vast majority of tickets are frivolous or can’t really be addressed/fixed because they are asking for ingame hints or trying to get something back that would be against the rules to fix.
In short, I can only guess at all the things people report, but in my own case it’s usually either ongoing harassment (where /ignore didn’t fix the problem) or a game breaking problem. Sadly both of those kinds of issues happen a lot more than they should in World of Warcraft.
PS: I should add too that I can only fathom the amount of tickets the new “hardcore” classic realms have introduced for them… I think you can use your imagination to figure out how bad that must be.
