Customer "Support" Feedback

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1

I am unsure if this is the place to post feedback. Non the less, here we go!

This specific issue is related to MoP Remix.
I have tried with no luck to get a tiny bit of clarification on the removal of legitimate gained stats on cloak that was removed, due to blizzard changing their stance on “Froggers”.

Quick TLDR of the scenario.
Once i had hit 70 and farmed for a bit, i learned that you can hand in Lesser Charms of Good Fortune for a Cache of Infinite Treasure, which always contain an Epic Thread for your cloak. So i figured, just like retail and the last 12ish years of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune, that Frogs on Timeless isle was the best place for them.
I went there, farmed for about 5 hours, obtained about 14400 Lesser Charms of Good Fortune, or 1440 Epic Threads & about 144k Bronze.

After handing in these quests, i went to bed. Next day the farm was nerfed, no biggie. I went on my day doing daily things, all raids, hc dungeon spamming ect.
Next few days went the same way, they buffed certain things, such as LFR, 3 Daily quests giving spools and just generally more sources for Threads & Bronze.
About 3 days worth of /played and a cloak sitting nicely on 16k Strength and about 138k Stamina, they posted a patch that removed the stats aquired from the frogs.

At first, i was puzzled about this, learning the Lesser Charms of Good Fortune was an oversight on their drop table. Okay fair. The farm has only been in the game for ~12 years.
Fair, after some quick math, the threads would math out to roughly 17280 Stamina & 1235 of each other stat.
However, my cloak was put to 2.5k of all stats and 25k Stamina, a loss of about 13.5k Stats & 113k Stamina. Not even close to the actual “frog” gain.

I did not lose any of the 144k Bronze however. Although, id much rather have the threads, as i do not really have any use for the bronze. I dont really care for all the xmog.

Now, to the CS feedback.
What happened? Why is every reply an automated copy paste response? It is actually completly useless and i do not understand why it even exists.

Reference for a potential Blizzard Employee reading this (tall order i guess)
EU94714881
EU94766953
EU94779622

I had multiple automated reponses in each, either directing me to Wowhead for “guides”, where this specific farm was advertised, but mostly just refering to a US forum thread with 100s of replies of people either complaining about froggers or about blizzard. Great.

At no point was my question answered, it was always just an automated copy paste of bloat. Except for one response that includes the following:
“if there’s something else we can do for you, maybe just a question, don’t hesitate to contact us anytime, day or night :)”

Okay, i get some questions down, these are the following questions.

#1. Why are you promoting Wowhead as a source for guides, where if you blindly follow their guides, it will lead to excessive punishment on your behalf?

#2. Are we to expect punishments such as the one you did for MoP Remix for retail. Let me elaborate. If i say, farm deers in Retail in Burgerzone for a few hours, then continue on my way for a few days doing other activities. After some days, you then decide those deers should not drop what they did, therefor youll now roll back my character from this point, until before the farm i did days maybe even a week ago, for just a few hours?

#3. By compensation, i did not mean in terms of MoP Remix stuff, but gametime for what you deem “legitimate” gameplay post farm of the now illigal 12 year old farming location.

#4. What is with all the automated responses? Its very hard and super frustrating getting an actual answer, rather than just a generic copy paste with instantly closed ticket on repeat.

I kid you not, i get the same automated copy paste i had gotten earlier, plus the following:

In addition to your response of keep creating tickets regarding the same issue, please let me give you some information about it.

Submitting multiple tickets, or spamming, on an issue which has previously been addressed by customer support is unproductive. Such behavior may include submitting tickets about repeated appeals, and making demands for resolutions which are out of our scope of support.
https://support.blizzard.com/article/000032221

Violating any area of the Terms of Use, including the areas detailed above, may result in suspension or closure of the responsible Battle.net account.

Please consider this as a friendly warning.

Thanks for the “friendly warning” Mr. “GM Gengaxil”

Ticket was then instantly closed. What in the world! This is crazy to me. You never once addressed the issue / questions i originally sent.
You are telling me not to make more tickets about the issue, even though you never read any of the responses from me.
On top of that, you shove a survey my way. Icing on the cake.

It feels like if you example write “frog” in a ticket, no matter the issue, youll currently get the same copy paste ive had, do it once and no matter what happens after, you just get the same bloat on repeat.

2

I really fail to see your side on this one.

The fact that people were advising others - on external websites - to exploit the hyperspawn and obvious oversight in coins being dropped from the frogs does not absolve you of this part of the in-game code of conduct:

"Cheating

(…) exploiting bugs, or engaging in any activity that grants an unfair advantage is considered cheating."

Now see where it doesn’t say that the punishment for exploiting a hyperspawn is only taking the ill-gotten power gains, sometimes the punishment has to be more severe to actually register.

I actually disagree with them not taking the bronze too because you can use that to mitigate the cloak loss by upgrading gear. It should be just like in life: when you steal something, the punishment isn’t just taking away what you stole. You face a penalty. Instead of putting you on time-out for exploiting, which would deprive you of a big chunk MOP Remix, they give you a literal slap on the wrist by just reducing your cloak stats.

If you feel that the way you were responded to was inappropriate, that’s exactly why they gave you the opportunity to leave feedback. If your actual grievance is that the responses were too generic, that’s valid feedback to leave in that regard.

To address some of your questions as I see them:

  1. “Why are you promoting Wowhead…” - because by and large, Wowhead is a great source of crowd-sourced information. As with every such website, you should still vet the information against your own personal moral codex.

  2. “Are we to expect punishments … for retail” - this has happened before and will undoubtedly happen again in the future. Raiding guilds exploiting the Lich King platform by throwing grenades to make it not despawn have been punished. PVP players exploiting have been deprived of ranking and punished accordingly. People mass mining fel slate hyperspawns in legion were punished. It all comes back to the “gaining unfair advantage” clause from the code of conduct.

  3. “Compensation” - I don’t think you’re entitled to any form of compensation for being penalized for violating the code of conduct.

  4. “Automated responses” - This I agree with. The customer support is lackluster in communicating that you have actually transgressed against their rules with way too flowery language. They should actually respond to your grievances by telling you that what you did was against the code of conduct, which is something you seem to not regard when talking about this situation. However the customer support has been trimmed down to almost nothing, leaving template answers the only viable method to get the queue under control.

Edit to add: I would also like to explain a bit why your framing of the hyperspawn abuse is - in my eyes - very misleading the way you state it.

First of all, there was no “changing the stance” on frog farming. The exploit was hotfixed very quickly and there was no statement to the effect of “well Frogging was fun while it lasted” coming from Blizzard. This would have sent a very wrong message causing “Exploit FOMO”, so the stance has always been the one from the code of conduct.

Secondly, you try to frame the frog hyperspawn as being equivalent to “the last 12ish years of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune”. That’s actually very disingenious, and let me explain why I think that:

Even when MOP was current retail content, the hyperspawn would have gotten you coins that could only be used for a second chance on getting a drop once per boss per week. The usefulness when the content was relevant was thus limited by the intrinsic game mechanic and implicitly also limited the amount you would want to farm or would be sensible to farm.

The Timeless Isle was the coda of retail MOP, it came out towards the very end of the expansion lifecycle instead of being available right from the start as in Remix. Even if you consider the power level of players at that point, there was no ramping up of power through the threads and chests gained for killing frogs back then.

After MOP fell out of current content, which was the vast majority of the “12 years” you describe, the only use for lesser charms were these re-rolls in a transmog capacity, so not an advantage over other people either.

With the MOP Remix version, the hyperspawn was connected immediately to a vast and fast power gain, which is a very different beast from drop re-rolls and transmogs, so I don’t think the framing of them being even remotely similar is fair.

2 Likes
3

So you expect to keep the stats on an item that’s been nerfed?

All that text for that?

4

Hi Worldguard,

I understand your concerns regarding this issue, however Customer Support does not have the specific answers that you are looking for. Unfortunately, opening additional tickets will not yield different results, and we may need to take action to prevent abuse of the system in some rare cases.

For more detailed information, please refer to this support article:

To clarify, our role is to assist players within the guidelines set by our developers. They have addressed this particular topic in a post, and I would encourage you to read if you haven’t already:

Thank you for your comprehension.

1 Like