I don’t know if you remember how a bug report and a GM’s answer/help used to work at blizzard, there were a few times when I had to ask for help from blizzard support, and when it EXISTED it was always fast and efficient, but here are two recent examples:
-the first story was back in shadowlands, i’w made a faction change on a character, and the vol’dun storyline bugged somehow, an NPC was was not there, maybe some phase bug, i wrote a ticket and the party began… you can respond 10 time on a ticket if your problem does not resolved then the ticket closing automaticly, i learn this then xDDD as I had to write 4 full tickets until finally I got a real GM who solved the problem in 5 minutes. At that time it took like 2-3 hours for a response on average, this whole story took 5 days before I got a solution, until then, in 40+ answers, a wowhead link about the same quest over and over again.
-recently, in wotlk classic, I wanted to use a realm transfer so that I could pvp a little, unfortunately this did not work out, as there was something in my mailbox in theory but it was empty, if I had to guess it was related to the Brew of the year achievement stuff,
I wrote to the support as many times before, the answer came surprisingly quickly in about 10 minutes, but unfortunately no solution, they said that they had reset something and I had to wait a few days, after a week I tried again and it still didn’t work. I reported back 2-3 times that i still have a problem, in the last one, unfortunately I wrote a keyword there: ``refund’', and it happened instantly.
I finally got my money back, but the problem was not resolved in over a week.
So this is how blizzard support works these days, if you need a refund or something similar, for which it is enough to recognize a “key word”, you will get an immediate solution, but if you have some actual BUG? Good luck then.
Slight problem, with that theory: you typed ‘refound’ twice so i would discount that as an accident, you probably put that on the ticket. Now if you had typed ‘refund’ then maybe, just maybe you could go with the keyword argument.
True, I just don’t understand why we still pay for it in this case? They don’t deserve it, but if we continue to pay and swallow everything they give, no matter how unqualified it is, nothing will ever change.
Although I saw videos where ppl tried to calculate the retail player’s number based on raider IO numbers, and if those numbers are even approximately realistic, then the situation is certainly not good.
On the other hand, half an hour of a BG or solo shuffle queue at retail is also telling something.
I do miss the actual human contact. The funny way they would write you when taking contact, and being kind enough to deliver a GM joke if you asked nicely.
I miss them appearing in the game. It was so ever funny when someone said that “DUH Gm’s are not in tradechat” to which some GM would send a snarky reply to that statement . I remember once we were repporting a hacker in WSG and then up popped a GM in the middle of the battlefield, just watching what was going on.
Sometimes you could even spot them out in the open world - when ever you saw one in their special outfit, you almost felt like Junior Gorg spotting a Fraggle
I once had an argument with one though. I did by mistake disenchant… I can’t even remember what it was anymore, but perhaps the purple cloak from guildrewards - it was something you were not supposed to be able to disenchant. And this GM firmly held on to that it was impossible, I must have seen wrong - to which I said yes I KNOW it’s impossible, but it happened - thats why I made the ticket. In the end the GM looked through my logs and sure enough saw that I disenchanted that item, and it was restored and the bug fixed.
The last time I saw an actual GM was at the very start of WoD, where we were a lot of people stuck in the air above the FP of the Garrison. That GM had to manually pluck us down one by one.
It’s a feature that I guess I can understand why it is… as it is. But I really DO miss the real human GM contact. It was so special to this game.
Ah yes, always liked the GM jokes, can still remember a couple of them. Also when they used to play tricks on players by polymorphing them into sheep or other such animals - good times, sadly gone now
In fairness, when this happened to me back in the day - towards the end of Wrath - a problem caused by a non-existent auction item not being in my mailbox, it took escalation and several weeks and repeated phone calls to fix. So the response to that particular problem was always a long one, not a recent decline in standards.
The problem was later fixed in retail builds, quite why they didn’t fix the problem in Classic retrospectively when it was released I dunno.
Few months ago I had a problem with payment methods, somehow I couldn’t pay my sub because “my card was incorrect”. So I wrote to support and I got copy-paste answer. I tried all that and replied as unsolved. So another supported answered with the same steps. And they did that 5 or 6 times until I just gave up and asked for help from community, which solved my problem after few minutes step by step.
Community is more involved and interested in the game then company for years now.
Maybe in the past the solution would also have been long, but nowadays starting the process is also long, by the time it gets to a real GM and you don’t just get automatic answers from the BOT GM.
Part of it, at least, because there are many people here on the forum who constantly play volunteer blizzard lawyer, it’s interesting that they haven’t appeared here yet, under other topics where someone dares to mention any problem, they immediately appear.
Let me preface this by saying we’ve all seen support change over the years I started in TBC and have had some amazing support from GMs back in Wrath and beyond. But it’s nothing like what we get today.
I’m a tad confused by your complaint. You are upset that you asked for a refund and got one?
I understand that there were issues and these were not being resolved and there was lots of back and forth but when you had enough and asked for a refund they gave it you quickly and that was a problem?
Or is the refund not really the issue, it’s the fact that they couldn’t solve the problem?
The problem is that it is an AI BOT that needs to be communicated with, and real problems that would require a real GM are very difficult to solve.
I don’t think anyone would be happy to write 4+ tickets FULL before they can get to a real GM by some miracle. Since i did it once as i mentioned in the first story.
I would even be able to accept if the problem is complicated for the BOT, it gave an answer that it would take x-y time for a real GM to deal with it, but that’s not what happens, it gives you useless advices or wowhead links, which can obviously help if you do something wrong, but not when it’s really a BUG.
Lets say, after you answer 2-3 times under a ticket that your problem has not been solved, the bot could send the previously mentioned answer that you have to wait, but a REAL GM will come and not bombard you with useless links/instructions.
If you read it properly you would have noted it wasn’t a typo as it was repeated.
The poster I quoted suggested that if you scream refund then it would pick a keyword up and sent to an actual GM. If only.
However the person I quoted not being native English speaker (I hope) probably used ‘refound’ in the ticket as they did in the forum post. The same as some people use costumer instead of customer.
. I remember once we were repporting a hacker in WSG and then up popped a GM in the middle of the battlefield, just watching what was going on.