Terrible Customer Support

#1 - July 16, 2019, 7:03 p.m.

I’d like to share my most recent experience with customer support and warn anyone attempting to get help from them that you will likely be lied to, not believed, and banned if you attempt to find a good GM. It appears that much like everything in WoW, the customer support system is a game of RNG. If you roll a good GM you’ll have a good time, but if you roll a bad one (or two or three) you’re going to have an annoying experience.

My subscription recently ran out and I decided that until I could afford to pay for another month, I would enchant gear on a level 20 and play that. Something strange happened after my subscription went down though. I had all of the starter edition restrictions (level cap, no mailbox, no auction house, no whispering/trading/invites, ect.), so I went into a battleground. I noticed that I was gaining experience. I thought nothing of this though, as my experience bar constantly read 0/24k or however much the experience was. After I few battlegrounds I somehow ended up hitting level 21 on my starter edition account. I still had all of the starter edition account restrictions but could suddenly log into all of my characters again, no matter what level they were. After a while the bug somehow fixed itself and restricted me again. I was locked out of my level 21, with the loss of a few thousand gold and the character.

With this being a bug, I made an appeal and asked for a rollback, which from talking to multiple people I know that this is something that Game Masters are able to do. The first response told me that my subscription had been up when I leveled and that there was no bug and due to this, they could not roll my character back (Lie #1). I reopened the ticket and provided proof that it was a bug and that I was on starter edition restrictions when the bug happened. I later got a response from another GM stating that rollbacks were an impossible task as there were too many variables (Lie #2). This is not true, I have spoken to multiple people who had their characters rolled back.

I then made another appeal, stating the facts and asking once again for a rollback. I was told that there is sometimes an amount of time for the starter restrictions. Whether or not this is true I do not know, but I do know that I had starter edition restrictions when I logged back in for the first time. I was once again told that it was impossible to roll back characters (Lie #3). I reopened the ticket saying that I know that it is possible to roll characters back, but I said if I could at least get 1 day of subscription to remake the level 20 it would be much appreciated. My ticket was closed with a response telling me that repeat tickets would end in actions being taken upon my account up to and including my account being terminated.

I am extremely disappointed with this service. I have played the game for over a decade and I am payed back with nothing but lies and threatens of bans after being victim to a bug that I had no control over. Its a shame to have this happen just after defending and complimenting the work of customer support a few weeks prior. If this is the customer support I can expect in the future, then Blizzard can expect the loss of another customer.

With Game Masters now lying to their customers, treating them poorly, threatening to ban them, all on top of them not even being willing to chat and only ever responding through a ticket response (They used to ask if you had time to chat if you were online), I can only hope I never have to contact support again. A warning to anyone who might be thinking about contacting customer support, don’t waste your time. You will not be treated like a valued customer.

#18 - July 16, 2019, 8:23 p.m.

Ideally such a process would not be necessary Sunadice. Our Game Masters all want to ensure that every player enjoys their experiences in World of Warcraft. Believe me when I say that if you aren’t in it for that reason, you don’t really last long as a Game Master - heck, you need that attitude in Customer Support regardless of your industry. So, let me assure you that nothing you experienced was done in malice or with the objective of lying to or misleading you.

It’s an unfortunate reality though that we do have folks would aren’t always satisfied with the answer they received and will continue to push the subject even though they’ve received the final decision on a topic. A lot of the time, these situations involve bans/suspensions where folks don’t necessarily agree with a moderation decision. You can probably understand how this can end up taking a lot of time from the Game Masters who would be better utilized assisting other players rather than continuing to tell the same individual no dozens of times over. Sometimes we need to remind an individual that their request has been seen, reviewed, but ultimately denied and that further attempts to contact us would not change that decision.

That being said, given the unusual circumstances in your report I wanted to give it some attention. I reviewed the tickets associated with this request and reviewed the character in question.

It looks like your account time expired roughly 45 minutes before your character leveled. I would have expected you to be removed from the game immediately when the time ran out but perhaps if you were on your low level character at the time, it did not remove you.

Speculation:

It’s possible that because your character remained in-game, it failed to pick up the leveling restriction as expected. I’ve never heard of this happening though, so it’s not something I can say for certain.

So, yes deleveling is technically possible. I want to stress that it’s very exceptional and generally we only want to do it when there is a confirmed bug.

Bug Report vs. Confirmed Bug

There is a difference from something being reported as a bug, to a bug actually being opened/tracked/confirmed by the Quality Assurance team. We receive a lot of reports for things that don’t appear to be functioning as expected. It takes a little while for these reports to be investigated by the team and then determined a bug or not. Often, until they are confirmed, the Game Masters will not act. It can be tricky, especially if the Game Masters go around making changes only to have the Quality Assurance team later return and clarify that it wasn’t actually a bug but a misunderstanding.

I hope that clears up some of the confusion I often see around requests like this. "Clearly this is a bug" is something we see a lot, but we still need sign-off on making changes to characters.

We try to chat if time permits or if we need additional information for a situation, but often it’s unnecessary to do so. Often, we have a lot of folks who require our attention and so it is more efficient and overall better to address cases without initiating a chat. I know that folks would love to talk to us every time, and it was one of my favorite things during my time as a Game Master - but we also want to be considering all of the other players who are waiting for us to review their case.

While I disagree with this sentiment, I can understand how your most recent experience could have a negative impact on your perception.

I felt it was necessary to address several of your points, even though by now you have probably received a notification that your character has been deleveled.
Even though we were ultimately able to offer to do this for you, it does not diminish the process you had to go through and your feelings towards it. I hope I’ve been able to pull back the curtain a little bit and shed some light on why some decisions are made, and hopefully you will reconsider contacting us in the future if there is something you need assistance with.