Tech Support sleeps while WoW is down.

#0 - March 26, 2008, 6:57 p.m.

I suggest everyone take a look at the following thread.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5540036533&sid=1&pageNo=1

On the day a new patch goes live, why is it that there are no technicians at work? Or what about the fact that they could be called in and put to work, because the worlds are not running? Why with all the money that Blizzard makes are there not techs on duty 24 hours a day 7 days a week?

I work in the IT field, and if one of my customers has a problem, I make myself available 24 hours a day to server their needs. I don't do this because I want lots of money, I do this to keep customers happy, which means I get to keep them as customers.

Blizzard makes over $100,000,000 a month. Yea, that's right, that means over $1 Billion a year. A #@$%ing Billion Bliz. Spend some of that money to pay for technicians to keep your customers happy. You sure as hell aren't trying to keep us as customers, otherwise you'd have techs working 24 hours a day.

I make this thread as instead of moving this thread to this forum the Blizz rep said this belonged in, it instead gets locked.

Blizzard takes your money, but isn't spending it to maintain what you are paying for. As customers, we need to come together and demand and ensure they provide us with what we pay for, and that is the ability to play this game.

Drysc

#14 - March 26, 2008, 9:41 p.m.

The issues you're referring to were realm and in-game related issues, which does not involve our Technical Support department. If your sound isn't working, or the game is crashing, that would be Technical Support. If a realm goes down, your character is stuck in a battleground, etc. That would be in-game support, or more than likely our server admins/IT departments.

The issue was indeed being addressed last night by our 24/7 in-house IT departments, and there was communication both from the Customer Service reps as you saw, as well as through the Breaking News window.

It's possible that there needs to be better wording for the Technical Support department to indicate that they only provide technical support, and are not related to or involved in game service issues.

Drysc

#20 - March 26, 2008, 9:54 p.m.

Q u o t e:
If they can get away with 1 8 hour shift for support, they will.

We have 24/7 365 in-game support, those are Game Masters and our Customer Service forum reps. Our Technical Support and Billing reps work overlapping shifts which extend their hours of operation out to 12 hour days, 8AM to 8PM, and they're answering e-mails/phones/snail mail (seriously)/faxes/etc. The majority of our development related staff, including designers, database engineers, server technicians, programmers, community managers, etc. are on-call 24/7, ready to be woken up at 2AM to lend a hand with any issues as they may happen.

All of our support has been kept in-house, we don't outsource, we hire and train everyone you speak to and keep them in our company. I'm not sure how many other companies with similar user bases, regardless of their products, can claim the same.

I'm not trying to show off, we're in fact generally a fairly humble company, but I don't think anyone that actually knows our support staff and the lengths we've gone to ensure a quality support experience for our customers would claim we attempt to cut corners wherever possible.