So Blizzard just closed a whole slew of open support tickets without reading them

[NMX-]

On the topic of other examples of cutting costs and trying to milk as much as possible from as little as possible:

paid-for services and items while we have a sub. It costs them nothing to make pets and mounts that they sell on the store, they just take whatever the team that makes these things already do, yet they attach an extra cost to that.

I will admit, this is getting off-topic, as the topic of this thread is about Customer Support giving a generic, but informative, answer to tickets of certain subject matter, which the goal is to provide players with more important tickets faster service.

Whenever it comes to the vanity items (pets/mounts/silly little $15 hats), that comes down to the player's choice. They're solely optional. I can still do everything I want to in WoW without even having to open the character/guild services in WoW, or the pet store in-game. While we do not have the option of not-paying a subscription for WoW, we have an option to not buy these services/pets/mounts. If I choose to not buy them, so be it, that's my choice. Nobody is threatening me if I don't buy them.

Maybe there's some company-cost to create a new pet or new mount, sure. Is there a large profit to gain from it that Blizzard is looking at? Sure. Is it working? Yes. But at what point should them doing this make you upset if you don't buy them, and your wallet is the same as if they never released them?

I do not scrutinize Blizzard for charging these kinds of things. Why should I? "My grocery store down the street is trying to make more money by providing their own brand-version of many products." Why would I get mad at my grocery store for making a money-making decision that doesn't force me to live my life any differently?

If, say, character transfers were free, then oh my goodness, the horrors we would see. We could see 30% of the player base being on just 1 server. I don't think it costs the company much for an automated system to copy/paste a character to another server, but without some kind of gate slowing players down from making such a rash decision as changing servers, we'd see some really messed up server population concerns.

On topic, I was asking Sulla for more examples of where Blizzard compromises player satisfaction for money.

[MasterOfNone]

Crabtree reminds me of T.O. He just needs someone to let the wind outta his sails.

Not to derail but nah. T O is a fool by comparison.

[ben-]

Blizzard has a system that picks out keywords and prioritizes tickets. It is very likely they knew the context of the ticket without seeing the actual ticket.

Ive noticed when the issue is important to my gameplay is answered rather quickly, when its about something less important i sit in line.

i.e. hax,gank,pvp, are all lower priorities than stuck.

[Baelic]

If they made a blanket response and actually ended up hitting people that have legit issues... that means one of two things (or both).

1) Those who made the tickets in the first place did so incorrectly
2) Blizzards indexing and categorizing system is flawed

As lazy as it may seem, giving a blanket response to issues that aren't meant for the CS department is a very efficient way to go about things. Too bad both the system and the people who use it are not perfect and therefor created a situation like this.

[Giscoicus]

Its not like its possible for them to handle all the tickets players make. If people used tickets for the right REASONS then yea, it would be, but; QQ Huolon camping QQ ganking QQ griefing QQ toxic QQ no loot QQ transmog legendaries QQ gnome druids.

[-Superman-]

gnome druids.

Someone has been reading my tickets! lol

[Eon Drache]

the last ticket I had I opened because a loot chest bugged. Took them 4 days to answer it and turned out the Azure Drake dropped. I'm glad they did this.

[freighttrain]

Yeah. My last response from them on a ticket was totally lacking of customer concerns. I can remember in WOTLK, they had a lot more players then than they do now and we would get a GM to actually contact you and discussion your ticket one on one. But now we get this automated crappy response?

I have never received a automated letter to a ticket. From day one to now, all of my tickets have been answered in-game by GMs. This includes two issues involving not getting a quest item no matter how many times I abandoned and accepted the quest, restarted the game with and with out my 2 little addons. Both were answered with in 24 hours and had the issues resolved. I also, as others have said, give good survey remarks and scores after every GM interaction. Not sure if that has anything to do with it or not.

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They've been riding a fine line of providing the least amount possible while reaping billions since Wrath (the peak of this game). Since Wrath, it's been a fine art of gliding gracefully to the ground for them. They'll say whatever they have to in order to redirect criticism (sure, we're adding more employees for better patch release dates), but they're actually riding a very tight line of getting the most money for providing the least. The most glaring example will be how we will be in another final tier lasting for a year after an expansion-long promise of this not happening. I'm sure the usual Blizz apologists will be lining up in droves to fire off a million different excuses for their biggest failure/lie to date.

Furthermore, your logic (adopted from the lips of Blizzard employees themselves) does not follow regarding character transfers. You act as if the only way to control things in a game is through charging people IRL money as a "are you sure you really want to do this?" sanity check. We could start a whole other thread about the myriad of rational options that Blizzard could take to control realm transfers that wouldn't involve me having to pay 55 dollars a pop to move my alliance characters over to horde on another server. If you buy into their rationalization for this outright gouging for something they know people are going to want over the course of several years playing the game, then you are not worth my time talking to about the subject.

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Also if you want a prime example of Blizz blatantly phoning it in, I challenge you to truthfully analyze the originality of the Dragon Soul raid in terms of content development. Enough said.

The same thing can be said about almost every piece of content in WoW. You know like all those reused human models for most of the dungeons. How about the 2 different types of cave maps found in almost every cave. Oh shit, green grass, yellow sand, blue water, brown bark on trees, how original.

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Yeah, I get that. That's what I said - they clear the slate hoping some of the customers who had issues won't reappear. That's cheap and disrespectful (and mostly unacceptable).

You have to deal with the issues. If you get too many, improve the game so that you get less, and improve the efficiency / increase size of the support so that you can handle more. Business 101.

They cleared the slate hoping customers with BS issues would go away.

[Noomz]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/1011699/

Unbelievable. The queue is big, so rather than filter or, I don't know, do their jobs, they just mass closed a whole bunch of open tickets with a generic response.

On the plus side, I'm sure their response time reports will look positive this month.

The problem is that people submit tickets about irrelevant, petty things that they have to siv through all the time. It's a big time sink. If you really have an issue, you won't have it difficult in resubmitting it if it's important.

And they probably have a bullshitfilter that takes away unimportant crap tickets, which they just did.

[Rapti]

They did the right thing actually. From CS and managing CS experience - They did the right thing when it comes to wow.
People who really need assistance will reopen tickets and those who made bullshit query will be dumped.
SLA will get back on track. Very good decision.

Anyone saying "improve a game" has no clue about Customer Service and what queries land in there.
Better product will not reduce amounts of tickets. Why? Because idiocy doesnt follow the same trend.

[Farora]

They did the right thing actually. From CS and managing CS experience - They did the right thing when it comes to wow.
People who really need assistance will reopen tickets and those who made bullshit query will be dumped.
SLA will get back on track. Very good decision.

Anyone saying "improve a game" has no clue about Customer Service and what queries land in there.

The right thing? Not really. The right thing from a customer perspective is hiring a few temps to catch up with tickets, then resume as normal.

[Gurushock]

I always just call them, you might not get what you need done right then, but most the time they get it done faster and done right.

[KurenaiXIII]

Hi there, excuse me. They *should* worship my "fucking customer ass". I pay their salaries. So does countless others. Asking for good customer service should be the least of their worries.

I hope you keep this attitude in mind if you ever work a customer-facing job and are treated like this. Remember: 'THEY PAY YOUR SALARY'. You should 'WORSHIP' their ass. ...

Or not, and instead act and expect to be treated like a human being and treat them like the human beings they are in turn. Mistakes get made. 200 tickets a day? Maybe for one or two servers. I would guarantee they see far more than that a day. When you're a group of even hundreds set against millions, well, the numbers just aren't in your favor.

But go on, tell them that you pay their salaries and to worship your ass. See where that gets you.

[Rapti]

No its not, trust me. Business & costs vs potential loss (this includes bad PR) - not worth it.
They still did the right thing. And Hey, I actually am THE customer in this case.

[Pony Soldier]

You know, just the other day after having some loading screen bug, people in trade chat were saying how the player support feature sucks now because it's all computerized. There's no more live chat from mods, or "Game Masters" or at least when you do send for live help it'll take days of waiting for them to contact you. I was saying how it's as if they're too lazy to help us anymore, their own customers. Was it really that hard of a job to help somebody out in the game? It's just all about cutting corners and making money faster anymore in the game industry. Companies don't care about their customers only the money their customers give them.

[Rapti]

No the core problem are totally bullshit reports.

[gamingmuscle]

You know, just the other day after having some loading screen bug, people in trade chat were saying how the player support feature sucks now because it's all computerized. There's no more live chat from mods, or "Game Masters" or at least when you do send for live help it'll take days of waiting for them to contact you. I was saying how it's as if they're too lazy to help us anymore, their own customers. Was it really that hard of a job to help somebody out in the game? It's just all about cutting corners and making money faster anymore in the game industry. Companies don't care about their customers only the money their customers give them.

It's not a hard job, but it's an expensive job to hand hold each and every customer that contacts you. At 15$ your sub doesn't pay for much hand holding LOL.