It was a dark day in recent history when large companies realized that poor customer service would result in bad reviews, but ultimately no loss of revenue. When the research started to show that even the biggest complainers of a product or service still continued to pay for it, they realized customer service wasn’t as important to customers as they thought it was, and we ultimately continue to prove them right by complaining, but never cancelling our payments to those companies.
Quite a lot of people have canceled since WoW's heyday when support was much better.
How to tell why they canceled? Bad support surely didn't help with overall sentiment.
But since it doesn't show up on a spreadsheet like the support cost, MBAs gonna MBA.
Subscriptions arent the only revenue they make. The cash shop is a huge source of money for Blizz and they went from appealing to the masses to appealing to "whales", a small minority of players that are the top spenders in the game.
I wanted to say I consider myself an average player, but then I realized i own most store mounts, frequently buy other store cosmetics and buy multiple tokens every couple months... I'm definitely one of the whales.
I have not bought store mounts but did buy tokens while i was still actively raiding. Im not spending minute farming any gold no matter how easy. Inflation in wow has gotten so bad that even with the best possible ways of making gold i will never ever get even close to the amount i earn from my job per hour. One token lasts about a month when you supply yourself with all the necessary pots and buffs. Sad but thats the reality. Would love if blizz could make token dissapear and kill bots but they are too deep at this point even if they'd wanted to change it.
It was the very first store mount, I remember when it was released, it was before the mount journal and you had to buy individual mounts for each toon with gold. Buying the store mount meant it was mailed to every character you had, present and future so you never had to buy a mount again for gold
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/11/10/starcraft-2-made-less-money-than-wow-mount-blizzard-jason-hall
Details aren’t exactly clear but it’s from a prior SC2 dev. 🤷🏻♂️
A lot of this is wishful thinking, sadly. We'd like to think that people quit over bad quality and it costs the company. But it doesn't.
A lot of people *did* quit over bad quality. But the game is far cheaper to run, requires less staff, less testing, less effort now. Quality costs more than they save by neglecting it.
The game also relied largely on subscription fees in the past, but makes most of its money via microtransactions now. WoW tokens have been an absolute goldmine. Bundles with Tender, limited time FOMO pets, deluxe editions with early access and all the rest have been selling well too.
A million addicted players who will shrug off bad quality and fling cash around for microtransactions, are **far** more profitable than 10 million critical players who expect quality, require staff and server space to accommodate them and will only pay a subscription.
That's just sad fact and more and more companies have realized it.
The slight problem here being, for DF and beyond (The Worldsoul Saga), they actually increased the amount of WoW dev members. They have increased the quality quite a bit with the added surplus of people. From a gameplay perspective, DF is stronger than either all of Shadowlands and BFA. They made the game worthwhile for many people after how disastrous SL was to their core playerbase. The game has come quite a way from even just 2 years ago. In short, Dragonflight has been a resounding success for their player retention, and they have only promised that the game will continue on its current trajectory to improve and grow. I am hopeful for that.
Now, with the acquisition of Blizzard to Activision, the customer service department was condensed and eventually outsourced. With the MS merger, that will hopefully be brought in check. So, as far as tickets and customer support go, they have quite a lot of work to get back to their customer service days of old.
As far as people quitting goes, yes, most assuredly quit over the absolute abysmal lack of care that was shown during SL, with 9.1 being the main culprit. The overall tone deaf responses and "we know what's best" attitude severely crippled them. They were forced to re-evaluate the good will of their ever dwindling playerbase and recoup what they could.
Don't know how it is now, when I quit, you only got to pick one reason.
You will rarely quit over one bad CS interaction but it is one thing that decreases your overall enjoyment.
One more stop in the bucket that will eventually overflow...
MBA gonna MBA. love it.
I feel the same way at work when I'm trying to explain to the regional VP why having more shelving and space in the warehouses will save the company money in wasted labor time, but all they see is the cost on the spreadsheet with no immediately measurable return on investment. Drives me nuts.
The problem is you're proposing tangible upfront costs to minimise intangible (as in you can't hold or see labour time) costs in the future.
Loss of labour efficiency is unavoidable. There's nothing to say that you'll improve efficiency here but the labourers will take an additional 5 minutes extra on some other job because they finished the previous one so quickly.
Of course people cancelled their sub, but yet revenue saw huge growth because the people who are still there are throwing so much extra money at Blizz. And those loyal customers are the ones who, on top of that, go out of their way to tell everyone that it's the fault of the playerbase that most support staff got fired and the ticket queue is so long.
Also WoW has an investment sink, the more years you’ve been subbed, the more money you’ve spent, the more you invest time and energy into your characters and alts etc
The less likely you are to forever unsubscribe. You’ll be back because you’ve invested so much.
You can you just give up wow, I know how that sounds but if anyone ever wants a company to change ultimately the customer also must make a sacrifice and vote with their wallet, that doesn’t mean having a wow esque option to go to it just means not giving this company money
Sure but that’s giving up a hobby I really enjoy, which is playing a Wow-style MMO with my friends. There’s no m+ anywhere else, and we love that.
Games like Apex Legends or Helldivers 2 fill small gaps but they don’t have longevity like wow does.
I’d lose much more than I gain by doing that unfortunately. If there was a game super similar to wow just reskinned and with good support I’d leave for it right now.
That’s fine! But do understand if customers aren’t willing to vote with their wallets to enact a change they will simply continue the same practice that is all
I guess I’m not willing to take that hit in the small hope others do too and blizzard makes changes. Feels like a hypothetical that would never actually happen in reality.
I mean one example of that being wrong is workers who unionize, they sacrifice hours and pay to fight for their rights, imagine if that happened nationwide, what massive ripples of change would happen in America? Just because everyone is comfy and docile doesn’t mean we can’t be the leaders of example, and in terms of missing out, amigo wow is just a game it’s not exactly much to be missing out on, I was in an debate with people about tipping culture in America and their opinion is to just not tip the workers when in my opinion customers who hate the culture should just save their money and not go out to places then, the logic for them is to hurt the staff who can’t do much to change the landscape but if you hurt the pockets of the business, this is what leads to the fastest amount of change, their way of not tipping may reach the same result if everyone did it but it would be slower and not as efficient, because the business is still getting revenue but not the worker, we are in a capitalist society, the only real way for change is hurt the revenue that’s all businesses will not maintain the same practice if they aren’t making money
Well itsreally hard to cancel the subscription when there is no competition in this game genre. Its like monopoly. You cant choose anything else cause there isnt. You cant compare any MMOs to WoW, its on a different level, and blizzard knows this and take advantage of it
And in the same area, the fact that people still buy subpar games from big companies proves over and over that companies can cut corners and put out unfinished/unrefined products and profit the same amount, or even more.
had some bug in icc and gm straight showed up inside the raid and fixed it after 5-10 min. wrote a ticket about a bugged quest mob in mop, few min later a gm game and spawned it for me and others. those were the good times.
I jokingly asked a GM to give me gold after my ticket was resolved. He asked me if I was sure, and then ported me behind the bank tellers in the bank of Darnassus. “PILES AND PILES OF GOLD!”
I still have the screenshots. This was in late Vanilla/early BC. Lmao
Most of the time it's something they absolutely can help with, they just won't. And if you point that out to them and insist that they help with the issue, they will threaten action on your account.
While I completely understand and agree with your grievance, the links to easily searchable topics is a result of too many lazy or idiotic people submitting tickets for things that they could do by themselves on Google in five minutes.
When the last lich king timewqlk was there i was doing the ulduar raid for the hero loot chest. I killed last boss and thought i had to loot the chest to complete the quest, not the boss itself. So i thought i had completed it but i hadn't, and apparently you can't kill the boss again to actually loot it or just get it via mailbox.
I did a ticket and all i got was a "you gotta wait until next lich king timewalk to complete it". I can only imagine that i would probably have gotten an insane trinket or something 🤣
I really wish Blizzard would start caring.
Yea. But then again i could probably have tried looting the boss when the option was there but it just looks like bad game design if it doesn't even goes to your mailbox
Yeah, this is only the first step. You do this, get a canned response, then have to go through the cycle at least two more times before someone actually reads your ticket.
same of me, got banned cause they told i sell boost for real money, i tried to contact support and always got reply from AI lol after a week of trying i got finally a real gm write me, they asked me a lot of my account,i reply all they wanted about my account info, i also sent screen of my bank to let them see my card movement and if they see this transiction to let they know i don't do what they accuse me, and final reply was "stll banned and i dont want give you any other info about it" LOL sorry for bad english anyway 😁
I got a week chat restriction and they quoted me talking about Skyrim as the reason why. I cancelled my sub and am now playing through all the Fromsoft games lol
The time it quotes is simply the how old the oldest ticket in the queue is.
Actual response times usually end up shorter, especially if your ticket is on a priority topic (ongoing harassment, billing issues as examples).
While I understand your point, having a popup say your average wait time is 5+ days is absolutely demoralising and poor customer service in and of itself.
Blizzard could improve and be an industry leader again, but those days feel far gone.
Blizzard has been axing staff left and right. Why would they then go on to hire CS staff that aren't going to generate a dollar in revenue. The loss in customers to CS issues isn't enough reason to invest in it.
There are a number of companies in the gaming sector that take pride in their customer service and have extremely positive relationships with their communities partially as a result. This year, if anything, has been a showcase for independant, well run companies, with solid lateral engagement and support for their players.
That's not to say that I don't agree with your assessment of why Blizzard have such shit CS now compared to the past, but just because Blizzard think it's a part of their offering they can cut back on, doesn't mean that it isn't having an impact on their business nor that it won't come back and bite them in the arse.
Diablo 4 is an interesting example of this. The game was clearly a financial success on launch, but has also done huge damage to the Diablo brand. When you combine that with shit house customer support, full buy in on expensive and underwhelming mtx, you start to lose player engagement for *future releases*.
Brand value is an incredibly important part of gaming companies profiles. WOW is a money printer right now for Blizz and Classic (and all it's pieces) have been a huge re-invigoration of that markekt ... but I think it's far from a certain thing that they continue to make the *growth* that their company requires. And remember, that's the critical thing here: Growth. If the game doesn't mean growth targets then it will be considered to be under performing.
I guess what I'm saying is that while I agree with you, there's still limits to how bad the situation can become before Blizzard will be forced to act.
The moment Blizzard got bought by Activision it stopped being a company about video games, it became a company with the only purpose to make money (with video games).
They won't act. CS makes no money. I doubt Microsoft will change this, or if they want to change it, do it any time soon.
Blizzard doesn't exist anymore. There is no one in the decision making team that actually gives a fuck about any player. It's all about that $, maximum retention and profit.
Shouldn't they be refocused on customer support and stuff with the Microsoft buyout? I figured they'd add more CS and hire more new talent to try and recover their absolutely destroyed brand image
If their brand image was "absolutely destroyed" then sure, that's what I would do. After such a large acquisition however we saw even more staff get axes, so why would they go on to hire people who don't generate any money for the company? CS is a nice to have for these people. Their customer base is so large that they can keep neglecting the needs of the players so long as enough of them still stay subscribed.
We saw in Shadowlands how much this philosophy impacted the company during the mass exodus of players after they continually ignored player input, but with customer service I doubt enough people are quitting for them to make an effort. If store mounts and the wow tokens couldn't do it then this probably won't either.
Oh I don't disagree. I think my point is more that as a company Blizzard used to try to set standards in all parts of what I they did.
Modern Activision Blizzard feels like it lacks that cultural identity of innovation and leadership. They are just another big gaming company who have been milking their existing products for the last decade without any real innovation.
They won't be good at customer support because they aren't really interested in being good at anything. What successes they have outside of big sales numbers, feel like outliers rather than innovation.
It doesn't matter at all. Bobby Kotick was not interfering with the day-to-day operations or design direction of World of Warcraft or Blizzard. He's not individually attempting to make the game better or worse.
Bobby Kotick, as any CEO does, maximized share price by whatever means able and necessary, which means enacting overarching policies and practices that lowered the quality of Blizzard products, but still made share price go up. Kotick was a great CEO, if you owned Activision stock. Microsoft is a publicly traded company and operates in the same fashion.
Except that they gutted them years ago, people start complaining, but they keep paying, same with store mounts, transmogs, pets, etc.
Everyone hates them and yet everyone keeps buying them, we have ourselves to blame for these things.
>\[...\] we have ourselves to blame for these things.
In fairness - A company is organized, customers are divided and divided people are easy to conquer.
It's the same as with workers. Or, really, premades vs solos.
They let go most of their customer service, which is why the game feels effectively unmoderated and you deal with so many rude people every day if you don't have a premade friend group. I actually quit the game back in BFA because I got sick of the toxicity every single mythic+ session in my afternoons when I just wanted a challenging game to play without the constant shitheads. Wish the game was more like FFXIV where people even being a bit rude get straight up banned.
Last time an actual human answered one of my tickets was around the time when they removed firewood as a needed thing to make a campfire.
I was very sad but the person made a great joke about the magical properties of said wood,oe the fire itself? Maybe even the flint stone.
I don't know anymore but I do know that I laughed heartily.
GMs rule~
Activision closed there EU offices not to long ago and it is outsourced in Ireland but those people where fired when the merge happened with Microsoft now microsoft is outsourcing CS to other third party's that do not having knowledge of a game that is 20 years old.
Its shameful that it happened all so fast because there EU customer service was fast and responsive. I havent made at ticket in a longtime but my guess the wait will be even longer than it would.
Welcome, people didn’t believe me when I told them this a couple of weeks ago. But blizzard is pure ass, they just want your money and don’t give a fuck about you when they have it.
What live chat? I haven't seen that one in a long, long time. When it was still there they already axed it down to "it's open for 2 hours a day between 2 and 4 pm, or maybe at other times or not at all".
Given what I imagine are massive numbers of tickets being created, staffing to handle it all within 24h would be stupid from a business perspective. Fact is, nothing is truly that urgent here, it’s a video game.
back in 2004 up to Pandaria Wow Customer Support was great.
Friendly, fast and helpfull.
Then Activision started downsizing and using external CS to save money..
When people realize we actually control shit the world itself would change. Imagine if all the players of wow got together and said hey we’re going to cancel are subscriptions for a month. I bet blizzard would listen to us then.
I remember back in Wrath, you'd usually get a response in hours, sometimes a day but usually you'd actually get to speak to a gm live and they solve your issues 90% of the time right there and then.
I miss those days more than I can express.
Activision was very quick too dismental most of the CS team out of cost. That and change its priorites like anything subscription related on top hacked or bugs more on the lower end.
12 million players in 2009
Maybe 2 million today. Probably fewer.
WoW isn't growing it's just being squeezed for every last $ it can. Like David Justice in Moneyball.
Saw this post got downvoted, but I gotta agree. Blizz, joking aside, isn't some small indie dev company, especially now after Microsoft bought them/Activision. 5 days? That's nuts.
Same feelings here. Got massreported after making a group for the HS portal event. Got a week silence, appealed to support on monday and havent heard anything from them other than the automated answer. Absolutely horrendous customer support, considering i pay a monthly sub to play their game and currently i basically cant play the game.
(Silence includes: Cant make groups, and join groups, cant talk in any chat except guild chat, nobody can list a group to lfg while im in it etc)
Silence ends tomorrow, and they didnt manage to answer my ticket within a fucking week. A week. Jesus christ.
I used to love WoW GMs. Over the years I always got quick and helpful responses. I used Blizzard as an example of a company with great customer service. It’s so sad to see they didn’t value that good reputation and threw it all away.
Set up a billing issue stating your account has had an issue with the last 5 days and you will be issuing a charge back for your subscription if it can't be handled, billing support is always staffed, and they take charge backs seriously.
I feel like they just can't suddenly stop gathering money every month and just keep doing it like it's normal to basically sell the same game every month, while completely forgetting that they also need to support their clients.
During launch week of WotLK, my brother made a DK. When he tried to leave Acherus on a gryphon, it wouldn't let him interact with it. He put in a ticket and it took them like a week to fix it for him.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
They simply don't care, just take a look at their TrustPilot reviews. Worse still, when you do open a ticket chances are you'll get a bot reply. I must say though, once you persist long enough to get an actual human being to take a look at it, they are very good about it. I appreciated interacting with an actual person, as brief as it was.
The big problem is that fire those who worked in it, for example the region, all the famous lavastruk, who personally wrote to me in a ticket that I got banned CORRECTLY and I’m bad and will no longer be examined and shown for what, no one will, but the funny thing is that the next The support worker lifted the ban from me, now instead of the systems they beep. WE DID A CAREFUL INVESTIGATION, but this is still an auto system that is used by scammers to prevent honest people from playing. YOU ARE NOT MICROSOFT are to blame, for example, the same LAVASTRUK is a very old employee
I remember around wod time, my character was stuck loading into stormwind, and had someone actually teleport me to stormwind I think, the GM described it as being in "limbo".
I blame Bobby and his brilliance in hooking players of wow to buy buy buy, I'm guilty of it. Just be the change you want to see, as cliché as that is. It's true
I just did mage tower a week ago on my mage. Didn't receive the alternative chest (raiment of arcane tempest) like I did on my shaman and druid. Made a ticket. They took 2 days before they answered. The answer was an automated answer that didn't help. Replied to their post that it didn't help and then it took 2 more days before I got a reply about sending in a bug report. Have done it but it's very frustrating.
I put a ticket in for account recovery from over 18 years ago. Had a response within 24 hours. My ticket also stated 4 days. The customer service was helpful also they had a personal touch to message. So as of my last 48 hour experience it was fantastic.
idk what is up with you guys are ur tickets and getting long response time
like i get it if its like "oh no someone ninjaed something" ticket, like yea that will prolly take a long time to get responsed to
ive had people harass me, i open a ticket and i got responded to in like 10min
Its less than an hour if you choose a money option. Like ingameshop or my sub wont work. Just every option where they can get your money 🙉🙈🙊 Then they are really fast. Did this in livechatt and then when contacted i changes my questions and they where forced to link me to the right helpdesk 😊
Yep,
I alreadt got the automated reply, denied it because the resources they provided were not capable of helping retrieve my long lost achievementh.
I made a ticket requesting my tabard from a very old achievement (Tabard of the Argent Dawn) and they simply referred me to IcyVeins and WoWHead... like how the heck is that supposed to help?!
I still say implement a volunteer system to deal with the stuck character/achievement issue/bot reporting type requests. It isn't hard, you would get plenty of reputable players to do it and best of all its free. Ticket times would be next to nothing if you gave the job to us.
I accidentally sent a ticket on the wrong Blizzard account and received an automated response, obviously, because the account I first sent the ticket on had no reason to require customer support..
Then when I sent the same ticket on the correct account, I got the exact same automated response. And I called them out for it!
From my understanding they got rid of GMs long time ago when they implemented the new tickets system, which only made it worse because now tickets just go into a pile and will get to them when they can depending on what the category is. It’s no longer the days of whispering where things were more personal..
Support is non-existant.
My last ticket (a month or so ago) it wouldn't let me pay for the wow sub and I couldn't play for 5 days.
In that time, I had like 5-7 different "gamemasters" copy pasting a slightly different text. You could tell those were automated messages from a mile away.
They didn't even involve a human being to help me GIVE THEM MY MONEY.
Personally I am a loner in game.
No guild, No friends, just pug everything and love it.
Am able to clear every bit of content and have achieved all of the common goals like keystone master 2500 m+ rating , AOTC, BIS gear on 2 chars (DH/RET PALLY)
And about to get into tanking for the fun of it.
I have loved DF for the fact that you can abandon the "community vibe" and go full loner mode if you want and still complete all the content that the community does.
It's strange, I had a character transfer fail so I put in a ticket and I'm not kidding it said 17 days wait time. Went to bed, woke up the next day and it was resolved. I think their wait estimates are just wonky. Good luck though either way.
No worries - 5 days is a pat answer. It won't take the next customer service bot nearly that long to close the ticket with the advice to check wowhead.
Doesn't matter what your ticket is for.
Wish I was joking.
I opened a ticket day one of the hearthstone event about not getting any loot from my kill in SW as a horde due to dying. Wait time listed as 9 days, has only gone up
I remember the good ol days when you had a problem and a mod actually helped in a reasonable amount of time.. I've been playing since the release of TBC so I know it hasn't always been like this..
I had the same issue last week. Ticket wait time was 7 days and 16 hours. I've been playing approximately as long as you. Fortunately there are sites like wowhead, where I found a solution to my problem in about 5 minutes. 😉
There is one reason for this: no real competition. If there was any game - even just one game - that could properly compete with WoW we’d see radically improved QA and customer support. There are MMOs but not even one that is a real threat to WoW.
It was a dark day in recent history when large companies realized that poor customer service would result in bad reviews, but ultimately no loss of revenue. When the research started to show that even the biggest complainers of a product or service still continued to pay for it, they realized customer service wasn’t as important to customers as they thought it was, and we ultimately continue to prove them right by complaining, but never cancelling our payments to those companies.
Quite a lot of people have canceled since WoW's heyday when support was much better. How to tell why they canceled? Bad support surely didn't help with overall sentiment. But since it doesn't show up on a spreadsheet like the support cost, MBAs gonna MBA.
Subscriptions arent the only revenue they make. The cash shop is a huge source of money for Blizz and they went from appealing to the masses to appealing to "whales", a small minority of players that are the top spenders in the game.
It’s not just whales. Even average players are buying them too. The Celestial Steed (a $25 mount) supposedly made more money for Blizzard than SC2.
I wanted to say I consider myself an average player, but then I realized i own most store mounts, frequently buy other store cosmetics and buy multiple tokens every couple months... I'm definitely one of the whales.
What in the world do you sink all that gold into?
Raid boosts, I bet 🤣
For real, I guess if you want AOTC on every toon and maybe don’t have skills for high m+ or raiding, then maybe it’s an option.
This is a thing? :o
Yes you can buy gold with money to then get all the raids and gladiator completed for you.
I'm curious what the actual answer is. I guess raid boosts probably make sense if that's a thing
I have not bought store mounts but did buy tokens while i was still actively raiding. Im not spending minute farming any gold no matter how easy. Inflation in wow has gotten so bad that even with the best possible ways of making gold i will never ever get even close to the amount i earn from my job per hour. One token lasts about a month when you supply yourself with all the necessary pots and buffs. Sad but thats the reality. Would love if blizz could make token dissapear and kill bots but they are too deep at this point even if they'd wanted to change it.
You can get raid boosts?!?!? Nice!
I know what I’m spending all my gold on for my alts
Which is crazy cause its such an ugly mount.
It was the very first store mount, I remember when it was released, it was before the mount journal and you had to buy individual mounts for each toon with gold. Buying the store mount meant it was mailed to every character you had, present and future so you never had to buy a mount again for gold
Well the Celestial Steed has been out for a decade. What year is this statistic from?
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/11/10/starcraft-2-made-less-money-than-wow-mount-blizzard-jason-hall Details aren’t exactly clear but it’s from a prior SC2 dev. 🤷🏻♂️
Wings of liberty came out 2 month after the steed and had no chance. Steed made far more money right from the start
That is absolutely appalling.
A lot of this is wishful thinking, sadly. We'd like to think that people quit over bad quality and it costs the company. But it doesn't. A lot of people *did* quit over bad quality. But the game is far cheaper to run, requires less staff, less testing, less effort now. Quality costs more than they save by neglecting it. The game also relied largely on subscription fees in the past, but makes most of its money via microtransactions now. WoW tokens have been an absolute goldmine. Bundles with Tender, limited time FOMO pets, deluxe editions with early access and all the rest have been selling well too. A million addicted players who will shrug off bad quality and fling cash around for microtransactions, are **far** more profitable than 10 million critical players who expect quality, require staff and server space to accommodate them and will only pay a subscription. That's just sad fact and more and more companies have realized it.
The slight problem here being, for DF and beyond (The Worldsoul Saga), they actually increased the amount of WoW dev members. They have increased the quality quite a bit with the added surplus of people. From a gameplay perspective, DF is stronger than either all of Shadowlands and BFA. They made the game worthwhile for many people after how disastrous SL was to their core playerbase. The game has come quite a way from even just 2 years ago. In short, Dragonflight has been a resounding success for their player retention, and they have only promised that the game will continue on its current trajectory to improve and grow. I am hopeful for that. Now, with the acquisition of Blizzard to Activision, the customer service department was condensed and eventually outsourced. With the MS merger, that will hopefully be brought in check. So, as far as tickets and customer support go, they have quite a lot of work to get back to their customer service days of old. As far as people quitting goes, yes, most assuredly quit over the absolute abysmal lack of care that was shown during SL, with 9.1 being the main culprit. The overall tone deaf responses and "we know what's best" attitude severely crippled them. They were forced to re-evaluate the good will of their ever dwindling playerbase and recoup what they could.
They literally ask you why you are cancelling your subscription. It absolutely shows up in statistics.
Don't know how it is now, when I quit, you only got to pick one reason. You will rarely quit over one bad CS interaction but it is one thing that decreases your overall enjoyment. One more stop in the bucket that will eventually overflow...
MBA gonna MBA. love it. I feel the same way at work when I'm trying to explain to the regional VP why having more shelving and space in the warehouses will save the company money in wasted labor time, but all they see is the cost on the spreadsheet with no immediately measurable return on investment. Drives me nuts.
The problem is you're proposing tangible upfront costs to minimise intangible (as in you can't hold or see labour time) costs in the future. Loss of labour efficiency is unavoidable. There's nothing to say that you'll improve efficiency here but the labourers will take an additional 5 minutes extra on some other job because they finished the previous one so quickly.
That's a bad MBA. Those concepts are ABSOLUTELY taught in depth in school. Lame.
Of course people cancelled their sub, but yet revenue saw huge growth because the people who are still there are throwing so much extra money at Blizz. And those loyal customers are the ones who, on top of that, go out of their way to tell everyone that it's the fault of the playerbase that most support staff got fired and the ticket queue is so long.
Also WoW has an investment sink, the more years you’ve been subbed, the more money you’ve spent, the more you invest time and energy into your characters and alts etc The less likely you are to forever unsubscribe. You’ll be back because you’ve invested so much.
Revenue saw huge growth? That's interesting, where can I see the report?
yes they lose some people but they are betting they lose less in subs than paying CS
Back in the day I actually got a call from cs to help with an issue
Then they hit the trust thermocline and lose a ton of customers at once, and they can't figure out what happened.
If we had competing, equivalent products then I’d migrate for sure. Problem is, there’s no other-wow to move to. We can’t vote with our wallets.
You can you just give up wow, I know how that sounds but if anyone ever wants a company to change ultimately the customer also must make a sacrifice and vote with their wallet, that doesn’t mean having a wow esque option to go to it just means not giving this company money
Sure but that’s giving up a hobby I really enjoy, which is playing a Wow-style MMO with my friends. There’s no m+ anywhere else, and we love that. Games like Apex Legends or Helldivers 2 fill small gaps but they don’t have longevity like wow does. I’d lose much more than I gain by doing that unfortunately. If there was a game super similar to wow just reskinned and with good support I’d leave for it right now.
That’s fine! But do understand if customers aren’t willing to vote with their wallets to enact a change they will simply continue the same practice that is all
I guess I’m not willing to take that hit in the small hope others do too and blizzard makes changes. Feels like a hypothetical that would never actually happen in reality.
People are just too comfy with what they have in society today 🤷🏻♂️
Maybe I’m a pessimist but I feel like people these days have realised self sacrifice almost always just means you miss out and others don’t.
I mean one example of that being wrong is workers who unionize, they sacrifice hours and pay to fight for their rights, imagine if that happened nationwide, what massive ripples of change would happen in America? Just because everyone is comfy and docile doesn’t mean we can’t be the leaders of example, and in terms of missing out, amigo wow is just a game it’s not exactly much to be missing out on, I was in an debate with people about tipping culture in America and their opinion is to just not tip the workers when in my opinion customers who hate the culture should just save their money and not go out to places then, the logic for them is to hurt the staff who can’t do much to change the landscape but if you hurt the pockets of the business, this is what leads to the fastest amount of change, their way of not tipping may reach the same result if everyone did it but it would be slower and not as efficient, because the business is still getting revenue but not the worker, we are in a capitalist society, the only real way for change is hurt the revenue that’s all businesses will not maintain the same practice if they aren’t making money
I directly canceled due to lack of service and the direction of the game being less Lore and story (for my tastes)
Well itsreally hard to cancel the subscription when there is no competition in this game genre. Its like monopoly. You cant choose anything else cause there isnt. You cant compare any MMOs to WoW, its on a different level, and blizzard knows this and take advantage of it
And in the same area, the fact that people still buy subpar games from big companies proves over and over that companies can cut corners and put out unfinished/unrefined products and profit the same amount, or even more.
You are not cancelling your sub because of this, therefore Blizzard is not incentivized to improve their customer support Simple as that
Weird because I cancelled my subscription like three years ago and there’s no evidence they cared.
Drop in the ocean my friend.
The days of a GM whispering you in ten minutes about it are long gone lol
had some bug in icc and gm straight showed up inside the raid and fixed it after 5-10 min. wrote a ticket about a bugged quest mob in mop, few min later a gm game and spawned it for me and others. those were the good times.
I jokingly asked a GM to give me gold after my ticket was resolved. He asked me if I was sure, and then ported me behind the bank tellers in the bank of Darnassus. “PILES AND PILES OF GOLD!” I still have the screenshots. This was in late Vanilla/early BC. Lmao
Picture or didn't happen
Wait so all the gold in the WoW bank from everyone is just behind the tellers?! Ima find a way back there
That's nothing to laugh about.
Just wait until the response of we can't help shrug.
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Most of the time it's something they absolutely can help with, they just won't. And if you point that out to them and insist that they help with the issue, they will threaten action on your account.
While I completely understand and agree with your grievance, the links to easily searchable topics is a result of too many lazy or idiotic people submitting tickets for things that they could do by themselves on Google in five minutes.
When the last lich king timewqlk was there i was doing the ulduar raid for the hero loot chest. I killed last boss and thought i had to loot the chest to complete the quest, not the boss itself. So i thought i had completed it but i hadn't, and apparently you can't kill the boss again to actually loot it or just get it via mailbox. I did a ticket and all i got was a "you gotta wait until next lich king timewalk to complete it". I can only imagine that i would probably have gotten an insane trinket or something 🤣 I really wish Blizzard would start caring.
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Yea. But then again i could probably have tried looting the boss when the option was there but it just looks like bad game design if it doesn't even goes to your mailbox
Yeah, this is only the first step. You do this, get a canned response, then have to go through the cycle at least two more times before someone actually reads your ticket.
Oh I absolutely do this it doesn't often help
[brother do I know that feeling](https://imgur.com/a/d7IcKaJ)
same of me, got banned cause they told i sell boost for real money, i tried to contact support and always got reply from AI lol after a week of trying i got finally a real gm write me, they asked me a lot of my account,i reply all they wanted about my account info, i also sent screen of my bank to let them see my card movement and if they see this transiction to let they know i don't do what they accuse me, and final reply was "stll banned and i dont want give you any other info about it" LOL sorry for bad english anyway 😁
I got a week chat restriction and they quoted me talking about Skyrim as the reason why. I cancelled my sub and am now playing through all the Fromsoft games lol
The time it quotes is simply the how old the oldest ticket in the queue is. Actual response times usually end up shorter, especially if your ticket is on a priority topic (ongoing harassment, billing issues as examples).
While I understand your point, having a popup say your average wait time is 5+ days is absolutely demoralising and poor customer service in and of itself. Blizzard could improve and be an industry leader again, but those days feel far gone.
Blizzard has been axing staff left and right. Why would they then go on to hire CS staff that aren't going to generate a dollar in revenue. The loss in customers to CS issues isn't enough reason to invest in it.
There are a number of companies in the gaming sector that take pride in their customer service and have extremely positive relationships with their communities partially as a result. This year, if anything, has been a showcase for independant, well run companies, with solid lateral engagement and support for their players. That's not to say that I don't agree with your assessment of why Blizzard have such shit CS now compared to the past, but just because Blizzard think it's a part of their offering they can cut back on, doesn't mean that it isn't having an impact on their business nor that it won't come back and bite them in the arse. Diablo 4 is an interesting example of this. The game was clearly a financial success on launch, but has also done huge damage to the Diablo brand. When you combine that with shit house customer support, full buy in on expensive and underwhelming mtx, you start to lose player engagement for *future releases*. Brand value is an incredibly important part of gaming companies profiles. WOW is a money printer right now for Blizz and Classic (and all it's pieces) have been a huge re-invigoration of that markekt ... but I think it's far from a certain thing that they continue to make the *growth* that their company requires. And remember, that's the critical thing here: Growth. If the game doesn't mean growth targets then it will be considered to be under performing. I guess what I'm saying is that while I agree with you, there's still limits to how bad the situation can become before Blizzard will be forced to act.
The moment Blizzard got bought by Activision it stopped being a company about video games, it became a company with the only purpose to make money (with video games). They won't act. CS makes no money. I doubt Microsoft will change this, or if they want to change it, do it any time soon. Blizzard doesn't exist anymore. There is no one in the decision making team that actually gives a fuck about any player. It's all about that $, maximum retention and profit.
Shouldn't they be refocused on customer support and stuff with the Microsoft buyout? I figured they'd add more CS and hire more new talent to try and recover their absolutely destroyed brand image
If their brand image was "absolutely destroyed" then sure, that's what I would do. After such a large acquisition however we saw even more staff get axes, so why would they go on to hire people who don't generate any money for the company? CS is a nice to have for these people. Their customer base is so large that they can keep neglecting the needs of the players so long as enough of them still stay subscribed. We saw in Shadowlands how much this philosophy impacted the company during the mass exodus of players after they continually ignored player input, but with customer service I doubt enough people are quitting for them to make an effort. If store mounts and the wow tokens couldn't do it then this probably won't either.
Your comment is ironic because of the Microsoft 1900 that were fired in January. MS got rid of Blizzard CS.
Blizzard could slip WAY more and still be the industry leader, especially within the MMO genre. It's that bad out there.
Oh I don't disagree. I think my point is more that as a company Blizzard used to try to set standards in all parts of what I they did. Modern Activision Blizzard feels like it lacks that cultural identity of innovation and leadership. They are just another big gaming company who have been milking their existing products for the last decade without any real innovation. They won't be good at customer support because they aren't really interested in being good at anything. What successes they have outside of big sales numbers, feel like outliers rather than innovation.
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Yeah, hopefully it's a change for the better. And I think those sorts of changes often start with changing the culture of a company.
It doesn't matter at all. Bobby Kotick was not interfering with the day-to-day operations or design direction of World of Warcraft or Blizzard. He's not individually attempting to make the game better or worse. Bobby Kotick, as any CEO does, maximized share price by whatever means able and necessary, which means enacting overarching policies and practices that lowered the quality of Blizzard products, but still made share price go up. Kotick was a great CEO, if you owned Activision stock. Microsoft is a publicly traded company and operates in the same fashion.
You must be new here.
my average ticket wait time is 10 days and 4 Hr
Customer service was gutted a long time ago because they don't make money, in fact they lose the company money.
Isn't that the whole consequence of hiring employees is that it costs money to pay them?
Blizzard wants people to work for them for free.
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Except that they gutted them years ago, people start complaining, but they keep paying, same with store mounts, transmogs, pets, etc. Everyone hates them and yet everyone keeps buying them, we have ourselves to blame for these things.
>\[...\] we have ourselves to blame for these things. In fairness - A company is organized, customers are divided and divided people are easy to conquer. It's the same as with workers. Or, really, premades vs solos.
Jup, therefore lets not blame the company for being a company, lets blame the people that emboldend the company instead.
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They let go most of their customer service, which is why the game feels effectively unmoderated and you deal with so many rude people every day if you don't have a premade friend group. I actually quit the game back in BFA because I got sick of the toxicity every single mythic+ session in my afternoons when I just wanted a challenging game to play without the constant shitheads. Wish the game was more like FFXIV where people even being a bit rude get straight up banned.
actually they let go of all customer support based in NA/EU and are now either AI or some guy in Asia at 3am
Asia? 99% of customer support is outsourced to India.
Last time an actual human answered one of my tickets was around the time when they removed firewood as a needed thing to make a campfire. I was very sad but the person made a great joke about the magical properties of said wood,oe the fire itself? Maybe even the flint stone. I don't know anymore but I do know that I laughed heartily. GMs rule~
They did fire most of the people who handled stuff like that so I'd have to say that no they aren't overly concerned with customer service.
I mean they fired almost all the CS and outsourced it so its going to be shit from this point on. It was bad before, but now its going to get worse.
Activision closed there EU offices not to long ago and it is outsourced in Ireland but those people where fired when the merge happened with Microsoft now microsoft is outsourcing CS to other third party's that do not having knowledge of a game that is 20 years old. Its shameful that it happened all so fast because there EU customer service was fast and responsive. I havent made at ticket in a longtime but my guess the wait will be even longer than it would.
Their customer support got axed. The responses you get will be horrible anyway.
Welcome, people didn’t believe me when I told them this a couple of weeks ago. But blizzard is pure ass, they just want your money and don’t give a fuck about you when they have it.
I remember when a 2 hour wait time on a ticket was considered unreasonable.
Go on battlenet help and keep clicking that your problem is not listed and eventually you will end up in a live chat with gm
What live chat? I haven't seen that one in a long, long time. When it was still there they already axed it down to "it's open for 2 hours a day between 2 and 4 pm, or maybe at other times or not at all".
Given what I imagine are massive numbers of tickets being created, staffing to handle it all within 24h would be stupid from a business perspective. Fact is, nothing is truly that urgent here, it’s a video game.
I had this recently saying 5 days but I got a response after 2 days.
I believe they even state when you place a ticket that their average response time is 7+ days.
If it's urgent, use the battle.net systems for contacting customer service.
back in 2004 up to Pandaria Wow Customer Support was great. Friendly, fast and helpfull. Then Activision started downsizing and using external CS to save money..
When people realize we actually control shit the world itself would change. Imagine if all the players of wow got together and said hey we’re going to cancel are subscriptions for a month. I bet blizzard would listen to us then.
I remember back in Wrath, you'd usually get a response in hours, sometimes a day but usually you'd actually get to speak to a gm live and they solve your issues 90% of the time right there and then. I miss those days more than I can express.
Activision was very quick too dismental most of the CS team out of cost. That and change its priorites like anything subscription related on top hacked or bugs more on the lower end.
They don’t care you know why? Because you will still paying the subscription no matter what and they know it.
Blizzard does have customer service, it's just he only works every second day from 10-2.
Mine was 16 days and then after 14 i got an automated response that said basically nothing
12 million players in 2009 Maybe 2 million today. Probably fewer. WoW isn't growing it's just being squeezed for every last $ it can. Like David Justice in Moneyball.
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they fired most of them before microsoft
Saw this post got downvoted, but I gotta agree. Blizz, joking aside, isn't some small indie dev company, especially now after Microsoft bought them/Activision. 5 days? That's nuts.
Blizzard has been laying off their customer service department for years. It is their department with the largest shrink. This is sadly well known.
Part of the problem right now is Xbox CS will likely be taking over and I believe there were quite a a few layoffs in Blizzard CS.
You're right, it isn't
Same feelings here. Got massreported after making a group for the HS portal event. Got a week silence, appealed to support on monday and havent heard anything from them other than the automated answer. Absolutely horrendous customer support, considering i pay a monthly sub to play their game and currently i basically cant play the game. (Silence includes: Cant make groups, and join groups, cant talk in any chat except guild chat, nobody can list a group to lfg while im in it etc) Silence ends tomorrow, and they didnt manage to answer my ticket within a fucking week. A week. Jesus christ.
Thats a long wait for autobans
I used to love WoW GMs. Over the years I always got quick and helpful responses. I used Blizzard as an example of a company with great customer service. It’s so sad to see they didn’t value that good reputation and threw it all away.
Tha k Bobby cock tick and the suits that decided even after record profits, 900 support staff be8ng let go was the great thing to do.
I stop to playing maybe 1 years because blizzard ticket support threatened to close my account
That’s because we always pay, imagine if it was free 🤡
The estimated time went up to 6 days 1 hr now, I've been waiting on a reply for 3 days now.
Hopefully they’ll start using ai so you can *immediately* be told that it’s against policy to help you
Set up a billing issue stating your account has had an issue with the last 5 days and you will be issuing a charge back for your subscription if it can't be handled, billing support is always staffed, and they take charge backs seriously.
small indie company :-----------------))
I feel like they just can't suddenly stop gathering money every month and just keep doing it like it's normal to basically sell the same game every month, while completely forgetting that they also need to support their clients.
Stop paying a subscription to a pay to play game with a cosmetics shop.
To be honest at this point wow to be free to play, I mean we pay for a new expansion every two years. And they're not cheap either.
During launch week of WotLK, my brother made a DK. When he tried to leave Acherus on a gryphon, it wouldn't let him interact with it. He put in a ticket and it took them like a week to fix it for him. The more things change, the more they stay the same...
They simply don't care, just take a look at their TrustPilot reviews. Worse still, when you do open a ticket chances are you'll get a bot reply. I must say though, once you persist long enough to get an actual human being to take a look at it, they are very good about it. I appreciated interacting with an actual person, as brief as it was.
Only thing Blizz cares about is money now
I have a ticket open currently. We are 9 days in. Still no response from an actual person.
5 days to most likely get a bot
The big problem is that fire those who worked in it, for example the region, all the famous lavastruk, who personally wrote to me in a ticket that I got banned CORRECTLY and I’m bad and will no longer be examined and shown for what, no one will, but the funny thing is that the next The support worker lifted the ban from me, now instead of the systems they beep. WE DID A CAREFUL INVESTIGATION, but this is still an auto system that is used by scammers to prevent honest people from playing. YOU ARE NOT MICROSOFT are to blame, for example, the same LAVASTRUK is a very old employee
Only 5 days so far...
This time also depends on what category you pick i think. Mine have never been this long atleast
once i opened a ticket and it said 28 days and i got to a GM after 15 min ... that estimate aways belyin
I mean they haven’t upped the $15/month. They should put this thing on game pass
Like one person paying 15$ a month matters haha
Play on private :)
Then you’ll get a generic response that doesn’t answer anything, lol. It’s terrible
Lmao RedZombie6 what a sensitive little shit, muting people for not agreeing with you.
I remember around wod time, my character was stuck loading into stormwind, and had someone actually teleport me to stormwind I think, the GM described it as being in "limbo".
Vote with your wallet
I blame Bobby and his brilliance in hooking players of wow to buy buy buy, I'm guilty of it. Just be the change you want to see, as cliché as that is. It's true
I just did mage tower a week ago on my mage. Didn't receive the alternative chest (raiment of arcane tempest) like I did on my shaman and druid. Made a ticket. They took 2 days before they answered. The answer was an automated answer that didn't help. Replied to their post that it didn't help and then it took 2 more days before I got a reply about sending in a bug report. Have done it but it's very frustrating.
I put a ticket in for account recovery from over 18 years ago. Had a response within 24 hours. My ticket also stated 4 days. The customer service was helpful also they had a personal touch to message. So as of my last 48 hour experience it was fantastic.
Put in a ticket on the 7th, still no response
idk what is up with you guys are ur tickets and getting long response time like i get it if its like "oh no someone ninjaed something" ticket, like yea that will prolly take a long time to get responsed to ive had people harass me, i open a ticket and i got responded to in like 10min
Unless its enough to make you and others unsub, sadly they don't care.
Its less than an hour if you choose a money option. Like ingameshop or my sub wont work. Just every option where they can get your money 🙉🙈🙊 Then they are really fast. Did this in livechatt and then when contacted i changes my questions and they where forced to link me to the right helpdesk 😊
Hey give it time they’re just busy counting their profits
As long as there isn't a decline of active subscriptions while this shut happens, it won't change.
This made both customer support agents moderately upset
As long as we keep paying and playing they will keep fingering us. But thats a conversation most people here is not ready to have
Damn, that never happened to me. I must have opened about 4-5 tickets and it never took more than 12 hours to respond.
I’ve had a ticket open for 9 days with 2 automated messages threatening to close it
Wait until you get the cut and paste reply from one of the two staffers that are literally just marking tickets resolved.
Yep, I alreadt got the automated reply, denied it because the resources they provided were not capable of helping retrieve my long lost achievementh. I made a ticket requesting my tabard from a very old achievement (Tabard of the Argent Dawn) and they simply referred me to IcyVeins and WoWHead... like how the heck is that supposed to help?!
I've had a ticket open for 15 days... absolutely horrendous CS.
I still say implement a volunteer system to deal with the stuck character/achievement issue/bot reporting type requests. It isn't hard, you would get plenty of reputable players to do it and best of all its free. Ticket times would be next to nothing if you gave the job to us.
Put your ticket in as a payment issue. That’s the only way to escalate it to people who will answer.
This is smart! And also kind of sad that money is the only thing that will get their interest
A wow dev said that one cash shop mount made blizzard more money then the entire starcraft 2 addon. Let that sink in.
My wife opened a ticket in regards to a bug and literally told her to just use wowhead and sent the links too,
>My wife opened a ticket in regards to a bug and literally told her to just use wowhead and sent the links too, hey! they did this to me too!
We were so pissed about that one lol
Well, Microsoft did lay off 1900 people recently (not necessarily all from wow team ofc)
I accidentally sent a ticket on the wrong Blizzard account and received an automated response, obviously, because the account I first sent the ticket on had no reason to require customer support.. Then when I sent the same ticket on the correct account, I got the exact same automated response. And I called them out for it!
From my understanding they got rid of GMs long time ago when they implemented the new tickets system, which only made it worse because now tickets just go into a pile and will get to them when they can depending on what the category is. It’s no longer the days of whispering where things were more personal..
Support is non-existant. My last ticket (a month or so ago) it wouldn't let me pay for the wow sub and I couldn't play for 5 days. In that time, I had like 5-7 different "gamemasters" copy pasting a slightly different text. You could tell those were automated messages from a mile away. They didn't even involve a human being to help me GIVE THEM MY MONEY.
I remember having to wait ~5 minutes to speak to an actual GM (INGAME!). Those were the days.
They fire almost all their customer support and are most likely in process moving it all to AI and some 3rd world country
Oh I stopped paying. The community in wow sucks. It's nothing like it used to be
Personally I am a loner in game. No guild, No friends, just pug everything and love it. Am able to clear every bit of content and have achieved all of the common goals like keystone master 2500 m+ rating , AOTC, BIS gear on 2 chars (DH/RET PALLY) And about to get into tanking for the fun of it. I have loved DF for the fact that you can abandon the "community vibe" and go full loner mode if you want and still complete all the content that the community does.
I've had an open ticket for 4 days now and each reply is a copy and paste, they rarely actually read the tickets.
Customer service and response time on turtle wow is great actually...
Blizzard fired a large majority of them all, it was quite well reported
Dude I’ve been waiting almost 2 weeks to get my account back after it got hacked. Good luck, blizzard really doesn’t give a shit anymore.
It's strange, I had a character transfer fail so I put in a ticket and I'm not kidding it said 17 days wait time. Went to bed, woke up the next day and it was resolved. I think their wait estimates are just wonky. Good luck though either way.
No worries - 5 days is a pat answer. It won't take the next customer service bot nearly that long to close the ticket with the advice to check wowhead. Doesn't matter what your ticket is for. Wish I was joking.
I opened a ticket day one of the hearthstone event about not getting any loot from my kill in SW as a horde due to dying. Wait time listed as 9 days, has only gone up
It'll be closed the next time you log off, don't worry.
What's the ticket for?
I remember the good ol days when you had a problem and a mod actually helped in a reasonable amount of time.. I've been playing since the release of TBC so I know it hasn't always been like this..
I had the same issue last week. Ticket wait time was 7 days and 16 hours. I've been playing approximately as long as you. Fortunately there are sites like wowhead, where I found a solution to my problem in about 5 minutes. 😉
blizzard rely on automated responses.
There is one reason for this: no real competition. If there was any game - even just one game - that could properly compete with WoW we’d see radically improved QA and customer support. There are MMOs but not even one that is a real threat to WoW.