Customer disservice

Another in a long string of occurrences that make me question Blizz and their notoriously bad customer service.

I love the Warcraft. It is a wonderful social game where I have made several good friends, friendships that bleed over into real life and will be there when wow is dust. I have also had the honor of having experienced the wonders of their customer service as I watched my brother log in when it was not him, watched him go from the bank to the mailbox while not answering tells, watched him strip to his shorts and make one last trip to the box. The whole time I had in a ticket, for hours no one replied. Locking the barn after the horses get away is pointless.

Even with the screen shots, the instant ticket put in, and phone calls my brother tried to make while we watched him get ransacked, it still took weeks to get his character back. Now in a knee-jerk reaction Blizz seems to be throwing their nets wide and not caring about the consequences. I suppose when you have ten million accounts losing a few might not seem to matter, but new things are on the horizon. If folks are unhappy enough they will move elsewhere.

Remember all the companies that outsourced tech support over the last decade? Look into how many lost business as a result. Now many companies are moving back to doing their own in house customer service. A shining example of this kind of callousness can be found on Temerity-Janes blog Here. I don’t know what else I can say other than good luck. Some times bad things happen to good people, I hope your story has a happy ending.

Edit: An interesting post about the why of the ban series can be found at priestly endeavors here.

My point is not to scream at Blizz for this particular issue, but for their very difficult to work with customer service in general.

Their recent tactic in using prior purchases with the same credit card information to support a ban I strongly disagree with. A for instance would be if I were to purchase a gaming keyboard that has programmable keystrokes with time delay built in as a gift for a friend who does not play wow, never installing it or it’s software in my system. Would this be considered sufficient wrong doing to hit me with the ban hammer? I understand that the credit card info they received was for purchasers of glider software, but it sets a dangerous precedent.

I don’t see this as having a long term impact on purchasing such things, it merely makes sure the “bad guys” pay for their hacks with cash and their accounts with game cards. I don’t know how far this will go, but I would like Blizz’s customer service to be a bit more forthcoming and a bit less confrontational.

A little help goes a long way

Before I start this, I am not tooting my own horn. I am A decent hunter, but by no means an expert. I have leveled one to 70 and raided as far as Kara before I switched to healing on my priest. I am now leveling a second one, alliance side. I have some experience, but still can’t seem to get the jump shot down. I strafe kite when kiting needs to be done. I will also note chain trapping is much less fun at 40 than 70.

Now back to the post…

An interesting thing happened to me a few days ago. I was playing on the alliance hunter I am currently leveling In Tenaris. I was just questing through, minding my own business an I made A bit of a boo boo. I pulled 4 mobs of level 44/45 when I meant to pull one out of the pack (for reference I was 40 at the time). I figured I was dead, but as I only needed two more to finish the quest I was on I decided to try to get them before the corpse run.

I put the pet on the caster, trapped to one with the stun ability, and commenced kiting the two others. As I finished burning down the caster and put the pet on the trap I noticed my health going UP on occasion. I check my buffs, Woot! druid hot’s! Sweet I think, There’s hope. So I killed, kited, and trapped till they were all gone.

I look around when the dust settles, there is a mid 50’s druid sitting a bit away. I go over to say thanks, he asks me if I can do it again for his friend. I said I would try and we partied up. A few minutes later his friend arrived. The hunter was 41, specced an odd hybrid of all three trees, and equipped with lots of +strength and +Stam gear. We went over to the next batch of mobs and pulled the whole group again, this time on purpose. With the much appreciated help of the druid’s hots I repeated the earlier performance.

On a side note I forgot how much my 70 hunter relied on both the beastlord set bonus to trapping and the improved trapping skills from being 17 points into survival. You know the old saying “you don’t miss something until it’s gone”? Well I sure missed it then. I can’t even imagine trying it one level earlier. I would have had no bestial wrath, no feign death, and would have still been wearing all leather instead of half mail.

Back to the story, We got to to chatting for a bit about wow in general. It turns out these two, and two other real life friends are all leveling their first characters at the same time. One druid and three hunters. They were new to the game, but had already figured out something that worked for them. The three hunters would all sic their pets on something and kill it while the druid healed. Not a bad system really, it just needed more than one of them online at once. None of them knew what kind of gear they needed. none knew anything special about talent specs. And the other two were logging in right now, could I show them too?

So that is how I ended up in a party of four hunters and one druid. We ran about for some time with me doing things and the others trying. We talked more about specs and gear choices. I pointed them to several blogs for both hunters and druids. Places like BRK, Gun Lovin Dwarf Chick, and Aspect of the Hare for huntering, Big Bear Butt, Leafshine, and Ferocious Bite for druiding. These folks have forgotten more about their classes than I have learned, and they have loads of links to other great sites as well. I also warned them to take everything on the official blizzard forums with a grain big bag of salt. We played around with trapping a bit, having each one of them trap the same mob in turn to keep it trapped while they each tanked and killed one of the other three. When we were done with that we decided to go plow through the pirates along the coast. Watching how fast things went down to the four of us focus firing was amazing.

After about an hour of playing around I had to log. I told them it was the most fun I had in the game in a while. They all said they planned to log as well and go do some blog reading. I think the highlight was as I was logging out. I watched someone try to sell one of the hunters a +strength axe during my countdown the last thing on my screen was “Are you nuts? a hunter needs agility”. I think I did some good, and that’s a good feeling.