Can Blizzard help with a ban in World of Warcraft? No, because the ban was fair. Even if you weren’t banned at all.
Years ago, Blizzard and especially World of Warcraft were known for their excellent customer support. Even today, veterans report finding game masters in the open game world who took care of their problems.
But over the years that has changed. More and more employees have been laid off, game masters are rarely visible and the waiting times for tickets to be processed are either long or the answers appear to be automated.
One player wanted to prove that some problems go unnoticed – he set a trap that customer service – or the automated version of it – immediately fell into.
What did the player do? Because there have been more and more rumors and indications in recent months that requests for unjustified account penalties only receive attention if you attract a lot of public attention on Twitter/X or Reddit, user h3lnwein wanted to find out what customer service is really like :
Inspired by another post here, I wanted to find out if customer service even looks at ban appeals. So I wrote a query. My account was never banned and I wrote the ticket while logged in with my character.
He attached the result in the form of screenshots.
What did he write? In his ticket to Blizzard he wrote:
Hello, my account was permanently blocked because I “abused the chat” with my magician. It says that my account has been permanently blocked. I didn’t do anything, what’s going on? There weren’t even any reports! Please reply as quickly as possible.
The answer to that was pretty sobering. Because he was again informed that the “action was carried out in accordance with the terms of use, which you agree to before playing.”
h3lnwein then asks again:
Yes, but I didn’t do anything, really nothing! Can someone please look at this again? Did anyone actually see the report I got and review evidence?
But he only got the same answer and the ticket was marked as “completed”.
The catch: honey wine isn’t banned the whole time. He wanted to prove that such requests are now only handled automatically and that no human review takes place.
This is how the community reacts: In the WoW subreddit, people are having a lot of fun with the successful trick to find out whether tickets of this type are still being responded to correctly. However, some also point out that “exploiting support” can also be punishable.
“For one of the few games in the world that people are willing to actually pay subscription fees for, I can’t express how frustrated and angry I would be if this happened to me” – rodeBaksteen
Of course, none of this reflects well on Blizzard and customer service. But after the recent layoffs, it seems logical that things will continue to go downhill.