So now that we know Blizzard's customer support is really lame, what should they do? Well I have some ideas.
First off, Blizzard really needs to back up accounts. Weekly at a minimum. Daily would be better. Then when this sort of thing happens, a customer can be up and running in a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks. In addition, just think how much time and money would be saved. It can't be very effective to have game masters essentially restoring everything by hand.
Second, Blizzard needs to log usage patterns. For example, say I log in from the same IP address between 9am and 11pm server time every day. And blizzard tracks that information. Then I suddenly log in from a different IP address at 3AM and start selling all my blue and purple gear. Hmmmm. Maybe something is up? Possibly? This should be a very easy thing to implement. If suspicious things start happening, a Blizzard game master should be notified and the account should be monitored.
Third, Blizzard needs to give game masters a little more power. If four guild members from a guild think an account has been hacked, maybe it would be a good idea if they could act? If you had the usage data described above it would be easy to figure out if someone is getting hacked.
Finally, if Blizzard doesn't do any of the above, they could at least e-mail customers with the status of the investigation every couple of days. Then at least a player with a hacked account would know they are working on fixing things. Leaving people hanging for days is just plain stupid. Just think if your phone went out or your power. Would you be ok with them getting back to you sometime in the next two weeks?
Blizzard needs to address some of these issues. They are the king of the hill right now, but if you don't treat your customers right, you are not gonna build any loyalty. And if you don't do that, as soon as the next good MMORPG comes out, they will wish they had treated folks a little bit better.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
The Trouble with Blizzard Support - Part I
This is the first part of a two part post on some stuff that happened with our Guild Master and our Guild back in December. I have broken the discussion into 2 parts. In this part, I will discuss the facts of what happened. In the next, post I'll try to make suggestions about what Blizzard should do and what they should have done.
Our guild master and her family are avid World of Warcraft players. They have two accounts and play regularly. They also have a nephew who lives nearby and plays as well. Our story begins when our GMs son visited his cousins house and played a little WOW. Apparently, hackers got a key logger installed on his machine. Therefore, while playing there, the hackers were able to obtain the passwords to both of my GMs accounts and her nephew's account.
Fast forward a few weeks to just before Christmas. Our GM logs off for the night around 12am server time. Pretty typical for her. And since it was near the holidays, we had several guildees (like about 5 or 6, including a couple of officers) playing most of the night. At like 3am, our GM and then her husband log in. Now being married with kids, this is very unusual. So our guildees said hi to her. No reply. So several of them begin to ask what's up. One of the hackers pleasantly tells them to "F*!# off, you idiots". Since our guild has a strict policy against using profanity, guild members realized almost immediately that our GM's account has been hacked. They all open tickets with Blizz game masters to shut down the account. Now this is 4 or 5 people opening at least 1 ticket. By now the Guild Bank has been emptied. Then the hackers begin to gkick all the guild members above level 30. So the fact that we have been hacked has been confirmed.
So our members finally get a hold of game masters and report that the GMs account has been hacked, they are robbing our guild bank, and gkicking members. Blizzards response "we can't do anything, only the account holder can shut down the account." So Blizzard does nothing. Absolutely nothing until, we are able to reach our GM via e-mail at about 3pm the next day. Then our GM changes her account password and calls Blizzard tech support alerting them to the fact that the account has been hacked.
The end result of Blizzard's lack of response? Our guild bank is emptied completely, probably losing the guild items worth 1000 to 2000 gold. All of our GMs toons are stripped of their gear or deleted. Her husbands account is also stripped and transferred to another server. (I find this particularly interesting as most character transfers take at least a day. They were able to move his primary toon from one server to another in 12 hours. Makes one wonder if the hackers don't have a back door into Blizzard's transfer system.) So their toons are stripped of gear and everything is sold and all their gold is taken.
So how does Blizzard respond? With an immediate call back? With a quick restore from the day before? No they gave each account a 3 day ban. Yep. If you report being hacked, Blizzard will shut you off the game for 72 hrs. Nice huh. And don't expect them to tell you anything. Cause they won't. They will say they are "investigating" and nothing else.
So what happens after the 72 hrs? A quick restore of your account? A detailed e-mail on what they have found out? Nope nothing. You get nothing. They say pretty much nothing other than they will be in touch after they have completed their investigation.
So fast forward 2 weeks, a Blizzard Gamemaster finally contacts our GM and begins to restore some of her stuff. But anything really important like her primary weapon (a bow, she's a hunter) or other gear, you don't get back. We got nothing back for our Guild bank. She get's practically none of her gear back for alts. It takes another couple of weeks before they restore stuff on her husbands toon.
Pretty lousy support if you ask me. What can we deduce from this state of affairs? A few things.
Our guild master and her family are avid World of Warcraft players. They have two accounts and play regularly. They also have a nephew who lives nearby and plays as well. Our story begins when our GMs son visited his cousins house and played a little WOW. Apparently, hackers got a key logger installed on his machine. Therefore, while playing there, the hackers were able to obtain the passwords to both of my GMs accounts and her nephew's account.
Fast forward a few weeks to just before Christmas. Our GM logs off for the night around 12am server time. Pretty typical for her. And since it was near the holidays, we had several guildees (like about 5 or 6, including a couple of officers) playing most of the night. At like 3am, our GM and then her husband log in. Now being married with kids, this is very unusual. So our guildees said hi to her. No reply. So several of them begin to ask what's up. One of the hackers pleasantly tells them to "F*!# off, you idiots". Since our guild has a strict policy against using profanity, guild members realized almost immediately that our GM's account has been hacked. They all open tickets with Blizz game masters to shut down the account. Now this is 4 or 5 people opening at least 1 ticket. By now the Guild Bank has been emptied. Then the hackers begin to gkick all the guild members above level 30. So the fact that we have been hacked has been confirmed.
So our members finally get a hold of game masters and report that the GMs account has been hacked, they are robbing our guild bank, and gkicking members. Blizzards response "we can't do anything, only the account holder can shut down the account." So Blizzard does nothing. Absolutely nothing until, we are able to reach our GM via e-mail at about 3pm the next day. Then our GM changes her account password and calls Blizzard tech support alerting them to the fact that the account has been hacked.
The end result of Blizzard's lack of response? Our guild bank is emptied completely, probably losing the guild items worth 1000 to 2000 gold. All of our GMs toons are stripped of their gear or deleted. Her husbands account is also stripped and transferred to another server. (I find this particularly interesting as most character transfers take at least a day. They were able to move his primary toon from one server to another in 12 hours. Makes one wonder if the hackers don't have a back door into Blizzard's transfer system.) So their toons are stripped of gear and everything is sold and all their gold is taken.
So how does Blizzard respond? With an immediate call back? With a quick restore from the day before? No they gave each account a 3 day ban. Yep. If you report being hacked, Blizzard will shut you off the game for 72 hrs. Nice huh. And don't expect them to tell you anything. Cause they won't. They will say they are "investigating" and nothing else.
So what happens after the 72 hrs? A quick restore of your account? A detailed e-mail on what they have found out? Nope nothing. You get nothing. They say pretty much nothing other than they will be in touch after they have completed their investigation.
So fast forward 2 weeks, a Blizzard Gamemaster finally contacts our GM and begins to restore some of her stuff. But anything really important like her primary weapon (a bow, she's a hunter) or other gear, you don't get back. We got nothing back for our Guild bank. She get's practically none of her gear back for alts. It takes another couple of weeks before they restore stuff on her husbands toon.
Pretty lousy support if you ask me. What can we deduce from this state of affairs? A few things.
- Blizzard does not back up your toons. The GM had to give our guild master her stuff one at a time. This means they have no backups of accounts and no way to restore them. They must take snap shots of your inventory list, but that must be the extent of their data protection.
- Blizzard gamemasters and tech support have no authority to help you. Bascially, you are screwed if you get hacked. If someone contacts you in time, you can reset your password, but that only kicks the hacker if they log out before stealing all your stuff. You are on your own. Blizard support can't do anything to help you.
- Blizzard does not take hacking or customer support seriously. They are taking in around $150M a month in revenue. There is NO excuse for not backing up players data. NONE!!! Disk arrays and storage are cheap. It would not be that difficult to backup accounts weekly or bi-weekly. Obviously they don't think this is important.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
AV Issues
WowInsider has posted this article which discusses the ongoing issues with AV. Apparently Horde turtle wins are so pervasive in some battlegroups, the alliance has stopped playing all together, causing 1 to 2 hr queues just to get in a match. I can understand why the alliance players quit, if the Horde forces a turtle and you end up getting 20 honor points from a 30 min game it is a waste of your time.
It is in the best interests of both sides to make the BG into a race. Race games last about 10 minutes. The winner gets 300-400 honor, losers get 200-300. So if you are winning most of the time, 900-1200 honor for 3 race games is better than the 800 honor you would get from one turtle game. Unfortunately, some players are incapable of doing the math or are just jerks and enjoy ruining the game for the other side.
Ultimately Blizzard needs to balance the game so that the losing team always gets a reasonable amount of honor in a reasonable amount of time. That is what made AV so popular in the past, it was the best way to have fun and grind PVP honor.
I just wish Blizzard would test some of these changes before making them. They seem to have a very bad habit of breaking that which is not broken. Then taking months to fix that which is newly broke. Frankly, I think a lot of people are getting tired of this.
It is in the best interests of both sides to make the BG into a race. Race games last about 10 minutes. The winner gets 300-400 honor, losers get 200-300. So if you are winning most of the time, 900-1200 honor for 3 race games is better than the 800 honor you would get from one turtle game. Unfortunately, some players are incapable of doing the math or are just jerks and enjoy ruining the game for the other side.
Ultimately Blizzard needs to balance the game so that the losing team always gets a reasonable amount of honor in a reasonable amount of time. That is what made AV so popular in the past, it was the best way to have fun and grind PVP honor.
I just wish Blizzard would test some of these changes before making them. They seem to have a very bad habit of breaking that which is not broken. Then taking months to fix that which is newly broke. Frankly, I think a lot of people are getting tired of this.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
More Kudos to the Exiles
Since my last post, Exalted Exiles have downed:
- Illhoof
- Shade of Aran
- And we got the Prince down to 10%
Grats to everyone who was on any of those runs. We just need to work on our Prince strategy and he is down next.
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