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Saturday, May 02, 2009

Classic customer service

So, there's this guy in World of Warcraft who'd had his account hacked and some characters swiped. Eventually (after a very very long time) Blizzard gets around to restoring the characters. Of course the characters' original items and gear were long gone, but Blizaard tends to put a sort of randomish sort of loot on restored characters, so you've at least got something to go on with.

One of the items Blizzard apparently furnished was a shirt. Not just any shirt, though, a shirt that kills all the enemies within 30 feet, with 100 uses. Something that, it seems, players aren't supposed to have. Blizzard use it for testing purposes.

Probably the item shouldn't be in the live-game object database, but heck - Blizzard gave it to him, and he tried it out. Not a big surprise there.

Every member of his guild got a 24 hour suspension, and the player himself has been banned. For cheating. My co-workers over at WoW Insider have an interview with the poor bugger.

Now that's classic customer service.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:53 AM

    So WoW is hiring LL G Team or vice versa?

    How sad. That should be a lawsuit if there was a lawyer willing to do it just for some internet fame and to make Blizzard look stupid.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I see that WOW is giving Google AdSense some competition in the classic customer service game.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I hadn't made that connection, but that is an undeniably trenchant observation :) Well spotted :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Actually the problem with Google AdSense is with how they treat their suppliers, rather than their customers - but it comes to the same thing.

    (On how to listen to customers I like the twitter stream of Kathy Sierra. But you can't follow her blog, because she stopped blogging after getting heavily griefed.)

    ReplyDelete
  5. There was a time, in real life, when there were many shirts like this.
    Even if they didn't actually kill you, they were so hideously gaudy that people quite often wanted to commit suicide rather than spend any longer looking at the wretched things.

    Ahh! The 1970s: The decade that style forgot.

    ReplyDelete

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