The 24/7 Customer Support is excellent

I just had a thought, and that was that Blizzard's 24/7 customer support is pretty much some of the best customer support I've ever had to deal with in my life.

And this is support on a darned GAME.

While the forums are a pretty poor place to express this sentiment, I believe that in most average cases when it comes to the everyday running of the game, this support line is an exemplar of not only the game industry but most any industry.

My case in point. I was playing one night on the weekend. It's about 2 AM or something in the morning, I had just gotten home from a party when I notice that my girlfriend had logged online just now. There was NO WAY that she was playing because she was in bed. I check the armory page quickly - sure enough her toons were stripped naked.

I immediately contact GM Support and send them a letter saying that I had suspicion to believe that her account was being hacked.

Less than half an hour later, they had her account locked down and letters sent out to her alternate contact address. By the next day (on SUNDAY) the guild banks that had been accessed were restored and she had the form waiting for account retrieval.

I have had many other examples where the customer support staff were able to quickly resolve most of my simple, item-maintenance needs. They were able to reassign mis-looted items, restore scams from in-game trades, and switch my mis-selected quest rewards.

Unfortunately there were a few limitations to their powers - once I erased an enchant and they couldn't change that; similarly a friend of mine said that they refused to grant her skill points when she had forgotten to train. While these kinds of mistakes might upset a player, it's understandable why they won't give "freebies" in this case. There are some mistakes that you see here and there but I think that many of those are blown out of proportion in comparison to the regular hard work and prompt service that we're used to receiving.

So let's give a moment of recognition to the GMs who work for Blizzard and have made the World of Warcraft experience a better one. There are a lot of controversies about the way that Blizzard designed this game but I think the 24/7 GM support is something that they really have managed to get right.