Blizzard today announched that an extra 250,000 copies of World of warcraft would soon be hitting the shelves of Europe. From what myself and thousands of other gamers have found they cannot even provide customer support for the gamers they have with a product which is in a polite way of puting it flawed.
The horror stories are numerous and the official tech support forum is littered with people who cannot access a game they have payed to play (in my case billed 3 times for one month) this however is just the tip of the iceberg as because if you didnt have a "Beta" account you cannot post on their forums. The true number of people locked out for no fault of their own must be reaching tens of thousands.
basically the problem at the moment is one of customer support. All new patches are done on a friday and then the customer support team signs off for the weekend leaving everyone high and dry at the only time most people have any kind of quality spare time to play. Why not patch on a Monday? then they have all week to sort things out instead of going for an extended siesta. If you took your car in for a service and they gave it you back with no wheels and said " sorry mate closed for the weekend" come back monday would you accept it?
I myself have been billed 3 seperate times for one month, and have this proof on my bank statement. Theres no point emailing customer support/billing support as the emails are always fired back to you as undeliverable. Try ringing? no chance they dont accept calls anymore as the system is overloaded. Can u contact blizzard at all or even let them know of any problems if you wernt a beta tester? NO.
Ok you would think i can just about accept being billed knowing that in time (i hope) i would get a refund. at least i can still play the game...... Well thats a big NO as well as they have lost thousands of peoples credit card details meaning you have to enter the details again and again, this results in the extra billing. The main screen for most people as i speak is informing them that their pre-paid credit has run out even when people have paid for 6 months in advance. You cannot log into account managament as this leads to a french page and has as i type been unaccesable for over 48hrs.
For a company making this much money from customers you would think customer support 24/7 would be a top priorty. It appears blizzard are basically taking money for a service which is not being provided, and making absolutely no statements at all about what is being done with the problem. In my eyes thats theft. If they lose a whold load of customers over this they wont care as so many people are waiting for a copy of the game they will soon be replaced. by a whole new generation of unsuspecting punters who don't know what hell they are entering with a customer support system that is non existent and a repeat billing system which is nothing short of highway robbery, for a game that is inacessable.
PC mags such as yourselves are always printing the good news stories, about " Biggest MMORPG EVER!!" How about reporting the problems of thousands of paying customers? WOW europe news even had the audacity to put two april fools jokes on their homepage instead of a tiny statement to even agknowlege the problems. The only fools are us the paying customers, for putting up with this joke.
Rant over
