Considering that I let my WoW account lapse into suspension around Christmas, I was a bit surprised to get an email response today regarding a GM complaint I made in October.

It was a pretty simple matter of a griefing player, but the GM that answered in-game originally gave a form response of "disputes on PvP servers are expected to be handled by PvP resolutions". Except Silvermoon is a PvE server and the complaint wasn't about PvP per se (nobody was flagged). So at the time, I sent off a simple GM feedback complaint that the GM hadn't taken the time to check the server-type.

It's rather amusing that a complaint of a lax GM gets responded to months later.

Overall, during my 3 years playing WoW, I would say that the customer service was good. Especially the in-game customer service. Blizzard made it very clear early on that they intended to have in-game solutions to stop gold farmers, griefers and other player-involved disruptions. Indeed, the GMs I'd spoken to expressed policies that they wanted players to report to GMs more, not less.

After Burning Crusade however, the situation seemed to change. Blizzard's customer service went downhill in a big way, both in-game and out. GMs were poorly trained, slow to respond and sometimes acted like they were being bothered rather than happy to help. This became more and more evident as players explained their GM experiences on the forums, then the forum posts themselves started getting removed.

Honestly, it wasn't a big factor in my leaving WoW. I left because of gaps in the game. But it's indicative of changes with Blizzard: they were once a company that focused on the details.