I'm providing these gems of insight to any company that wants to clean up their Customer Service. This is fairly specific to games, MMORPGs in particular.

This is meant as a simple guideline with emphasis on two key issues: Customer Perspectives & Solving Problems.

The mantra of this guide is Keep it Simple or to put it another way: Solve it more, deal with it less. The best customer service is misdirection. It sounds like a paradox, but it's true. To players experiencing problems, they should feel as though it's being worked on, to everyone else your customer service should be invisible. They should feel like problems are fixed mysteriously and magically.

Here are the points:

• Do NOT have Forums. It's drama you don't need. Focus your game on your design. If you want player feedback, ask for it via forms or hire perceptive people to follow the fansites.
• Provide strong community features in-game. This is to replace the server forums. Give them places to congregate and socialize, activities that build server communities. Lists of progression and otherwise. Cooperative content as well as the usual competitive features. Maybe even have in-game Community Managers.
• Do NOT have GMs. Unless you plan on them being actual Game Masters that control monsters and put the smackdown on griefers and exploiters. Otherwise, your GMs will just be magnets for abuse. Problems are better reported and forgotten than dwelling on them while waiting for a GM petition queue.
• Collect player reports. Instead of GM petitions. Sift them automatically if you can.
• Give automated feedback. It's just like gameplay, when you do something it should make a sound, have a visual clue and / or explanation. Player reports should be treated the exact same way, it's reassuring. If they're reporting a known bug, give an ETA on its fix, or point to a list of workarounds.
• Make a black hole. For incomprehensible or pointless player reports. Don't dwell on what cannot be understood. Feedback it as if it was accepted however.
• Do NOT discuss balancing issues. Not unless they're a glaring fix that's obvious. Let the theorycrafting players sort it out for themselves, that's what they like to do anyway. Meanwhile it will give those busybodies less control over your game and the rest of your players (the less vocal majority) will be happier with their characters by not being informed as much about who is overpowered and who isn't.
• Separate bug fixes from patch notes. Make your patch notes about content-only, no matter how small. This will allow players to celebrate the content without distraction. It will also reduce the "introduced more bugs than fixes" perceptions. Lists of fixed bugs should go elsewhere, but don't call them patch notes.
• Make a complete bug and issues list. Detail it thoroughly, categorized and catalogued. The point here isn't full disclosure, it's about flooding the information so it's too long and boring to read. This should result in less drama, although occasionally some nerd will be as thorough as you, but these obsessive geeks cannot be avoided anyway.
• Keep quiet on embarrassing bugs. At least until you fix them. The drama doesn't help the game or the players. Do this very selectively, only on the most extreme cases like say um, gender affects animation attack speed. =P
• Erase all mention of fixed bugs. List them as fixed once, then about a week later, obliterate them. No sense dwelling on the past, it's just another distraction from the game itself.

The idea here is to streamline the process, allow you to fix your issues while ignoring any drama from the players over the bugs. Ignoring and diffusing drama is key! It's not helpful to anyone, least of all the players themselves.

While following this guide, you may be accused of using draconian measures, but the truth is these are modern solutions. You cannot afford to cater to every little perceived need, do not handhold and babysite your players, it's just a waste of resources that could be better spent on your game.

To Players: This is a tongue-in-cheek guide.
To MMORPG developers and publishers: No, it isn't.

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.