Blizzard Won’t Transfer My Character

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post. As you may know, me and Blizzard have a sort of rocky relationship. First they locked my account, then I said I will never play WoW again, then I reconsidered. I was wondering whether or not I would get my Warrior character back at some point. It seems that the answer is no:

Greetings ,

In order to transfer a character between accounts both accounts need to be the same version (i.e. if one account is a full version account the other one would need to be so as well). So it won’t be possible to transfer a character from the trial account to the new account. What we needed to do was to use the key from the new box to upgrade the old account, that would unlock the old account. As an authentication key can only be used once we have two options if you still wanted to use that old character: 1) I can get you the information to get a refund for that authentication key (keep in mind the new account will be permanently closed) and then use the new key to upgrade the old account. 2) You could purchase a new authentication key to upgrade the second account.

Best Regards,

Wait… Didn’t they just tell me to “Buy Another Box”.

…

OMFG!

…

LOL!

After all this, I get another “either buy a new box, or lose your progress with the new character” choice. I guess when we talked on the phone I did not understand his instructions correctly. I thought I was supposed to create a new account and get the character transferred. Apparently this is not the case which means I now have to either spend more money, or choose between the two characters.

This is seriously stupid but I don’t really care anymore. I pick the hunter, and as long as they keep their paws of of him think I’ll be ok. They can take the Warrior and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine (and by that I mean one of the WoW data centers of course – server rooms rarely have windows, no?).

Sigh… Blizzard, why won’t you let me love you? Seriously, the game is great but your customer support is shit and your problem resolution procedure is full of “do or die” gotchas. I didn’t follow the instructions correctly – or I followed the wrong instructions and now I’m screwed. I know that Blizzard apologists will bring up gold farming, scams and all that stuff again but it doesn’t really matter anyway. In fact I sort of expected this to happen, and this is one of the reasons why I just rolled up a new character and started playing. I just knew there will be another issue there.

The other reason of course is the fact that Blizzard phone support is closed on the weekends. WTF? Why? I mean, I can understand that people like to have weekends off, but come on. You can do shifts. You can outsource. You can do lots of things. And don’t tell me outsourced support is shit – I got totally shafted here, and the billing dept. representatives were completely powerless to help me. They could have easily been from an outsourcing group in India – the level of service I got would probably not change.

Don’t get me wrong I do appreciate the fact that their phone people actually speak English but I wish they would actually pick up the phone on the weekends when people actually, you know – play the games. Not everyone has time to play on weekdays. Not everyone can take 2-3 hours out of their schedule to troubleshoot their WoW issues on the phone on a Monday evening. Weekends are when people play games, and have time to resolve game related issues. But Blizzard only does Mon-Fri tech support. It sucks.

But, I don’t care anymore. Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care. I’m going to enjoy the game, and hope I never have to call that stupid 1-800 number again.

[tags]wow, blizzard, support, world of warcraft[/tags]