Customer support

Once upon a time there was a player of World of Warcraft whose account got hacked. The hacker disenchanted all his items, and the shards and his gold sent to different players by mail. At first our WoW player was terribly sad, and quit his WoW account. But after some time he came out of his depression, decided to fight the evil, resubscribed to WoW, and contacted the Blizzard customer support. And look, in an example of excellent customer support Blizzard reinstated all his items, and banned all the accounts of the players who had received the shards and gold from the evil hacker. And so the player lived on happily ever after.

Once upon a time in a parallel universe there was a player of World of Warcraft who had burned out and gotten bored. So he disenchanted all his items, and sent the shards and his gold to several guild mates by mail. Then he cancelled his account. But some times later he realized that this had been a stupid mistake. He wanted to get back to WoW, but of course he didn't want to restart naked. So he contacted the Blizzard customer supported, invented a completely fictitious story of having been hacked, and the stupid suckers believed him and gave him back all his stuff. The player hadn't thought very deeply about this move, and so half of his guild mates getting banned for receiving stolen goods came as some surprise to him. But well, he said, better them than me, and kept mum. But he told the real story to a friend, who was also a friend of one of the banned players, and the guild learned why so many of them were suddenly gone. They contacted Blizzard customer support, but the customer support turned out to be totally unable to digest such a complicated tale, and the players remained banned. The guild split up and they lived on unhappily ever after.

Not my guild, not even my server, fortunately. But the second version of this fairy tale is how a friend, a member of the guild that broke up, but not involved in the bannings, told it to me. Since several years I cite the official policy that Everquest had for a while (don't know if they still have it), that if a player reported he got hacked, his account was automatically banned, punishing the victim even further. I used to consider that as a prime example for bad customer service, but in this case it would obviously have been the right response. There *are* trojans and keyloggers stealing WoW passwords, so being hacked is a possibility. But how can a customer service representative know if somebody was really hacked, or if he was just stupid and then changed his mind? How can the word of one guy be enough evidence to ban several other accounts? It would seem to me that such a customer service situation is impossible to resolve, and whatever decision the GM takes, it has a good chance to punish the completely wrong guy.