Recently, Blizzard dropped the banhammer on a ton of players, players that were removed from the game for allegedly using the Glider software to bot.

I’m not even going to try to break down that statement. People doing it were intentionally cheating, and while some may complain, I’ve personally seen several emails by folks that were banned that had been using the software, that openly admitted that they new they were cheating, but figured they’d never be caught because the software was designed to be hard to trace, and that, as Monty Python might say, “It’s a fair cop”. they also mostly said leveling without botting was too boring once they had their first level 70, and if they wanted to get into playing another character in PvP they saw no reasoning to go through the grind of leveling it all over again.

/facepalm

I do have to give credit to those players whose emails I saw, by the way. I hate cheating in multiplayer games, but I have yet to see a cheater that got banned that objected because they thought it was okay. They knew it was against the ToS, and they were busted. They didn’t cry about it.

I’m sure they are out there… please don’t direct me to where they are QQing. Leave me my illusions, please?

Just last night I remarked in guild chat how delightful it was to fly around on my Hunter Miner, farming nodes of Rich Adamantite, at times when the zone and server are usually barren and overfarmed.

But as with all good things, there has to be some bad. And this is just particularly vile.

Blizzard banned a great many people. And at least one of those people seems to have a massive following asserting that they have known him and played actively with him for a very long time, and that he has never ‘botted’ or cheated.

I am talking about the Hunter Lamaa of Aetherial Circle, the same guild that so very many WoW bloggers are a part of.

TJ wrote a very good post about it, asking for other bloggers to issue a call to arms.

I do not know Lamaa personally. I’ve never even spoken with him, as far as I know. I can’t speak for his integrity, or what he may have tried while drunk and high on crack for two hours in the depths of a dark Saturday night of his soul.

Personally, I believe Lamaa, but I certainly can’t swear to his innocence before a court of Blizz law.

But there is a part to this story that slams home, with great force.

And that is Lamaa’s utter inability to make personal contact with anyone in Blizzards’ customer service that is willing to help him. That, in fact, he is just completely without any kind of helpful guide to getting an answer, explanation, or resolution.

I have stated before that my account was hacked a year and a half ago. I’m pretty sure I already wrote about the experience extensively elsewhere.

Even better, I mentioned just yesterday, is that I still have all of the emails that I received from Blizzard about my petition to get my stuff back. Emails that span a month and a half, and that were literally my ONLY recourse to getting my problem addressed, and that repeatedly say not to attempt to call about my issue, and that in the end let me know that they would not help me in any way, via a form letter. I think I might just make those into PDFs and upload them with appropriate blackouts for your enjoyment later.

Because my account was still active after I was hacked, I was able to post my problem in the official WoW Forums Customer Service section. Where my posts asking for help were first, filled with people (not Blizz employees) assuring me I must be a gold buyer, account sharer, moron or user of illegal software or I would not have been hacked. Then, without a Blizz reply, my thread was deleted. I tried several times to post my problem, with it getting deleted each time, and I started camping on the Customer Serice forum to figure out what was going on.

What I found out at that time, the week after Christmas, was that MANY people had been hacked, that MANY of them were posting anxious threads asking for help, and that within minutes ALL of them were being deleted. Once I recognised that it wasn’t a mistake or glitch, that there was intentional action taking place to remove any thread created by anyone that had been hacked asking for help, I stopped going to the customer service forum. I waited for my emails to update me on the status of my stuff, and I never went back. Why bother?

I’ve said it before… I love Blizzards’ game designers and programmers, the artists and writers. I love the game. Even after my experience with customer service and getting hacked, I still play, because I love the game.

But I see the customer service department for what it was then… worthless. Amlost criminally so. Just because you sell a product and make people agree to your terms of service before they can use it, does not in my opinion mean you are absolved from providing any customer service to them in the future. Nice trick if you can pull it off, though.

I had thought that there were now manned phone lines for help with account problems. I had thought that customer service had become MUCH more responsive to problems people experience when their accounts get hacked. I thought, basically, that the word I had gotten recently was that Blizzard had acknowledged the shameful nature of their customer service, and worked to correct it.

I sincerely hope that Lamaa gets the opportunity to receive what we expect as the very least that any company can provide in terms of customer service… someone to try and help him with his problem. 

I hope that, as someone in TJ’s comments said, the problem may be as simple as Blizzard wanting to help everyone to the best of their ability, but being temporarily swamped by the sheer volume of complaints and reported issues, both honest and not, and that it will only take them some time to investigate his particular situation and get it straightened out.

I really, truly do.

But believe me when I say, I was there the week that hundreds got hacked for Christmas… I was one of the ones affected… and I saw, first hand, how I and many others were treated when we tried to have our cries for help heard.

We were silenced… our pleas for help not merely ignored, but deleted by the Blizzard forum customer service moderators.

I speculated at the time as to why they did it… were they afraid that people would see that hacking was a major issue, and they wanted to prevent the sheer volume of complaints from being reported on a news site, scaring other customers away? Or was there some other reason, one that I just didn’t know? Were they afraid news that customers were getting hacked would hurt sales of the game after Christmas? I have no idea whatsoever.

It’s enough for me to know that I will continue to love this game, and play it, but I have no faith in Blizzards’ customer support to treat the customers fairly and with actual concern, and I will never, ever log into the game without wondering if I’m going to see my characters stripped naked again.

Good luck to you, Lamaa. God bless you. I wish you all the best, and I hope you get to play with your friends again soon and provide Massive Quantities of Sustained Ranged DPS.

WTB a phone number at Blizzard someone actually answers, to forward to Lamaa. PST.

Disclaimer - I am horrible… HORRIBLE… at returning emails.

I get hundreds of emails a day. Between the blog and WoW Insider, I’m freaking serious.

BRK never mentions this, so either he is far more organized than I am, or, well… he’s probably just more organised than I am.

I made the mistake of mentioning my email depsair to TJ once. She quickly informed me that she spends hours each night answering every single email, because HER readers matter to her. And she reaffirmed the fact that, yes, I suck.

Note to self: Don’t go crying to TJ for sympathy in future.

But really. I cry inside, but I just can’t answer them all when I’m at work. I do my best to answer the ones that are folks saying Hi, but if there is a question asking for info, it gets read, and then I move on, fully intending to get to it as soon as I can.

And then a month later, with several hundred emails asking for in-depth answers to tanking or druid questions… none of whom I even acknowledged at the time, because “I’ll answer that tonight when I get home”… I give in to despair, crack the seal on a bottle of Captain Morgan and get drunk.

But sometimes… sometimes, I get an email that not only asks a question, but asks one that I can answer super-quickly, and at just the right time at work for me to have the 20 minutes it takes to actually put the answer down in pixel form.

Congratulations Saresa, you managed to hit the window of opportunity, and your email question will actually get answered instead of sitting forgotten for two months.

And if you have emailed me with a serious question, and never heard from me again… I’m sorry. I really am. I read it, I swear I did.

I suck. I know this.

I really do intend to answer your questions when I get home, but… my email’s the black hole, it swallows not only your questions but also my will to live.

Now, on to the question from Saresa! 

Saresa of Destructive Reach wrote;
 

I was talking to a druid friend of mine the other day, and he mentioned Barkskin when we were AoEing.  Now, me being the noob druid I am, didn’t even realise that feral druids had that spell. 

Anyway, my friend said that it is useful for tanking, but I am not so sure, seeing as it lasts a whole 12 seconds.  I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the issue.

Saresa/Hermia

Thank you very much for your question, Saresa!

Your friend is right, but possibly not in the way you might be thinking.

What Barkskin primarily does for feral tanks, is allows us to cast a channeled spell against a group of enemies without the possibility of interruption.

Feral druids do not have any threat mitigation abilities, and that applies to our spells, as well. So our spell damage does a little more threat than other spell casters.

To provide you the most common example of Barkskin tanking, I’ll talk about the trash pulls prior to Moroes in Karazhan.

There are mobs of non-elite opponents just prior to Moroes, that are too great in number for a bear tank to swipe or tab-target easily, and that are a mix of physical and ranged casters.

As a druid main tank for these pulls, you can have the rest of your team stand down a bit on the stairs, and then you pop your caster-form head up onto the landing.

Target one of the non-elite crowd, fire off a ranged spell of choice, and then duck back down the stairs out of line of sight, forcing the entire group, ranged casters and physical alike, to come to you as a tight group.

When you back down the stairs, pop your Barkskin, and activate your channeled spell Hurricane to bring up the targeting reticle.

Barksin lasts 12 seconds, Hurricane lasts 10. This gives you 2 seconds after firing off Barkskin to activate Hurricane and center your targeting reticle properly, and still get your full 10 seconds worth of damage ticks on the mobs.

Be warned, sometimes I have found the reticle graphics to bug, leaving you no positive idea where your AOE target is for Hurricane. Just an FYI, keep an eye on where your mouseover icon is when you prepare to activate your spell.

As the group of enemies crests the rise and comes down the stairs to you, you fire off Hurricane, doing a ton of AOE damage to every mob at once, and with Barkskin up they can pound you for 12 seconds without interrupting the spell.

As long as your healers are prepared for you to be in squishy form, and the party casters let you have a second or two for Hurricane to tick some Threat, you should have no problems holding aggro for the life of your Barkskin.

If you practise how you back away and at the last second jink back in towards them a bit as they crest the landing, the ranged casters usually abandon casting for melee, tightening the group up some more, something I do most often when pulling the tables right in front of Moroes…

If you have multiple Druids that are also Barkskin/Hurricaning, and of course the masters of AOE, Mages, it makes potentially hectic free-for-alls of mobs running all over the place chasing healers and spike damage into a tightly orchestrated massacre, leaving a small pile of corpses at your feet.

Win! 

Saresa, I hope this answers your question, and that you enjoy having this additional technique to pull mobs of enemies.

With multiple healers in a 5 man, this can be nuts, but lots of fun, if your group is in a playful mood.

Say you have an atypical group makeup for a 5 man, with two healers and two druids or a druid and a mage, and a DPS. You can have a lot of fun on your pulls as the tank by Moonfiring a mob, ducking around a corner to force a line-of-sight pull to your face, Barkskin/Hurricane the group while the two healers focus on you, let the other druid start his Barkskin/Hurricane two seconds after yours so his Threat trails yours, and then once your Barkskin runs out shift to cat and claw the faces of the poor dazed bastards that survived.

Hey, remember, we be droods. Improvise, adapt and overcome. And above all else, have fun!