He/She said “some realms will still have to wait for this problem to be fully resolved. The hardware upgrades take quite a while and it is being done in stages. Once it is fully resolved, we will announce it in the Breaking News and on the forums”.

I said something along the lines of “good, as its getting annoying”, and they replied:

“I understand. We sincerely apologize for this. I am sure this will be fixed within the coming weeks”.

Fingers and paws crossed, hey?

I have to say, if I am aware of a company, a contractor, or any official representative of a business that takes this approach to customer service, I drop them like they’re hawt.

I, the consumer, do not exist so that I may be fleeced like a sheep, regardless of what some might prefer to think.

It may be messy, and require actual thought, but how customer service issues get addressed reveals the soul of an organization. And if your answer is, “there is no soul to any business, only maximum profit at minimum expense”, my work here is done.

First, dungeon instances reside on their own set of servers. The server you play on has no bearing on that, so playing on a low pop server doesn’t help get into instances. Once you enter an instance, you’re on a different physical server. So, server population is irrelevant.

This has been a running problem for some time, but I don’t think Blizzard anticipated (though they should have) the MASSIVE increase in heroics being run with the emblem changes. Even when people first hit 80, heroics weren’t nearly so busy as it took time for people to get to 80, creating a gradual progression with people “graduating” from heroics as new folks hit 80 and started. Even then, though, this did crop up from time to time. Now, however, virtually every single player is trying to get into instances – be they heroics or something else – all the time. People, even with well geared toons, are farming heroics en masse.

Blizzard does understand, though. They tell you there’s a problem because they need to ensure people are aware that THEY are aware that there is. If they didn’t, people would rant even more about them being totally unaware. Blizzard employees play too, and they know what’s going on. You can’t be surprised they haven’t given a time frame for fixing it, though, there are many reasons for them to not. If they give a date, and then can’t meet it (which isn’t unusual with these things) people will freak out. They may well simply not know how long it’ll be either.

All in all, while it’s obviously a difficult problem for them to solve, the overall issue is very simple. It’s unfortunate, but you need to expect some issues when dealing with a software project of this size.

Before I quit reading the forums entirely a couple of years ago, I noticed that the US blue posts almost all amounted to ‘it sucks to be you, and if you don’t like it tough’. There were actually posts maintaned that linked to the euro forums, where people would ask questions and actually get answers instead of silence or insults. A lot more information and communication happened on the euro forums…

They just don’t seem to understand, like BBB says… We know there’s a problem. Telling us there’s a problem doesn’t really mean anything. Tell us when the problem will be fixed, or that it’s more difficult than you thought and you’ll have to do something else, and here’s the expected timeline. This is the most annoying thing about blizzard, the total lack of any communication other than ‘keep paying us, ok?’

I’m wondering how much of it is current hardware being at capacity (Blizzard has one of the biggest server farms for any industry) and the renewed interest in heroics for easy emblems.

I’m also wondering if the lack of communication is because there’s nothing really new to communicate. I have no idea how Blizzard procures their servers, gets them ready, tests them, etc., but I’d imagine it’s longer than 2 weeks. And how many “we’re currently working on this” updates are possible?

Wonder if they’ll get around to fixing NA servers a bit quicker than that, now that many of the high profile WoW sites are starting to notice it.