My customer Service experience

#0 - April 21, 2009, 3:50 p.m.

Greetings!

I recently went through the joy of having my name reported as a Violation. The name in question is "Siouxsie". I logged in and discovered that I had been flagged for a rename. So, I checked the email associated with my account, and discovered I had been "actioned". The first thing I did was talk to a GM, but as I suspected, i was going to have to have direct contact with Account Administration. The GM was sympathetic, but unable to help.

That didn't particularly bother me since my prior dealings with AA had been great. (I had previously been hacked and had recieved excellent service from them). So, I emailed AA and incated my desire to appeal, and was informed that after reveiew, my name violated the "Real World Reference" portion of the naming policies.

I drafted a response, and indicated that:

1) The name "Siouxsie" is one spelling of many varieties for the extremely
common name: Susie, Suzy, or Suzie. This is no different than having a
charcter named Brian or Bryan, or really any real life first name. Certainly
my character does not have a last name attached, and it is therefore not a
real world reference.

2) The character in EPL, specifically in the death knight starting area,
Siouxsie the Banshee is much more strognly suggestive of a real world
reference than my own name. Also, for what it's worth, my character name
predates both the Burning Crusade Expansion as well as the Wrath of the lich
king expansion, and therefore pre-dates that NPC.

3) This ruling would ban every common name, as some famous figure
undoubtedly has such a name. For instance it would ban everyone named George
(Bush), Robert (Kennedy), Bill (Clinton), or even Mike (Morhaime). That is
to say banning all real life first names is a bit overbroad.

I then receieved a response that my name violated the naming rules because I was on an RP server.

I'm pretty frustrated. I drafted a fairly snide follow up to AA asking if Siouxsie the Banshee in EPL was going to be removed from the game or renamed since it was apparently breaking RP immersion, but I wanted to also post here about my customer service experience.

I'll close with this: I've had this name since the day Scarlet Crusade went live (Over 4 years ago). There is nothing wrong with this name. I'm not going to "quit the game" or anything like that, but this pretty much wrecks my identity on SC.

Your Unhappy Customer,

The Mage Formerly Known as Siouxsie.

#102 - April 21, 2009, 7:14 p.m.

I'm sorry if you've found this to be a frustrating experience, but I'd like to point out some things.

The game itself contains many references to real world people, events, stories etc. While we feel that these 'easter eggs' contribute positively to the overall World of Warcraft experience, the same exact references created by a player on an RP realm may be inappropriate. It's important to keep in mind that our standards of conduct for naming, chat and behavior apply to solely to our players, not to the content our Developers devise.

Our role play realms comprise a 'stricter' set of standards for naming that any other realm does, and if a name is reported to us, we'll definitely look into it. This erstwhile character name could definitely be considered a reference to the well known Siouxsie Sioux. As a result, it isn't unreasonable that our staff chose to take action against that name. Here's a link to our Role Play realm policies, and the naming policy at large:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=20458

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=20368#realworld

That said, I certainly do understand your concerns in this case, and if you feel that this action was applied in error, then the only appropriate course of action would be to submit an email to [email protected] to dispute the matter.