Why is there never a gamemaster around...Ever

The @BlizzardCS twitter actually posts updates of the current petition queue wait times. If you're hip to the tweeting jive you can also ask questions of it, and like our customer support forum here, we have people replying directly.

http://twitter.com/blizzardcs

As others have guessed, yes, the release of Cataclysm has substantially increased the amount of petitions.

The @BlizzardCS twitter actually posts updates of the current petition queue wait times. If you're hip to the tweeting jive you can also ask questions of it, and like our customer support forum here, we have people replying directly.

http://twitter.com/blizzardcs

As others have guessed, yes, the release of Cataclysm has substantially increased the amount of petitions.

Wouldn't it make prudent business sense then, to hire temporary people to serve as GMs during this time? I mean... all that awesome press about selling millions of Cataclysm copies in records times, you'd think hiring some temps to maintain customer service wouldn't really be that much of a burden on the bottom line...

We probably could outsource and throw a ton of people at it who don't know the game, don't play the game, maybe have never played any game, and ask them to just churn through tickets as fast as possible. Quality in our customer support has increased substantially over the years, but it's something we continue to strive for even with a well trained (and always in-house) customer support staff. I'm not on the business side of things, but no I don't believe your solution would be prudent business sense.

Among other improvements to help lower queue times, we're always looking for dedicated and highly motivated people to join our team. And if you're able and willing, we have our job opportunity pages -

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/directory.html#region=Americas;sortby=Team;showonly=CustomerService