Reader A was minding his own business, raiding orcs and hording alliances or whatever it is World of Warcraft players do, when he says a hacker started selling in-game items for real cash, spurring Blizzard to cancel his account. A says Blizzard is aware that the nefarious activity wasn’t his fault, but stopped him cold anyway, bringing out his wrath of the Lich King.

Here is the email he wrote to Blizzard:

Even though this helps me close an account that I wasn’t using much anymore but the circumstances in which this was arbitrarily handled without ANY input from me, the user, shows astronomically bad customer service. What makes it worse is that this is not a new account. I have had this for over six years now working on all of my different characters. And all of this shut down within hours of being hacked? What’s hilarious here is that you detected the strange activity and emailed me!! Punishing your paid users for faults in your authentication mechanism makes so much sense, doesn’t it?

I’m intentionally using my work signature here to lend credibility to my assertion that a lackadaisical approach to customer service will not serve you well by isolating payers that have played for a long time. I was hoping to come back to the game with Catacylsm but you adeptly took care of that because there is no way I can develop a character the way I had done on my Trifectum account.

I am seriously hoping for a human response this time explaining your actions and hopefully a resolution that returns my account to me for whenever I want to get back in the game. I know your business model for handling customer requests is horrible so I’ll give you a few days to get this squared away. After that these emails will be forwarded to all of my friends’ blogs, consumer protection web sites, and FTC so they can be warned about this kind of treatment. Hiding behind a EULA does not protect you against bad publicity highlighting your refusal to communicate with your users.

World of Warcraft vets, what would you do in A’s situation?

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.