The Point of A Subscription

[Sephirah]

I expect

1. Periodic Content Updates
2. Customer Service
3. Monitoring of Servers for Performance and Maintenance Issues
4. Monitoring of Player Experience and Expulsion of Cheaters/Botters/Spammers

Literally every one of these things exist. I had a question about changing my character's birthday using a phial of fantasia and the support staff told me if I had used mine by mistake all I needed to do was reply and ask them to restore it for me as a one-time courtesy and they would. Granted, I didn't need this done for me, but they offered, so clearly their support exists.

As for content updates, what do you think is happening right now?

Monitoring the servers for performance, even with the issues their servers have, they have done nothing but improve since the release.

Monitoring of players, Their GMs investigate reports for harassment, exploits, and cheaters. Several hackers and RMTs have already been banned.

You want them to make you a sandwich when they're done too?

[Altheras]

1. Seems good. They're going to be giving us content pretty quick.

2. Customer Service may not be the best now, but over time they will probably hire more CS people to help out. The game launched with way higher numbers than they expected, so hopefully over time the player to staff ratio will improve. (I have seen a lot of bad Customer Service complaints, but I can't really judge by those since only people who have a bad time bother to post. Most who have their issues solved and are happy don't feel the need to post, so you're pretty much always going to see more negative than positive.)

3. Sever performance started out pretty awful but they've taken lots of steps to address it, and I've only see stability and connectivity improve so far. So looks good to me.

4. If you black list spammers like I do, go and delete all of your old blisted names, just up until your most recent 10 or 20 are left on your list. Do this periodically. You will almost NEVER have a repeat spammer. They DO ban them. You can't tell from your blist. Banned players don't show up as (banned) or (deleted). They just sit on your blist taking up room. Also keep in mind that sometimes spammers are hacked accounts and their original owners eventually get them back. So periodically clearing out your blist can show you just how many spammers have been banned or returned to their real owner. The (deleted) that you sometimes see on your blist is for characters that have actually been Deleted, not banned or suspended accounts.
As for the botting, they will probably eventually implement a feature to just flat our break the teleport hack, but I suspect they are handling this matter delicately because they don't want to implement something that will break the game for players when they do this.
SE also has a tendency to do 'blanket bans' at the end of a month, so you may see that botter for what seems like a long time, but odds are, if enough people have reported them, they will get banned at some point, results aren't always immediate.

[Krasus]

1. Agree

2. While there seems to be some confusion as to what customer service is, I would like to say that in the past, SE has not and most likely will not be of much assistance when if comes to recovering account information. They believe this is your own personal responsibility.

3. Considering the start that vanilla WoW got off to, I have absolutely no complaints. That's the price you pay when you want to be the first to play a popular game.

4. While it did get out of hand at first, they have made a tremendous difference on Behemoth but I can not speak for other servers I do not play on. They haven't completely wiped them out but give it some more time.

Note: Also, if your concerned about it's longevity, take a look at FFXI, it's older than WoW and it still has a player base.