I'm guessing he is talking for Gaming company ;)

They pay one dude to read the forums and make reports on forum posts to the developers. They pay another dude to 'curate' their museum of night elf statues and whatnot.

Losing a million WOW subs might have had something to do with it. Until Mists comes out and shows strong sales and resubs I doubt they'll beef back up. Influx of new players is probably lower than in times past and existing players may also need less support.

Smart money is on, whatever the specific reason, its intended effect is to make Kotick look good to the board.

I guess introducing more server-side fixes for quests and broken stuff (once every two-three weeks), so less workers are required to help people with bugged things, also can be counted.

My guess is some of these people will be hired back once Titan is released, assuming it is a MMO game (everything says it will be, so far).

nopers, I know this for a fact because one of my friends worked for a subcontractor to blizzard doing GM work.

last time I checked Blizact as a whole didn't have any of it's headquarters on Albuquerque.

Obviously bug fixes (and to some extent balance tweaks) help, but they've done this all along, I'm not sure why they'd suddenly cut staff now due to it. It's possible the subs they lost were the most whiny and costly customers so on balance they're no better or worse off w/o them.

Maybe it is / was different for the US?, but last time I went job hunting on Blizzard's page, for the EU, the CS offices were (and still are) located in Cork, Ireland.

my guess is that in the process of accounting for the losses due to Rift and KTOR taking heavy swings at WoW's player base, they found that a shit ton of their support numbers were collage kids that couldn't care less and spent most of their time fucking off and playing on their personal account / hooking up guildies with free loot and insider info on drop rates and upcoming patch changes.

remember that WOW GM who answered that complicated algebra (or was it trig?) homework equation that someone submitted as a support ticket? yeah, that was done one the clock ... I'm guessing the (s)he isn't with the company anymore (either now, or before this layoff) despite how much people liked it and thought it was cool.