Here's how I'd imagine it working.
There are paid game staff members who have at least some access to the chat channels, and frequently have the ability to connect in the game in order to look and see what's going on when people are having problems. It's often easier to interact with a player in-game than through a ticket, it helps avoid problems. What sort of problems? Well, Star Wars Galaxies went to the ticket-based support, and I had a corrupt item preventing game-play (could not move, could not destroy the item, it had junk characters in the name). It took 13 round trips o