I was 18 when WoW dropped. I behaved like I was 11. One day, in Tanaris, all of a sudden my Dwarf Paladin was teleported to the top of a small hill. There in front of me was a human male character with the tag . He told me that my behavior was erratic and undesirable. And that if I continued along this path that I wouldn't be playing WoW for very long. And before I could reply, he asked me if everything was okay at home, and if I needed to talk to anyone. I didn't have anything particularly bad going on in my home life, I was just an edgy and immature punk kid. We talked for maybe 10-15 minutes. He was kind but serious, and when I reflect on this now, 20 years later, it makes me kind of emotional, because I did change the way that I interacted with others from that point on. Not because of fear of punishment but because someone actually cared enough to give me a second chance. He used that word a few times and it stuck. I think this GM could see (by my chat logs I assume) that I wasn't only a douchey kid, but someone who needed a real adult to tell him that the way he was behaving wasn't normal. Thanks for giving a shit, GM.
Way less impactful but I also had a GM experience in tanaris back in the vanilla days (I was sniping people in gadgetzan as a mage on the rooftops after they changed the policy about exploiting guard pathing in towns) and a gm started off pretty strong like "knock it off or I'll knock you off." I remember as the interaction was ending he's like "be a good sport, man. sure it might be fun to kill low level characters for a brief moment but what are you really accomplishing putting your effort into that?" In the moment I wasn't really taking to heart what he was saying, but I've come back to that interaction a few times in my life when I felt like I'm wasting my time doing something, and it kinda motivated me to step up and move on to better things. Gm's are people too. Many of them were trying to be helpful. Sometimes they don't realize the impact they're actually going to have. I wish I remembered that GM's name because as weird as it is he/she had a pretty big impact on some key events in my life.
Good old days when ppl took time to "correct" the behavior of an other human and not "gaslighting" , just giving moral advice. Thx for sharing the story!
the absolute worst decision blizzard ever made was eliminating live gms. not just from botting perspective, but anyone who has played long term and had interactions with them loved it.
The "Can I have free gold" ticket for sure is troll, but if you ask nicely you can actually ask for gametime. I did that a few times when I was still a poor student and always got a few days or even a week for free
@@tomebundalevski1872Doesn't happen nowadays, everything is automated responses until you get to an actual person who just claims they can't help you. Customer support is pretty much gone.
I was a real idiot. I learned pretty early on (may/june 2005ish) if you put in a debit card without enough money in it, Blizzard would immediately activate your account again for 24 hours, realize the transaction didn't go through, and would then deactivate your account again. There were some weeks where I was doing it every day because I didn't have the cash to play. All it would do was put a hold on $1 for 24 hours, and then reset. I'm honestly amazed Blizzard didn't ban me for it. I'd probably milked a couple months doing it over the course of vanilla. I would have had no argument if they did. It could have gone south so many way, either getting banned, or my bank letting the transaction through and overdrafting me. I was just a poor 19 year old at the time.
My Best interaction with a GM. Many. Many years ago. It was probably 3 months before the release of TBC. My account was hacked. I had taken a week off playing WoW, and came back to discover. All my items were sold. Absolutely everything. My bank emptied alongside my alts. And the gold farmer who had hacked my account,, had spent the week mining nodes to flood the AH with a bunch of cheap ores. The gold farmer, had not sent any of the gold he had farmed to any alternate account. So I was left with a naked character, inventory full of ores, AH full of ores. And a LOT of gold. I was a raider and one of the Main tanks for our guild. And so understandably wanted my Wrath Gear back. I put all of the ores in my characters inventory on the AH. And proceeded to open a ticket. The GM. Very kindly. Managed to give me back ALL of the items the Gold farmer had sold. Including the items he sold on the AH........ Which included all of the ores...... And surprisingly, the Gold they had acquired on my character remained. The Net profit I gained from being able to sell all the ores on the AH again made me one of the richest individuals on Zenedar - EU and had me absolutely rolling in money come TBC release. My interactions with GMs have been nothing but fantastic in my experience. Knowing its an actual person talking to you goes a looong way to cementing a positive customer service relationship.
I had same issue, account got hacked, i made a ticket, it took 24-36 hours to be replied and got 2 options, rollback to a certain date or continue as I were. I was 56-58, gained a lvl or 2 while waited on ticket, so I option 2 was best choice in my eyes. Not all GMs were the same. Nice story btw ^^ Golden Age of Gaming is over man ... I remember Half-Life 1 and 2 community .... Mod community was insane and freeee!!! Damn i miss those days.
The reason Blizzard does not have as good customer service is no doubt that they no longer have to. The world has moved on from that time. Companies do not hire people to do customer service if they can get away with a FAQ and an automated service. The "free gold" message is not something that would bother a GM. They would just reply "no" and close the ticket.
nah they'd always respond, at least back in the first few years. If you made a ticket for free gold you'd get a couple paragraphs being like no, but here's a few spots I know of that you can farm at and some cheesy RP joke.
First time I caught a zombie account hack, my gear was replaced with shite greens, becaus eit had been over 90 days. Second time, the GM told me "I cant verify what you had. because of the time frame" To which I replied: Then jsut kindly refund my service feee, I have nod esire to play in crappy greens like you gave me last time. I had good gear." He replied: "Relax, Ill give you good gear. "Immediatly gave me full teir 8 shadow preist set. Which was literallyt way better than any of the gear I had lost. My friends who had asked me to come back and play with them, didnt even have as many pieces as he had given me. They were all jealous. So it wasnt always a bad interaction, but sadly most of the time, for most people it was. That particular GM was just being insanely generous I suppose that day.
Back in the days over 10 year ago I had a male gnome mage that I did plan to make a faction transfer to undead mage female. For some reason the faction change screwed up and I remained a gnome but I changed the name. I changed my name to "Witchbit%h" and ran around for a couple of weeks as a gnome male mage named "Witchbit%h". Then I wrote a ticket to a GM saying that I believe people took offence of my name and asked for a name changed. But to be honest I just regreted my name decision. I got the name change for free. Good days!
I've worked both customer support (for a large retailer) and tech support (for a software dev company) and anyone that thinks KPIs are the way to go has no idea what they're doing. KPIs undermine the quality of support as well as many factors that affect the time needed for larger tickets.
In 2012 my call center got a questionnaire. It was from blizzard. Most if not all didn't know what it was but me and a buddy did. All I wanted was to be a GM. It never did happen but I can still dream
43:00 They can't force you to leave and keep your belongings, even if they promise to send them later, without your consent. If they try it call the police, it's illegal for them to withhold your property in that manner. I had a former coworker who had to do this when our terrible boss at the time fired him. The police showed up and brought him back inside the building to let him get his things while the manager was allowed to watch.
The idea that blizzard could "easily" deal with the RMT issue is ridiculous. The demand from players is too high and the bot farms are FAR more organized and advanced than people realize. It wont stop until players stop buying gold, and they never will.
I remember coming home from work in TBC to hop on my warlock that was t4/t5 geared. Logged on and ALL my characters, my warrior, my warlock, my hunter, my shaman. All naked. I then immediately logged on the blizzard website, changed all my passwords. I logged on my warlock and she was in a shadowlabs run, inventory FULL of gems, boe blue's, epics, patterns etc. I petitioned a GM and they said they could restore it through the mailbox and to keep everything my lock had. After i had all my equipment back, i sold all the extra and ended up with 50-100k+ gold not to mention all the random extra stuff they mailed me that i had either looted or found at some point in time, trash greens, cloth, blue's etc. It sucked, but blizzard made up for it. Don't think that'd happen nowadays.
I wouldn't say "blizz don't care", the problem is not enough players care. Blizz is gonna respond to what the majority of players do. I find that some players care about bots, some content creators do anti-bot content, but when I point out bots to people, most seem to not really care or they don't respond like they do.
My account got hacked back in wrath. However I was like 12 and had trouble leveling so before I got my account back my brother told me to wait and see if they would level my death knight to 80 for me. I was level 76 at the time of the hacking. My brother and I played on the same server Azshara NA horde, so he went and found my character being botted killing beasts for skinning and mining nodes. Eventually my character hit 80 and they even geared my dk out in season 6 pvp gear costed honor points, as well as geared me out in some heroic gear/frost emblem items. Eventually got my account back maybe like 1 month later and I got to keep everything including the 25k gold they farmed.
Speaking of the Arcanite Ripper. I also had a compromised account situation. The GM that had my ticket had told me they couldn't restore it. But for whatever reason, made an exception and quietly gave me one anyway. Even gave me a little shush message about it lol. This is more about some GMs back in the day being cool, and doing a little extra for the playerbase*. I miss those days.
i remember in wotlk someone managed to hack my account. my uncle was on playing and saw my account log in but i was at school. he immediately logged into my account and every character was naked and all my gold was gone. got everything back via GM that same day but it fuckin sucked cus it was raid night and i had to miss that raid
As someone who worked in a similar environment. I can tell you that a live view count is no way near that stressful, when you stream, you go at your own pace.
Super interesting that gms had to be invisible. Been getting into osrs and it seems their gms get much more leeway to interact with the community, showing up to content creator events etc.
Go to Turtle WoW/Ascension ect any big private server and they ban bots and gold selling. If private servers can easily do this, Blizzard are either incompetent or are actively ignoring an issue they know about. Gold selling used to be a big issue on private servers, now it doesn't exist.
That's quite a difference though. These private servers, although some are quite alive, they have a peak of 5-6 thousand, while the real game has millions, aswell as several game modes and upcoming contents. It's self explanatory why it's so easy for private servers to manage. These servers are also free to play so the dev gains nothing from botters, it only annoys their players. While blizzard does gain from botters and they supply the player base with materials. So their view of them is entirely different than some random guy who runs a free to play private server.
@A_Goat The private servers have well over 1 million players if you add them all up.. but they used to have bots/goldselling issues. Nostralious had a big issue back in the day.. But that's my argument, if these smaller servers can do it, why can't a massive company? Blizzard have the resources to do it.. they just choose not to do anything about it.
@traviscue2099 Yeah, private servers as a whole have made up over a million players across their entire life span, for sure, but most of which did not remain active, while Blizzard has that same number in just daily users but a drastically larger 130 million active players on top of that. Even the biggest server you mention, Nostalrius peaked at 10k. 10k daily vs 1.3million daily. Surely it's easier to manage the first and not the latter. Nost was also a single server realm, while the real game has many servers across each and every expansion, re release and seasonal mode. The load to manage is not even comparable. Not disagreeing with you, just don't think this is a fair equivalent. Blizzard certainly could do better.
I ve had gm in wow classic couple years ago showing while i was in dungeon, he waited till we killed the boss and than told me to log out so he can fix my issue with warlock quest not giving me my items, so i didnt had my soul bag :D it was best couple minutes in all the years playing wow for me, and the group :)
My account got ''zombied'' before, I had quit for maybe a year or something, and decided to resub, to find my character with 300 mining and tons of ore in his bags. I must have gotten lucky and resubbed while it was still being used to either bot or just farm. First time I ever had a max profession at the time as well lol
During wrath i learned my guildie and friend was a gm, they proved it without a doubt to me. I used to openly talk in guild chat about wanting to buy gold but could not afford it when i was young, only to find out years later that most of the guild was populated by GMs and people who worked at blizzard lol. I honestly think im on a watch list so ive never bought gold or eff all lol.
If anyone asks a GM for gold, they should instantly fill every bag and bank slot they have with unsellable, soulbound garbage items that they have to individually click and drag to destroy
The interactions I've had with proper GM's over the years have felt like I was in the presence of a God. The way they "spoke" and the things they sorted out for me was amazing
I also got a Keylogger. Couldnt get rid of it. Got my Stuff Back, changed the Password with a Monitor Keyboard, Put it in txt File and then Ctrl + v it from there on. xD
Wow has an insane botting problem. On anniversary right now I can find bots in most zones. If they wanted to they could probably shut it down, as it ruins the server economy and creates gold bloat since everyone just starts buying gold. I think they only put effort into things that creates money.
Im actually happy Swifty on EU posed a the real Swifty. Hope he made a lot of unassuming children's day. Kinda think of him as a wow Santaesque type character now. 😂
Made a ticket because [Shard Labor] Achievement was bugged and i couldnt complete it so i couldnt get the mount. Support responds to ticket saying i hadnt completed the achievement and theyre not allowed to give hints. Explain every facet of my problem in depth so they can give me my mount. "There is no current known bug about this quest sorry" Respond again to the ticket, refusing to close it Support responds to ticket saying i hadnt completed the achievement and theyre not allowed to give hints. Completely unable to get the mount.
Still to this day i don't understand the logic behind forcing me to change the name of my warlock "dogfart"years back. Blizzard itself has fart and mooning emotes built into the game. surely a name of dogfart isn't as blizzard emote popping up saying that you're dropping your pants to moon someone,.. lol
Honestly, Blizz are incentivised to allow botting and RMT. WoW token has to be bought with cash or gold on AH and if the price of gold inflates it makes it harder to obtain which drives sales. Likewise, RMT is benificial because it lets people who are 'bad' at the game just buy stat sticks to boost their performance, those same whales are likely to spend money on cosmetics and anything else convenient for them in the store - boosts for example. Race to world first likely wouldnt exist which is advertising for Blizz cause without the bots injecting currency to buy guilds would have to spend more time farming to buy BIS, or farming BIS. It's within Blizzards interest to keep these things within the game for the same reason they allow addons. It's financially benificial - for those not understanding where addons comes from, I firmly believe the only reason addons exist to the extent they do and Blizz seems to play so fast and loose with them is because it would require blizz updating draconian systems almost entirely. This would take time and money, and why bother when someone else is doing the work for you?
If Blizzard was getting a cut, wouldn’t they just generate gold to give the gold selling company instead of having bots? Blizzard gets their sub for each bot, that’s why they still exist.
@@Neotidus More likely explanation is that botters have bribed someone inside the company. Blizzard does not actually make any money from botters, because botters buy their subscrptions with stolen credit cards and blizzard is obligated by law to return the money.
revenue is not profit, but you need economical degree to understand such terms :D. When someone opens a regular business they don't think about the people they pay but the revenue they get and how to optimize it. If you owned a business and not know your bottom tier employees you'd do something similar, maybe not in such harsh manner, but would still do it. Also, as an employee you should not expect to actually live there for ever or be considered family by superiors. Gamers are customers, treated like customers, gaming today is pure industry and if you want to survive in gaming industry you need to optimize business because there is fierce competition on the market, like it or not. What he was doing was good for players, but the way to do it was bad. If you have such an idea you present it to your superior and they determine what u are paid for, not yourself. We don't know if he did something good for the game, other might have been doing same thing, assigned to that thing. If every employee would start making such decisions just because it seems better you'll have chaos. If you have KPI's is 100% about you, stop making stupid excuses. Again, he was employed on a certain job, he is not manager or anything so he is not even entitled to know, nobody reports to you as support team member what other teams are doing and how well they are doing. And its normal, because even if you would catch a glimpse, you would jump to conclusions without having any data to support your conclusion. At the end of the day you are payed to do your job and only your job. Think you can do better ? Open a business of your own. There is a risk taking action or not taking actions. Such decisions are based on statistics. If you invest extra 100k dollars to better control gold sellers but nothing changes on medium term as income, you just threw away those money for nothing. Once you did and experienced that you will not do it again. And you'll say, wait, but 100k is not that much, well, with that money they could pay an employee or two for a year, doing something valuable.
how can they fire people without giving them a reason? Do GMs work without a contract ?? I thought that applied only for the shady and "semi-legal" jobs?
Most states in the US allow ‘at will’ employment. Which means you can quit at will with no explanation and you can also be fired at will with no explanation.
@@leinonibishop9480 yes but thats for small companies or fastfood/gastronomy and stuff like that right? No way a giant company like Blizzard employs "at will". And who would accept a job at a place like Blizzard if they knew they could be fired any time without a reason. If someone accepts a job like like it's their own fault.
@@ASIRA89 i don't know about blizzard specifically but I've worked at several large, nationwide companies (not fast food) and even in management positions they are all at will employers.
I had my account hacked and botted after i quit during cata came back they didnt vendor everything but i did have more gold than before and bags full of ore (along with mining which I didnt have)
I only ever had one interaction with a GM. I was trying to get my exploration title, and I was in darkshore at max level on a horde character. This GM started questioning why I was there, and i ignored them. So they threatened to ban me and I went off on them. I had done nothing wrong, I was just going for an achievement in the game, and I paid their salary. Their insane power trip and threats were not my problem. So I reported them to the ticket system, and the same GM closed my ticket... So I sent an e-mail to blizzard about it. You cant even find an e-mail for blizzard now. good times.
The game is definitely not more fun with bots, Trading is a nightmare. The first 50 listings of an item are price-fixing bots. The only benefit was the currency exchange bots, which always gave terrible ratios any way.
Don't know if I believe that. If they didn't care about gold selling. Then bots wouldn't get banned and players buying gold also wouldn't get temp bans.
They do controlled ban waves, they do ban bots cause it's against TOS, but they don't put much effort on it since it's actually good for them. 1 Bot = 15$ a month, imagine the amount of money only via suscriptions they receive from them
Only thing I disagree with is the scoreboard. An effective team needs to be able to track their progress. It sounds like their scoreboard was effective, and easy to interpret.
A department with no good leadership needs a scoreboard.. If you have a boss with the ability to actually lead his employees, the overall team effectiveness would be determined by concerted team tasks solved. In each of those tasks each worker would be given an area of responsibility to answer up for. This method doesn't rely on crappy metrics and logarithmic functions to determine success but rather actual progress of the team.
This mofo complaining about having to work 8 hours and then go home -_-'' seriously talking about thinking you have it bad While your living a dream...... i work 10-15 hours a day , i start on monday morning until saturday evening... i take pride in my work.. but this guy is just trying to find any single reason to complain about
You shouldnt be proud from being a slave. People should have better work hours, we have the technology to automate so many jobs. People should work less, not more than before.
@@teemumiettinen7250 clearly you have no clue how the world works, a slave is being forced to work however i want to work longer hours ... let me guess you dont order anything online ? if you do... then stop ordering on the internet so the truck drivers can take a break. you dont use the toilet ? kitchen ? shower etc ? i work in sewer technology... sewers dont stop... you dont stop using it. you wanna automate sewers ? ... its already automated mostly.. now its time for people to stop using sewers if you want that gone aswell... ahh yes completely automate the whole world so nobody has an income anymore -_-''. Sounds like america to me...
@@teemumiettinen7250 and FYI i am proud at my job, people are happy we do it and come to help them and that thanks to us they can still use the sewers. they are gratefull, and we are happy with what we do... so dont act all slave blabla on me
blizzard doesn't gaf about gold buyers or gold sells even high end mythic guilds buy gold for WF 😂 sad but true p2w from boe's to leveling profession's to make orders but yeah it is what it is
I find this hypocritical Guzu. Complaining about bots & gold buying when joining Onlyfangs & playing with gold buyers like Soda. You cant complain about bots & reward players who buy gold. The community isnt prepared to police itself
Not joining the big content guild would be stupid. Sure fuck Soda for buying gold but I'm pretty sure all of us have had goldbuyers in their guild before that doesn't make all guild members hypocrites...
@@animalchin5082 Thats it, self interest over principles. The community wont police itself, I rest my case. If the community wont ban the gold buying streamers, why should Blizzard ban the bots
@@sticktothefacts8905 "If people won't stop buying weapons, drugs, PEOPLE illegally, why should the government keep it illegal". What weird logic is that. Bad things have to be controled by the people in charge so they don't go out of hand (like botting did especially in classic wow)
This was way back in mid Burning crusade, my dad had full raid epic armor set from Tempest Keep at the time. One day he longs in some guy stripped his character and sold all his gear and took everything. The GM was able to help him get all his stuff back and even gave him back his gold with a few extra hundred gold. I miss talking with GM's. I miss the blizzard i grew up with.
if Wow wanted to kill bots and gold farms ...they could find a way but since gold can = $$ and Blizzard will never turn down $$... they most likely support it player based is jaded spoiled kids who turned a Great game to this from cata until now..its been trash xpan after trash xpan... don't we own phones =P
Why would they care about gold sellers any more? It's literally a losing battle with any and all MMORPGs. You'll never beat the gold sellers and you'll just waste time and resources trying to.
@@IceTax69 They dont, Soda got a slap on the wrist for buying gold. And the players & community dont care either, they flock to watch OnlyFangs & the gold buyers. Guzu doesnt really care, he joined OnlyFangs. Nobody is making a stand except MadskillzHC
@@doomgu544 If you can't do 6-8 calls an hour, you should at least be able to prove that you were working on longer cases and your boss will probably understand, as long as you can prove you've been working that entire time. If it keeps happening and you can't prove anything and can't match this target, than you are obviously just not doing your job and are slacking off.(Or like in this guys case, wasn't doing his job properly. Which is what he got fired for.)
what's the reason behind worry about bot's? theyr paying like you, is obvious blizzard don't care, even me, i like it gold cost is very low even in fresh server, 1 hour of irl work and ur ok for months in wow, welcome bot
They are just a bunch of sweaty try hards that are sad they won't be the best at the game and don't know how to enjoy things for what they are. They are egotistic ppl that want other ppl to think they are good at the game and don't actually play just for fun.
Terrible logic. If you would rather spend real money than actually play the game, then that's a massive flaw in the game design and the correct response is to give feedback and quit until it's improved. You're part of the problem. Get better. Anybody who cheats at a game, getting an advantage over others, is absolute scum and deserves nothing good in life.
@@dtyj2815 this is pure cope juvenile level logic, cheatering is selfish and entitled behaviour you are literally devaluing other players time investment for your personal convenience. If you can't grasp this basic logic than your mother did a bad job raising you.
We are talking about Activision here... The company that also owns Call of Duty.. The only thing that greedy pos company cares about is 💵.. aka having as many players as possible in game to increase their odds of subscriptions or in game micro transactions. 💯
I was 18 when WoW dropped. I behaved like I was 11.
One day, in Tanaris, all of a sudden my Dwarf Paladin was teleported to the top of a small hill. There in front of me was a human male character with the tag .
He told me that my behavior was erratic and undesirable. And that if I continued along this path that I wouldn't be playing WoW for very long. And before I could reply, he asked me if everything was okay at home, and if I needed to talk to anyone. I didn't have anything particularly bad going on in my home life, I was just an edgy and immature punk kid.
We talked for maybe 10-15 minutes. He was kind but serious, and when I reflect on this now, 20 years later, it makes me kind of emotional, because I did change the way that I interacted with others from that point on. Not because of fear of punishment but because someone actually cared enough to give me a second chance. He used that word a few times and it stuck. I think this GM could see (by my chat logs I assume) that I wasn't only a douchey kid, but someone who needed a real adult to tell him that the way he was behaving wasn't normal.
Thanks for giving a shit, GM.
Way less impactful but I also had a GM experience in tanaris back in the vanilla days (I was sniping people in gadgetzan as a mage on the rooftops after they changed the policy about exploiting guard pathing in towns) and a gm started off pretty strong like "knock it off or I'll knock you off." I remember as the interaction was ending he's like "be a good sport, man. sure it might be fun to kill low level characters for a brief moment but what are you really accomplishing putting your effort into that?" In the moment I wasn't really taking to heart what he was saying, but I've come back to that interaction a few times in my life when I felt like I'm wasting my time doing something, and it kinda motivated me to step up and move on to better things. Gm's are people too. Many of them were trying to be helpful. Sometimes they don't realize the impact they're actually going to have. I wish I remembered that GM's name because as weird as it is he/she had a pretty big impact on some key events in my life.
"erratic and undesirable"
I'm curious about what that means.
@@VegetoStevieD considering he mentioned chat logs probably more like an old COD chatroom
Love your story bro
Good old days when ppl took time to "correct" the behavior of an other human and not "gaslighting" , just giving moral advice.
Thx for sharing the story!
the absolute worst decision blizzard ever made was eliminating live gms. not just from botting perspective, but anyone who has played long term and had interactions with them loved it.
From their pockets pov they probably disagree
@Vigor8 facts LoL
They could literally just give free play time to regular high community honor players to GM and not lose too much $$$
That is true, I remember my GM interactions and they were such a cool experience.
@@Vigor8probably would save them money tbh
The "Can I have free gold" ticket for sure is troll, but if you ask nicely you can actually ask for gametime. I did that a few times when I was still a poor student and always got a few days or even a week for free
That’s actually really cool haha
Can confirm this, blizz ended up giving 1-2 months in total after multiple times :D back in MoP...😊
@@tomebundalevski1872Doesn't happen nowadays, everything is automated responses until you get to an actual person who just claims they can't help you. Customer support is pretty much gone.
That’s badass
I was a real idiot. I learned pretty early on (may/june 2005ish) if you put in a debit card without enough money in it, Blizzard would immediately activate your account again for 24 hours, realize the transaction didn't go through, and would then deactivate your account again. There were some weeks where I was doing it every day because I didn't have the cash to play. All it would do was put a hold on $1 for 24 hours, and then reset. I'm honestly amazed Blizzard didn't ban me for it. I'd probably milked a couple months doing it over the course of vanilla. I would have had no argument if they did. It could have gone south so many way, either getting banned, or my bank letting the transaction through and overdrafting me. I was just a poor 19 year old at the time.
My Best interaction with a GM.
Many. Many years ago. It was probably 3 months before the release of TBC.
My account was hacked. I had taken a week off playing WoW, and came back to discover.
All my items were sold. Absolutely everything. My bank emptied alongside my alts.
And the gold farmer who had hacked my account,, had spent the week mining nodes to flood the AH with a bunch of cheap ores.
The gold farmer, had not sent any of the gold he had farmed to any alternate account.
So I was left with a naked character, inventory full of ores, AH full of ores. And a LOT of gold.
I was a raider and one of the Main tanks for our guild. And so understandably wanted my Wrath Gear back.
I put all of the ores in my characters inventory on the AH. And proceeded to open a ticket.
The GM. Very kindly. Managed to give me back ALL of the items the Gold farmer had sold. Including the items he sold on the AH........
Which included all of the ores......
And surprisingly, the Gold they had acquired on my character remained.
The Net profit I gained from being able to sell all the ores on the AH again made me one of the richest individuals on Zenedar - EU and had me absolutely rolling in money come TBC release.
My interactions with GMs have been nothing but fantastic in my experience.
Knowing its an actual person talking to you goes a looong way to cementing a positive customer service relationship.
I had same issue, account got hacked, i made a ticket, it took 24-36 hours to be replied and got 2 options, rollback to a certain date or continue as I were. I was 56-58, gained a lvl or 2 while waited on ticket, so I option 2 was best choice in my eyes.
Not all GMs were the same.
Nice story btw ^^
Golden Age of Gaming is over man ... I remember Half-Life 1 and 2 community .... Mod community was insane and freeee!!! Damn i miss those days.
The reason Blizzard does not have as good customer service is no doubt that they no longer have to. The world has moved on from that time. Companies do not hire people to do customer service if they can get away with a FAQ and an automated service. The "free gold" message is not something that would bother a GM. They would just reply "no" and close the ticket.
nah they'd always respond, at least back in the first few years. If you made a ticket for free gold you'd get a couple paragraphs being like no, but here's a few spots I know of that you can farm at and some cheesy RP joke.
First time I caught a zombie account hack, my gear was replaced with shite greens, becaus eit had been over 90 days.
Second time, the GM told me "I cant verify what you had. because of the time frame" To which I replied: Then jsut kindly refund my service feee, I have nod esire to play in crappy greens like you gave me last time. I had good gear."
He replied: "Relax, Ill give you good gear. "Immediatly gave me full teir 8 shadow preist set. Which was literallyt way better than any of the gear I had lost.
My friends who had asked me to come back and play with them, didnt even have as many pieces as he had given me. They were all jealous.
So it wasnt always a bad interaction, but sadly most of the time, for most people it was.
That particular GM was just being insanely generous I suppose that day.
Back in the days over 10 year ago I had a male gnome mage that I did plan to make a faction transfer to undead mage female. For some reason the faction change screwed up and I remained a gnome but I changed the name. I changed my name to "Witchbit%h" and ran around for a couple of weeks as a gnome male mage named "Witchbit%h". Then I wrote a ticket to a GM saying that I believe people took offence of my name and asked for a name changed. But to be honest I just regreted my name decision. I got the name change for free. Good days!
I've worked both customer support (for a large retailer) and tech support (for a software dev company) and anyone that thinks KPIs are the way to go has no idea what they're doing. KPIs undermine the quality of support as well as many factors that affect the time needed for larger tickets.
In 2012 my call center got a questionnaire. It was from blizzard. Most if not all didn't know what it was but me and a buddy did. All I wanted was to be a GM. It never did happen but I can still dream
43:00
They can't force you to leave and keep your belongings, even if they promise to send them later, without your consent. If they try it call the police, it's illegal for them to withhold your property in that manner. I had a former coworker who had to do this when our terrible boss at the time fired him. The police showed up and brought him back inside the building to let him get his things while the manager was allowed to watch.
The idea that blizzard could "easily" deal with the RMT issue is ridiculous. The demand from players is too high and the bot farms are FAR more organized and advanced than people realize. It wont stop until players stop buying gold, and they never will.
53:00 he actually stated he DID do his job too; he met their metrics. This was that "above and beyond" that people crave in employees now lol.
I remember coming home from work in TBC to hop on my warlock that was t4/t5 geared. Logged on and ALL my characters, my warrior, my warlock, my hunter, my shaman. All naked. I then immediately logged on the blizzard website, changed all my passwords. I logged on my warlock and she was in a shadowlabs run, inventory FULL of gems, boe blue's, epics, patterns etc. I petitioned a GM and they said they could restore it through the mailbox and to keep everything my lock had. After i had all my equipment back, i sold all the extra and ended up with 50-100k+ gold not to mention all the random extra stuff they mailed me that i had either looted or found at some point in time, trash greens, cloth, blue's etc. It sucked, but blizzard made up for it. Don't think that'd happen nowadays.
100% got in trouble when I was young and made a character called Kneegrow. They did not appreciate it.
I wouldn't say "blizz don't care", the problem is not enough players care. Blizz is gonna respond to what the majority of players do.
I find that some players care about bots, some content creators do anti-bot content, but when I point out bots to people, most seem to not really care or they don't respond like they do.
I got paid for playing WoW back in Vanilla. I wrote for a certain magazine about WoW.
niiice :D
My account got hacked back in wrath. However I was like 12 and had trouble leveling so before I got my account back my brother told me to wait and see if they would level my death knight to 80 for me. I was level 76 at the time of the hacking. My brother and I played on the same server Azshara NA horde, so he went and found my character being botted killing beasts for skinning and mining nodes. Eventually my character hit 80 and they even geared my dk out in season 6 pvp gear costed honor points, as well as geared me out in some heroic gear/frost emblem items. Eventually got my account back maybe like 1 month later and I got to keep everything including the 25k gold they farmed.
Speaking of the Arcanite Ripper. I also had a compromised account situation. The GM that had my ticket had told me they couldn't restore it. But for whatever reason, made an exception and quietly gave me one anyway. Even gave me a little shush message about it lol.
This is more about some GMs back in the day being cool, and doing a little extra for the playerbase*. I miss those days.
i remember in wotlk someone managed to hack my account. my uncle was on playing and saw my account log in but i was at school. he immediately logged into my account and every character was naked and all my gold was gone. got everything back via GM that same day but it fuckin sucked cus it was raid night and i had to miss that raid
His response to severity 0 chat violations "they turned off the language filter" should be the answer to EVERY chat violation ever.
As someone who worked in a similar environment. I can tell you that a live view count is no way near that stressful, when you stream, you go at your own pace.
blizz dont give a single F. they just care about the $ never gonna change
Super interesting that gms had to be invisible. Been getting into osrs and it seems their gms get much more leeway to interact with the community, showing up to content creator events etc.
Go to Turtle WoW/Ascension ect any big private server and they ban bots and gold selling. If private servers can easily do this, Blizzard are either incompetent or are actively ignoring an issue they know about.
Gold selling used to be a big issue on private servers, now it doesn't exist.
Yeah the admin used to sell gold themselves, but blizzard shut that shit down hard
Turtle is good in a lot of ways, but it's also overrated in some ways too.
That's quite a difference though. These private servers, although some are quite alive, they have a peak of 5-6 thousand, while the real game has millions, aswell as several game modes and upcoming contents.
It's self explanatory why it's so easy for private servers to manage.
These servers are also free to play so the dev gains nothing from botters, it only annoys their players. While blizzard does gain from botters and they supply the player base with materials. So their view of them is entirely different than some random guy who runs a free to play private server.
@A_Goat The private servers have well over 1 million players if you add them all up.. but they used to have bots/goldselling issues. Nostralious had a big issue back in the day..
But that's my argument, if these smaller servers can do it, why can't a massive company? Blizzard have the resources to do it.. they just choose not to do anything about it.
@traviscue2099
Yeah, private servers as a whole have made up over a million players across their entire life span, for sure, but most of which did not remain active, while Blizzard has that same number in just daily users but a drastically larger 130 million active players on top of that. Even the biggest server you mention, Nostalrius peaked at 10k. 10k daily vs 1.3million daily.
Surely it's easier to manage the first and not the latter. Nost was also a single server realm, while the real game has many servers across each and every expansion, re release and seasonal mode. The load to manage is not even comparable.
Not disagreeing with you, just don't think this is a fair equivalent. Blizzard certainly could do better.
I ve had gm in wow classic couple years ago showing while i was in dungeon, he waited till we killed the boss and than told me to log out so he can fix my issue with warlock quest not giving me my items, so i didnt had my soul bag :D it was best couple minutes in all the years playing wow for me, and the group :)
My account got ''zombied'' before, I had quit for maybe a year or something, and decided to resub, to find my character with 300 mining and tons of ore in his bags. I must have gotten lucky and resubbed while it was still being used to either bot or just farm. First time I ever had a max profession at the time as well lol
out of all companies, blizzard is for sure not the one that will bring back people to work there instead of automized support.
I still remember my friend getting fired for teleporting two of our friends up to Alcatraz in TBC
During wrath i learned my guildie and friend was a gm, they proved it without a doubt to me. I used to openly talk in guild chat about wanting to buy gold but could not afford it when i was young, only to find out years later that most of the guild was populated by GMs and people who worked at blizzard lol. I honestly think im on a watch list so ive never bought gold or eff all lol.
If anyone asks a GM for gold, they should instantly fill every bag and bank slot they have with unsellable, soulbound garbage items that they have to individually click and drag to destroy
The interactions I've had with proper GM's over the years have felt like I was in the presence of a God. The way they "spoke" and the things they sorted out for me was amazing
Does anyone else remember their first time reading trade chat in wow and no understanding what people were even typing, it was like another language.
I also got a Keylogger. Couldnt get rid of it.
Got my Stuff Back, changed the Password with a Monitor Keyboard, Put it in txt File and then Ctrl + v it from there on. xD
29:26 as a software engineer, this absolutely is not an impossibility.
Wow has an insane botting problem. On anniversary right now I can find bots in most zones. If they wanted to they could probably shut it down, as it ruins the server economy and creates gold bloat since everyone just starts buying gold. I think they only put effort into things that creates money.
Im actually happy Swifty on EU posed a the real Swifty. Hope he made a lot of unassuming children's day. Kinda think of him as a wow Santaesque type character now. 😂
Made a ticket because [Shard Labor] Achievement was bugged and i couldnt complete it so i couldnt get the mount.
Support responds to ticket saying i hadnt completed the achievement and theyre not allowed to give hints.
Explain every facet of my problem in depth so they can give me my mount.
"There is no current known bug about this quest sorry"
Respond again to the ticket, refusing to close it
Support responds to ticket saying i hadnt completed the achievement and theyre not allowed to give hints.
Completely unable to get the mount.
Absolutely heartbreaking i couldnt stop crying
Still to this day i don't understand the logic behind forcing me to change the name of my warlock "dogfart"years back. Blizzard itself has fart and mooning emotes built into the game. surely a name of dogfart isn't as blizzard emote popping up saying that you're dropping your pants to moon someone,.. lol
there's no way this guy doesn't see how uneven his mustache is
obliviously blizzard manager were paid by gold seller
Ahh man I remember the PTR that they left /worldport on good times good times
57:34 I literally grabbed eggnog out of my fridge moments before he said this…
I always wondered how you tied your shoes Guzu...
I saw so many videos about this gold selling thing. Guyz, bliz selling golds and if you try to go into that market u are banned.
Honestly, Blizz are incentivised to allow botting and RMT.
WoW token has to be bought with cash or gold on AH and if the price of gold inflates it makes it harder to obtain which drives sales.
Likewise, RMT is benificial because it lets people who are 'bad' at the game just buy stat sticks to boost their performance, those same whales are likely to spend money on cosmetics and anything else convenient for them in the store - boosts for example.
Race to world first likely wouldnt exist which is advertising for Blizz cause without the bots injecting currency to buy guilds would have to spend more time farming to buy BIS, or farming BIS.
It's within Blizzards interest to keep these things within the game for the same reason they allow addons.
It's financially benificial - for those not understanding where addons comes from, I firmly believe the only reason addons exist to the extent they do and Blizz seems to play so fast and loose with them is because it would require blizz updating draconian systems almost entirely. This would take time and money, and why bother when someone else is doing the work for you?
Pete Wisdom from Deadpool lol
this is off topic but keeping with current newsy stuff, how do people of denmark view greenland and its status?
Yo, I watched that video a couple days ago! I didn't know it was making the Reaction Andy rounds!
Yeah, they don't give a damn. That is why I don't pay them anymore.
Bots get a cut to Blizzard. The ONLY reason it's been active since 2006.
If Blizzard was getting a cut, wouldn’t they just generate gold to give the gold selling company instead of having bots? Blizzard gets their sub for each bot, that’s why they still exist.
ofc they get a cut from players selling tokens for bots to buy
@@Neotidus More likely explanation is that botters have bribed someone inside the company.
Blizzard does not actually make any money from botters, because botters buy their subscrptions with stolen credit cards and blizzard is obligated by law to return the money.
I got the CE pets back when a GM log into my account to fix something x3
revenue is not profit, but you need economical degree to understand such terms :D.
When someone opens a regular business they don't think about the people they pay but the revenue they get and how to optimize it. If you owned a business and not know your bottom tier employees you'd do something similar, maybe not in such harsh manner, but would still do it.
Also, as an employee you should not expect to actually live there for ever or be considered family by superiors.
Gamers are customers, treated like customers, gaming today is pure industry and if you want to survive in gaming industry you need to optimize business because there is fierce competition on the market, like it or not.
What he was doing was good for players, but the way to do it was bad. If you have such an idea you present it to your superior and they determine what u are paid for, not yourself.
We don't know if he did something good for the game, other might have been doing same thing, assigned to that thing. If every employee would start making such decisions just because it seems better you'll have chaos.
If you have KPI's is 100% about you, stop making stupid excuses.
Again, he was employed on a certain job, he is not manager or anything so he is not even entitled to know, nobody reports to you as support team member what other teams are doing and how well they are doing. And its normal, because even if you would catch a glimpse, you would jump to conclusions without having any data to support your conclusion. At the end of the day you are payed to do your job and only your job. Think you can do better ? Open a business of your own.
There is a risk taking action or not taking actions. Such decisions are based on statistics. If you invest extra 100k dollars to better control gold sellers but nothing changes on medium term as income, you just threw away those money for nothing. Once you did and experienced that you will not do it again. And you'll say, wait, but 100k is not that much, well, with that money they could pay an employee or two for a year, doing something valuable.
how can they fire people without giving them a reason? Do GMs work without a contract ?? I thought that applied only for the shady and "semi-legal" jobs?
Most states in the US allow ‘at will’ employment. Which means you can quit at will with no explanation and you can also be fired at will with no explanation.
@@leinonibishop9480 yes but thats for small companies or fastfood/gastronomy and stuff like that right? No way a giant company like Blizzard employs "at will". And who would accept a job at a place like Blizzard if they knew they could be fired any time without a reason. If someone accepts a job like like it's their own fault.
@@ASIRA89 i don't know about blizzard specifically but I've worked at several large, nationwide companies (not fast food) and even in management positions they are all at will employers.
@@ASIRA89good luck finding a job in the usa that's not at will employment, basically have to get a union job which are rare and limited industries.
@@leinonibishop9480 idk what to say about that. That seems pretty crazy to me.
I'll never forget in cata I had 200k I traded it for 160$ PayPal and the 40k+ stone drake good times
I had my account hacked and botted after i quit during cata came back they didnt vendor everything but i did have more gold than before and bags full of ore (along with mining which I didnt have)
such a racist gm, mentioned russians only in negative context
I only ever had one interaction with a GM. I was trying to get my exploration title, and I was in darkshore at max level on a horde character. This GM started questioning why I was there, and i ignored them. So they threatened to ban me and I went off on them. I had done nothing wrong, I was just going for an achievement in the game, and I paid their salary. Their insane power trip and threats were not my problem. So I reported them to the ticket system, and the same GM closed my ticket... So I sent an e-mail to blizzard about it.
You cant even find an e-mail for blizzard now.
good times.
You caught aggro from a tier 5 god complex neckbeardian
Meoooooooooow-xmas!!!! Love to you all
So Guzu's a swifty?
holy fuck its annoying when Guzu keeps pausing the video just to talk about something else entirely thats is not in he focus of the video
So watch the original?😂 i get it, but nobody is forcing you to watch Guzu react
That's what you watch a react video for, not all the commentary has to be on point to make it entertaining.
Literally the point of the react video dude. Watch the original if you don't like it, duh.
Look at POE 1 , they ignore bots and sales. Has open trade. The game is more fun.
The game is definitely not more fun with bots, Trading is a nightmare. The first 50 listings of an item are price-fixing bots. The only benefit was the currency exchange bots, which always gave terrible ratios any way.
Want to play a janky in development game with bugs and loot ? Try Pantheon ! Ps its an indy game
Don't know if I believe that. If they didn't care about gold selling. Then bots wouldn't get banned and players buying gold also wouldn't get temp bans.
Its for show
They do controlled ban waves, they do ban bots cause it's against TOS, but they don't put much effort on it since it's actually good for them. 1 Bot = 15$ a month, imagine the amount of money only via suscriptions they receive from them
@@Drathrin So is your activism.
They allow it to happen, the ban waves are an excuse when private servers don't have botting or gold selling.
@@dtyj2815 touch grass
The dude worked for Blizzard for 1 year.. 🤣
you are correct!
That story at the end.. never happened.
Only thing I disagree with is the scoreboard. An effective team needs to be able to track their progress. It sounds like their scoreboard was effective, and easy to interpret.
A department with no good leadership needs a scoreboard..
If you have a boss with the ability to actually lead his employees, the overall team effectiveness would be determined by concerted team tasks solved. In each of those tasks each worker would be given an area of responsibility to answer up for. This method doesn't rely on crappy metrics and logarithmic functions to determine success but rather actual progress of the team.
This mofo complaining about having to work 8 hours and then go home -_-'' seriously talking about thinking you have it bad While your living a dream...... i work 10-15 hours a day , i start on monday morning until saturday evening... i take pride in my work.. but this guy is just trying to find any single reason to complain about
You shouldnt be proud from being a slave. People should have better work hours, we have the technology to automate so many jobs. People should work less, not more than before.
@@teemumiettinen7250 clearly you have no clue how the world works, a slave is being forced to work however i want to work longer hours ... let me guess you dont order anything online ? if you do... then stop ordering on the internet so the truck drivers can take a break. you dont use the toilet ? kitchen ? shower etc ? i work in sewer technology... sewers dont stop... you dont stop using it. you wanna automate sewers ? ... its already automated mostly.. now its time for people to stop using sewers if you want that gone aswell... ahh yes completely automate the whole world so nobody has an income anymore -_-''. Sounds like america to me...
@@teemumiettinen7250 and FYI i am proud at my job, people are happy we do it and come to help them and that thanks to us they can still use the sewers. they are gratefull, and we are happy with what we do... so dont act all slave blabla on me
blizzard doesn't gaf about gold buyers or gold sells even high end mythic guilds buy gold for WF 😂 sad but true p2w from boe's to leveling profession's to make orders but yeah it is what it is
Game master is the lowest wring of any company lmao all his info is from over a decade ago before the wow token came in.
All of that was laid out right at the start...
@@--_DJ_-- and then the reaction video title is EX BLIZZ GM REVEALS EVERYTHING AND ITS HEARTBREAKING
@@ChichiNaka What difference does the title make?
I find this hypocritical Guzu. Complaining about bots & gold buying when joining Onlyfangs & playing with gold buyers like Soda. You cant complain about bots & reward players who buy gold. The community isnt prepared to police itself
Cry more
Cry more
Not joining the big content guild would be stupid. Sure fuck Soda for buying gold but I'm pretty sure all of us have had goldbuyers in their guild before that doesn't make all guild members hypocrites...
@@animalchin5082 Thats it, self interest over principles. The community wont police itself, I rest my case. If the community wont ban the gold buying streamers, why should Blizzard ban the bots
@@sticktothefacts8905 "If people won't stop buying weapons, drugs, PEOPLE illegally, why should the government keep it illegal". What weird logic is that. Bad things have to be controled by the people in charge so they don't go out of hand (like botting did especially in classic wow)
This was way back in mid Burning crusade, my dad had full raid epic armor set from Tempest Keep at the time. One day he longs in some guy stripped his character and sold all his gear and took everything. The GM was able to help him get all his stuff back and even gave him back his gold with a few extra hundred gold. I miss talking with GM's. I miss the blizzard i grew up with.
Im unsubbing now this company is trash thanks for showing me the light. 2 year hardcore player feeling abandoned. . . IM FREE!
if Wow wanted to kill bots and gold farms ...they could find a way but since gold can = $$ and Blizzard will never turn down $$... they most likely support it player based is jaded spoiled kids who turned a Great game to this from cata until now..its been trash xpan after trash xpan... don't we own phones =P
this dude should not have a stash
Just an observation. Maybe stop speaking over the video you're watching when the person is speaking in the video. Almost made me switch off.
Why would they care about gold sellers any more? It's literally a losing battle with any and all MMORPGs. You'll never beat the gold sellers and you'll just waste time and resources trying to.
"insert any game", why should they care about cheaters?
@@IceTax69 They dont, Soda got a slap on the wrist for buying gold. And the players & community dont care either, they flock to watch OnlyFangs & the gold buyers. Guzu doesnt really care, he joined OnlyFangs. Nobody is making a stand except MadskillzHC
6-8 calls an hour is one ever 8 minutes. Most of these tickets take like 1-2 minutes to solve. You should never be "falling behind" or that's on you.
Man who has never worked a day in his life ^
@@dtyj2815 keep bouncing on it and maybe one day you’ll get that bag bro!! Keep grinding!!
@@doomgu544 If you can't do 6-8 calls an hour, you should at least be able to prove that you were working on longer cases and your boss will probably understand, as long as you can prove you've been working that entire time. If it keeps happening and you can't prove anything and can't match this target, than you are obviously just not doing your job and are slacking off.(Or like in this guys case, wasn't doing his job properly. Which is what he got fired for.)
what's the reason behind worry about bot's? theyr paying like you, is obvious blizzard don't care, even me, i like it gold cost is very low even in fresh server, 1 hour of irl work and ur ok for months in wow, welcome bot
They are just a bunch of sweaty try hards that are sad they won't be the best at the game and don't know how to enjoy things for what they are. They are egotistic ppl that want other ppl to think they are good at the game and don't actually play just for fun.
Terrible logic. If you would rather spend real money than actually play the game, then that's a massive flaw in the game design and the correct response is to give feedback and quit until it's improved. You're part of the problem. Get better.
Anybody who cheats at a game, getting an advantage over others, is absolute scum and deserves nothing good in life.
@@dtyj2815 this is pure cope juvenile level logic, cheatering is selfish and entitled behaviour you are literally devaluing other players time investment for your personal convenience.
If you can't grasp this basic logic than your mother did a bad job raising you.
I saw a game master in Deathknell by the skeletons outside the blacksmith building on anniversary launch.
We are talking about Activision here... The company that also owns Call of Duty.. The only thing that greedy pos company cares about is 💵.. aka having as many players as possible in game to increase their odds of subscriptions or in game micro transactions. 💯
Crazy to worship a washed player only to become a washed player yourself!
in other news the sky is blue... of course they don't care. just look at "top" streamer dwods in onlf***s buying gold openly left n right lol sadacts
Bots are the new costumer, you are just the mount buyer.