Howdy friends! I know this is more of a talk-heavy episode (sorry for so few skits / memes). I had a lot to say on this topic, but I’m taking all the feedback on board and will write funnier scripts next year! Likewise, if you have any questions about my time as a Game Master at Blizzard, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll be happy to elaborate. I’m an open book! Last but not least: have a wonderful Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or however you celebrate in your neck of the woods! What matters most is eating good food, spending time with loved ones, and playing some great video games, so make some great memories! 👏 Thanks for all the support this year and for checking out my silly channel. You’ve made my life a little brighter, and I hope that these videos can give you some joy or a laugh as well. 💛 And yes I’m STILL slightly green from the body paint 😂😂😂
I use to raid with a group of GM's back in WoTLK. They worked at the Austin office. I heard alot about it. but i didnt tell anyone. They said I was on some list that knew they where GM's? idk. but I got more then one year of game time in cards, And pretty much anything blizzard gave out. Wonder if David or Morgan worked there when you did. I grew up with Davids brother. And knew them threw that.
Dont apologize for a lack of pointless memes that don't add anything to the video . Anyone above like 25 appreciate it, it's only the brainrot kids that cant watch longform without stupid bits to break it up.
You hear him download this video now. That way, it never goes away! SHAME SHAME SHAME Blizzard. Well, is there anyone there now who was there then? I need to run this past the T H O R I'm sure he would calm us down.
I remember never submitting any ticket in WoW as I usually researched any problem and tried to fix it myself. But in Legion I had some issue that needed an actual GM. As we talked about it, it became a 30 minute conversation about not just the game but life itself, it was so refreshing. As a farewell, the GM remarked that this is my first GM interaction since I have the game for 10 years and he wanted to be memorable. So he upgraded my account to the Legion Deluxe edition so I got the promotional mount and pet from it. I was so happy.
It really doesnt surprise me theyd do this. Back when i played, I would say that i probably got about 5-6 free months of time from them justnbecause. @Raphxx59
I only submitted one GM support ticket when I played 2005-2010. I was a kid in highschool farming my Beaststalker (T0/dungeon set) with the gloves being my final piece for the full set. The boss died, I won the roll, but my bags were full (whoops), so the gloves remained on the dead boss...which had bugged into a wall and I couldn't click to loot (after deleting some gray vendor trash item from my bag)! I was very sad and didn't expect to get the item, but I sent in the ticket. Next day, I get in-game mail with a Blizzard logo! They had the Beaststalker gloves attached! It was like opening a gift on Christmas morning! Thanks, 2005-06 Blizzard GM staff!
To anyone this happens to in the future, there is a solution. You need to bind the “interact” command to a button on your keyboard, then /target boss, be close enough to loot it, and hit the “interact” key bind you see up. This will make you loot the target. Now, if it’s so far into the wall to where you’re too far to loot it, you’re outta luck.
@@Jesse3beards uncollected loot above a certain quality gets mailed to players automatically now when the corpse despawns or on a server reboot, meaning this can't happen anymore.
Dude at least you had a weird reason you couldn't get your item. I had bag space during Classic 2019 re-release and I personally looted the boss in UBRS and won the roll for one of the 0.5 items - it never made it into my bags and being 2019 where they just don't care, they said there was nothing they could do then threatened me for asking them to escalate it cause it was a Blizzard error, not my own. That threat told me everything I need to know about this company.
Having an actual person to try and resolve your issue was sooooooo much better than what we get now. I miss the GMs and I miss Blizzard tech support, they were always very kind and positive. All healthy gaming communities need human managers.
I had 3 different GMs reply to a recent ticket and none of them understood the issue and provided very unhelpful "copy/paste" sounding info. Some of it even felt like AI might be being used. I eventually just gave up and closed the ticket.
that shit is expensive. times change. back in the 80s and early 90s, lots of companies (like Sierra On-line) had folks you could call on the phone and ask for tips and hints. paying guys to sit there and wait for phone calls is expensive. and since it's an unskilled role, they can't do anything else but sit there, eat chips, play games, and wait for phone calls. you don't need GMs like that anymore. it costs a lot of money, they deal with a lot of abusive behavior, and it's generally not needed anymore. besides, they only worked 9 - 5. you couldn't reach them after 5 pm, and often earlier, because they'd knock off early on fridays. that's 8 pm eastern, but if you needed help on saturday morning, you were shit outta luck until monday. the memory is a lot more amazing than the reality was.
This was an awesome insight of what many of us experienced in the golden era of WoW. As a returning WoW player I can only relate to negative experiences of customer support and actually having to go through a week of waiting for support ticket responses and multiple requests to actually get a GM interaction to my support ticket and explain why I couldn't be helped (bugged looting with transmog making it unobtainable but had no impact on gameplay itself) without the what felt cut and pasted auto reply which really does reflect the KPI system and what feels drastically understaffed now. Really sucks the customer support aspect of WoW is a shadow of if at all of what it was. Thanks for your work during that era and thanks for giving us a real accounting of what it was like doing it. Great video!
Thank you for the kind words and donation, mpsguy! I agree with you: it sounds like nowadays it takes ticketing multiple times to get issues resolved. The GMs of the past had an amazing relationship with players, and I'm very grateful to have been a part of it (if only for a little while). Thank you again for your generosity and support, and I hope you and yours have a wonderful holidays!
I remember I made a ticket to a GM about how my Eviserate was bugged on my rogue cause I was doing it with 5 combo points, and it said it would do 102 damage, but it was only doing 75 dmg or something, and the GM taught me about armor lol
To be fair to you, most games I know represent the actual applied number of damage and take damage mitigation into the math before representing a number to the player.
Had a GM help me on the old "Green felfire" for warlocks quest. Boss had died, but i died a bit after, and it didnt complete my quest. So a GM took control of my character and did it for me again. His words were "Im putting your warlock on stereoids and doing it this way, that way he wont feel like he got it for free ;)" It was a fun interaction, and immensely helpful!
I remember back in 2007 on my first character, I had just got enough gold for my epic mount but wanted to wait until the weekend to buy it as I was toiling over which horse to buy. When I got home from work that day I found that my character had been cleaned out and all of my gold gone. I opened a ticket and started chatting with the GM. We chatted for a bit while they investigated the issue, I told them that I was super bummed because I had borrowed a large chunk of the gold from a friend and now I had lost their gold. Eventually I was asked to log out to complete the restore, and when I logged back in, everything was back to normal, but with the added surprise that the GM had plopped one of the epic horses into my bags. He jokingly said it was so I could get the gold back to my friend before I had lost it again, and ended the chat. Doubt that would happen nowadays.
I was in Scholomance when we found a boss that was bugged. Name was greyed out and it didnt drop loot. So I wrote a ticket and the GM was kind enough to give me the loot. A rogue chestpiece. I told him our druid was the only one in our party who could wear it if he ever decided to play feral. A little while later I receive a thank you letter from the druid. This was one of my best GM interactions. I also had a few bad ones.
Thank you, Clyde. I can't find the GameMasters that brought magic to my life, that helped me when the hobby that got me through my darkness was under threat, that lifted spirits and enchanted a world of warcraft and wonder. I'd like you to take a few bucks and have a drink in their stead for me.
That's incredibly kind of you DarthMalaster--I'm so glad that you had a good experience with World of Warcraft, and that you have fond memories of the Game Masters! You have my word that your kind gift will go to a drink on their behalf. You are greatly appreciated! ❤️
Hey there, I’m a former GM also from the North Austin office. I was there from 2009 to 2013. I was in the Latin American team. Contact me if you would to talk and possibly do a video but from the Lat Am perspective
Howdy fellow GM! I'd love to connect on Discord! Do you feel comfortable replying to this comment with your username and I'll add you + send you a message? Thank you for your work supporting the players, and happy holidays! ❤️
Former T1.5 GM (paid t1 to do T2 shit, long story); Austin was lit as a job. The teams I was on had house parties every month, and on the low, I could get XO's and a bag at the Chinese vendor during late night shifts, "General Sao's specials" heheh. This may raise an eyebrow but this was 2010 - 2015, a long time ago. I did miss the old building though, it had a . . . Atmosphere lol. It's sad what became of the culture moving forward. Glad I moved on when I did.
I was a GM from 2013 to 2024 (when all game masters were laid off.) This video is kinda funny in how outdated it is and how passionate this guy seems to be over things that were resolved what i assume are hours after he left. I was there in the new offices, when they made a dedicated LATAM team section, when the management kept leaving and the whole operation was in freefall, when we moved to remote work exclusively, and when the big glasses girlboss from Microsoft fired everyone in a zoom call. Some of my co-workers still havent found a new job. I have no love lost for Blizzard but at the same time I dont regret working there the time i did.
Thank you for the kind words Projection Projects -- it was definitely an uncomfortable conversation (one that I kinda earned by not doing what they were wanting me to be doing), but that's life. I hope you have a wonderful holidays with friends and family! ❤️
@@NotYourFriend-YT Technically you were doing what they wanted, just before they wanted you to do it: if any of those players came back, they would have had to put in a ticket that you then would have had to take care of, just at a later date. You were just doing it proactively, at an earlier time that was more likely to allow you to still have the logs to verify what had actually been taken. As someone who did a lot of quitting and coming back to WoW, I definitely see value in what you were doing, even if it did mean I might have sat in queue for a ticket for a bit longer because of it--worth it, in my book. There's a non-zero chance my account may have even been one of the ones you rescued, as I do remember one time when I came back from a break noticing signs that my character was not exactly as I had left it, but that things had been restored, not perfectly, but close enough that it didn't matter. I remember being impressed that Blizzard cared enough about people getting hacked to have someone proactively taking care of it even on accounts that were inactive. I don't know if it was you, or if it was someone else following in your footsteps, but I definitely have to say thank you for the work you did during those two weeks.
The really sad thing is that, that manager likely had his butt chewed too. As someone who climbed the corporate ladder in a fortune 500 company, it all just rolls downhill and everyone is kept on edge by metrics. I can remember every Monday being my admin day and I would get sent a new email on a new thing we are doing or tracking or promoting and that everyone needed to be trained. Then they would not approve full staffing and set people up for failure, then when the inevitable pressure hits to the point of no return, they let you go and make it seem like it's your fault. It's so common for corporate managers and execs to jump from one company to another and leverage positions, in part because of this pressure they put on everyone. That manager or lead likely was just a product of that environment. I remember district and regional phone calls with all managers and they would ask questions like, who has a new idea or initiative that is helping their sales. This would be weekly, monthly and bi monthly. Like anyone could possibly have that on top of being short staffed, having all these ideas and trainings etc... It was maddening and everyone would just pretend. But don't worry, if you perform well in your region (this would be like 50+ stores in a say a 1/8 of the US chunk or something) maybe you can go to corporate HQ and meet the CEO then have a 3 day vacation anywhere there's a store, quarterly of course. The pressure these companies do, while Bobby Kotick gets another yacht based on your efforts is insanity and a massive issue.
@@NotYourFriend-YT The way I see it, if you were going to go down anyways (Be it by burning out, or as an eventual victim of a mass layoff), may as well going down trying to do some good along the way. Go out with a bang, not a whimper.
Hearing the SOP of having to recover accounts makes me understand the stress or frustration I made my first and only ever GM had to do. My dad had died in 2017 and I know he had a Blizzard account and a copy of WoW. In his belongings, I found a copy of WoD, and the code with it. A buddy of mine told me I can recover my dad’s account WITH the code, and a picture of the death certificate. I do not remember that GM’s name, I wish I did now since it was a year ago, I wish them the best though, for seriously bringing in a little bit of closure on my dad’s passing. Thank you Clyde for doing your best work possible for us WoW gamers
Thank you for the kind words PsychoCaster -- I'm glad that you have some gaming memories to look back on with your father. My dad only played Pilot Wings on the Super Nintendo, and after that he basically ignored any of my attempts to game with him. 😂 Sending you all the love in the world, and thank you for sharing your story. ❤️
i remember that one period in WoW when you couldn't go a single day without seeing the center of orgrimmar painted with corpses spelling out the url for a gold selling site, and every 5 minutes seeing an ad in tradechat from the same bot account looking back, there's no way blizzard was simply incapable of dealing with that; they just didn't care
Completely agree with you 2tooth, it's a shame that Blizzard doesn't take more steps to deal with this behavior or make it clear how much they're actually doing behind the scenes.
I remember my first big interaction with a GM very fondly. I organized an excursion to Hyjal, back in vanilla (right on the cusp of BC release, so 2.0, where the wall-hopping bug got introduced which allowed us to get up there) I got there with 2 of my mates, me being a warlock. Summoned another warlock. He got another one in. Got a mass summon party going. Ended up with one major guild of the realm being almost fully present (their raid lead failed to show up so they were just having fun), and a whole bunch of random people I didn't know. Roughly a hundred folk running in unreleased, normally inaccessible territory. Suddenly I got swept aside by a GM, told me "OK so I recognize that this is fun but I'm gonna have to port ya'll back home" and "_please_ (!) don't do this again". The GM did end up showing themselves (so no invis) to basically get the crowd under control. We did have a little fun, the GM changed their model to Lord Kazzak and threw some spell effects around for a fitting ending to our little "exploration". (And yes, I did end up doing something like that again - the old Ironforge "basement" with the crystals and stuff.) The whole ordeal did end up with me getting a bit of a rep on the realm as being an explorer, which was cool I guess.
These are the kind of interactions that made the game so memorable back then. Part of it was nostalgia but a lot of it was real intrigue at exploring a new game. Nowadays people kind of know which questions to ask when an expansion is released, and since a lot of the content can be queued for if not soloable, most of the people you meet like tyler durden would say are "a one time use friend".
@@linsqopiring6816 Not to my knowledge, although Demon Hunters are able to do some unusual clipping with their double-jump to get out-of-bounds in certain dungeons. Thats about it though
I still remember the olden times back in like 2007 when I got stuck in a hammock as a cat druid in Tanaris. And the gm joked about fish getting caught in nets was a usual sight, but cats getting caught in nets was rather embarassing, but he said that in a fun way, not a rude way XD. And then he set me free, yay.
I was a game master from 2008 till 2012 in Austin and I can say this video is absolutely accurate. I was laid off with the blizzard 600 in 2012. Thanks for bringing back a lot of memories, both good and bad. 😊 The best thing I got from my time there were some life long friends and a cool employee jacket!
Howdy John, and thank you for the donation / and the kind words! I would *LOVE* to pick your brain about your role at Irvine, what life was like in your neck of the woods, and all things Game Masters! Feel free to reply here with your discord details (or send me an email at notyourassociate@gmail.com) and we'll chat soon. Thank you again for your kindness, can't wait to connect!
I have one memorable interaction with a GM. I hacked myself into the unfinished area under Karazan (back when you could do that, because I like to explore) and honestly...the crypts really freaked me out. Yes, I'm a fully grown woman, and I was unnerved by pixels on a screen. But I couldn't hack my way back out and my HS was on CD so...I opened a ticket, and explained myself, and apologized for breaking the rules and begged to be released lol. I think the GM might have thought I was a child or something [from how it affected me] because suddenly my character looked like she was being picked up by the scruff of her neck like a kitten, carried out and gently placed on the ground outside the raid. The GM said they weren't going to penalize me, hoping that I'd been "scared straight" and kindly asked me not to do that again. It was really rather sweet and nice and left a good impression of WoW GMs on me forever.
I remember there was a bug with one of the bosses in 25m ICC, and when the GM showed up, he hung out with us for a bit, insta killing the tank that pulled the boss that somehow got bugged, throwing fireworks everywhere. Calling everyone chickens for not pulling without the tank, then turning everyone into chickens for like, 20 secs. we even convinced him to pull some mob packs with us. He didn't do any damage but it was fun to see it. Those were the days
Nyildris made me laugh really hard and I have no idea why. It's giving "unmarried elf librarian man with five cats who wears sweatervests and can cook a perfect souffle".
Right??? And it was made even worse because some of my friends were getting REALLY cool names. Then I looked at my screen and saw "Nyildris" and was like ... uh .... can I get a do-over?? xD Thanks for checking out the video Morgan. Have a happy holidays and eat some delicious food! ❤️
Would you be able to give us the GM perspective of what happened with the player (Leroyspeltz) in 2008 that accidently received the item "Martin Fury" when a GM was restoring their items? Would you know how this GM could have made such a mistake? Or could there have been more to this story? Thanks for the vid!!
That manager was so wrong about you. I have barely ever played WoW and I just found your channel through the Nintendo series, but this video was equal parts entertaining as it was incredibly informative. Thank you so much for sharing your experience - I enjoyed every bit of it.
Man, these vids exude so much 2008 energy in a modern-day video essay format. I am all for it. I remember being a noob in middle school when Burning Crusade was new and they were cool to me. Helped fix a bugged quest npc. I was amused by the roleplay they did on a non RP server though. I assume it was just policy to start/end with "In a flash of arcane light from the pits of the seven hells comes Smurple the Dark One"
Smurple would be an amazing name for GM, haha. Thank you very much for the kind words and for checking out the video Lucas!! I see you're into voice acting -- let me know if you'd ever like to voice a meme in an episode! I *love* having guests on for all the dorky skits / clips I voice over. (Goodness knows my production value can only go up from here, haha.) Happy holidays!!
@@belovedofdeath You're totally welcome Mala! Send me an email at notyourassociate@gmail.com and I'll send you my next script when it's ready! Always happy to have friends on. 🙂
As someone who dealt extensively with Blizzard support throughout the years. After 2012 the quality of support responses fell through the floor. I can count on one hand the number of times when I got an actual person-to-person conversation. It all switched to the support site and were tickets closed due to 1) incompetence or 2) a game master not reading any previous replies to a ticket. Especially after 2016. The amount of time I experienced targeted harassment or got reported for just being bad at a game spiked exponentially and support would uphold those suspensions because they came from the automated system. I was in direct contact with a supervisor at one point who literally did nothing except told me to wait for the automated suspension to expire. First and second replies were always the same canned response. Then they would start threatening to ban you for asking for a proper response. The whole "customer support" system has gotten worse. It's just a soulless machine, automated systems, and copy-paste responses. I wish I knew the name of the support person who helped my first stuck ticket back in 2005. They set the bar for friendliness and how personable support could be to this very day. Note: The log retention was still 90 days as of ~2022.
While the GM position you're talking about is more about general help/moderation, I'd love to see games be developed where GMs take on a role of curating the player experience. We're starting to see some of this in games like Helldivers 2, and it's been very effective at driving player engagement. So I'd love to see companies take it even further.
There was something mysterious yet so magical about interacting with GM's back in the day. I think it really added a certain level of mystique to the game that nothing could be substituted for.
I still remember when my friend and I started wow and our recruit a friend bonus didnt work...so we wrote a ticket and a GM talked to us for like an hour about the game, gave us tips and all. You could literally feel that there was a real human beeing happy to show some kids the game for the first time. Or when I saw my first "patrolling" Quest-NPC and after he vanished I thought I deleted the NPC with my DC. Poor GM had to explain to me that stuff like that isnt possible and how to do my Quest....fun times. Now I write a ticket and IF im lucky, they respond after 3 days telling me how to open my mailbox or other stuff that has NOTHING to do with my problem. Really great Video!
Hey! from a former Blizzard customer, Thank you for your service throughout the years. You guys help me alot when my account was hacked and all my gold/gear stolen one day. Its good to remember the good days of WoW. Played WoW since 2006 and Quit WoW since BFA which was 2020 and sold my account on the internet. Have not looked back and have not miss a thing. No Regrets.
@@jesusreyesrodriguez5022 14 Years my friends come and go. None that stayed. All my friends are either married or too busy at life to play WoW anymore.
I go back to my account every now and then, try it for a month, realise that no one I know no longer plays… at 1 stage I was running 2 accounts playing like most weekends and 6 hrs a day .. I do miss it, but it’s the fact most games can’t come close to the “wow” experience that keeps me coming back. It’s lonely being a guild master with no guild left….
@@peteb5343 I had a group of irl friends (and friends of my friends) who would play a ton of the same games and we'd always form our own little 'irl' guild. I fell behind on the whole getting my life sorted as an adult thing, so I know the feeling of coming online to an inactive guild. :( Even for guilds that weren't irl friends - sometimes all it took was for the guild leader to become inactive and the whole guild fell apart. It's sad, because I was always apart of these really small guilds that were like a tight-knit family: it wasn't just playing the game it was talking about our lives, our problems, etc. It just seems harder to find guilds like that anymore since many just have the goal of growing big since in most games now a bigger guild reaps bigger benefits - which takes away the closeness aspect I feel.
some of my favorite memories of playing wow as a kid is needing to open a ticket, and just legit chatting with GMs for like an hour+ every time. they were always chill, professional, and made me want to be one SO BADLY. Thanks for the video, this was a super cool inside look from the GM perspective and knowing that yall liked to just sit and chat with us as well made me smile. subbed for sure.
I'm glad you have such amazing memories of GMs Jay! Likewise, thank you very much for the kind words and for checking out the video. Happy new years and holidays! ❤️
Hey dude. I know exactly how you feel. I was a QA tester for a South African Company. Not in a sense of a GM but a QA tester is testing an unreleased game and making tickets on issues. Thank you for telling us your story on being a GM and how you got laid off. I got placed on Performance Management too micromanaged ony because the team leaders at my workplace are relentless. I was the only QA working remotely from home while the rest of the Team was at the office so you can imagine the situation I was placed - feeding all the info through through text. NO ONE had my back, No one had any Emotional check in to say "how are you Doing" and afterwards got Mutually dismissed. To this day, I still get PTSD thinking about it. Glad you got out of that toxic work environment. What you did saving those Zombie Accounts was still tiny accomplishments in the end. We learn and take with us any valuable knowledge to the next work environment. Good Luck on your 2025 year. May it be the best Year for you
Thank you for the kind words R_Jay! Happy New Year for you as well, and thank you for sharing your experience being a QA tester. I can only imagine how tough that situation must have been (having the team be in-person but you were remote). I hope 2025 is a wonderful year for you!
Grandma? That name sounds like a badass nightelf hunter to me. I wouldn't have a single clue what you want with cookies if you contacted me like that :D
I interviewed with Blizzard once for a QA position. The one question as far as I can tell that resulted in me not getting the position was "If you and another peer had a solution to a problem that were equally good, how would you resolve which one to use"? My answer was "Flip a coin", assuming we were both mature enough to just pick one at random. The answer they wanted was "Let's do your way this time and my way next time".
I've watched a lot of videos about blizzard and how they used test to decide who gets the job and who doesn't. Blizzard employees had absolutely no idea what they were doing. It's very clear that whoever was coming up with these test, was some high schooler wannabe cool kid and came up with a bunch of random reasons and test to see if you are "cool enough" to be apart of the company. Your answer was logical, simple, and correct.
So, what you're saying is, Blizzard wanted employees who wouldn't stand up for themselves or accept fair treatment. They wanted people who would tuck tail between their legs and defer to others. IMO, your answer would have actually been the best one because it shows both maturity and fairness.
@@pringusdingus It is a lesson I should have learned when I worked at Amazon (not the warehouses); they aren't looking for people who respect their coworkers, they are looking for people who consider themselves better than their coworkers and are willing to manipulate others to get ahead as those are the ones easier to isolate and easier to manipulate to get that extra bonus for pushing their coworkers to get more done for less.
Few stories to share. One's a fun interaction with a GM and the other is about the "other" side of RMT'ing (not as a hacker or cheater or a company, just an individual.) Had a GM unstick me from being glitched inside of a wall, who showed up in person and then wanted to help me get to where I was questing. He summoned a 2 seater motorcycle mount which didn't exist in the game yet that I was able to sit on him with and he did a spell effect to make fire shoot out of the back of it and tripled the regular speed of a mount. He did some sick jumps off ramps on the way. It wasn't until a full expansion later (WotLK?) that the mount was introduced to the public. Now during WoW Cata I was a RMT'er. I ran the 3rd largest guild in the game and ran raffles, contests, and had the wealth of the entire guild at my fingertips to re-sell as I saw fit. I never hacked accounts or did anything evil to obtain the gold, I just had such a massive surplus from my guild as well as controlling the auction house and wanted to supplement the income I had (retail worker). Now around this time I wanted to quit the game badly, but had wayyy too much to give up so I tried to get myself banned by OPENLY advertising the RMT and what I was doing. To my surprise I never got in trouble for it. I eventually sold my entire guild and the weird thing is, the person I sold it to had game masters change my guilds name to something else. My guilds name didn't break terms of service or anything of the sort, and to my understanding game masters didn't change the names of guilds for players. At the time besides being the guild master of such a large and famous guild I also had a (different) youtube channel that was flourishing in WoW content as well as being a big name on warcraftmovies. So was being an e-celeb, being the guild master of the 3rd largest guild, and the person holding the auction house hostage make me immune to game master punishment? I never found out why, but according to your story it seems like game masters were just told to leave the RMT dudes alone and focus on helping players instead.
Thanks for posting this video. I really enjoyed learning about what it was like behind the scenes whilst I was playing WoW. I played obsessively for 5 years.
This was a great watch thank you. I have a special memory of talking to a gm and him helping me with a quest bug. He rpd the whole thing. I was only a kid so it felt like it was a celebrity. ❤ bring back gms!
The one or two times I remember talking with a GM were very nice. They were very polite and friendly and seemed happy to help, rather than this just being their job. Having worked customer support for a short time myself, I know it takes a special kind of person to maintain that kind of energy. I couldn't handle how exhausting it was trying to stay positive when your job is to read peoples problems and complaints all day. Sincerely, thank you to all GMs for helping all of us have just a little better game experience. Also, you sending cookies after helping someone is adorably wholesome.
100% can confirm i would talk to a GM for 20-30 min about random stuff after my issue was resolved in 1 min. Those were the best times of WOW (TBC - Wrath).
Back when AOL was a thing my friends and I used to have a few of the AOL support staff on our AIM list and talk to them about random stuff, support jobs were a lot different back then.
@@Agret I don't know the patch, since I started playing in 2007, but from what I understand, when WoW was new you used to be able to add GMs to your friend list and do similar.
Blizzard GMs are a thing of the past. In January, they laid off all the in house teams. Now they rely on outsourced agents from Egypt overseen by a few Champions. It may not have always been perfect, but I felt more confident knowing the GM I was talking to was actually a Blizzard employee.
I remember when Blizzard did phone support. My account got hacked and I talked to someone who asked some basic questions including how much gold I had. I couldn't remember but it was caught quick enough that they said I had way more than that on one character and they just said "Don't tell anyone but here keep the extra." I spent it so fast because I felt like Scrooge McDuck in his vault.
That happened to me with SWTOR, didn't get my account hack but someone did try too login from a other country, had to call tech support, give 3 answers only I would know .. WoW Cataclysm, I did get hack , Blizzard froze my account into I changed my password, some how no joke I had 12 months of Free Play , don't know if that was Blizzard being nice or the hacker was using a year timecard
I remember my first game interaction with a GM. It was in Nagrand during BC and me and my friend were trying to kill the bird elite but it was stuck and evading. I opened a ticket and when I was flying, I noticed someone flying infront of me in those robes. I thought it was a hacker so I flew away from it. I later got a message from teh GM telling me to fly over to the bird with my friend so we could kill it. He reset the boss but someone kept jumping in and interfering with the kill. So the GM turned the guy into a maggot and kept him that way until we killed the bird. It was amazing. We thanked him and continued playing. The guy who was a maggot freaked out the whole time. This was 12-13 years ago. I'll never forget experiences like this. Thank you for your hard work!
What a great video, thank you very much for sharing! I vividly remember my interaction with a GM about 15 years ago, where a red dragon patrolling in Blasted Lands got bugged out and I couldn't kill him. I opened a ticket, and after a while I saw a small dragon flying towards me from the sky. He then transformed into a human with a black/blue robe, introduced himself and told me not to worry and that he will fix it. He then summoned a Fel Reaver (!!!) and ordered it to attack the dragon. Even that wasn't working, and he then despawned both and told me to wait till a new dragon spawns soon. On his way out, he exited with a little twist, making my character explode all the way to the highest point of the sky, and then slowly fall while twirling.. I don't remember if he gave me any cookies haha! I cant describe what a wholesome experience this had felt.. this lives rent free in my head and I have always enjoyed sharing it.. took a lot of screenshots as well of course! :)
The way you got chewed out by that manager reminds me of a few bosses I had. I would do stuff that the store manager loved, to the point he made sure I knew he was impressed with my work. But my direct supervisor hated it cuz it wasn’t 100% what she wanted me to do. Store was a mess, I reorganized it. And caused chaos for helping lol. Great vid, keep ‘em coming!
@39:22 Man... that boss did an absolute shit job. If he was doing his job well, he would have recognized your burnout, listened to why you were doing what you were doing and looked for a way to move you in a direction that fit the company goals without just invalidating your view and of course without denigrating you as a person. He could have brought life back to your work, saving your job, saving the company money (backfilling rolls is expensive) and most important of all, he could have just been a better human being to his fellow human beings.
Two occasions I had the privilege to see a game master, once when there was a ton of harassment going down in Goldshire "mutual combat" but it was excessive and non-stop.. a blue GM chat appeared in the general chat, I don't remember what they said, but they said something in general chat totally random, not directed to anyone, and the GM appeared in the middle of the people causing drama for a brief second and disappeared.. that was enough to scare everyone straight and probably scared those arguing s**tless and to behave. The other time was during the middle of a raid but when we killed a boss it didn't drop any loot at all, it was the 15th anniversary special event raid, but one of the bosses didn't drop any loot.. so our guild leader sent a ticket and actually got a quick response as we continued and were in Naxxramas part of the se raid, barely clearing the path of trash on the way to the next boss when we noticed the GM who was visible the whole time standing there silently.. doing whatever they had to do (I assume review logs?), but as everyone gathered near by said hi, they said hi back, etc.. then as we were just all standing around near them waiting, they spawned a hogger that was higher level than us, and hogger proceeded to wreck and killed the whole raid while we were waiting for them to resolve the issue, which they did.
That's amazing you got to see one in person Lycan! I very rarely had the pleasure of showing my character off in-game, but it definitely was a fun moment when it happened. The fact that you got to see it in a raid setting is even cooler! Happy holidays, and thank you for sharing such an amazing memory! ❤️
I remember ICC 25. Lichking disappeared when shifting to HC. No ID, no reason at all. GM spawned after a 15 minute ticket. He informed a Senior to have a look. They couldn't help us, but did some RP and transformed our modells into LK and others. Great times. Lately I had an simple issue with recruit a friend connection ... "Sorry, your problem. Ticket closed." Useless..
I think it’s alarming to hear that managers didn’t want employees to confront gold buying/selling. This makes me wonder why buying and selling wouldn’t be one of the major concerns for GMs and blizz as a whole.
Many reasons, main one being they make more money hand over fist leaving it alone. It also justifies the existence of their wow token and their continued monthly subscription 20 years later. Pretty much every factor thats relevant here comes back to money, because the only positive is a better game for the players. Lol
Another perspective is that there was enough work to keep you occupied with helping active players and resolving their problems for the entirety of your shift. What he describes essentially means he removed gold from the economy while helping zombied accounts of inactive players. The focus was always active and current players and not so much those that gave up on the game. Exception of course for those zombied accounts that held some power in guilds for instance and were used to clear out guild banks, etc. Or those that were simply reported by friends of those affected, one wouldn't just ignore reports of a clearly hacked account just because the player is no longer active. Going after gold buying and selling was also technically the responsibility of other departments. Now are/were they effective in their role? As a GM it's hard to see the full picture of what's being done because there's little communication on that front and you just know what's within your reach and responsibilities and you're biased towards a clear "no, they're not effective", as especially in those days you worked on hacked accounts every single day and could literally spend hours upon hours following the gold trail to remove a few million gold. Back then that may have been quite a bit but I guess in the overall picture it was a bunch of hours wasted that you could have spent helping active and engaged players.
@@Pathitehe said “Draenor realm” aka the server “Draenor”. There are two servers named Draenor, one for US (specifically in the Pacific time zone) and one for EU, both being PvE servers. Nothing to do with WoD. It is entirely possible that the original commenter was on the US Draenor server during this guy’s time as a GM, and entirely possible that this guy helped him with a ticket during that time.
Such a fascinating video! I applied to be a WoW GM at the Austin branch in 2016 but didn't make the cut, so it's very interesting to see what I missed out on. I will say the hiring process in that era was more casual than what you described in 2012, they ferried me and two dozen other applicants into a room, a Blizzard employee asked each of us a random question like "What's your favorite ice cream flavor?" and then we were sent outside to wait, and I wasn't called back in. No 1-on-1 interviews with the team lead in that era :)
That's interesting to hear how the interview process changed Aabicus! Thank you for sharing your experience, and likewise thank you very much for the kind words. You are the best! 🙏
Back in the day I had a GM help me transfer my zulian tiger mount off one account to my new one - I thought with the names not matching they wouldn't be able to help out (as the original account was a friends they gave to me years ago - eventually made my own account) but I suppose I got super lucky with the GM I was matched with. They understood how precious it would be to keep such a cool limited mount instead of it being lost to time on the old account. Those were definitely the good days and I am very grateful to have experienced GM's in their prime doing gods work. Thanks!
I remember that name, Nyildris! I don't remember exactly what I had done to get in the position I was in, but I had gotten wedged into some sort of piece of the environment (I think it had been somewhere in Thousand Needles, it's been a LONG time) , and was stuck 'falling' so I couldn't hearthstone out. And the GM that helped me was able to yoink me outta that! So uh.. thanks for the save back then. XD Edit: Thinking back on it, it was one of the pillars where the Grimtotems were located. I was a druid, so I thought I could get down easily with cat form (Cause you know.. less falling damage) only to get caught on some of the crags, fall behind one of them and BOOM.. stuck falling. TBH I got stuck in a LOT of weird places in cat form, but this was the only time I called for GM help due to the perpetual falling. Alt + f4 didn't help either as logging back in.. I was still falling.
That's amazing, I'm glad I was able to be of assistance that do (or one of my peers). Getting stuck in the world's geometry happened more often than people realized, and it seemed to happen at the most inconvenient times ... I remember one player being like, "a rare mob just ran by me!!! SPAWN IT FOR ME!!!" and I was like .. I can't do that my friend .. 😂 Likewise, thank you for checking out the video Nova, you are greatly appreciated. Merry Christmas and happy holidays! ❤️
Hello splendid moustache man, I don't suppose you'll see this comment but I have a very strange and personal question about GMs; Around 2010 when I was a kid I was running an Undead to Mulgore to meet my friend who was levelling. Whilst bored on the journey I opened a GM ticket and asked if they could teleport me to the Tauren starting zone cos I was an inpatient child. About 10-15 minutes later when I was approaching the starting zone a GM appeared floating above me and whispered me something to the effect of "Looks like you're a long way from home" and "As you're almost to your destination let's see what I can do..." he then proceeded to teleport me to the well at the first quest in Mulgore, turned into a giant demon and started raining fire on the area visually. Afterwards he did an RP exit and vanished. I have told multiple friends about this, even people who have connections with Blizzard, all of them have told me this shouldn't have happened/wasn't possible. BUT IT HAPPENED. Please, as an actual game master could you tell me, was this my memory playing tricks on me? Was this guy breaking conduct? Was this you??? Thank you and great video
Thank you for the kind words Leonard Sporgo! This is an interesting one ... porting / moving players around was definitely within our wheelhouse, and I know that I would've personally LOVED getting a ticket of, "hey can you TP me to the Tauren starting area?" 😂 As far as spawning enemies or visual effects, I'm sure this was possible within Atlas Tools (or one of their pieces of software), but it wasn't something I was particularly knowledgeable about or did. The closest I got to this was updating quest or achievement flags when things bugged out for players. 😅 That said, I believe you! I'm glad you had such a memorable interaction with a GM, and that they were able to make your day with some fun RP / effects. Thank you for checking out the video and for sharing your experiences -- have a wonderful New Years! ❤️
Had some interactions with GM's in the first years, most awesome thing was they had to log into my account once, and when I logged back in, I got a mail that my account was upgraded, for which I got some cool new pets like the Mini diablo etc :D
Ya, as a player, I pretty much stopped playing around the time that those layoffs happened. The World of Warcraft changed in a big way that day. I've tried to go back over the years, but it's never been the same. And, like MANY other formers players, I've been on a search for that same feeling I had when WoW was new. Never again I'm afraid. Sad indeed.
I play Mortal Online 2 which still has active GMs. It's pretty great, you run into a problem and open a ticket, and they usually respond within a minute. They're not always helpful, but sometimes they save the day. "Hey, my pet got killed because the server lagged and i couldn't get it away from the things killing it," and they just revive your pet.
I think you ran into one of my characters in wow, not sure which one, but I recall the name. You were nice to me. Whenever I wrote a ticked I always said after it was over regardless; thank you for your time and consideration.
This was really fun! Thank you for talking so candidly about how things worked for the folks working behind the scenes. I remember opening only a few ticket inquiries in my first few years of playing, and always wondered why the GMs that answered me seemed to be playfully role-playing in-character with their responses. Now I know why!
I'm glad you enjoyed it Drowsy! I hope you and your friends and family have an awesome holidays coming up. Eat some good food and play some fun video games!
GM's were awesome in WoW. Nearly everyone of them I spoke with (admittedly not all that often) were friendly, helpful, and went above and beyond your typical customer service experience. One spoke with me for nearly an hour trying to help me figure out a semi-glitch with the Bolvar Fordragon quest. And this was only probably 3-4 weeks after Lich King released (so likely a very busy period). I actually got into the habit of opening tickets with the message "There's nothing wrong. I just wanna say I appreciate you guys". QUESTION THOUGH - I often heard rumours that if you actually got to GM Island, it would be a ban for glitching, but the GMs there would actively engage you in a very friendly conversation first almost congratulating you for making it there.
I play since the beginning. And a big point for the love to WoW back in the days where the Gamemasters. The funniest thing i have a memory, was someday we had lootproblems in the Raid, the Gamemaster fixed it, but he watched us wiping some time and made commentaries like a reporter in a Soccergame ^^
Maybe your opinion in part 8 was the saddest, cause yeah it's still a freaking problem 😭 It was great to hear about your experience man. GMs probably are still low in supply but as a player I know I miss you guys. They're trying to AI more of that kind of thing and it's just depressing!
I've been playing since December 2004 and had great experiences with game masters. One of them helped me as I did the "Insane" title and it bugged, the GM sat with me and verified that I did have all the boxes ticked to get the title and had it not been for that game master, my 3 year grind would have been for nothing. You guys were so helpful with the botting problems and people harassing us so thank you. I miss having GM's in the game you made the game a LOT better. Now it is automated by an abusable system and it seldom works to improve the game.
Never played WoW myself, but man if this wasn't an interesting watch. I love how you're able to present your videos so that, even if it's about a topic or a game that I'm not familiar with and/or admittedly don't care for, I'm still interested in listening. You do great work, man! Keep it up! Hope the holidays are kind to you :]
Thank you Morgan!! Also, is that your cat in your profile pic?? THEY'RE ADORABLE! haha. (Sorry if I've asked that before, I have hella deja-vu when it comes to cute animals.) Have a happy holidays yourself, and eat some good food / play some great games! You're the best!
@@Duelcitizenx About ten minutes earlier in the video from when he explained that point he said he had been fired. That's not subtext, he just misspoke.
He admits he found a 'loophole to bypass the ticket queue altogether' then says if your manager starts going on to you about numbers that you don't deserve it and that he didn't deserve to get talked to about a performance plan when he admitted he was burnt out and stopped doing the job he was being paid to do which was to provide customer support. Don't know how long he expected to get away with not doing his job.
To be honest, when management puts you on a PIP, it means they are documenting everything you do, putting you under a microscope with the intention of building a case to terminate you. Don't let the anagrams wording mislead you into thinking a Personal Inprovement Plan is a good thing. The verbage says it is, but the paperwork says it's not. Even if he turned in his badge willingly, the companies bottom line was to terminate him.
I randomly was shown your video. I watched the entire video. This was so interesting and well made. Thank you. I look forward to watching some of your other content.
Respect to Not Your Friend for replying to every comment. It makes my day every time my favorite youtuber of all time (not exaggerating) replies to my comments!! Thx for being u mustache-man
You're way too kind to me Tails, haha. Thank YOU for being such a friend of the channel and for laughing at all my dorky memes and skits. ❤️ Do you have any fun plans for the holidays? I think we're going to hunker down and watch a bunch of Christmas-y movies and play some video games. (I am NOT looking forward to having to do all the dishes lol)
@@NotYourFriend-YT Thank you so much for replying! It always makes my day seeing your responses. Your skits and memes are the best, and I love being part of your community! For the holidays, I’m mostly going to be watching Christmas movies and spending time with family while on vacation in New Orleans. I totally get you about the dishes-I’ll probably have to help out too, lol
I remember setting up private servers back in the day and getting to GM Island. I was thoroughly excited and then ultimately kind of disappointed. That's it? The mythical land of GMs? A jungle island with a single building? Alas, as someone with server admin rights on that private server it was easy to spawn in entities to liven up the place. We turned it into a little port with a pier, a large tower reaching past the trees and some NPCs to populate it. Seemed more worthy that way :)
I worked on a private server that turned the inside checkered 'interrogation' room of GM island into a sex dungeon lol. We had a separate place for talking with players/punishing in an area we made in Stormwind coz that kind of punishment would have been a lil... lewd. Half the players probably would have liked it too much anyways. We also had parties/gatherings in the asset areas where there were like one of each and every building on a grid under the map (im presuming for copy pasta'ing to use above the map in the play space). I was asked to make an NPC on GM island that ported us to xyz of the asset village so it was easier to get to. He had the ID/graphical display of a goblin and his name was, 'Moogle, Asset Village Teleporter'. I bet Blizzard employees never got to name a goblin of ANY kind 'Moogle'. Fun times. I only bailed on that entire scene to help a few friends with their ARK community server and making custom scripts/mods for it. Mainly custom recipes.
I'm not sure on this being the reason but at least on live servers I know that the invisibility tag was set after the login. If you were not careful to log out on GM Island, you might login with your human GM character in, for instance, Orgrimmar and get insta-gibbed by a guard before the invis flag can be applied and then there you are, a blue robed corpse that might draw a bit too much attention. :P So GM Island was definitely a good choice for logging in and out.
/worldport Clyde's home :) Great video as usual! Very thorough and packed with interesting info... hopefully the Blizzard agents won't find you :D That mario segment was... something else. Happy holidays to you as well, thank you for everything!
I mostly played Vanilla and a good bit of TBC. I was in the top raid guild on my server. We had every raid on farm. And my favorite moment in WoW history was a GM joining a dungeon and laugh with us because a boss was spawned in under the map and was still able to attack us. He was so kind and funny and he knew we saw the humor in it so he leaned into that. He pulled him out of the floor and sent the boss out of the roof and said "oh oops that's too far" and then moved the boss down enough that just the boss's feet were in the room.
Man, I loved the GMs. I had a couple tickets that needed GM help back in the WotLK days, including a quest chain that had broken due to a bug, and when my account got hacked by a keylogger before authenticators were a thing (it was rough logging in to raid naked XD). I appreciate what you all did and miss the magic GMs brought to the game.
Fun fact doxxing was not against the ToS back in legion :) as I opened 7 tickets about being doxxed in game and was told "nothing we can do contact the authorities"
That fking creepy, you'd think Blizzard would fully , ban those people off their servers, I mean they're giving away people privacy. That got to be against Blizzard policy 😮
34:00 not allowing goodbyes or returns to the desk is EXTREMELY important for security and safety. 99.9% of people would just grab their stuff, say goodbye and leave. 0.1% of people would do something malicious. and tech support are often the greatest risk if one of them does something malicious. imagine what massive amount of headache you could cause in just a few minutes with all your tools and access. Its not uncommon for tech support people with a lot of access to be legally barred from entering a building even before they are fired. where i live, this is standard procedure for tech support for schools. even if someone quits on their own, they are trespassed immediately and legally never allowed to return the school on their own for very obvious safety reasons
That's a fair point Gunhaver, especially our office being in Texas I could definitely see how people would be worried for the potential for a dangerous reaction. Thank you for sharing your insights and this context!
You can remotely lock the computers before anyone even walks through the door at start of the day. We do this all the time in CySec for various reasons. So no, it isn’t a risk. It’s pure superficial PR and not wanting to let the ex-employees sour the employees’ idea of the company on their way out.
What you say is true, but it can be true and you could at the same time handle the fired person with decency. I've seen so many people fired over my career, then one day it happened to me too. I was a team lead with an awful lot of responsibilities, and virtually everyone owed me an awful lot of favors, I was a top performer, saved gajillion dollar contracts for the company all the time, I was doing heavy overtime hours on most days, I mentored and trained people in the high arcanes of IT, and I was also responsible for interviewing people and ordering their tools (laptop, headset, etc. etc.). When I got fired I was treated like a criminal and I literally had to prove that the hundreds of tools I have ordered for my team members I have not stolen. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. It took me over a day to dig up the e-mails for every single item.
I was a GM, also in Austin, from mid 2008-early 2009. It was the worst job of my life. Strict start and end times, which was frustrating due to the traffic situation in Austin, and also unnecessary. Why can't I just start taking tickets if I arrive at work 30 minutes early? Why can't I stay 30 minutes late if I showed up 30 minutes late? I believe you had three late warnings (a lifetime limit) before you were fired. This meant you had to get there super early, in order to plan around traffic. The quotas were rough. It was 10 tickets an hour at the time (you said "8 tickets a day" at the end of the video, but you mean 80 tickets a day, right?). 10 tickets/hour is a very high pace of work. It's a huge amount of typing. My hands ached. The night schedule sucked. I hated only having free time in the middle of the night. I got called for jury duty while I was a CSR and I remember barely being able to stay awake; thankfully the judge dismissed me after I told him about the schedule. The pay sucked. That was the worst part. I think it was just a hair above federal minimum wage at the time. It was not enough to afford an apartment on one's own. You had to bunk with others. There were posting for roommates on the bulletin boards. You said you loved the people you worked with, but I remember feeling ambivalent about mine. People didn't really talk much. I remember waiting in line to get our copies of Wrath of the Lich King signed by some developers who, I guess, had flown in from Irvine or something? There were no conversations in line. Everyone was silent. I am not at all surprised you were fired for what sounds like trying to specialize into compromised accounts, probably in an attempt to make the work a little easier for you. Because, as a Blizzard CSR, you're just a cog. You're not supposed to be creative; you're not supposed to increase your productivity by automating your work - aside from macros; you're not supposed to learn new skills and make the company better in some way. You're supposed to do exactly the job you are prescribed, in exactly the way they want you to do it. Which honestly, was a huge self-own for them. After I (quickly) left Blizzard, I moved to Silicon Valley, worked my way up through a tech company startup to now a position of leadership, and have taken a completely different approach to our customer support. We empower our support team to learn to use SQL, and Python, and to use more advanced capabilities of the tools we use, and let them go nuts. We've hired out of our CS team, product managers and software engineers. And we pay everyone what they're worth. I get why they cut the CS department. There just isn't that much value in typing out nice chats to players who are upset about another player using bad language. It was always doomed. And honestly, given my experience, I'm glad there aren't more CSRs who have to endure it. It was hell.
Thank you for sharing your experiences working there Bucket; I definitely lucked out with my team / coworkers, but I know that wasn't the case for everyone. It's going to be interesting to see how the industry changes on this front over the next 5-10 years. Glad you've found success in Silicon Valley! Happy holidays and have a great new years. 🎄
Thank you for checkin' out the video raffenionify! I hope you have a wonderful holidays ahead, and you get to spend some time with friends and family with a good movie or video game. (I'm going to be slightly green for another week I think, haha.)
Never saw your channel before and this popped up in my feed and I had to watch it. I remember being in high school -roughly 2005- talking to a gm and asking him how do I become a gm because it sounded like the best job in the world and he just said to apply lol. I never followed though, I was probably too busy farming crusader orbs, other raid mats etc and just raiding. I always loved talking to gms. I would ask them all kinds of crazy stuff to see what info or funny responses I could get from them (I almost nearly always asked for the gm to show themselves to me.) I love this video, thank you for it.
Thank you for the kind words TCuddles and for checking out the video! I'm glad you got to chat with a GM back in the day-some other commenters have said it's a rare experience nowadays. Have a happy new years!
From a long time WOW player and 10 year veteran of a horrible call center with metrics out the wazoo I want to thank you for the laughs. You've earned another subscriber.
Pausing at the "bad language" part, I always thought "so, a guy or gal, probably underpaid, is going to have to read my chat, see that I didn't commit any offense, close the ticket, and then open one of the thousands of similar tickets from people who love these kinds of buttons" - Glad to see I was right, it IS a nightmare x)
Image the things you'd have to read as a GM getting reports from the various RP realms and what's being said between people in Silvermoon / Goldshire. If you don't know what I mean be glad. :>
Great video! I only ever had great experiences with WoW's Game Master's back in the day, and it's sad to see them be so screwed over. WoW's game masters raised the bar on live support for an MMO back in the day and we haven't really seen it since.
I remember having good conversations with GM's in World of Warcraft, I can always remember being kind to them even if the GM said something game related I didn't get. I miss having GM's in WoW, I have noticed a drastic change with their in-game customer support. World of Warcraft's GM's created a personal connection to an actual person.
Very interesting and fun video! It's nice to see a fellow GM and I think it's the first time I see someone sharing their experience and thoughts about working as a GM for Blizzard in so much detail. I worked as a Gamemaster for Blizzard myself from 2009-2012 and can relate to a lot of things mentioned in the video. A thing I'd like to add is that the ticket count of 6-8 per hour wasn't a very difficult goal to reach in my opinion. It might sound hard, but it really depends. Yes, there were cases that required hours of work. But then there were also cases that only required a few minutes. Overall, from my experience, it balanced out in the end. Also, most Gamemasters I knew, including myself of course, worked simultaneously on several tickets. Sometimes 2 tickets at the same time, sometimes more. Personally, I knew people who constantly had 4-5 tickets open at the same time. Multitasking was heavily encouraged. And if anyone wonders: Yes, Game Masters worked with chat macros. Not exclusively of course, but where it made sense. On a sidenote, related to what's mentioned in the video about productivity, in my team we had GMs assigned from time to time to "Special Tasks". If you were on special task, you were assigned to a specific type of tickets, like comp accounts, and handlded only those for a while. Productivity goals were then set specifically to this type of ticket. I kinda agree with what's being said about compromised accounts and gold selling in the video. There could have been done more. The only thing that I saw change at some point was the promotion of the authenticator token/app and the corehound pet. In my team, we were encouraged to promote the token/app to players to keep their accounts safe. At least something I guess. The tickets I liked the least personally were ban appeals... Those had the tendency to result in endless discussions and honestly, getting to a win-win in those cases was basically impossible. What I still remember the most are all those tickets where gamers were grateful to get help with their ingame, tech or billing issues. Those made up for a lot of the not so nice things. I had so many awesome interactions with gamers that the few bad ones really didn't matter. Players often shared their story outside of the game as well, sometimes funny and happy and sometimes really sad ones. I guess most players know, when a ticket gets closed, you get a survey to rate the service you received by a GM. And most of us, if not all, read those comments.So yeah, it was always great to read through good feedback and see you could help someone enjoy the game again. Personally, I had the time of my life working at Blizzard. I loved their games, still do (maybe not as much as back then) and had the privilege to work with and meet amazing people from all walks of life. AtBlizzard, I could nerd out and live my passion for the game(s) at work (should've seen my desk), and everyone who works at a "normal" office and worked at a gaming company as well can probably tell there's a difference in office culture. Those years at Blizzard will always have a special place in my heart.
Reading feedback was my favorite part :D And yeah multiple tickets, chaos on the desk, great people, I was lucky I had two veterans/rockstars on my side when I started(they were really wizards), which made my experience way more fun. And yeah macros and shortcuts were there to deal with "bad" types off tickets and to automate and speed up that side of the job so you can spend more time on the side that was awesome and give more there. I was always a balancing act :D
As someone that as their teenage hobby was a gm on some private server I would love to learn more about the details of "atlas" and the gm work. No detail is to boring. Did you use the regular WoW Client? Did different tiers of gms have different commands? What abilities did GM's have? Could you spawn NPC's that would persist on a specific server? Could possess players and if you did could you use "their" UI? Was that possible while they were online? Did GM's have special UI Elements ingame or were you only using chat commands? How did Atlas interact with the client? Did you hit these boxes you mentioned ingame or in the atlas software? Did you create new GM characters every day new or did you reuse characters on different realms? Would you have been able to log into your GM character from home to fix issues you might have encountered during playing in your free time? Were you allowed to tell people at all that you were working as GM at Blizzard? I am now over 30 and one of the questions I always wanted answers to was always these little details in how a real GM back then worked. I am really talking about the absolute technical fine details
There's so many great questions here YSP, and I'm going to include them in a follow-up video where I go through them. I don't want you to have to wait, so I'll try to give high-level answers here: Did you use the regular WoW Client? >> No, for issues that required us to go in-game we used a modified client. We were strictly prohibited from logging in with our personal accounts on this client, and would get talked to / pulled aside if we did even as an accident. Did different tiers of gms have different commands? >> Not quite; the different tier of GM referred to the complexity of the tickets they fielded. T1 processed most basic game knowledge inquiries, stuck characters, basic account compromises, harassment, etc., and T2+ fielded more nuanced types of reports or tickets involving a greater deal of research. Could possess players and if you did could you use "their" UI? >> We could 'possess' players and see their UI, but we didn't have any addons installed so often times it would look very clunky on our end because they used things like Bartender or Pitbull to move UI elements around. Was that possible while they were online? >> It was not, but Atlas Tools had the ability to 'boot' players offline, which was functionality we used quite a bit when it came to compromised accounts, hackers, players disputing bans, etc. Did GM's have special UI Elements ingame or were you only using chat commands? >> Yes, but they were primitive and being entirely honest, most WoW Addons have fancier GUIs than the GM toolbox. 😂 We used a mixture of a toolbox as well as chat commands. Did you create new GM characters every day new or did you reuse characters on different realms? >> We re-used characters on realms if the need arose. Would you have been able to log into your GM character from home to fix issues you might have encountered during playing in your free time? >> Negative, those accounts were specifically only able to log in from Blizzard's IP addresses. Were you allowed to tell people at all that you were working as GM at Blizzard? >> Yes, but we were strongly discouraged from going into too great of detail. Needless to say, they didn't want our IRL friends saying, "let me talk to THIS specific Game Master ..." 😂 Anyway, I'll elaborate on all of these questions in the upcoming Q&A video because you've raised some great ones. Thank you for checking out the video YSP, and happy holidays / have an awesome new years!
@@NotYourFriend-YT Thanks for your reply! Can't wait for the new Video. Maybe you will be able to make video with some mockup images. But most importantly we would want to know those technical fine details as GM work. Yes, I know. Most of it was just boring chat work through atlas. But even naming chat commands from back then in a list you can think of. It would be boring for most people. But us old teenage wannabe-gms, it would be fun to compare those to private servers. What could actual gms do back then and what could us wannabe gm's on emulators do :D Happy New Year! :)
That was probably okay, as long as it was just tongue-in-cheek. I seriously doubt that GMs would've penalized a player for disliking Trolls / Orcs / Undead / Gnomes / any other in-game race. That said, if the language crossed the line or became really nasty, it probably would've gotten a warning. 😅
I'm not discounting your theory regarding WoW, but I heard somewhere that gold scammer bans in online games happen in large waves rather than on individual detection to avoid them figuring out how they were discovered. Your method may have worked short term, but eventually they would catch on to which accounts were getting caught and adjust their methods. From my understanding, the goal is to take out an entire team for long enough that they move on to a different way to make money altogether.
Man a GM helping me out with something regarding those TBC neon dragons i dont recall the name of, followed by giving me a free month worth of membership still resonates. Sometimes miss wow, but by all that is good in life i aint boutta support Blizzard again
Howdy friends! I know this is more of a talk-heavy episode (sorry for so few skits / memes). I had a lot to say on this topic, but I’m taking all the feedback on board and will write funnier scripts next year!
Likewise, if you have any questions about my time as a Game Master at Blizzard, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll be happy to elaborate. I’m an open book!
Last but not least: have a wonderful Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or however you celebrate in your neck of the woods! What matters most is eating good food, spending time with loved ones, and playing some great video games, so make some great memories! 👏
Thanks for all the support this year and for checking out my silly channel. You’ve made my life a little brighter, and I hope that these videos can give you some joy or a laugh as well. 💛
And yes I’m STILL slightly green from the body paint 😂😂😂
The intro makes up for everything.
In 2019 in classic wow I got a 3 day ban for naming my hunter " thatsmygear " f blizzard GMs
I use to raid with a group of GM's back in WoTLK. They worked at the Austin office. I heard alot about it. but i didnt tell anyone. They said I was on some list that knew they where GM's? idk. but I got more then one year of game time in cards, And pretty much anything blizzard gave out.
Wonder if David or Morgan worked there when you did. I grew up with Davids brother. And knew them threw that.
Dont apologize for a lack of pointless memes that don't add anything to the video . Anyone above like 25 appreciate it, it's only the brainrot kids that cant watch longform without stupid bits to break it up.
You hear him download this video now. That way, it never goes away! SHAME SHAME SHAME Blizzard. Well, is there anyone there now who was there then? I need to run this past the
T H O R I'm sure he would calm us down.
I remember never submitting any ticket in WoW as I usually researched any problem and tried to fix it myself. But in Legion I had some issue that needed an actual GM. As we talked about it, it became a 30 minute conversation about not just the game but life itself, it was so refreshing. As a farewell, the GM remarked that this is my first GM interaction since I have the game for 10 years and he wanted to be memorable. So he upgraded my account to the Legion Deluxe edition so I got the promotional mount and pet from it. I was so happy.
Back when games were ran by people who actually cared 😭
Yeah ofc, a GM upgraded your account to give you a free mount and pet. We all believe you :)
@ have several screenshots to back me up, but in a nutshell yeap he did upgrade my account :)
@@Raphxx59they actually did this, quite a lot back in the day.
It really doesnt surprise me theyd do this. Back when i played, I would say that i probably got about 5-6 free months of time from them justnbecause. @Raphxx59
I only submitted one GM support ticket when I played 2005-2010. I was a kid in highschool farming my Beaststalker (T0/dungeon set) with the gloves being my final piece for the full set. The boss died, I won the roll, but my bags were full (whoops), so the gloves remained on the dead boss...which had bugged into a wall and I couldn't click to loot (after deleting some gray vendor trash item from my bag)! I was very sad and didn't expect to get the item, but I sent in the ticket. Next day, I get in-game mail with a Blizzard logo! They had the Beaststalker gloves attached! It was like opening a gift on Christmas morning! Thanks, 2005-06 Blizzard GM staff!
To anyone this happens to in the future, there is a solution. You need to bind the “interact” command to a button on your keyboard, then /target boss, be close enough to loot it, and hit the “interact” key bind you see up. This will make you loot the target. Now, if it’s so far into the wall to where you’re too far to loot it, you’re outta luck.
@@Jesse3beards uncollected loot above a certain quality gets mailed to players automatically now when the corpse despawns or on a server reboot, meaning this can't happen anymore.
@@Ketris0 Only on Retail WoW. The mechanic to mail forgotten loot isn't included in any of the Classic Versions
@@JAY-lz6os More evidence that Blizzard is just trying to keep the gravy train rolling at this point.
Dude at least you had a weird reason you couldn't get your item. I had bag space during Classic 2019 re-release and I personally looted the boss in UBRS and won the roll for one of the 0.5 items - it never made it into my bags and being 2019 where they just don't care, they said there was nothing they could do then threatened me for asking them to escalate it cause it was a Blizzard error, not my own. That threat told me everything I need to know about this company.
My man left Blizzard like a cop in an 80s movie after becoming WoW Superman for 2 weeks. Respect.
yeah i was expecting him to say i put my badge and gun on the desk and left :D
@@Desalater2 Blizzard: Хей, но мы не выдавали пистолет)
Yes they gave totally wrong gm name for 80s detective
"You're a loose cannon GM who doesn't play by anyone's rules. I'm gonna need you to turn in your badge and hearthstone...and your other hearthstone."
Batman.
Having an actual person to try and resolve your issue was sooooooo much better than what we get now. I miss the GMs and I miss Blizzard tech support, they were always very kind and positive. All healthy gaming communities need human managers.
I forgot they existed back in the day. I was GM on a private server. Retail has 0 support now.
Lets rephrase that: All communities need human managers. Not just gaming.
I had 3 different GMs reply to a recent ticket and none of them understood the issue and provided very unhelpful "copy/paste" sounding info. Some of it even felt like AI might be being used. I eventually just gave up and closed the ticket.
@@myrustledjimmies it really is just that now.
that shit is expensive. times change. back in the 80s and early 90s, lots of companies (like Sierra On-line) had folks you could call on the phone and ask for tips and hints.
paying guys to sit there and wait for phone calls is expensive. and since it's an unskilled role, they can't do anything else but sit there, eat chips, play games, and wait for phone calls. you don't need GMs like that anymore. it costs a lot of money, they deal with a lot of abusive behavior, and it's generally not needed anymore.
besides, they only worked 9 - 5. you couldn't reach them after 5 pm, and often earlier, because they'd knock off early on fridays. that's 8 pm eastern, but if you needed help on saturday morning, you were shit outta luck until monday.
the memory is a lot more amazing than the reality was.
This was an awesome insight of what many of us experienced in the golden era of WoW. As a returning WoW player I can only relate to negative experiences of customer support and actually having to go through a week of waiting for support ticket responses and multiple requests to actually get a GM interaction to my support ticket and explain why I couldn't be helped (bugged looting with transmog making it unobtainable but had no impact on gameplay itself) without the what felt cut and pasted auto reply which really does reflect the KPI system and what feels drastically understaffed now. Really sucks the customer support aspect of WoW is a shadow of if at all of what it was. Thanks for your work during that era and thanks for giving us a real accounting of what it was like doing it. Great video!
Thank you for the kind words and donation, mpsguy! I agree with you: it sounds like nowadays it takes ticketing multiple times to get issues resolved.
The GMs of the past had an amazing relationship with players, and I'm very grateful to have been a part of it (if only for a little while).
Thank you again for your generosity and support, and I hope you and yours have a wonderful holidays!
I remember I made a ticket to a GM about how my Eviserate was bugged on my rogue cause I was doing it with 5 combo points, and it said it would do 102 damage, but it was only doing 75 dmg or something, and the GM taught me about armor lol
cringe xD
lol
😂😂😂 nice
To be fair to you, most games I know represent the actual applied number of damage and take damage mitigation into the math before representing a number to the player.
this is just sweet lol.
Had a GM help me on the old "Green felfire" for warlocks quest. Boss had died, but i died a bit after, and it didnt complete my quest.
So a GM took control of my character and did it for me again. His words were "Im putting your warlock on stereoids and doing it this way, that way he wont feel like he got it for free ;)"
It was a fun interaction, and immensely helpful!
I remember back in 2007 on my first character, I had just got enough gold for my epic mount but wanted to wait until the weekend to buy it as I was toiling over which horse to buy.
When I got home from work that day I found that my character had been cleaned out and all of my gold gone. I opened a ticket and started chatting with the GM.
We chatted for a bit while they investigated the issue, I told them that I was super bummed because I had borrowed a large chunk of the gold from a friend and now I had lost their gold. Eventually I was asked to log out to complete the restore, and when I logged back in, everything was back to normal, but with the added surprise that the GM had plopped one of the epic horses into my bags. He jokingly said it was so I could get the gold back to my friend before I had lost it again, and ended the chat.
Doubt that would happen nowadays.
This is why blizzard used to be everyones favorite gaming company, its a shame how big of a nail in the coffin activision was to them.
I remember getting cookies from Nyildris!! I know it was a mix behind the scenes, but thank you for some of the best support that gaming had seen.
grandma nyildris's fresh home made cookies
I was in Scholomance when we found a boss that was bugged. Name was greyed out and it didnt drop loot. So I wrote a ticket and the GM was kind enough to give me the loot. A rogue chestpiece. I told him our druid was the only one in our party who could wear it if he ever decided to play feral. A little while later I receive a thank you letter from the druid.
This was one of my best GM interactions. I also had a few bad ones.
Thank you, Clyde. I can't find the GameMasters that brought magic to my life, that helped me when the hobby that got me through my darkness was under threat, that lifted spirits and enchanted a world of warcraft and wonder.
I'd like you to take a few bucks and have a drink in their stead for me.
That's incredibly kind of you DarthMalaster--I'm so glad that you had a good experience with World of Warcraft, and that you have fond memories of the Game Masters! You have my word that your kind gift will go to a drink on their behalf. You are greatly appreciated! ❤️
Hey there, I’m a former GM also from the North Austin office. I was there from 2009 to 2013. I was in the Latin American team. Contact me if you would to talk and possibly do a video but from the Lat Am perspective
Howdy fellow GM! I'd love to connect on Discord! Do you feel comfortable replying to this comment with your username and I'll add you + send you a message? Thank you for your work supporting the players, and happy holidays! ❤️
sure thing. I haven’t used Discord in a very long time so I would need to set it up again. I will reply back on Thursday after Xmas so we can connect
@lordProxid message back already! 😊
Former T1.5 GM (paid t1 to do T2 shit, long story); Austin was lit as a job. The teams I was on had house parties every month, and on the low, I could get XO's and a bag at the Chinese vendor during late night shifts, "General Sao's specials" heheh. This may raise an eyebrow but this was 2010 - 2015, a long time ago. I did miss the old building though, it had a . . . Atmosphere lol. It's sad what became of the culture moving forward. Glad I moved on when I did.
I was a GM from 2013 to 2024 (when all game masters were laid off.) This video is kinda funny in how outdated it is and how passionate this guy seems to be over things that were resolved what i assume are hours after he left. I was there in the new offices, when they made a dedicated LATAM team section, when the management kept leaving and the whole operation was in freefall, when we moved to remote work exclusively, and when the big glasses girlboss from Microsoft fired everyone in a zoom call. Some of my co-workers still havent found a new job. I have no love lost for Blizzard but at the same time I dont regret working there the time i did.
Sorry that manager said those things to you. You deserved better for trying to help and bring justice for people who had compromised accounts.
Thank you for the kind words Projection Projects -- it was definitely an uncomfortable conversation (one that I kinda earned by not doing what they were wanting me to be doing), but that's life. I hope you have a wonderful holidays with friends and family! ❤️
@@NotYourFriend-YT Thanks! Hope you have a great holiday as well.
@@NotYourFriend-YT Technically you were doing what they wanted, just before they wanted you to do it: if any of those players came back, they would have had to put in a ticket that you then would have had to take care of, just at a later date. You were just doing it proactively, at an earlier time that was more likely to allow you to still have the logs to verify what had actually been taken. As someone who did a lot of quitting and coming back to WoW, I definitely see value in what you were doing, even if it did mean I might have sat in queue for a ticket for a bit longer because of it--worth it, in my book. There's a non-zero chance my account may have even been one of the ones you rescued, as I do remember one time when I came back from a break noticing signs that my character was not exactly as I had left it, but that things had been restored, not perfectly, but close enough that it didn't matter. I remember being impressed that Blizzard cared enough about people getting hacked to have someone proactively taking care of it even on accounts that were inactive. I don't know if it was you, or if it was someone else following in your footsteps, but I definitely have to say thank you for the work you did during those two weeks.
The really sad thing is that, that manager likely had his butt chewed too. As someone who climbed the corporate ladder in a fortune 500 company, it all just rolls downhill and everyone is kept on edge by metrics. I can remember every Monday being my admin day and I would get sent a new email on a new thing we are doing or tracking or promoting and that everyone needed to be trained. Then they would not approve full staffing and set people up for failure, then when the inevitable pressure hits to the point of no return, they let you go and make it seem like it's your fault. It's so common for corporate managers and execs to jump from one company to another and leverage positions, in part because of this pressure they put on everyone. That manager or lead likely was just a product of that environment. I remember district and regional phone calls with all managers and they would ask questions like, who has a new idea or initiative that is helping their sales. This would be weekly, monthly and bi monthly. Like anyone could possibly have that on top of being short staffed, having all these ideas and trainings etc... It was maddening and everyone would just pretend. But don't worry, if you perform well in your region (this would be like 50+ stores in a say a 1/8 of the US chunk or something) maybe you can go to corporate HQ and meet the CEO then have a 3 day vacation anywhere there's a store, quarterly of course. The pressure these companies do, while Bobby Kotick gets another yacht based on your efforts is insanity and a massive issue.
@@NotYourFriend-YT The way I see it, if you were going to go down anyways (Be it by burning out, or as an eventual victim of a mass layoff), may as well going down trying to do some good along the way. Go out with a bang, not a whimper.
Hearing the SOP of having to recover accounts makes me understand the stress or frustration I made my first and only ever GM had to do. My dad had died in 2017 and I know he had a Blizzard account and a copy of WoW. In his belongings, I found a copy of WoD, and the code with it. A buddy of mine told me I can recover my dad’s account WITH the code, and a picture of the death certificate. I do not remember that GM’s name, I wish I did now since it was a year ago, I wish them the best though, for seriously bringing in a little bit of closure on my dad’s passing. Thank you Clyde for doing your best work possible for us WoW gamers
Thank you for the kind words PsychoCaster -- I'm glad that you have some gaming memories to look back on with your father. My dad only played Pilot Wings on the Super Nintendo, and after that he basically ignored any of my attempts to game with him. 😂
Sending you all the love in the world, and thank you for sharing your story. ❤️
i remember that one period in WoW when you couldn't go a single day without seeing the center of orgrimmar painted with corpses spelling out the url for a gold selling site, and every 5 minutes seeing an ad in tradechat from the same bot account
looking back, there's no way blizzard was simply incapable of dealing with that; they just didn't care
Completely agree with you 2tooth, it's a shame that Blizzard doesn't take more steps to deal with this behavior or make it clear how much they're actually doing behind the scenes.
I remember my first big interaction with a GM very fondly.
I organized an excursion to Hyjal, back in vanilla (right on the cusp of BC release, so 2.0, where the wall-hopping bug got introduced which allowed us to get up there)
I got there with 2 of my mates, me being a warlock. Summoned another warlock. He got another one in. Got a mass summon party going.
Ended up with one major guild of the realm being almost fully present (their raid lead failed to show up so they were just having fun), and a whole bunch of random people I didn't know.
Roughly a hundred folk running in unreleased, normally inaccessible territory. Suddenly I got swept aside by a GM, told me "OK so I recognize that this is fun but I'm gonna have to port ya'll back home" and "_please_ (!) don't do this again". The GM did end up showing themselves (so no invis) to basically get the crowd under control. We did have a little fun, the GM changed their model to Lord Kazzak and threw some spell effects around for a fitting ending to our little "exploration".
(And yes, I did end up doing something like that again - the old Ironforge "basement" with the crystals and stuff.)
The whole ordeal did end up with me getting a bit of a rep on the realm as being an explorer, which was cool I guess.
These are the kind of interactions that made the game so memorable back then. Part of it was nostalgia but a lot of it was real intrigue at exploring a new game. Nowadays people kind of know which questions to ask when an expansion is released, and since a lot of the content can be queued for if not soloable, most of the people you meet like tyler durden would say are "a one time use friend".
Do they still have the wall hopping bug?
@@linsqopiring6816 Nah, traversal in the game has been changed and fixed several times over time so that probably won't ever work again
@@Stonezorz Ok thnks. Are there still similar bugs though?
@@linsqopiring6816 Not to my knowledge, although Demon Hunters are able to do some unusual clipping with their double-jump to get out-of-bounds in certain dungeons. Thats about it though
I still remember the olden times back in like 2007 when I got stuck in a hammock as a cat druid in Tanaris. And the gm joked about fish getting caught in nets was a usual sight, but cats getting caught in nets was rather embarassing, but he said that in a fun way, not a rude way XD. And then he set me free, yay.
That's beautiful xD
😂
2007 was a great year
I was a game master from 2008 till 2012 in Austin and I can say this video is absolutely accurate. I was laid off with the blizzard 600 in 2012. Thanks for bringing back a lot of memories, both good and bad. 😊 The best thing I got from my time there were some life long friends and a cool employee jacket!
Man i miss the days of a GM showing up in person with their cloak. Old school GMs where the best. Thanks for making my memories positive.
I wanted so bad to be the GM of old, but they told us we couldn't do cool shit.
Thanks!
I started as lead producer for Atlas (Irvine) in 2014. Would love to chat at some point 😊
Howdy John, and thank you for the donation / and the kind words! I would *LOVE* to pick your brain about your role at Irvine, what life was like in your neck of the woods, and all things Game Masters! Feel free to reply here with your discord details (or send me an email at notyourassociate@gmail.com) and we'll chat soon.
Thank you again for your kindness, can't wait to connect!
I have one memorable interaction with a GM. I hacked myself into the unfinished area under Karazan (back when you could do that, because I like to explore) and honestly...the crypts really freaked me out.
Yes, I'm a fully grown woman, and I was unnerved by pixels on a screen. But I couldn't hack my way back out and my HS was on CD so...I opened a ticket, and explained myself, and apologized for breaking the rules and begged to be released lol.
I think the GM might have thought I was a child or something [from how it affected me] because suddenly my character looked like she was being picked up by the scruff of her neck like a kitten, carried out and gently placed on the ground outside the raid. The GM said they weren't going to penalize me, hoping that I'd been "scared straight" and kindly asked me not to do that again. It was really rather sweet and nice and left a good impression of WoW GMs on me forever.
That's adorable
They could do that?
Also, you can still bug in using fear or polymorph.
Thats no hack..
Yesss I did the same thing. Karazhan crypts with all the hanging mobs, and the smiley face. Good times.
@SmaLyLindom exploit, hack, you get the idea.
I remember there was a bug with one of the bosses in 25m ICC, and when the GM showed up, he hung out with us for a bit, insta killing the tank that pulled the boss that somehow got bugged, throwing fireworks everywhere. Calling everyone chickens for not pulling without the tank, then turning everyone into chickens for like, 20 secs.
we even convinced him to pull some mob packs with us. He didn't do any damage but it was fun to see it.
Those were the days
that's a core memory right there
@@MightyPotatoastor just WoWhead
Nyildris made me laugh really hard and I have no idea why. It's giving "unmarried elf librarian man with five cats who wears sweatervests and can cook a perfect souffle".
Right??? And it was made even worse because some of my friends were getting REALLY cool names. Then I looked at my screen and saw "Nyildris" and was like ... uh .... can I get a do-over?? xD
Thanks for checking out the video Morgan. Have a happy holidays and eat some delicious food! ❤️
@NotYourFriend-YT Couldn't you get a do-over though? I mean, can't be that hard for them. xD
@@figgeeklund Yea, some people might really hate a name because it's a trigger for them somehow.
Would you be able to give us the GM perspective of what happened with the player (Leroyspeltz) in 2008 that accidently received the item "Martin Fury" when a GM was restoring their items? Would you know how this GM could have made such a mistake? Or could there have been more to this story?
Thanks for the vid!!
That manager was so wrong about you. I have barely ever played WoW and I just found your channel through the Nintendo series, but this video was equal parts entertaining as it was incredibly informative. Thank you so much for sharing your experience - I enjoyed every bit of it.
Man, these vids exude so much 2008 energy in a modern-day video essay format. I am all for it.
I remember being a noob in middle school when Burning Crusade was new and they were cool to me. Helped fix a bugged quest npc. I was amused by the roleplay they did on a non RP server though. I assume it was just policy to start/end with "In a flash of arcane light from the pits of the seven hells comes Smurple the Dark One"
Smurple would be an amazing name for GM, haha. Thank you very much for the kind words and for checking out the video Lucas!!
I see you're into voice acting -- let me know if you'd ever like to voice a meme in an episode! I *love* having guests on for all the dorky skits / clips I voice over. (Goodness knows my production value can only go up from here, haha.)
Happy holidays!!
Awwwww I wanna do a voice some time @@NotYourFriend-YT! :3
@@belovedofdeath You're totally welcome Mala! Send me an email at notyourassociate@gmail.com and I'll send you my next script when it's ready! Always happy to have friends on. 🙂
As someone who dealt extensively with Blizzard support throughout the years. After 2012 the quality of support responses fell through the floor. I can count on one hand the number of times when I got an actual person-to-person conversation. It all switched to the support site and were tickets closed due to 1) incompetence or 2) a game master not reading any previous replies to a ticket.
Especially after 2016. The amount of time I experienced targeted harassment or got reported for just being bad at a game spiked exponentially and support would uphold those suspensions because they came from the automated system. I was in direct contact with a supervisor at one point who literally did nothing except told me to wait for the automated suspension to expire.
First and second replies were always the same canned response. Then they would start threatening to ban you for asking for a proper response. The whole "customer support" system has gotten worse. It's just a soulless machine, automated systems, and copy-paste responses.
I wish I knew the name of the support person who helped my first stuck ticket back in 2005. They set the bar for friendliness and how personable support could be to this very day.
Note: The log retention was still 90 days as of ~2022.
Man this is so interesting I could listen to you talk about it for hours
While the GM position you're talking about is more about general help/moderation, I'd love to see games be developed where GMs take on a role of curating the player experience. We're starting to see some of this in games like Helldivers 2, and it's been very effective at driving player engagement. So I'd love to see companies take it even further.
There was something mysterious yet so magical about interacting with GM's back in the day.
I think it really added a certain level of mystique to the game that nothing could be substituted for.
cool icon.
I still remember when my friend and I started wow and our recruit a friend bonus didnt work...so we wrote a ticket and a GM talked to us for like an hour about the game, gave us tips and all. You could literally feel that there was a real human beeing happy to show some kids the game for the first time. Or when I saw my first "patrolling" Quest-NPC and after he vanished I thought I deleted the NPC with my DC. Poor GM had to explain to me that stuff like that isnt possible and how to do my Quest....fun times.
Now I write a ticket and IF im lucky, they respond after 3 days telling me how to open my mailbox or other stuff that has NOTHING to do with my problem.
Really great Video!
Hey! from a former Blizzard customer, Thank you for your service throughout the years. You guys help me alot when my account was hacked and all my gold/gear stolen one day. Its good to remember the good days of WoW. Played WoW since 2006 and Quit WoW since BFA which was 2020 and sold my account on the internet. Have not looked back and have not miss a thing. No Regrets.
Don't you miss your friends?
@@jesusreyesrodriguez5022 14 Years my friends come and go. None that stayed. All my friends are either married or too busy at life to play WoW anymore.
I go back to my account every now and then, try it for a month, realise that no one I know no longer plays… at 1 stage I was running 2 accounts playing like most weekends and 6 hrs a day ..
I do miss it, but it’s the fact most games can’t come close to the “wow” experience that keeps me coming back. It’s lonely being a guild master with no guild left….
@@peteb5343 I had a group of irl friends (and friends of my friends) who would play a ton of the same games and we'd always form our own little 'irl' guild. I fell behind on the whole getting my life sorted as an adult thing, so I know the feeling of coming online to an inactive guild. :( Even for guilds that weren't irl friends - sometimes all it took was for the guild leader to become inactive and the whole guild fell apart. It's sad, because I was always apart of these really small guilds that were like a tight-knit family: it wasn't just playing the game it was talking about our lives, our problems, etc. It just seems harder to find guilds like that anymore since many just have the goal of growing big since in most games now a bigger guild reaps bigger benefits - which takes away the closeness aspect I feel.
some of my favorite memories of playing wow as a kid is needing to open a ticket, and just legit chatting with GMs for like an hour+ every time. they were always chill, professional, and made me want to be one SO BADLY. Thanks for the video, this was a super cool inside look from the GM perspective and knowing that yall liked to just sit and chat with us as well made me smile. subbed for sure.
I'm glad you have such amazing memories of GMs Jay! Likewise, thank you very much for the kind words and for checking out the video. Happy new years and holidays! ❤️
Hey dude. I know exactly how you feel. I was a QA tester for a South African Company. Not in a sense of a GM but a QA tester is testing an unreleased game and making tickets on issues. Thank you for telling us your story on being a GM and how you got laid off. I got placed on Performance Management too micromanaged ony because the team leaders at my workplace are relentless. I was the only QA working remotely from home while the rest of the Team was at the office so you can imagine the situation I was placed - feeding all the info through through text. NO ONE had my back, No one had any Emotional check in to say "how are you Doing" and afterwards got Mutually dismissed. To this day, I still get PTSD thinking about it.
Glad you got out of that toxic work environment. What you did saving those Zombie Accounts was still tiny accomplishments in the end. We learn and take with us any valuable knowledge to the next work environment.
Good Luck on your 2025 year. May it be the best Year for you
Thank you for the kind words R_Jay! Happy New Year for you as well, and thank you for sharing your experience being a QA tester. I can only imagine how tough that situation must have been (having the team be in-person but you were remote). I hope 2025 is a wonderful year for you!
Grandma? That name sounds like a badass nightelf hunter to me. I wouldn't have a single clue what you want with cookies if you contacted me like that :D
I interviewed with Blizzard once for a QA position. The one question as far as I can tell that resulted in me not getting the position was "If you and another peer had a solution to a problem that were equally good, how would you resolve which one to use"? My answer was "Flip a coin", assuming we were both mature enough to just pick one at random. The answer they wanted was "Let's do your way this time and my way next time".
I've watched a lot of videos about blizzard and how they used test to decide who gets the job and who doesn't. Blizzard employees had absolutely no idea what they were doing. It's very clear that whoever was coming up with these test, was some high schooler wannabe cool kid and came up with a bunch of random reasons and test to see if you are "cool enough" to be apart of the company.
Your answer was logical, simple, and correct.
Ok but if you went with their answer, how do you decide whose way to go with this time? Yours should have been an acceptable answer imo.
So, what you're saying is, Blizzard wanted employees who wouldn't stand up for themselves or accept fair treatment. They wanted people who would tuck tail between their legs and defer to others. IMO, your answer would have actually been the best one because it shows both maturity and fairness.
@@pringusdingus It is a lesson I should have learned when I worked at Amazon (not the warehouses); they aren't looking for people who respect their coworkers, they are looking for people who consider themselves better than their coworkers and are willing to manipulate others to get ahead as those are the ones easier to isolate and easier to manipulate to get that extra bonus for pushing their coworkers to get more done for less.
Perhaps the hiring manager appreciated your answer and decided to do it your way, but you lost the coin flip.
Few stories to share. One's a fun interaction with a GM and the other is about the "other" side of RMT'ing (not as a hacker or cheater or a company, just an individual.)
Had a GM unstick me from being glitched inside of a wall, who showed up in person and then wanted to help me get to where I was questing. He summoned a 2 seater motorcycle mount which didn't exist in the game yet that I was able to sit on him with and he did a spell effect to make fire shoot out of the back of it and tripled the regular speed of a mount. He did some sick jumps off ramps on the way. It wasn't until a full expansion later (WotLK?) that the mount was introduced to the public.
Now during WoW Cata I was a RMT'er. I ran the 3rd largest guild in the game and ran raffles, contests, and had the wealth of the entire guild at my fingertips to re-sell as I saw fit. I never hacked accounts or did anything evil to obtain the gold, I just had such a massive surplus from my guild as well as controlling the auction house and wanted to supplement the income I had (retail worker). Now around this time I wanted to quit the game badly, but had wayyy too much to give up so I tried to get myself banned by OPENLY advertising the RMT and what I was doing. To my surprise I never got in trouble for it. I eventually sold my entire guild and the weird thing is, the person I sold it to had game masters change my guilds name to something else. My guilds name didn't break terms of service or anything of the sort, and to my understanding game masters didn't change the names of guilds for players. At the time besides being the guild master of such a large and famous guild I also had a (different) youtube channel that was flourishing in WoW content as well as being a big name on warcraftmovies. So was being an e-celeb, being the guild master of the 3rd largest guild, and the person holding the auction house hostage make me immune to game master punishment? I never found out why, but according to your story it seems like game masters were just told to leave the RMT dudes alone and focus on helping players instead.
Thanks for posting this video. I really enjoyed learning about what it was like behind the scenes whilst I was playing WoW. I played obsessively for 5 years.
This was a great watch thank you. I have a special memory of talking to a gm and him helping me with a quest bug. He rpd the whole thing. I was only a kid so it felt like it was a celebrity. ❤ bring back gms!
The one or two times I remember talking with a GM were very nice. They were very polite and friendly and seemed happy to help, rather than this just being their job. Having worked customer support for a short time myself, I know it takes a special kind of person to maintain that kind of energy. I couldn't handle how exhausting it was trying to stay positive when your job is to read peoples problems and complaints all day. Sincerely, thank you to all GMs for helping all of us have just a little better game experience.
Also, you sending cookies after helping someone is adorably wholesome.
100% can confirm i would talk to a GM for 20-30 min about random stuff after my issue was resolved in 1 min. Those were the best times of WOW (TBC - Wrath).
Back when AOL was a thing my friends and I used to have a few of the AOL support staff on our AIM list and talk to them about random stuff, support jobs were a lot different back then.
@@Agret I don't know the patch, since I started playing in 2007, but from what I understand, when WoW was new you used to be able to add GMs to your friend list and do similar.
Blizzard GMs are a thing of the past. In January, they laid off all the in house teams. Now they rely on outsourced agents from Egypt overseen by a few Champions. It may not have always been perfect, but I felt more confident knowing the GM I was talking to was actually a Blizzard employee.
This video is very interesting! From a 15 years of playing WoW player's perspective it's very interesting to know what is to be GM and all the cases
As a former Game Master in the European branch in 2005-2006, this was a fun watch and stroll down memory lane :)
I remember when Blizzard did phone support. My account got hacked and I talked to someone who asked some basic questions including how much gold I had. I couldn't remember but it was caught quick enough that they said I had way more than that on one character and they just said "Don't tell anyone but here keep the extra." I spent it so fast because I felt like Scrooge McDuck in his vault.
That happened to me with SWTOR, didn't get my account hack but someone did try too login from a other country, had to call tech support, give 3 answers only I would know .. WoW Cataclysm, I did get hack , Blizzard froze my account into I changed my password, some how no joke I had 12 months of Free Play , don't know if that was Blizzard being nice or the hacker was using a year timecard
I remember my first game interaction with a GM. It was in Nagrand during BC and me and my friend were trying to kill the bird elite but it was stuck and evading. I opened a ticket and when I was flying, I noticed someone flying infront of me in those robes. I thought it was a hacker so I flew away from it. I later got a message from teh GM telling me to fly over to the bird with my friend so we could kill it. He reset the boss but someone kept jumping in and interfering with the kill. So the GM turned the guy into a maggot and kept him that way until we killed the bird. It was amazing. We thanked him and continued playing. The guy who was a maggot freaked out the whole time. This was 12-13 years ago. I'll never forget experiences like this. Thank you for your hard work!
What a great video, thank you very much for sharing! I vividly remember my interaction with a GM about 15 years ago, where a red dragon patrolling in Blasted Lands got bugged out and I couldn't kill him. I opened a ticket, and after a while I saw a small dragon flying towards me from the sky. He then transformed into a human with a black/blue robe, introduced himself and told me not to worry and that he will fix it. He then summoned a Fel Reaver (!!!) and ordered it to attack the dragon. Even that wasn't working, and he then despawned both and told me to wait till a new dragon spawns soon. On his way out, he exited with a little twist, making my character explode all the way to the highest point of the sky, and then slowly fall while twirling.. I don't remember if he gave me any cookies haha!
I cant describe what a wholesome experience this had felt.. this lives rent free in my head and I have always enjoyed sharing it.. took a lot of screenshots as well of course! :)
The way you got chewed out by that manager reminds me of a few bosses I had. I would do stuff that the store manager loved, to the point he made sure I knew he was impressed with my work. But my direct supervisor hated it cuz it wasn’t 100% what she wanted me to do. Store was a mess, I reorganized it. And caused chaos for helping lol. Great vid, keep ‘em coming!
@39:22 Man... that boss did an absolute shit job. If he was doing his job well, he would have recognized your burnout, listened to why you were doing what you were doing and looked for a way to move you in a direction that fit the company goals without just invalidating your view and of course without denigrating you as a person. He could have brought life back to your work, saving your job, saving the company money (backfilling rolls is expensive) and most important of all, he could have just been a better human being to his fellow human beings.
Two occasions I had the privilege to see a game master, once when there was a ton of harassment going down in Goldshire "mutual combat" but it was excessive and non-stop.. a blue GM chat appeared in the general chat, I don't remember what they said, but they said something in general chat totally random, not directed to anyone, and the GM appeared in the middle of the people causing drama for a brief second and disappeared.. that was enough to scare everyone straight and probably scared those arguing s**tless and to behave.
The other time was during the middle of a raid but when we killed a boss it didn't drop any loot at all, it was the 15th anniversary special event raid, but one of the bosses didn't drop any loot.. so our guild leader sent a ticket and actually got a quick response as we continued and were in Naxxramas part of the se raid, barely clearing the path of trash on the way to the next boss when we noticed the GM who was visible the whole time standing there silently.. doing whatever they had to do (I assume review logs?), but as everyone gathered near by said hi, they said hi back, etc.. then as we were just all standing around near them waiting, they spawned a hogger that was higher level than us, and hogger proceeded to wreck and killed the whole raid while we were waiting for them to resolve the issue, which they did.
That's amazing you got to see one in person Lycan! I very rarely had the pleasure of showing my character off in-game, but it definitely was a fun moment when it happened. The fact that you got to see it in a raid setting is even cooler!
Happy holidays, and thank you for sharing such an amazing memory! ❤️
I remember ICC 25. Lichking disappeared when shifting to HC. No ID, no reason at all. GM spawned after a 15 minute ticket. He informed a Senior to have a look. They couldn't help us, but did some RP and transformed our modells into LK and others. Great times. Lately I had an simple issue with recruit a friend connection ... "Sorry, your problem. Ticket closed." Useless..
damn, pretty mean of the GM to wreck your run.
I saw a GM speak in general once and make a generalized comment about something. I don't think it's the same event though.
@@Agret it was fun, we were all laughing about it in the raid voice chat, was awesome getting wrecked by the elite hogger
I think it’s alarming to hear that managers didn’t want employees to confront gold buying/selling. This makes me wonder why buying and selling wouldn’t be one of the major concerns for GMs and blizz as a whole.
Many reasons, main one being they make more money hand over fist leaving it alone. It also justifies the existence of their wow token and their continued monthly subscription 20 years later. Pretty much every factor thats relevant here comes back to money, because the only positive is a better game for the players. Lol
Another perspective is that there was enough work to keep you occupied with helping active players and resolving their problems for the entirety of your shift. What he describes essentially means he removed gold from the economy while helping zombied accounts of inactive players. The focus was always active and current players and not so much those that gave up on the game. Exception of course for those zombied accounts that held some power in guilds for instance and were used to clear out guild banks, etc. Or those that were simply reported by friends of those affected, one wouldn't just ignore reports of a clearly hacked account just because the player is no longer active.
Going after gold buying and selling was also technically the responsibility of other departments. Now are/were they effective in their role?
As a GM it's hard to see the full picture of what's being done because there's little communication on that front and you just know what's within your reach and responsibilities and you're biased towards a clear "no, they're not effective", as especially in those days you worked on hacked accounts every single day and could literally spend hours upon hours following the gold trail to remove a few million gold. Back then that may have been quite a bit but I guess in the overall picture it was a bunch of hours wasted that you could have spent helping active and engaged players.
I haven't played WoW in over 5 years, but I do remember you helping me with a ticket on the draenor realm. Thank you for the cookie, btw.
Things that didn't happen!
@@zanebostickinternet pessimist detectedddddd!
Did the cookies actually do anything?
@@zanebostick Yeah, WoD was about the end of 2014 I believe? So about 2 years too late for this guy. Sounds like he was mainly active during Cata.
@@Pathitehe said “Draenor realm” aka the server “Draenor”. There are two servers named Draenor, one for US (specifically in the Pacific time zone) and one for EU, both being PvE servers. Nothing to do with WoD.
It is entirely possible that the original commenter was on the US Draenor server during this guy’s time as a GM, and entirely possible that this guy helped him with a ticket during that time.
Such a fascinating video! I applied to be a WoW GM at the Austin branch in 2016 but didn't make the cut, so it's very interesting to see what I missed out on.
I will say the hiring process in that era was more casual than what you described in 2012, they ferried me and two dozen other applicants into a room, a Blizzard employee asked each of us a random question like "What's your favorite ice cream flavor?" and then we were sent outside to wait, and I wasn't called back in. No 1-on-1 interviews with the team lead in that era :)
That's interesting to hear how the interview process changed Aabicus! Thank you for sharing your experience, and likewise thank you very much for the kind words. You are the best! 🙏
Great insight, always wondered what the life of a gm was like back in those days, thank you!
Back in the day I had a GM help me transfer my zulian tiger mount off one account to my new one - I thought with the names not matching they wouldn't be able to help out (as the original account was a friends they gave to me years ago - eventually made my own account) but I suppose I got super lucky with the GM I was matched with. They understood how precious it would be to keep such a cool limited mount instead of it being lost to time on the old account. Those were definitely the good days and I am very grateful to have experienced GM's in their prime doing gods work. Thanks!
I remember that name, Nyildris! I don't remember exactly what I had done to get in the position I was in, but I had gotten wedged into some sort of piece of the environment (I think it had been somewhere in Thousand Needles, it's been a LONG time) , and was stuck 'falling' so I couldn't hearthstone out. And the GM that helped me was able to yoink me outta that!
So uh.. thanks for the save back then. XD
Edit: Thinking back on it, it was one of the pillars where the Grimtotems were located. I was a druid, so I thought I could get down easily with cat form (Cause you know.. less falling damage) only to get caught on some of the crags, fall behind one of them and BOOM.. stuck falling. TBH I got stuck in a LOT of weird places in cat form, but this was the only time I called for GM help due to the perpetual falling. Alt + f4 didn't help either as logging back in.. I was still falling.
That's amazing, I'm glad I was able to be of assistance that do (or one of my peers). Getting stuck in the world's geometry happened more often than people realized, and it seemed to happen at the most inconvenient times ... I remember one player being like, "a rare mob just ran by me!!! SPAWN IT FOR ME!!!" and I was like .. I can't do that my friend .. 😂
Likewise, thank you for checking out the video Nova, you are greatly appreciated. Merry Christmas and happy holidays! ❤️
Hello splendid moustache man, I don't suppose you'll see this comment but I have a very strange and personal question about GMs;
Around 2010 when I was a kid I was running an Undead to Mulgore to meet my friend who was levelling. Whilst bored on the journey I opened a GM ticket and asked if they could teleport me to the Tauren starting zone cos I was an inpatient child. About 10-15 minutes later when I was approaching the starting zone a GM appeared floating above me and whispered me something to the effect of "Looks like you're a long way from home" and "As you're almost to your destination let's see what I can do..." he then proceeded to teleport me to the well at the first quest in Mulgore, turned into a giant demon and started raining fire on the area visually. Afterwards he did an RP exit and vanished. I have told multiple friends about this, even people who have connections with Blizzard, all of them have told me this shouldn't have happened/wasn't possible.
BUT IT HAPPENED. Please, as an actual game master could you tell me, was this my memory playing tricks on me? Was this guy breaking conduct? Was this you??? Thank you and great video
Was the wild west back then and things like this happened regularly .
Thank you for the kind words Leonard Sporgo! This is an interesting one ... porting / moving players around was definitely within our wheelhouse, and I know that I would've personally LOVED getting a ticket of, "hey can you TP me to the Tauren starting area?" 😂
As far as spawning enemies or visual effects, I'm sure this was possible within Atlas Tools (or one of their pieces of software), but it wasn't something I was particularly knowledgeable about or did. The closest I got to this was updating quest or achievement flags when things bugged out for players. 😅
That said, I believe you! I'm glad you had such a memorable interaction with a GM, and that they were able to make your day with some fun RP / effects. Thank you for checking out the video and for sharing your experiences -- have a wonderful New Years! ❤️
Your presence in the game is both felt deeply and sorely missed. Thank you for your service to us insatiable nerds and our absurd requests.
Had some interactions with GM's in the first years, most awesome thing was they had to log into my account once, and when I logged back in, I got a mail that my account was upgraded, for which I got some cool new pets like the Mini diablo etc :D
How does this man not even have 10K subscribers? talks and edits like hes got 10 million. Thanks for sharing your story!
That's very kind of you loltewb, thank you for checking out the video and have a Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays! 🎄
Ya, as a player, I pretty much stopped playing around the time that those layoffs happened. The World of Warcraft changed in a big way that day. I've tried to go back over the years, but it's never been the same. And, like MANY other formers players, I've been on a search for that same feeling I had when WoW was new. Never again I'm afraid. Sad indeed.
Try ascension private server. It's actually good.
Thanks for all your hard work as a GM :) 💙
Wish Blizzard understood how important unsung heroes like you really were.
I play Mortal Online 2 which still has active GMs. It's pretty great, you run into a problem and open a ticket, and they usually respond within a minute. They're not always helpful, but sometimes they save the day. "Hey, my pet got killed because the server lagged and i couldn't get it away from the things killing it," and they just revive your pet.
Hell yeah! MO2 devs are awesome. This video made me appreciate them even more.
I think you ran into one of my characters in wow, not sure which one, but I recall the name. You were nice to me. Whenever I wrote a ticked I always said after it was over regardless; thank you for your time and consideration.
This was really fun! Thank you for talking so candidly about how things worked for the folks working behind the scenes. I remember opening only a few ticket inquiries in my first few years of playing, and always wondered why the GMs that answered me seemed to be playfully role-playing in-character with their responses. Now I know why!
I'm glad you enjoyed it Drowsy! I hope you and your friends and family have an awesome holidays coming up. Eat some good food and play some fun video games!
GM's were awesome in WoW. Nearly everyone of them I spoke with (admittedly not all that often) were friendly, helpful, and went above and beyond your typical customer service experience. One spoke with me for nearly an hour trying to help me figure out a semi-glitch with the Bolvar Fordragon quest. And this was only probably 3-4 weeks after Lich King released (so likely a very busy period).
I actually got into the habit of opening tickets with the message "There's nothing wrong. I just wanna say I appreciate you guys".
QUESTION THOUGH - I often heard rumours that if you actually got to GM Island, it would be a ban for glitching, but the GMs there would actively engage you in a very friendly conversation first almost congratulating you for making it there.
Banned for three days for the first time. gm may appear before bans
I play since the beginning. And a big point for the love to WoW back in the days where the Gamemasters. The funniest thing i have a memory, was someday we had lootproblems in the Raid, the Gamemaster fixed it, but he watched us wiping some time and made commentaries like a reporter in a Soccergame ^^
lolz
Maybe your opinion in part 8 was the saddest, cause yeah it's still a freaking problem 😭 It was great to hear about your experience man. GMs probably are still low in supply but as a player I know I miss you guys. They're trying to AI more of that kind of thing and it's just depressing!
I've been playing since December 2004 and had great experiences with game masters. One of them helped me as I did the "Insane" title and it bugged, the GM sat with me and verified that I did have all the boxes ticked to get the title and had it not been for that game master, my 3 year grind would have been for nothing. You guys were so helpful with the botting problems and people harassing us so thank you. I miss having GM's in the game you made the game a LOT better. Now it is automated by an abusable system and it seldom works to improve the game.
Never played WoW myself, but man if this wasn't an interesting watch. I love how you're able to present your videos so that, even if it's about a topic or a game that I'm not familiar with and/or admittedly don't care for, I'm still interested in listening. You do great work, man! Keep it up! Hope the holidays are kind to you :]
Thank you Morgan!! Also, is that your cat in your profile pic?? THEY'RE ADORABLE! haha. (Sorry if I've asked that before, I have hella deja-vu when it comes to cute animals.)
Have a happy holidays yourself, and eat some good food / play some great games! You're the best!
You didn't get fired. You quit. Totally different.
Subtext is obviously not your strong suit.
@@Duelcitizenx About ten minutes earlier in the video from when he explained that point he said he had been fired. That's not subtext, he just misspoke.
He admits he found a 'loophole to bypass the ticket queue altogether' then says if your manager starts going on to you about numbers that you don't deserve it and that he didn't deserve to get talked to about a performance plan when he admitted he was burnt out and stopped doing the job he was being paid to do which was to provide customer support. Don't know how long he expected to get away with not doing his job.
To be honest, when management puts you on a PIP, it means they are documenting everything you do, putting you under a microscope with the intention of building a case to terminate you. Don't let the anagrams wording mislead you into thinking a Personal Inprovement Plan is a good thing. The verbage says it is, but the paperwork says it's not. Even if he turned in his badge willingly, the companies bottom line was to terminate him.
I randomly was shown your video. I watched the entire video. This was so interesting and well made. Thank you. I look forward to watching some of your other content.
Thank you for the kind words Occrameq! I'm glad you found it interesting, and I hope you have a wonderful New Years! 🎉
I've only had a few tickets over the years. They were all answered quickly and the GM's were always great.
long time player. awesome video for all the insight. thanks! the loss of gms was a huge blow to wow. it's just not the same without them.
Respect to Not Your Friend for replying to every comment. It makes my day every time my favorite youtuber of all time (not exaggerating) replies to my comments!! Thx for being u mustache-man
You're way too kind to me Tails, haha. Thank YOU for being such a friend of the channel and for laughing at all my dorky memes and skits. ❤️
Do you have any fun plans for the holidays? I think we're going to hunker down and watch a bunch of Christmas-y movies and play some video games. (I am NOT looking forward to having to do all the dishes lol)
@@NotYourFriend-YT Thank you so much for replying! It always makes my day seeing your responses. Your skits and memes are the best, and I love being part of your community! For the holidays, I’m mostly going to be watching Christmas movies and spending time with family while on vacation in New Orleans. I totally get you about the dishes-I’ll probably have to help out too, lol
I remember setting up private servers back in the day and getting to GM Island. I was thoroughly excited and then ultimately kind of disappointed. That's it? The mythical land of GMs? A jungle island with a single building?
Alas, as someone with server admin rights on that private server it was easy to spawn in entities to liven up the place. We turned it into a little port with a pier, a large tower reaching past the trees and some NPCs to populate it. Seemed more worthy that way :)
I worked on a private server that turned the inside checkered 'interrogation' room of GM island into a sex dungeon lol. We had a separate place for talking with players/punishing in an area we made in Stormwind coz that kind of punishment would have been a lil... lewd. Half the players probably would have liked it too much anyways. We also had parties/gatherings in the asset areas where there were like one of each and every building on a grid under the map (im presuming for copy pasta'ing to use above the map in the play space). I was asked to make an NPC on GM island that ported us to xyz of the asset village so it was easier to get to. He had the ID/graphical display of a goblin and his name was, 'Moogle, Asset Village Teleporter'. I bet Blizzard employees never got to name a goblin of ANY kind 'Moogle'. Fun times. I only bailed on that entire scene to help a few friends with their ARK community server and making custom scripts/mods for it. Mainly custom recipes.
@@davidmoak1219 Square Enix would like to have a word with them if they named anything Moogle haha
I'm not sure on this being the reason but at least on live servers I know that the invisibility tag was set after the login. If you were not careful to log out on GM Island, you might login with your human GM character in, for instance, Orgrimmar and get insta-gibbed by a guard before the invis flag can be applied and then there you are, a blue robed corpse that might draw a bit too much attention. :P
So GM Island was definitely a good choice for logging in and out.
/worldport Clyde's home :) Great video as usual! Very thorough and packed with interesting info... hopefully the Blizzard agents won't find you :D That mario segment was... something else. Happy holidays to you as well, thank you for everything!
You too Jim! Happy holidays and play some great games and have fun with friends / family! ❤️
I mostly played Vanilla and a good bit of TBC. I was in the top raid guild on my server. We had every raid on farm. And my favorite moment in WoW history was a GM joining a dungeon and laugh with us because a boss was spawned in under the map and was still able to attack us. He was so kind and funny and he knew we saw the humor in it so he leaned into that. He pulled him out of the floor and sent the boss out of the roof and said "oh oops that's too far" and then moved the boss down enough that just the boss's feet were in the room.
Man, I loved the GMs. I had a couple tickets that needed GM help back in the WotLK days, including a quest chain that had broken due to a bug, and when my account got hacked by a keylogger before authenticators were a thing (it was rough logging in to raid naked XD). I appreciate what you all did and miss the magic GMs brought to the game.
Fun fact doxxing was not against the ToS back in legion :) as I opened 7 tickets about being doxxed in game and was told "nothing we can do contact the authorities"
That fking creepy, you'd think Blizzard would fully , ban those people off their servers, I mean they're giving away people privacy. That got to be against Blizzard policy 😮
34:00 not allowing goodbyes or returns to the desk is EXTREMELY important for security and safety. 99.9% of people would just grab their stuff, say goodbye and leave. 0.1% of people would do something malicious. and tech support are often the greatest risk if one of them does something malicious. imagine what massive amount of headache you could cause in just a few minutes with all your tools and access. Its not uncommon for tech support people with a lot of access to be legally barred from entering a building even before they are fired. where i live, this is standard procedure for tech support for schools. even if someone quits on their own, they are trespassed immediately and legally never allowed to return the school on their own for very obvious safety reasons
That's a fair point Gunhaver, especially our office being in Texas I could definitely see how people would be worried for the potential for a dangerous reaction. Thank you for sharing your insights and this context!
You can remotely lock the computers before anyone even walks through the door at start of the day. We do this all the time in CySec for various reasons. So no, it isn’t a risk. It’s pure superficial PR and not wanting to let the ex-employees sour the employees’ idea of the company on their way out.
What you say is true, but it can be true and you could at the same time handle the fired person with decency. I've seen so many people fired over my career, then one day it happened to me too. I was a team lead with an awful lot of responsibilities, and virtually everyone owed me an awful lot of favors, I was a top performer, saved gajillion dollar contracts for the company all the time, I was doing heavy overtime hours on most days, I mentored and trained people in the high arcanes of IT, and I was also responsible for interviewing people and ordering their tools (laptop, headset, etc. etc.).
When I got fired I was treated like a criminal and I literally had to prove that the hundreds of tools I have ordered for my team members I have not stolen. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. It took me over a day to dig up the e-mails for every single item.
I was a GM, also in Austin, from mid 2008-early 2009.
It was the worst job of my life.
Strict start and end times, which was frustrating due to the traffic situation in Austin, and also unnecessary. Why can't I just start taking tickets if I arrive at work 30 minutes early? Why can't I stay 30 minutes late if I showed up 30 minutes late? I believe you had three late warnings (a lifetime limit) before you were fired. This meant you had to get there super early, in order to plan around traffic.
The quotas were rough. It was 10 tickets an hour at the time (you said "8 tickets a day" at the end of the video, but you mean 80 tickets a day, right?). 10 tickets/hour is a very high pace of work. It's a huge amount of typing. My hands ached.
The night schedule sucked. I hated only having free time in the middle of the night. I got called for jury duty while I was a CSR and I remember barely being able to stay awake; thankfully the judge dismissed me after I told him about the schedule.
The pay sucked. That was the worst part. I think it was just a hair above federal minimum wage at the time. It was not enough to afford an apartment on one's own. You had to bunk with others. There were posting for roommates on the bulletin boards.
You said you loved the people you worked with, but I remember feeling ambivalent about mine. People didn't really talk much. I remember waiting in line to get our copies of Wrath of the Lich King signed by some developers who, I guess, had flown in from Irvine or something? There were no conversations in line. Everyone was silent.
I am not at all surprised you were fired for what sounds like trying to specialize into compromised accounts, probably in an attempt to make the work a little easier for you. Because, as a Blizzard CSR, you're just a cog. You're not supposed to be creative; you're not supposed to increase your productivity by automating your work - aside from macros; you're not supposed to learn new skills and make the company better in some way. You're supposed to do exactly the job you are prescribed, in exactly the way they want you to do it.
Which honestly, was a huge self-own for them. After I (quickly) left Blizzard, I moved to Silicon Valley, worked my way up through a tech company startup to now a position of leadership, and have taken a completely different approach to our customer support. We empower our support team to learn to use SQL, and Python, and to use more advanced capabilities of the tools we use, and let them go nuts. We've hired out of our CS team, product managers and software engineers. And we pay everyone what they're worth.
I get why they cut the CS department. There just isn't that much value in typing out nice chats to players who are upset about another player using bad language. It was always doomed. And honestly, given my experience, I'm glad there aren't more CSRs who have to endure it. It was hell.
Thank you for sharing your experiences working there Bucket; I definitely lucked out with my team / coworkers, but I know that wasn't the case for everyone. It's going to be interesting to see how the industry changes on this front over the next 5-10 years.
Glad you've found success in Silicon Valley! Happy holidays and have a great new years. 🎄
Thank you, as the veteran of this game since it started, I can't thank you enough.
Very informative video about the behind the scenes life of what it’s like as a game master, bravo
I appreciate your transparency whether its about the good, the bad or the ugly. Keep it up.
Thank you for checkin' out the video raffenionify!
I hope you have a wonderful holidays ahead, and you get to spend some time with friends and family with a good movie or video game. (I'm going to be slightly green for another week I think, haha.)
I didn't know Pete from the Deadpool movies had a TH-cam channel
😂 i wrote the same comment
The blizzard is not your friend line is so true, they don’t gaf about player support anymore.
Never did
Never saw your channel before and this popped up in my feed and I had to watch it. I remember being in high school -roughly 2005- talking to a gm and asking him how do I become a gm because it sounded like the best job in the world and he just said to apply lol. I never followed though, I was probably too busy farming crusader orbs, other raid mats etc and just raiding. I always loved talking to gms. I would ask them all kinds of crazy stuff to see what info or funny responses I could get from them (I almost nearly always asked for the gm to show themselves to me.) I love this video, thank you for it.
Thank you for the kind words TCuddles and for checking out the video! I'm glad you got to chat with a GM back in the day-some other commenters have said it's a rare experience nowadays. Have a happy new years!
From a long time WOW player and 10 year veteran of a horrible call center with metrics out the wazoo I want to thank you for the laughs. You've earned another subscriber.
What a beggining! And that callback to Mario, oh, is beauty!
Haha it was a blast to film. Thanks for checking out the video Victor, and happy holidays! 🎁
40:00 i would not call that "to be fired" i would call that "i quite, bye!" ...
Pausing at the "bad language" part, I always thought "so, a guy or gal, probably underpaid, is going to have to read my chat, see that I didn't commit any offense, close the ticket, and then open one of the thousands of similar tickets from people who love these kinds of buttons" - Glad to see I was right, it IS a nightmare x)
Image the things you'd have to read as a GM getting reports from the various RP realms and what's being said between people in Silvermoon / Goldshire. If you don't know what I mean be glad. :>
Great video! I only ever had great experiences with WoW's Game Master's back in the day, and it's sad to see them be so screwed over. WoW's game masters raised the bar on live support for an MMO back in the day and we haven't really seen it since.
I remember having good conversations with GM's in World of Warcraft, I can always remember being kind to them even if the GM said something game related I didn't get. I miss having GM's in WoW, I have noticed a drastic change with their in-game customer support. World of Warcraft's GM's created a personal connection to an actual person.
Very interesting and fun video! It's nice to see a fellow GM and I think it's the first time I see someone sharing their experience and thoughts about working as a GM for Blizzard in so much detail. I worked as a Gamemaster for Blizzard myself from 2009-2012 and can relate to a lot of things mentioned in the video. A thing I'd like to add is that the ticket count of 6-8 per hour wasn't a very difficult goal to reach in my opinion. It might sound hard, but it really depends. Yes, there were cases that required hours of work. But then there were also cases that only required a few minutes. Overall, from my experience, it balanced out in the end.
Also, most Gamemasters I knew, including myself of course, worked simultaneously on several tickets. Sometimes 2 tickets at the same time, sometimes more. Personally, I knew people who constantly had 4-5 tickets open at the same time. Multitasking was heavily encouraged. And if anyone wonders: Yes, Game Masters worked with chat macros. Not exclusively of course, but where it made sense.
On a sidenote, related to what's mentioned in the video about productivity, in my team we had GMs assigned from time to time to "Special Tasks". If you were on special task, you were assigned to a specific type of tickets, like comp accounts, and handlded only those for a while. Productivity goals were then set specifically to this type of ticket.
I kinda agree with what's being said about compromised accounts and gold selling in the video. There could have been done more. The only thing that I saw change at some point was the promotion of the authenticator token/app and the corehound pet. In my team, we were encouraged to promote the token/app to players to keep their accounts safe. At least something I guess.
The tickets I liked the least personally were ban appeals... Those had the tendency to result in endless discussions and honestly, getting to a win-win in those cases was basically impossible.
What I still remember the most are all those tickets where gamers were grateful to get help with their ingame, tech or billing issues. Those made up for a lot of the not so nice things. I had so many awesome interactions with gamers that the few bad ones really didn't matter. Players often shared their story outside of the game as well, sometimes funny and happy and sometimes really sad ones.
I guess most players know, when a ticket gets closed, you get a survey to rate the service you received by a GM. And most of us, if not all, read those comments.So yeah, it was always great to read through good feedback and see you could help someone enjoy the game again.
Personally, I had the time of my life working at Blizzard. I loved their games, still do (maybe not as much as back then) and had the privilege to work with and meet amazing people from all walks of life. AtBlizzard, I could nerd out and live my passion for the game(s) at work (should've seen my desk), and everyone who works at a "normal" office and worked at a gaming company as well can probably tell there's a difference in office culture. Those years at Blizzard will always have a special place in my heart.
Reading feedback was my favorite part :D And yeah multiple tickets, chaos on the desk, great people, I was lucky I had two veterans/rockstars on my side when I started(they were really wizards), which made my experience way more fun. And yeah macros and shortcuts were there to deal with "bad" types off tickets and to automate and speed up that side of the job so you can spend more time on the side that was awesome and give more there. I was always a balancing act :D
As someone that as their teenage hobby was a gm on some private server I would love to learn more about the details of "atlas" and the gm work. No detail is to boring.
Did you use the regular WoW Client?
Did different tiers of gms have different commands?
What abilities did GM's have? Could you spawn NPC's that would persist on a specific server? Could possess players and if you did could you use "their" UI? Was that possible while they were online?
Did GM's have special UI Elements ingame or were you only using chat commands? How did Atlas interact with the client? Did you hit these boxes you mentioned ingame or in the atlas software?
Did you create new GM characters every day new or did you reuse characters on different realms?
Would you have been able to log into your GM character from home to fix issues you might have encountered during playing in your free time?
Were you allowed to tell people at all that you were working as GM at Blizzard?
I am now over 30 and one of the questions I always wanted answers to was always these little details in how a real GM back then worked. I am really talking about the absolute technical fine details
There's so many great questions here YSP, and I'm going to include them in a follow-up video where I go through them. I don't want you to have to wait, so I'll try to give high-level answers here:
Did you use the regular WoW Client? >> No, for issues that required us to go in-game we used a modified client. We were strictly prohibited from logging in with our personal accounts on this client, and would get talked to / pulled aside if we did even as an accident.
Did different tiers of gms have different commands? >> Not quite; the different tier of GM referred to the complexity of the tickets they fielded. T1 processed most basic game knowledge inquiries, stuck characters, basic account compromises, harassment, etc., and T2+ fielded more nuanced types of reports or tickets involving a greater deal of research.
Could possess players and if you did could you use "their" UI? >> We could 'possess' players and see their UI, but we didn't have any addons installed so often times it would look very clunky on our end because they used things like Bartender or Pitbull to move UI elements around.
Was that possible while they were online? >> It was not, but Atlas Tools had the ability to 'boot' players offline, which was functionality we used quite a bit when it came to compromised accounts, hackers, players disputing bans, etc.
Did GM's have special UI Elements ingame or were you only using chat commands? >> Yes, but they were primitive and being entirely honest, most WoW Addons have fancier GUIs than the GM toolbox. 😂 We used a mixture of a toolbox as well as chat commands.
Did you create new GM characters every day new or did you reuse characters on different realms? >> We re-used characters on realms if the need arose.
Would you have been able to log into your GM character from home to fix issues you might have encountered during playing in your free time? >> Negative, those accounts were specifically only able to log in from Blizzard's IP addresses.
Were you allowed to tell people at all that you were working as GM at Blizzard? >> Yes, but we were strongly discouraged from going into too great of detail. Needless to say, they didn't want our IRL friends saying, "let me talk to THIS specific Game Master ..." 😂
Anyway, I'll elaborate on all of these questions in the upcoming Q&A video because you've raised some great ones. Thank you for checking out the video YSP, and happy holidays / have an awesome new years!
@@NotYourFriend-YT Thanks for your reply! Can't wait for the new Video. Maybe you will be able to make video with some mockup images. But most importantly we would want to know those technical fine details as GM work.
Yes, I know. Most of it was just boring chat work through atlas. But even naming chat commands from back then in a list you can think of. It would be boring for most people. But us old teenage wannabe-gms, it would be fun to compare those to private servers. What could actual gms do back then and what could us wannabe gm's on emulators do :D
Happy New Year! :)
so you can't be racist...
what if you hate someone just for being a gnome?
That was probably okay, as long as it was just tongue-in-cheek. I seriously doubt that GMs would've penalized a player for disliking Trolls / Orcs / Undead / Gnomes / any other in-game race. That said, if the language crossed the line or became really nasty, it probably would've gotten a warning. 😅
I'm not discounting your theory regarding WoW, but I heard somewhere that gold scammer bans in online games happen in large waves rather than on individual detection to avoid them figuring out how they were discovered. Your method may have worked short term, but eventually they would catch on to which accounts were getting caught and adjust their methods. From my understanding, the goal is to take out an entire team for long enough that they move on to a different way to make money altogether.
Man a GM helping me out with something regarding those TBC neon dragons i dont recall the name of, followed by giving me a free month worth of membership still resonates. Sometimes miss wow, but by all that is good in life i aint boutta support Blizzard again