More GM Information

**ChrisC** · 01-04-2008

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This is from something awful forums.

How good was the pay? Could you ever work from home? Off shifts? What was the whackiest ticket you've ever responded to?

It was $10/hr for your first three months and then $12/hr after that when I started, but they began contracting with a temp agency which in my experience tended to bring in sketchier employees, and I think they were paid $9/hr. You couldn't ever work from home, since your work requires the use of Blizzard's software tools, which they take no chances in letting people smuggle out copies of.

There were shifts for all hours of the day and night, and you really had no say in which hours you worked unless you got approval to switch to another team (initially there were three main shifts [morning, evening, overnight], but they eventually decided to stagger it so there'd be some new teams coming in and new teams leaving fairly regularly).

Wackiest ticket ever? That's a hard question to answer. I tended to enjoy the tickets from gold farmers which could range from "Please you unban my good friend AppleBabby, she very much enjoy to more gameplay" to "Here are golden agriculture culprits observed agriculture: (list of names)" (the various gold farming companies would frequently turn in lists of each others' farmers in this fashion) to the simple "cao ni ma" or some various string of Chinese words. Perhaps a more precise definition of "wacky" would help me come up with a better answer, because few tickets are made with the intent to be silly, even if that's how their serious request sometimes comes across.

How much does Blizzard monitor you guys? Did you get away with doing anything against the rules, like helping a friend?

They monitor GMs very closely. Every GM action is logged and monitored. They have a whole division, Internal Affairs, that audits GM actions. If they don't catch it immediately (flags are raised whenever a suspicious action is made, such as spawning Magmadar in Orgrimmar), they'll catch it eventually, and if they find you gave a bunch of gold and items to your buddies, you can count on each one of those accounts getting permanently banned. That's not to say people didn't try.

Regular GMs no longer possess much actual in-game power though, so only someone who has been there for a while and been promoted to some other position has access to such things.

If two full-health level 60 warriors with the same spec, one with the Unstoppable force and the other with the Immovable object, fight in the Western Plaguelands, who would win? What if it was two Paladins?

E; Serious Answer: What was it like? Did you have to go the office and sit in a cubicle or were you allowed to work at home? What was the average age of the GM's? Did Blizzard hire you directly from California or did a temp agency pick you up in your city?

I live in Austin...

Is it a worthwhile job or would you avoid it?

My perspective has always been that while the Immovable Object may be immovable, the person holding it isn't. Therefore, the Unstoppable Force has the clear advantage. If it were two Paladins, there would be no winner because the fight would never end.

You did have to go to work and basically work in a cubicle, but the cubes were fairly open and you got to talk to your team a lot whenever necessary. The average age of a GM was probably around 28; most were early to mid-20s, but a fair number were in their 30s or 40s.

They did hire me directly. When I worked for Blizzard, their entire support department was based in California; however, this has changed now that the bulk of their support has moved to Austin (it's cheaper and they pay them less).

I enjoyed it for about a year until I got intimately familiar with office politics and they introduced several new managers who cared little about helping the customer and focused much more on crunching out numbers. It really sucks when you know you could get back someone's lost epic items but are not permitted to due to restricted policies aimed at chopping down the volume of tickets (to be frank, I broke these policies quite often). I'm not sure how many of those people are still working there, but it is my interpretation that the move to Austin was a firm attempt at re-building the department due to the grave concerns raised by many of the employees; I can only hope this means those people are no longer there.

So, yeah, I'd probably recommend it under the optimistic assumption that they've done a good job restructuring.

When they say they won't unlock an account ever under any circumstance and that I should never contact them again, do they really mean it?

Yes.

Since you used the word "unlock", it sounds to me like the account in question was sold. If an account is sold/purchased, and Blizzard finds out about it, it is considered to be compromised and will be locked until the original account owner contacts them and proves his or her identity. If you aren't the original owner of the account, then you have no recourse.

If an account was banned or suspended inappropriately, such things can be reversed by contacting them, but I never saw a deservedly banned account get unbanned.

When I ask GMs stupid questions such as, "What happens when The Unstoppable Force hits the Immovable Object HURR" or say similarly funny/stupid/random things is it annoying or does it brighten your day?

Any particularly funny encounters along the same line?

Absolutely! I always enjoyed talking with people who were having a good time. GMs can talk with several people at once, so I usually was able to make conversations into positive experiences instead of cold, mechanical transmissions of information. Plenty of GMs did not care much about this, and policy did allow them to macro their way through most conversations. Many of my coworkers did make fun of me for talking to players too much and trying everything possible to make them happy.

Sadly, most GM conversation is with people who aren't in any mood to crack a joke, and changing their mood in most cases is no simple matter. Most happy players, after all, see no need to create a GM ticket. This just made it all the nicer when I got to encounter a player who I was able to joke around a bit with.

As a Specialist and an Account Investigator, the overall tone of the issues you handle is far more dire, and you'd never see a lighthearted or jocular ticket because only serious issues like "My account got stolen" or "I lost all my armor" get referred to those GMs.

There were a few lines that seemed to be popular. Some players would ask me what kind of pie I liked, or whether I preferred ninjas to pirates (ninjas may have the edge in close-quarters combat, but you can't beat the character, resilience, and sheer unbridled masculinity of pirates). Most offhand questions tended to be in regards to GM duties, GM Island, Ashbringer, or asking me to do something cool for them.

I remember once having to reset a bugged Ragnaros encounter after manually teleporting all the raid members into the instance. Unfortunately, the reset command was input too early (not by me!) and the raid died laughing. Once, in trying to get someone out of a stuck situation, mistakenly summoned them far above the ground and watched them plummet to their death.

The "plague" epidemic during the release of Zul'Gurub was highly entertaining, as some of you may remember; the Corrupted Blood debuff would be applied to a player's pet and they'd dismiss it, then hearth and take out the pet at an auction house. The disease would then immediately infect and kill everyone. We had the job of separating the healthy from the weak, but we'd always have the infected people running back towards other people with glee.

Whenever there's a big exploit that can't be hotfixed, they'll spawn a Guardian of Blizzard (GoB). It's basically an infernal that kills anyone who gets within a certain range of it. When there was a Zul'Gurub bug that allowed people to break rep items indefinitely, one had to be put down and it was great to watch the players gather right outside its range (defined by the line of corpses) and try to break through periodically (completely impossible).

I guess the ticket that got all your GM buddies wanting to see what happened because it was just so loving out in left field, and the person submitting the ticket didn't mean it that way. That's still hilarious though. Our server's top guilds had a habit of inviting one gold farmer into the guild, ours talked about the honorable elephant of the association all the time.

I don't know, based on my guildies' experiences, it seems like they restore lost items in almost all cases now. Would it be server or guild dependent (i.e. they care less if it's a guild whining about their karazhan loot)?

I apologize: maybe it's due to the countless tickets I went through in my tenure there, but there isn't something that comes to mind immediately that stands out above the rest. I will think about it more and respond better once I come up with a few that fit the description. There are certainly tales worth telling.

Item restoration depends largely on when the item was lost. Around the time I was leaving, the ability was given to regular GMs to "undelete" items, so if an item was recently lost (sold or destroyed, most likely), they could easily and quite quickly get it back for them. Before this feature (and also in cases of gear lost a fair while ago, a large number of items lost, or regarding unlootable items from a raid kill), the issue was referred to Character Specialist who would have to do intensive log searches to verify the manner of loss. We'd see how the items were lost - if they were sold or disenchanted, the player would need to get the money and reagents gained in order for us to restore their stuff. This was to prevent people from trying to take advantage of the system.

Under the orders of the "new regime" of management, we were only allowed to search shorter and shorter timeframes for lost items. This led to a lot of claims being denied. I don't believe this is a problem anymore, but I was just mentioning it as a factor in my distaste with the new GM department management which may or may not be there anymore. Unlootable raid kills had less of an issue because it was usually nothing the players had control over (meaning we had much more responsibility for the problem) and they almost always submitted a petition as soon as the issue occurred; lost gear may sometimes have been requested months after it was lost, especially if some guy lets his little brother play his account while he's off on vacation and returns to find his items gone and character deleted.

If a guild is whining about their loot (i.e., "Your loot system is broken, we always get <this item> and never anything else!") then they are simply told that everything's working properly and the loot selection is completely random. To my knowledge there was never any confirmed, longstanding problem with the random loot generation (I was under the impression that they tested it regularly) and anything else is pure hearsay and superstition. Loot issues did occur, but I mean to say there was never anything like "The loot is determined by the class of the raid leader/first person who enters the instance/etc."

Have you ever worked any form of customer service / customer support that involved talking to them on the phone, instead of through chat?

If so, which did you prefer? I'd say the obvious answer is chat, but you may have had to deal with some real idiots on a daily basis, and if you ever had to talk to clients on the phone in another position, maybe they were more intelligent (or appeared to be - it's amazing how the written English language can make the smartest of people look like fools).

While I haven't worked in another strictly Customer Service Representative position, I've performed customer service in restaurants and bookstores, and in terms of job responsibilities, it was quite a bit more fun to be a GM. As a GM, you have quite a bit of perceived authority over the players (largely since you are able to fully evaluate their claims with access to all possible information - players cannot take advantage of or successfully lie to you), while as a standard customer service person you are at best on equal level with customers and have no such wealth of evidence at your fingertips. You also get to spend most of your time talking about a common interest you share with the players. In the common event of a disagreement, the GM is able to make the final decision, usually by adherence to policy, and if the player has a punishment on the way, no amount of squirming will get out of it.

I can't really say how intelligent the players were on the whole, but a lot of people sure do get hung up and enraged over minor things in this video game. There were plenty of miscreants and jerks, but there are also quite a number of nice people who play the game, too.

What sort of things can you do with the GM software? I used to play (quit over a year ago) and remember hearing that occasionally GMs would audit (invisibly) the top guilds making server or world first kills.

What's the best cheat you saw/caught/heard about and what was the stupidest?

Did you use a lot of macros for common questions? Does Blizzard actually provide them ("ENJOY YOUR STAY IN THE WORLD OF AZEROTH!" for instance)

When new content is put live, it's absolutely monitored and audited in every way to ensure that the content is working properly and any progress players make is legitimate.

The best cheat I saw was probably the teleport hack that existed a while ago. It would let a player literally teleport wherever they wanted. This was mostly used by gold farmers, who would teleport bot-controlled low-level characters between mining nodes and farm up tons of minerals. They also heavily exploited the hippogryph egg quest between Feralas and Gadgetzan with this (which led to the elimination of the quest). Probably the coolest implementation, though, would be for a ranged character to use it in Dire Maul, which allowed them to train all the units to one place and hover way up in the air on some little ledge or something; they couldn't be attacked, and they'd sit there calmly killing everything. They'd teleport somewhere else in the instance, and all the enemies would immediately run towards them, then they could teleport back and loot. While awaiting approval to take action, I enjoyed summoning them from their "safe" places into the mobs' eager hands.

It should go without saying that this kind of hack (and many others) is easily verifiable and anyone who uses it will probably get banned eventually. Other stuff includes bots, which were (and I'm sure still are) fairly common. Once, some people figured out how to finangle their talent points to get multiple high-tier talents at the same time. Imagine being able to get 31-point talents in each tree on your favorite class. Other people (particularly your enemies) notice such things! There was also once a bug that let you accept multiple quest rewards from the same quest by standing a certain distance from the quest turn-in, allowing you to get the reward without "completing" the quest.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was one scenario I heard of in which a player was given a test item known as Martin Thunder (look it up, it's on thottbot and such). It lets you kill all enemies within a 30 yard radius. I don't recall whether his acquisition of the item was accidental or intentional. Basically, he got to level 60 in a matter of hours and was clearing Blackwing Lair on his own. Pretty awesome, sure, but he's totally banned.

And yes, every GM has self-created macros for common responses, but I preferred to make small alterations on each one to fit the conversation so I didn't sound like a robot. Blizzard does have some universal macros you can use, but GMs also make their own (or they used to, at any rate).

Did anyone ever submit a ticket trying to order pizza?

I know years back when I played Asheron's Call a player(s) did this, apparently to a great extent, because it became a banable offense to do so if I recall correctly. Mostly just curious if anyone carried on the tradition to WoW, since I have never played WoW.

That's pretty hilarious. I did receive one asking for a pizza, but when I told him I didn't know how to do that command he was pretty disappointed.

But yeah, it was nothing like a running gag.

I've heard conflicting stories that GMs are not allowed to play, and also that they are allowed to play but aren't allowed to tell anybody they are a GM. Which one of these is true?

I no longer play, but I personally believe that character transfers ruined the game, how many problems did they cause for GMs?

They're certainly allowed to play, but they aren't allowed to handle issues on the realms they play on, and they aren't allowed to tell anybody that they're a GM. While I was there, I had a level 60 rogue and paladin, among others in the 40s and 50s. Only a few people didn't play the game at all, and they still managed to do their job pretty well.

I happen to agree that character transfers badly damaged the community aspect of the game, but it was a STRONGLY requested feature. Some of the most outraged players I ever handled were positively livid about not being able to move their character to another server for whatever reason. They'd talk about how they'd invested so much into their character, but all their real friends are actually playing on some other server, so why can't they just move their character over there? The GMs were quite pleased when the feature was revealed, just because it meant we would no longer be berated by players on this particular issue.

I have a few questions:

I've talked to a few GMs that act like a Murloc or such (saying "*rises from the mud and yells mururururururur. What can i do for you?) Or something along those lines and it was hilarious, did you ever do anything like this? Do they do this stuff to everyone or just a few times when they're bored?

When talking to a person do you prefer that they get done as fast as possible or do you enjoy the small conversations that go on during the chat?

What would be a good thing to say to a GM that would brighten his day and give him a little chuckle?

Do you guys really ban people for staying stuff like "fag" and "poo poo"? I've heard that happens and it sounds pretty lame.

Thanks!

I only adopted such introductory tactics on RP realms. I admit it: I would role-play if the player I was speaking to was into it. I mainly would speak in trollish or pirate dialect, depending on the faction of the player. That sort of introductory line, while a bit silly, is typically the mark of a GM who has put some care and thought into what he's going to say and is interested in giving you a fun chat.

Personally, I quite relished the small talk that plenty of players were keen to partake in. Many GMs are more interested in solving the problem and moving on, but if you engage one, odds are good they will reciprocate.

It's pretty easy to put a smile on a GM's face, since the other people he or she's talking to are probably very upset about something. Really, any lighthearted question about what cool powers GMs have or did they see some new movie or what awesome GM weapon do they have that and are they able to kill someone in ONE HIT with it or just thanking them for answering your question are all pretty nice things to say.

A GM's basically just a gamer (in most cases, anyway) who should know a good bit about the game and will do anything they're allowed and able to do to help you in whatever way you need. This is unrelated to your question, but when they say they can't do something, they aren't kidding. :P

Policies against language changed constantly over time. It used to be unacceptable to say "gay" or "fag", but at one point a huge public outcry was made about the policy being biased against homosexuals. It was changed so that you're able to refer to yourself as "gay", but calling someone else "gay" as an attack is against policy. "Nigga", when used in a friendly fashion, is acceptable, but "******" is not. A lot of it comes down to context, which can be pretty easily interpreted based on the conversation and circumstance.

The bottom line is, yes, you can have action taken against your account for swearing at people, but you'd have to be ridiculously flagrant and consistently rude about it to get banned. They give plenty of warnings and small suspensions and very few bans for language infractions.

How do you guys tie accounts together? For example, one account gets banned for botting, and then all the rest of the user's running accounts. How do they spot-check new ones so fast?

Do you know <GM> Zarborough? If so, can you please describe him, his job title, what he does, what he looks like, etc.

Will you trade account-ban-immunity for donuts?

I probably shouldn't post information about how, specifically, they are able to detect bots and investigate accounts as you describe. However, they are certainly able to do so and it is common to ban entire "rings" of gold farmers/bots through the process. I mean, a lot of it is common sense: they obviously already have all the information pertinent to each account. It's not hard to see if a guilty exploiter is running multiple suspicious accounts.

I don't recall a GM by that name, so he may have joined up after I left. I'm afraid I'm not sure.

The answer to your last question is yes. However, please remember that I have absolutely no ability to uphold my end of the bargain.

It was sold, but I am the original owner. I was only really half serious about the question, as I didn't really expect Blizzard to unlock the account for me. It would save me a lot of trouble, though, since the only classes I really want to play are the ones I already levelled to 60 on my old account. It just seems like such a waste to have them sitting there unplayable forever. I was just hoping that maybe after a while there'd be some sort of amnesty.

They may have changed policy regarding sold accounts since I worked there (policy revisions were a constant occurence, after all). Last I knew, someone who sold their account could get it back by contacting the department (usually by phone) and simply asking for the account back. They were required to present verification of their identity. However, if it was compromised/sold multiple times, or they *know* you sold the account, they may treat it differently.

Usually they aren't able to prove that a player sold the account so they treat it like the account was merely "compromised" (a generic term for "someone got into this account without the owner's consent"). If you told them you sold it, it's probably locked for good. I'm afraid I can't say for sure. If you haven't tried calling them by phone, try that. If you have, then I'm afraid they quite likely mean what they say.

Hope you got a good price for it. And hey, with the new patch, leveling XP requirements are reduced by 15% and quest reward XP are increased by 15%, or something thereabouts. That'd almost be enough to get me playing my lowbies again if I hadn't sworn the game off for life.

When there's something obviously wrong with a mechanic or calculation, why do some (all?) GMs always insist that it's working correctly?

For a recent example, the gently caress up with Gladiator calculations for the end of season 2 (the same ones that happened with season 1, mind you). My buddy submitted a ticket asking for an update/acknowledgment of the problem, and the GM told him repeatedly that the calculations were working as intended. It's very frustrating to be told over and over that something is working properly when it blatantly isn't.

Do you guys know there's a problem and because of some silly protocol have to repeatedly tell us there's none, or are some GMs really that oblivious to what's going on in the game and/or are simply extremely uninformed by community managers/developers/whatever?

When dealing with players, what kind of information about them do you look over before talking to them besides their name/ticket? Level, class, play time, in-game achievements, past tickets/warnings/suspensions/bannings? Are there any special flags that come up if you're dealing with someone that's another GM, CM or developer?

As you suspected, much of the reason you receive that response is because GMs are usually not well-informed by the development team about what is and isn't a known issue. The GMs pretty much have to fend for themselves, but in their defense they do a pretty good job. The problem is that sometimes they are told emphatically that there is no issue with something that players consistently petition about, only to have it fixed or changed in the next patch.

When there hasn't been a recent patch and there does not seem to be a widespread outcry on a particular issue, GMs will often explain that there is no issue, partly because they have not been told otherwise and partly because many players will claim things that are unsubstantiated. I've had players swear to me that they "lost a level" or lost reputation or lost honor that they KNOW they had, but after doing a token search on their character's logs I'm able to tell them that I've been unable to verify their loss, that no change to their character's XP/rep/honor occurred in my investigation, and that we won't be able to offer reimbursement. GMs aren't able to dig into the mechanics of the old Honor system or the new Gladiator system (to my best guess, that is, due to the similar mechanics of the two systems - I wasn't around for the Gladiator stuff), so they have to simply trust what their higher-ups tell them to say, which is usually "We haven't heard there's a problem, so it must be fine."

That said, once an issue becomes heavily reported, the department recognizes it as a potential issue and posts it on the internal information system - at this point, GMs should be telling players something along the lines of "thanks for the report, we're looking into it". Eventually the reported issues are passed along to the developers and, if a fix is being implemented, the GMs are generally notified and they will update their communications with players accordingly. This level of communication may have been improved since I left, but it took the devs more than two years to fix many incredibly simple yet annoying and recurring issues, not to mention major ones. Need I mention the Paladin Seal of Command bug?

GMs have access to the things you mentioned, and depending on the ticket, they will do research beforehand so that they have the information you request once they start talking with you. However, those things won't really affect how they interact with a player, except that they'll be able to tell that an account with a level 70 will generally be more informed than an account with no higher than a level 12 about general game lingo and mechanics and whatnot. No special flags come up if the player you're speaking with works for Blizzard, and it's against company policy for a player to reveal that they're a Blizzard employee to prevent any favoritism, but a GM can usually still tell such things if they look into the account enough or simply recognize the registered name on the account.

So, for a basic question, a GM will simply look at the character name and issue. The other information is there but plays little part in the answers unless necessary.

Did the GM team keep an official/inofficial list of players who reported actively?

Was the European policy on swearing/offensive words/etc different from the US one?

Nope.

No idea what the US policy is like, but in my experience the actual strikes (or not) often come down to the mood of the GM handling the case. One day an insult will just be a "Thanks for the report, we will investigate" and closing the ticket, another day you might get a minor strike for the same insult.
One of the first things we learnt was that "noob" is NOT an insult. :P
On a side note, my all time favourite WoW-Insult:
"Can i borrow your mom? I want to go as a son of a bitch for carnival!"
I think i actually just closed that ticket to honour that guys creativity.

What are the honest chances of getting a character transferred from a US server to an EU one? Is there any method of asking for this that would be more likely to be followed up on?

I've never ever heard of any case like this, and chances are, even if it COULD be done (which i very very very much doubt), the GM handling your ticket wouldn't either.
Yes, please. I'm not familiar with most things WoW, but I'm very interested. Especially in things like bugs and hacks. Do tell.

Hacks? No way any Ex-GM is ever going to say anything about those on the internets, even being out of the NDA.
And bugs, well. This would fill an entire thread on its own, so i'm not gonna go into this here.

What sort of priority do you give to spelling and grammar errors reported by players? I found a few weird phrasings and spelling errors when BC first came out and reported these to GMs, who more or less said "kthx". Were these ever forwarded to the dev team?

Theres a localisation forum, thats where you are supposed to report spelling and such. Either than that, all bug reports, unless known (which most of them are, having 10 million players report stuff), are being forwarded to QA, who take it from there.

Can you manifest yourself into an avatar/mob? If so, are you limited to playable character models? I believe some of the CMs became mega mobs at the release of the Burning Crusade. Do you ever manifest yourself as part of your daily duties?

You could, given you have the powers to do it (Your average GM can't). And yes, there are models that aren't playable but whose skin a GM can use.
You NEVER EVER show yourself in daily duties. Never.

I recall someone posting about a goblin GM serenading a female character with a gift-wrapped item restore. Sheesh.

Whew, that's definately something you are not supposed to do. That guy has guts.

Also, what's with GM items? Do you have access to spawn these items for your GM character? Or do they come pre-equipped?

As a normal GM, you just have a little AddOn which lets you spawn GM-Equip - Def/Statwise, you'd definately be better off with starting equip. Edit: Even if you managed to get your hands on this, it would be useless without a GM account, so forget it

What development secrets can you tell us about the game? Any fun or crazy details about how WoW is implemented? Like the teleporting stuff was really neat to hear about.

As you probably are aware, a GM is neither a Developer nor QA ;D

I was running a live botting camera website. Basically an image refreshed every 5 seconds or so displaying my character botting. The name, chat logs, everything were hidden. The character got banned two days after the website went live. After that account got banned another person working on the project put his bot up and he got banned 10 minutes later.

How did you guys find me? Did you look at my website and search around looking for my character? Why did you put that much time into busting me (one account)?

I have gotten over twenty banned. Can I get some sort of award?

Someone probably just reported you as a bot the normal way.
That, or someone reported the site and a Bothunter took the time to figure out what server you are on - the rest is easy, and could be found out by anybody, even without GM-Powers. (/who is your friend, and there'll only be so many, say Troll Shamis lvling 24/7 in the area you were in...)

No award, but always a thanks for every report

Are there any special in game zones that only GM's have access to? I have seen one or two using model viewers, but I was curious as to whether these areas are abundant, are there different ones depending on which continent you're on?

There are a few, but none of them are particularily exciting. We've already established that GM island is boring - how about a room with a chair in it, and nothing else? Yeah...
And as a GM, you don't really care about continents since you can worldport anyway, so it doesn't matter where they are

I could never be a GM because the temptation to do awesome and badass poo poo would overpower me and I'd be fired in a day

You can't actually do that much as a normal GM. You can port to places, summon people, show yourself, create useless 1 def no stat GM equip and ding your GM char to 70 - that's about it. Not very tempting, if you ask me.

This is probably something I can find out myself but: can players change their account first/last name and email address? Also, what happens if they've forgotten their secret password? Is any of that recoverable?

For Name and Lastname - No. Unless you got married and somehow supply Acc+Billing Support with your wedding cert. Otherwise, totally not possible.
Emails can be changed in your Account Management

Secret password, i don't recall ever dealing with such a case, but you'd most likely be able to recover your account by providing Acc+Billing with actual proof of your identity.

What type of training do you do for the job? Is there perhaps a programme database that helps out with certain topics that GMs can follow?

I don't know what sort of training the inhouse GMs get, but we had 2 weeks of training in groups, which was essentially learning the main policies, learning how to treat customers, the ticket protocol, doing practise tickets, learning how to use the tools. Plus a test at the end of 2 weeks which was impossible to flunk.

Do you think that with the huge growth of WoW, that the support for players has gone down? I work for a customer services company and I know, from experience, that as a company grows, more cost-efficient options are taken which don't always favour the customer.

I don't know what its like in the HQs, but i'd imagine its the same - the first people you hire will be carefully selected and good at what their are doing. However theres a high turn-over, so at some point you inevitably have to lower your expectations.

What have you guys been doing about the gold selling spammers sitting in each city. Like the guys whose name is "zlmtptaligk" and constanly spam a macro about their gold farming site. Do you activitely ban the accounts of people doing this?

They get banned by the dozen. Mainly because essentially all of them are on trial accounts anyway.

This is a perhaps a question you can't answer, but have you had any interactions with the Blizzard employees who actually coded/created the game and do you know if they play WoW? The way I figure it, the guys who are involved in creating the game must have some very good knowledge on the game machanics and be pretty drat good at it, not to mention all the exploits too!

This is something only a US GM could answer, but my best guess would be no. Afaik they aren't even working on the same site (or state, for that matter).
You might know someone from QA though, and as they are kind of the link between GMs and Devs and have to reproduce bugs/exploits all day, they'd definately know more about this sort of thing that a GM.

Was there contention amongst the GM's when wallwalking was banned? For anyone who wasn't around for this - you used to be able to walk horizontally along very steep surfaces, such as mountains in the barrens. By walking horizontally until you came to a relatively flat part, you could then climb up a few feet and walk horizontally again. This allowed access to a bunch of "restricted" areas, like Hyjal, AQ, and the area south of the Greymane Wall in silverpine. Many players, including me, found this exploration to be totally awesome and one of the best parts about wow. Did a few players ruin it for everyone, or was it just considered the best way make players enjoy the game?

I wasn't around for that. I just know i hated people that got themselves falling off the world...

Also count me in with the people who are interested in spectating capabilities. Did you ever become invisible and watch boss kills, or just wander through Org? Did you ever walk up, invisible, to someone running through the barrens alone and /poke them?

If you have nothing to do, are really bored and noone is watching your back, yes.
Though i remember back from the Mechanar elevator issue, we'd often watch people for a few minutes just to check if they'd wipe, so you could stay there and port them again incase it happens. Mainly because then you'd only have to do the "paperwork" once.

What sort of priority do you give to spelling and grammar errors reported by players? I found a few weird phrasings and spelling errors when BC first came out and reported these to GMs, who more or less said "kthx". Were these ever forwarded to the dev team?

Did the GM team keep an official/inofficial list of players who reported actively?

Was the European policy on swearing/offensive words/etc different from the US one?

Also, Princess Maraudons

I find that to be a humorous nickname, in more ways than one. The boss's name is actually Princess Theradras (Maraudon is the name of the instance dungeon she's in)! Shows what those overseas support folks know!

I am a stickler for syntax errors and would never pass up submitting such a report. A while ago, there were some worthless random-property Green rings called "Perdiot" rings. I'm sure you all remember quite clearly when they changed it to "Peridot". That was all me, baby!

I knew some GMs who did tend to brush off issues perceived as "minor" in the interest of expediency, but any such report should always be filed for the devs to review. Even so, I did notice that many of my own bug/typo submissions would go unaddressed for months at a time, or even (apparently) ignored completely - I'm really not too sure why they took so long to fix many seemingly simple issues.

There isn't a list of players who report a lot of issues, but a player's past reports (and violations) are viewable by GMs.

I suppose the EU policy on offensive words is quite different from the US one since Alek mentioned that it was pretty much up to the GM as to how to handle it. US GMs have specific policies regarding any possible foul language situation, and while such policies may change over time, there's always a policy-directed course of action. That's not to say that some GMs didn't ignore a few foul language reports here and there, though.

Can you manifest yourself into an avatar/mob? If so, are you limited to playable character models? I believe some of the CMs became mega mobs at the release of the Burning Crusade. Do you ever manifest yourself as part of your daily duties?

I recall someone posting about a goblin GM serenading a female character with a gift-wrapped item restore. Sheesh.

Also, what's with GM items? Do you have access to spawn these items for your GM character? Or do they come pre-equipped?

What development secrets can you tell us about the game? Any fun or crazy details about how WoW is implemented? Like the teleporting stuff was really neat to hear about.

All GMs have invisible avatars that they use when they need to investigate something in-game. Usually they're just sitting at GM Island while the GM handles tickets and talks to players. The avatars are regular player avatars, but they are naked unless manually clothed by the GM. Regular GMs can only give themselves the standard GM garb, which is basically a blue robe, sandals, and hood. Specialists and higher GMs are able to equip themselves with any items they want. It usually wasn't worth it to spend time doing this, since giving yourself items only serves personal aesthetic purposes and equipping each of your characters on each realm would take quite a while. I was only really interested in items that weren't yet available in-game like Ashbringer, the Twin Blades of Azzinoth (which used to be way better than the current ones!), or brand new set items. But really, such items just served as something to look at while you did your work.

I wasn't aware of a command that would let you assume the form of a non-player character, but I'm sure it was possible. GMs can fly and pass through the game environment. Making yourself visible was more or less never necessary and was only used in situations in which asserting authority over a situation was necessary.

For instance, there were a couple of guilds on one server that were both trying to kill an outdoor raid boss, Lord Kazzak. When Kazzak kills someone, he gains a ton of health, and you have to kill him within a short period of time or else he goes berserk and becomes more or less unbeatable. This functionality led to griefers who'd run up to him (often with low-level, naked characters) and intentionally die. As a result of the ensuing calamity, a policy was created that disallowed same-faction players from interfering in an attempt by another raid to kill the boss. Such conflicts were fairly common.

The players were very flippant and uncooperative, being only concerned with wrecking the other guild's chance at the kill. They were unable to settle down and agree to individual attempts on the boss, so my senior revealed himself and sent multiple zone-wide messages making it clear that anyone who interfered in the other raid's attempt would be suspended. The GMs then sat in between the two guilds and booted from the game any player who attempted to run from the idle raid to the other raid's boss attempt. Eventually one of the guilds was able to kill the boss. I was unaware at the time, but that guild would soon develop a reputation among GMs as an exploiting, troublemaking band of miscreants.

I was running a live botting camera website. Basically an image refreshed every 5 seconds or so displaying my character botting. The name, chat logs, everything were hidden. The character got banned two days after the website went live. After that account got banned another person working on the project put his bot up and he got banned 10 minutes later.

How did you guys find me? Did you look at my website and search around looking for my character? Why did you put that much time into busting me (one account)?

I have gotten over twenty banned. Can I get some sort of award?

Quite an impressive number of banned accounts! I won't comment on how they find and ban bots, but they do so all the time without internet detective work. They already have everything they need.

Are there any special in game zones that only GM's have access to? I have seen one or two using model viewers, but I was curious as to whether these areas are abundant, are there different ones depending on which continent you're on?

Yep. The in-development Outland was a fun one to access. It was actually in-game for quite some time, far to the west of Booty Bay. As a GM, you'd simply face west and fly for a while. By the time you got near Kalimdor on the world map, you were there. It looked a bit different than it does now, but it was still quite cool to look around. It was barren of NPCs, and it looked quite a bit different than it does today. For one thing, there were these weird floating mushroom things, and the Dark Portal didn't look nearly as cool as the final version. There were large sections of unfinished terrain; untextured, it was bright white and perfectly flat. There was also a little dwarven camp on the edge of it that was there as a joke, but I'm afraid I can't seem to recall what they'd named it.

GM Island is sectioned off from the world now (it's actually technically still in Kalimdor, but it's separated from the game world by a vast expanse of invisible, impenetrable walls). There are several developer-only zones, but we typically were only able to easily explore those on test servers. These include several unreleased instances such as the Emerald Dream and other stuff like Developer's Island. I'm pretty sure there are vids on the internet showing these things in some hacked copy of WoW.

Areas intended to be inaccessible to players, like behind the walls of Zul'Gurub and Hyjal and the Greymane Wall, were easily accessible, though. Just hop over the wall and you're in! You didn't even need special GM powers to do so, but it certainly made it easier.

What does the GM interface look like? Are you just running a few chat windows and whatever logging applications you have to go through people's actions/item deltions/etc or does logging into work every day entail a wow-like interface where your GM avatar/character plays around GM Island in god mode?

If someone opens a ticket or you're in a discussion with someone and they "(something) is happening right now," can you see the zone/instance/view as their character to see exactly what they're talking about in game? Once, a GM responded to a ticket I had open for a few hours during phase 5 of Kael'thas, and I had to ask the GM to hold on for a bit. Would he (could he) be interested and go into some viewer-mode to watch my guild's Kael kill or would he just tend to his other chats / generally not care? If a GM were to go in and observe a raid like this, would he open up raid chat or guild chat too?

I know you said that the loot randomization has nothing to do with the first person to enter the instance or start the raid, but if you wanted one particular item to drop in a 5-man instance, could you make it drop?

You can think of it as just a bunch of chat windows, with pertinent information being displayed where necessary. It's a separate program from WoW itself; going in-game is only necessary for certain duties such as observing potential suspicious activity, assisting with a live and important issue (like a raid encounter not working properly), restoring a vast quantity of items, moving a stuck character, and so forth. They were pushing towards automating some of the simpler things so that they could be done from the GM program, so perhaps it is less necessary these days.

In the situation you describe, the GM could (and would, if the issue required his observation) certainly come into your instance and observe what's going on. If there's no reason to do so, he may still do it out of idle curiosity, but he certainly has a lot of issues to tend to and he is likely more interested in getting them done. He wouldn't need to enter your raid and it wouldn't say anything like "<GM>indivi has entered the channel." GMs will avoid speaking in any sort of channel unless it's absolutely necessary.

There's not any way to make a specific item drop, no. Loot is randomized when the instance is created and the mob is spawned - to the best of my knowledge, it does not take any specific factors into account when the loot is generated. The best way to get the item you want is to kill the mob, reset the instance, and repeat until your item shows up. :P

What have you guys been doing about the gold selling spammers sitting in each city. Like the guys whose name is "zlmtptaligk" and constanly spam a macro about their gold farming site. Do you activitely ban the accounts of people doing this?

Oh yeah. Gold farmers/spammers go through accounts like nobody's business, and they must be making a killing because every time you ban one, two seem to show up in its place. Most of the spammers are trial accounts, like Alek said, and while Blizzard has implemented a lot of restrictions on trial accounts to clamp down on this (they can't send mail, they can't use public channels, they can't whisper unless whispered to, etc.) the spammers can still just stand in town and speak in /say. Report them and they should be gone fairly quickly.

**ChrisC** · 01-04-2008

Please wait to post still.

Was there contention amongst the GM's when wallwalking was banned? For anyone who wasn't around for this - you used to be able to walk horizontally along very steep surfaces, such as mountains in the barrens. By walking horizontally until you came to a relatively flat part, you could then climb up a few feet and walk horizontally again. This allowed access to a bunch of "restricted" areas, like Hyjal, AQ, and the area south of the Greymane Wall in silverpine. Many players, including me, found this exploration to be totally awesome and one of the best parts about wow. Did a few players ruin it for everyone, or was it just considered the best way make players enjoy the game?

I wasn't around for that. I just know i hated people that got themselves falling off the world...

Also count me in with the people who are interested in spectating capabilities. Did you ever become invisible and watch boss kills, or just wander through Org? Did you ever walk up, invisible, to someone running through the barrens alone and /poke them?

If you have nothing to do, are really bored and noone is watching your back, yes.
Though i remember back from the Mechanar elevator issue, we'd often watch people for a few minutes just to check if they'd wipe, so you could stay there and port them again incase it happens. Mainly because then you'd only have to do the "paperwork" once.

Yes, please. I'm not familiar with most things WoW, but I'm very interested. Especially in things like bugs and hacks. Do tell.

I'll save this up for a later post, as I have lots to say about such things. I'm glad to see such interest, though!