I was a GM for Blizzard for 5 years, between 2015 and 2020. We were still doing some fun interactions with players up until I left, even though it wasn't anything quite as dramatic as transforming an entire raid into animals or anything like that. My favorite story was, back in Warlords of Draenor, there was a secret hunter pet named Gara, and I got a ticket from a player who's flags for it were broken, so they couldn't tame Gara, nor restart the process. They were logged into their priest when I got the ticket, so I logged into their hunter and talked to them in-game while I was fixing it. Eventually, once I got everything reset for it, I sent them a message that just said "Ever taken a selfie with yourself?", teleported over to them, made their hunter visible, and let them get a selfie of their hunter and their priest together. Those little interactions made the job alot less tedious, though they were few and far-between. They started scaling back more and more on how much we could do to make interactions special, but any time you could, it was great. Plus, writing some horrible dad jokes for GM jokes was fun! Why did the hipster murloc move from the Southfury River to the Wailing Caverns? He wanted to leave his main-stream to get a bit more underground!
How could you login on their hunter? As far as I know GMs don't have access to player accounts and Blizzard frequently states that GMs never ask for passwords...
@@ara9914 They actually did that to me once. I had a bugged Recruit a Friend mount (the devs forgot to update its use-lvl from 40 to 20) so they told me they would log in to my character and check if this was true. It disconnected me (of course) and just like I was told I couldn't log back in for a minute or so. After that, the moment I got in the item was replaced with the updated one.
@@ara9914 They can connect to the server with your account's unique identifier using their own auth token, they don't need passwords. That in itself is the main reason they would never ask for one.
I once had a GM appear and watch me AoE farm the orc camp in arathi highlands. I was so scared I thought I was doing something bannable at first but they were just like “ nice pull” and vanished lol. I miss those days.
I used to swear someone was leading random mobs to me because I'd get into a fight with a mob and randomly another mob just jumps me and ik its set route wasn't near me.
Back in Classic, we as a guild celebrated our one year anniversary. It was just like the usual chat we had with eachother everyday in the evening, but with alcohol and meeting ingame in the tavern in Orgrimar. About 15 minutes before the party started, I got killed by a guildmate in a duel (sometimes that happened when a dot kept on ticking even after the duel was already over) and there appeared no window to revive myself. Other players weren't able to target my cow carcass either, so I had to ask a GM for help. She decended down from the sky and rezzed me in front of all the people dueling outside of OG with a whole extra show on top to make it fun for all the bystanders to watch. I then thanked and invited her to our party and told her to bring as many of her GM friends with her as she wanted. Seven of them showed up. They fucking lighted up OG with all sorts of stuff, they spawned in mobs for people to fight, one of them sat at a campfire and answered people's questions regarding the secrets of WoW, they publicly advertised our guild with some fanfic about us being the chosen ones of the GM gods, etc. etc. Thanks to them, our anniversary had been 10 times better than we could've ever imagined and after that day we had an unbelievable influx of new players, everybody present that day either wanted to join us or become friends with us. :D I stopped playing the game a few years ago, but man, I'll never forget those seven GMs that stayed in the office for one extra hour after their shift had already ended just to entertain a bunch of strangers. That's dedication. :D
They should have GMs focused on issues and a couple of role player DMs that focus on this kind of stuff, some sort of in-game God that from time to time mix with humans
I was a GM between 2008 and 2012 in the EU, let me shed some light on how stuff changed from the early days. I started as a GM towards the end of TBC, I think the Sunwell patch had just released. When I started there was two types of GM, your regular GM and a Specialist GM, the Specialist GM's where usually the ones who had been there since the start and had proven to have good customer communication skills, so they were given more leeway to do things, like turn into a dragon to kill a bugged mob, stuff like that. Regular GM's would actually rarely need to log into the game. But then WotLK hit, and the playerbase skyrocketed, all of a sudden we were flooded with tickets for all sorts of stuff, mainly phasing issues at the start of LK and the specialist GM role kinda got phased out as it just took too long to resolve the issue. By the end of LK is where it started getting bad for GM's as mentioned in the video, players started getting demanding, specifically with the Argent Tournament. In the past if a player sold something to a vendor we'd happily return it or refund it if they bought the wrong thing (within reason) but with the Tournament, players were buying weapons, using them for a few days then going, "Nah I don't like this" and asking for a refund, we'd usually do the first one no problem, but then they'd be back saying they bought another weapon used it for a few days and would rather have a different one. These kind of tickets took up the bulk of our work, so players who had actual issues with quests or bugs were left waiting as ticket assignments where filtered on a first come first served basis. Blizzard realised that something had to be done (in the EU at least, we'd always get conflicting reports that the US was doing something different, eventually it all balanced out) so the in-game 2 hour refund system was introduced, we'd still help the first time if they went over the 2 hour window, after that it was tough titties %n (that's what we called players, cos in our chat tool, you could type %n and it would populate the players name.) Over the next couple of years, Blizz started implementing systems to control the ticket volumes, letting players undelete a character and so on, we'd still get tickets from players asking to undelete a character that they deleted like 5 months ago, and sorry %n, that shit is gone, as deleted characters and items would only be held on the servers for like 6 weeks and then be purged. We did our best to try and educate players on being more careful, especially when buying or selling items and deleting characters, but it took a long while before this actually sank in as the playerbase still had this misconception that GM's could fix everything, we couldn't we were still limited in what we could do. But that essentially the reason why you don't see GM's anymore, we just got too busy to be spending way too long farting about fixing an issue that could be resolved in 2 seconds. I actually interupted a specialist GM when I first started, it was in Shadowmoon Valley, I had gotten a ticket saying that a quest specific mob was stuck in the terrain and you couldn't kill it. So I logged into the game, used the /kill command, wished my player happy questing and was gone. My player was happy, and I guess anybody else that came along would be too as they could do the quest also. After like 5 minutes I get a message from a specialt GM saying "did you just /kill that mob?" I was like yeah, and he told me he had been on that for like 15 minutes with his player setting up this elaborate situation of turning into something, giving a grand speech and then I killed it like half way through. So while that may have been awesome for that 1 player he was dealing with, it sucked for the hundreds of other players who had probably raised tickets about it. My takeaway from my time as a GM, was that we shouldn't be there for the players amusement, we were there to fix shit and keep things running smoothly so that all players could enjoy the game. The Devs made the game, the GM's kept that shit running smoothly, at least we tried to. :D I'll leave you with my favourite ticket, Player had been in the Storm Peaks and the Time Lost Proto-Drake litterally spawned in right next to him, and back then it was a ridiculously rare spawn, he managed to kill it but it bugged and died on a rock or something and he couldn't loot it. I logged into the game, had a quick look at the logs to see if he tagged it first, he did, so the loot was his, summoned the corpse to his feet and he was able to loot it. He was so happy and couldn't thank me enough, he thought that his chance to get the mount had come and gone. It was tickets like that that made all the whiny refund requests bareable. :)
It sure fixed the ticket response time, too! My Naxx lockout bug got resolved yesterday, a mere 11 weeks after filing a ticket about it. (Current Actiblizz mindset is very much "Hire three guys for this and make sure they work shifts so there's zero predictability in response time.")
Love how years ago back in vanilla, had a dwarf hunter named cloudx, name got deleted for being a "copy righted name" then someone ended up using the name lol. Brought it up to a gm who was giving me shit and told me some smart ass thing like "its not related to his case so I should sent in a separate ticket " lol
while you state "we shouldnt be there for the player amusement" you obviously enjoyed being able to be there directly for the players on occasion. A GM actually spawning in was always an occasion, i faintly remember GM's showing up stopping bitch wars in town. Also GM's just randomly spawning some mobs in town added some flavour events that the game normally doesn't have. But yes, it is additional workload that needs to be dealt with and ofc there will always be ppl who get demanding when they can actually directly interact with GM's. Still, from a player perspective i still think it was a really nice touch to have "the gods walk among us" rather then writing some text on a website and getting a text as answer.
Ideally you'd want both types of GMs, since they are both good for the game. Specialist GMs to create those memorable moments that spawned this fan video, and Regular GMs to get tickets out of the way as efficiently as possible. Too bad those two roles conflict with each other.
Former WoW GM here. I came in towards more the stricter side of things but it was still a great job, at least for me. We always wanted to do the most we could for each player, we helped everyone that we could as fast as we could. There were some great interactions and some not so great but that's just how the world is. My favorite thing was telling player WoW jokes, as GM's we'd come up with them and share them internally with each other. Even if it was a little "haha" or a "ROFL" it made my day because I know how much that interaction meant to players around the world. Unfortunately myself with a lot of great people were affected by the layoffs. Shout out to the people and users on WoWhead, MMO Champion, and the WoW Forums you guys and your info really did contribute to the community. Thank you to the players, even though it was work it was one of the highlights in my life being able to help you guys through your journey in WoW.
omg thats awesome!!! i loved the jokes too!!! By any chance, it is a small world i have to ask but have you or maybe you've heard it from another gm but when i was 11 yrs old my toon colbiw i did brewfest boss and didnt get the mount but i DC'ed and didnt see who won or if i did and couldnt loot it LMAO and a GM was like sorry no didnt win... but its brewfest and ive had one too many pints... hic! and told me to not tell ANYONE and said to check my mailbox, teleported me to a mailbox and BOOM THE KODO WAS IN THE MAIL! lmfao it was the coolest thing ever and is still my fav mount because of it! when i ride it i feel like im riding a one of a kind, did not come off the boss came from a gm lol super nice of the gm! that was like around 16 yrs ago ish xD ( so i think im safe to say, blizz wouldnt take away something that drops like 100% now hopefully and my account is safe xD )
@@Jaggro What topped it was the fact that I just wanted a name change. (At a time paid name change didn't exist.) The game master landed next to me in Elwyn Forest, we both hid in nearby mountains and discussed my request. Meanwhile I was frantically linking his items (the robes etc) in the chat to my friends.
@@Jaggro one teleported me to the GM isle on purpose because i asked him. though he did say he woulden't :P then he said OOOPS in the chat 5m later and teleported me back
I once got stuck in Durotar as alliance during Noblegarden farming eggs on a PvP server. Literally stuck between two rocks and very killable by horde. My HS was on cooldown and I begged a GM to unstick me and port me to safety. They appeared above me and laughed at me in full Noblegarden garb carrying an egg basket as a weapon, and kindly ported me back to stormwind.
I got stuck in limbo after the Great Raiding Crash of 2004 when my then pvp server called Sunstrider crashed everything during peak Raiding hours. Everything disappeared and went black, we then spent a few minutes falling. Though no one could tell until we all hit the bottom of the game zone. Most people just respawned back at Ironforge but I guess I was trapped in a non world. All I could see was sky above and sky below. Relogging didn't help, my character was effectively dead. It took 2 days before my ticket was responded to due to the amount of damage the crash caused. But finally the GM turned up and teleported me home. It wasn't much of an interaction, but the GM was funny and made a story upto say I was in heaven and my time wasn't done yet and I was being sent back to see out my destiny. All in humour. I miss them days
I remember getting stuck somewhere in outside molten core and being unable to retrieve my body, back when there was no return to graveyard option. Had to wait for a GM to res me lol
GMs had the power to give accounts 2 weeks+ play time as well. I remember being a kid and putting in a ticket and asking for a couple days more time before my account time ran out waiting for birthday money lol. Made me feel like Blizz cared.
One of my fondest memory from my first time in WoW, a year or so before TBC, was trying to put a group together to run SFK. For those unaware, back then there was no Dungeon Finder. If you wanted to do a dungeon, you'd go to a major city and announce it it the Group Finder chat, then two in the group had to ride to the location to summon the others most of the time. This time around, I was one of the people who was tasked with summoning. I was already at the location waiting for the second person. Bored, I went to the village just south of SFK and started jumping around on the rooftops. Eventually I fell down a chimney and couldn't get out. At this point I'm freaking out, because maintaining a group can be difficult. If any single person gets sick of waiting and bails out, it's bound to cause a chain reaction. Instead, they all got engaged giving me tips on how to get out. Finally we settle on me deleting my Hearthstone, which is bound to Orgrimmar, and to use the /unstuck command. One of the guys told me that if the /unstuck command couldn't find my Hearthstone, it would just teleport me a short distance away. I tried it and... obviously it didn't work. Now I was truly stuck, and the only way to get me would be if a third person showed up and summoned me. I thought that would split the group for sure, so I sent a ticket about the issue instead. 5 minutes later, a tiny dragon appears in front of me. I don't get enough time to process what I'm even looking at before the dragon starts laughing at me. It introduces itself as a Game Master, and between laughs and jokes about Christmas coming early, he managed to teleport me out and restore my Hearthstone. I thanked the little winged creature, and he proceeds to thank me back, saying that I totally made his day. An amazingly wholesome and funny interaction that I retell anytime I get the opportunity. :)
the Summoning Stones infront of Dungeons coulnd't summon players till tbc. So there might be somethin off in your memories. But yea the Chimney thing, i understand 100%. Alterac Ruins.. fell into a few of them at this pont. :D
It represented a time when Blizzard still had a soul. When they still loved their game and the people who played it. But I believe those people are gone now, replaced with marketing executives, content calendars and engagement metrics. Sure it was messy back then, but it had charm. Things are so formulaic now.
Command abuse by GMs was indeed an issue. You can't hire 200 GMs and let them play it by ear without the most insane (and insanely expensive) abuses happening.
I remember a GM partying with us in goldshire. We had a massive party going on and a GM showed up (assuming cause we made some lag not 100% sure). Instead of ridiculing us, they turned into a 2 headed orc made themselves huge and started talking in all kinds of different languages. They spawned in fun party related items and eventually they vanished never to be seen again. This was back in burning crusade, and I've always wished another instance like this would happen.
Pretty sad they removed the interactions. I can understand the reason behind it, but I wish they brought back something similar. Perhaps not as GMA but perhaps “living NPCs” have some staff show up once in a blue moon on some random map and get up to some shenanigans with the players around. More “community service” type stuff and just rotate who among staff gets to okay that day, all use the same character so they don’t get their ego caught up in the hype
Smaller games still do it. In Elite: Dangerous (sci-fi), staff had to handle the alien ships for special events, there was no AI for them. I've definitely heard of similar things in other games, too, but can't remember their names right now.
@@xdgg4433 I played from 2007 to 2009 or so on Global America when it had a massive and amazing community. was in the top 10 ranking with 3 stars in EIC that was destroyed when they released the galaxy pay gates. A guy i knew who loved the game and community so much he went to work for Bigpoint and he hated it due to the complete disrespect they had towards us as a community. Not to mention the pure greed that caused it to become what it is today, dead space and bots.
@@Nitidus I'm just laughing at the idea of the programmer going "Boss, we don't have enough budget to fix/make the Artificial Intelliigence (AI)" and the boss just going "Then hire Non-Artificial Intelligence"
Former GM here. Worked 5 years for Blizzard and loved it. Especially the ingame contacts. A few clarifications though: While GMs generally had a lot more freedom during WoW vanilla (So I heard...as i started just short befor BC came out), that was taken pretty much off the plate for a fair few years until, at a certain point, it was decided to introduce a special team back into support, that would pick tickets that lend themselves to ingame direct GM support and being visible, to, I guess, make us feel more approachable. The team was on a type of rotation, with GMs handpicked by their general quality of support for it. I was part of, I think, the second round of people doing this and really enjoyed it. Mostly we picked quest or raid issues, that would require us to go ingame and fix them anyway, but while we would usually do so invisible, we were allowed to show ourselves and use some very specific spells created for just that type of support. There was once even a screenshot from a guild with my GM character, solving one of the stuck quests, which was very fun to see. What was not part of it was giving items to players for free (unless as restore of course) or killing them, unless needed to solve the issue. We were not supposed to interfere with the game in other ways than plain cosmetic (the transformations you could see) or solve the issue and basically appear to "work magic" to do so. I saw a comment somewhere that the GMs you could see were only Devs. That is not correct. Though I'm sure there were some Devs having fun around Vanilla time and the pre-expansion patches. I left in the first wave of redundancies, figuring (rightly so, it turned out) that there wasn't much room for career advancement after. I'm sad to hear that special way of interaction got abused and had to be abandoned later. It was such a great thing for us and the players. The white room on GM island was, at least in my initial training, used as a target to practice our GM "flying through walls" skill, so we'd learn to navigate to a location that wasn't reachable otherwise. I still feel the training I received at Blizzard was one of the best in the industry. Despite now working for a huge IT company, that of course offers a lot of training. The tools we had, how the training was delivered and how they were improved to make more and more complex issues easy to resolve is incrdible and many companies could learn from it.
Thanks very much for your input. I'm loving how this video is resulting in more GMs talking about how thing used to work. There was so little online when I was researching this video that I had to go back as far as 2009 for some first hand accounts
@@Jaggro We weren't allowed to talk even to our friends in WoW about our job while working for Blizzard. Really top secret verything. ;-) I still feel weird posting here, but hey, they can't fire me for it anymore. 😛
@@ForThePleasureOfEating in a way that’s probably a good thing. One of your friends might accidentally spill the beans,and you’d get hounded on your personal account. Or have someone pressure you to do something you weren’t supposed to do.
IIRC the hidden room was originally supposed to be "GM Jail," with the idea being that players could be sent there for bad behavior. For obvious reasons though, this never was something that actually was done in live - though I do recall some of the oldtimers (pre-Vanilla GMs) saying that they had used it during the beta, but I can't confirm that. Def agree about the tools and training at Blizzard - though I'm definitely biased on the latter, as I was somewhat involved in training. Although a lot of people complained about it initially, when Atlas got its legs it was SOOOO much better than the old days with GM Tool.
No one ever believes me when I tell them this story but I don't care and continue to tell it because it's a memory of mine that I will never forget. I got randomly messaged by a GM when I was a noob to the world. Apparently there was a mix up and they meant to contact someone else. Either way they continued the conversation for a bit before telling me they had to go. At this point I realized they had powers because they were toying with me throughout those few mins by going visible shushing me and then going invisible again. I asked if they can show me something cool before they left. They teleported me to GM Island went visible, waved goodbye, went invisible, said Bye! In the local chat, then I disconnected, Only to log back in and find myself back where I was originally. I bet they did this because they knew I didn't know any better. It wasn't until much later that videos were released and I saw the castle that she brought me in front of on GM island that I realized where it was she took me.
I believe you. Taking a player to GM Island was forbidden, but I can totally imagine one people or the other doing so anyway. I was bold enough to do things nearly as forbidden, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@knivesron I have tons. I was a specialist of killing player in duels, making giant enemy chickens appear on raids, walking as a demon around bots during investigation. I had only 3 rules : Never give an advantage to a player, never annoy someone who is not willing to have fun with me, never spawn mobs unless needed. In nearly tens years, I have fucked up a character only once. (And fixed it.) So that's fine.
I still remember an interaction I had with a GM where they introduced themselves by saying that the clouds parted and light shined through the opening, and down descended the GM from the heavens. I remember smiling at the fact that they put that much effort into their writing and how much they wanted to preserve immersion. I miss old GM interactions.
IMPORTANT! - I've been made aware of a spam bot replying to comments on this video using a variation of my name. I'm doing my best to remove the comments and block the channel but please note I'll never ask for any of your details or try communicate with you outside of this video. Thanks and always be vigilant! Thank you all so much for the beyond overwhelming support. I really never expected the video to be this big in my lifetime. I wanted to like and reply to every comment but now that Asmongold has reacted to it I think I'd need to it be a full time job to do so! Just know I'm reading all of them and I appreciate all of your support. I'll be aiming to upload every 2 weeks so please subscribe if you liked what you saw! Thank you all so much.
Also just saw this late on a recap on asmon’s youtube and had to come say I thought this was a really well-done video. Great content, well thought out, well edited, and you are well spoken. Earned a sub from me for this for sure. Looking forward to your next video! Love you
When I was 9 and first started playing, a random guy came up to me in the nelf starting zone and asked if I wanted to go on an adventure - obviously I said sure and we ran all the way to dark shore together while he protected me from higher level mobs on the road, being the first time I experienced Darnassus and the portal, the boat showed up right on time and boated over, then ran down the far end of the dock from town as a different boat from the first time arrived (the model I later saw again as very similar to the boat to Exodar) and the boat took me through a loading screen and dropped us off at an island without NPCs and human architecture and he just said something along the lines of “hang out as long as you want, but you have to hearth back” and vanished I tried to take some other poor random guy with me again and was so confused why the boat didn’t come again, but that interaction with the GM is to the day one of my gamer highlights
I was questing in the Stranglethorn Vale/Booty Bay area back in Wrath and teamed up with a Gnome to take on one of those [3 Players recommended] quest targets - we died a couple of times trying and the Gnome mentioned that they were chatting with their GM friend. I asked jokingly if the GM friend could help us - They turned up, turned me and the Gnome into pirates and healed us through the fight so we could complete our quest! I wish I had taken screenshots.
Huge shout out to all my Guides who take time and energy out of their lives to handle all the low level questions new players have even though they are not GMs and not getting paid or kickbacks.
I only got to see a GM in person once, and I was legitimately surprised when it happened. I was questing an alt through Winterspring back in the original wrath days, and encountered a hunter bot doing the usual yeti farm. I reported him assuming I'd get the standard "thank you for reporting" response but instead the GM actually appeared near me and went to observe the bot in person.
Investigating bots manually on reports was a standard thing up to 2016 or 2017, the automated systems would find them, but who knows when? - After that, we had to let it to the automated systems anyway. Some old rebels (hum hum) never left checking them though.
no gms, garrisons, man when i returned in wod it was depressing the game felt dead. glad they got us back to social based gaming prob thanks to twitch streamers
I still remember our first Illidan kill, somehow the server crashed and dropped nothing, we were kicked out the raid party so no one was able to loot, we opened a ticket, a GM came, spawned another Illidan let him kill everyone of us, then kill him and mass ress us. Then started dancing and spam chickens.
Twice I've had the need of a GM's help. Both times stuck in a chimney. Once in Duskwoods on my old undead rogue, and once in Alterac Mountains near Dalaran dome on a blood elf mage. No runes and both times HS was on cooldown. In Duskwoods I was ported to the middle of Darkshire without getting aggro on guards on a pvp server before he ported me to Org. In Alterac Mountains the GM spent around 15 minutes just telling stories before porting me out of the chimney and challenging me to a duel and just insta win. Both GM's just laughed and asked how I got stuck in a chimney, and I've gotten one of those GM's help another time, and he just asked me if I was stuck in a chimney. Only needed help because I fell through the world that time, he did not show up, just ported me to the surface.
My first time talking to a GM was also because I was stuck in a chimney, in Lakeshire. Didn't have a hearthstone because I would often destroy that for an extra slot of inventory space when I was full... They didn't show up in game, they just teleported me out. I was quite young back then and was kind of nervous talking to a GM, so I didn't say much more than thank you and take care ^~^ I wonder how many people they had to rescue from chimneys over the years.
What if you were the only one who ever got stuck in a chimney because not once in my entire wild career did I ever even think to try and go into a chimney lol
@@leonardceres9061 That's fair =p I can't speak for the original commenter but I sometimes just get the urge to see if I can go to places without caring about whether I -should- go to said places. In games, that is... just to clarify that >~>
@@Jaggro I remember also getting stuck in a fireplace in Duskwood. It was I think from the Stalvan the Reaper or something questline. You go around and find clues or something, and then creepy magical effects happen to you. I got polymorphed, and the sheep with the smaller hitbox walked into the fireplace, took fire damage, and then the effect broke, trapping me. The fire there would still hurt me, but not enough to kill me. So it would constantly interrupt the cast of my HearthStone. Had to ask to be gotten out.
I was a GM back in the day, and when the GM's started getting out of control, I was promoted to a manager. I was more or less in charge of checking the activity of all GM's to make sure their "fun activities" didn't get out of control. And trust me when I tell you that this was a full time job and some new GM's were fired on their first day, they just couldn't keep their hands to themselves.
I worked as a GM at the office just outside of Paris from 2005 until 2008. It was fun but a lot of things outside of appearing in front of players were a bit tedious. Also we only appeared in front of someone rarely, not all the time. 99% of the issues got dealt with through a ticketing system.
@@Dunwael It sure was, just the Mcdonalds close to the office was such a bad idea though haha. Good old times. Still missing one of my seniors a lot. R.I.P
C'est marrant, on a peut-être déjà échangé en jeu sur le serveur Dalaran à cette époque là. J'adorais le style plutôt RP, c'était toujours un grand moment de recevoir un whisp de GM haha x)
@@H0kram Salutations ! Je suis le Maître de Jeu Gwenyrael, et je vous contacte à propos de votre requête concernant vos souvenirs nostalgiques. Avez-vous un instant à me consacrer ?
I remember holding a Lesson on the Holy Light on a RP Server. A Gamemaster spawned in and made sure no one "ruined" it. He (was a male model) also frequently asked questions and thanked me for my contribution to teaching about the lore and worldviews ingame. Most epic moment in all these years in WoW.
With Dragonflight’s launch, the servers were obviously having issues, and in Stormwind the boat to the Dragon Isles completely broke. On MoonGuard, my friend told me that he had found a GM flying around invisible trying to get the boat to respawn to let more players jump into the expansion since the boat wasn’t spawning again on its own. Obviously it was a game bug situation, not a player interaction, but it’s cool to know GM accounts still exist.
I had a ingame wedding in wrath where a gamemaster where doing the ceremony. It was on the shore of silvermoon. he even despawned the npc there and made a buffed for us. Great times.
This is how EverQuest GM's did things. A GM married my wife and i in a game called EverQuest Online Adventures. A PS2 MMO. I still have the original video recorded on VHS! on my channel lol. They hosted events, it was so cool. The MMO genre really isn't what it once was. It's not just nostalgia goggles. It wasn't perfect no, but it was NEW, it was EXCITING, it had a more small community feel per server, and it felt like the devs really loved us. I liken it to working for a small family business where everybody knows your name from the owner to the new guy. Contrast that with working at say. . . walmart lol. Oh and EQOA also had a GM island, we found it much later when rebuilding our world and server. Our devs did an interview with us and we learned a lot. SoE shut us down in 2012, we turn 20 this Feb 11th 2023!
I remember I once got a character stuck in a perpetual instant DC area, and I couldn't get her out. So I sent a ticket, technically I had exploited to get out of bounds but I more so just wanted to see a little Easter egg in northrend dalaran. Keep in mind i was fully open and transparent with the gm about what i was trying to do and saying as it was a pretty well known thing and this was during like, Legion i was unlikely to get in trouble. The GM was super chill, offered to port me back to a major city for my faction, and then I asked if they had any GM jokes I could end the interaction with. They told me one, I laughed, then I told them a joke, and they found it funny too. Over all a great interaction that I recall fondly. I've never had a bad experience with any of WoWs GMs, they are all typically down to earth and understanding people who are genuinely great to talk to.
Thanks for the video, and be sure to keep it up! Sadly some of the WoW community can be harsh and judgemental, especially to OC, but don't let it stop you!
I remember when they bugged out an NPC and I had to despawn it. This was right before they removed unarmed as a skill so people were trying to get their skill up. Someone yelled GM run! And everyone scrambled away.
A friend was on the GM isle in 2006, I had him in my guild til just recently where he left, probably because the acc was deleted after 15 years or so idk. I was with him in a group and saw where it was located. If you wrote /who gm isle or something like that you also got the info of said player. The coolest thing I had was a phone call, not really from a gm, but employee, he gave me a job offer because back then I was very active into having new ideas for features in the game and some abilities are based of my ideas (like the self heal of rogues which back then costed combo points). I declined the job offer tho because I was studying computer science at that time. I also had multiple encounter with GMs ingame. It was just great, you felt like a real part of the game and company behind it. That was the best quality any game ever had. I've wrote a support ticket today and got an automatic reply that there are currently many tickets and they closed it. I've no issues waiting for days but automatically closing it isn't nice. The quality went down, as it goes down in the whole gaming industry. :(
Ex GM here also. Played since release of TBC and became a GM towards the tail end of WOTLK into the Cata launch. From speaking to a lot of people that I worked with and were there before and after me...up to the layoffs, they had said there were no major changes but overtime there was more pushback on those type of gm interactions and 'familiarity' with players. Many saw this as something that was push more from the activision side. In general the majority of people I still spoke to said it the job started to become more like a standard call center/tech support job. Some people were ticket/ingame support and others did phone support for billing/account issues. They started to merge those and it seems that was the beginning of the end for many of them. Being a GM meant something different but for many in the end it became a standard and less enjoyable tech/cs role. The point made at around 5:25 mark is correct, I had heard of people getting really into the 'fame' side of being posted about online. If you got a mention on wowhead/forums etc it would be talked about in a 'ah thats cool' type of way. Buy it seemed others were getting a bit obsessed with it. Thats where professionalism has to take over but you knows it can be the 'one person to spoil it for all' type scenario. Side story, in my first year I got really sick around xmas and had to be brought to hospital... while waiting on the stretcher to be seen a nurse started asking me questions (name/dob etc). When she asked me what I did for a living.. for a split second younger me said to me (this is you time.. DO IT).. I proudly (with as much as i could puff my chest out) stated.. I'm a Game Master 😏 I still chuckle to myself about that every now and then 😁 /%n
They have team lead/managers. All activity is monitored just like anything else. It was more done for some light fun and the sense of 'wow i saw a gm today' type of thing for the community. It is why the role of a gm was seen as different to your standard customer support type role. But like anything .. once ego's enter the chat and people saw it as bragging rights.. it quickly descends into a mess and as such stopped. Its the old line of 'this is why we can't have nice things'
Back in TBC Classic 2021 i was doing TK on last boss Kael'thas Sunstrider , we wiped multiple times and a GM appeared, cheering us up in chat i think they're too busy in PTR nowadays.
I remember when I played this game a long time ago I filled out a support ticket for a problem and some guy came swimming down from the clouds through the air. When the issue was resolved, he swam back up into the clouds.
The interrogation room was reachable; however it was from my understanding very rarely used. I personally was pulled in there by a GM way back in 05. I was being a jerk to someone online by making alts to bypass the ignore system to bother them and the alt I was on got instantaneously teleported into a textureless room with a chair. The GM told me to sit down and wanted to know why I kept doing what I was doing and went on to explain how I should be more understanding of people's requests to be left alone. The whole experience was very shocking, as I felt like a kid who just got put in time out by their parents. I'll never forget that room or the GM, because the talk he had with me made me take better consideration of how I interact with others online.
I was a GM around 2006. We could get to the interrogation room by swimming down through the ground, but it wasn’t used for anything other than the occasional making sure someone was a bot (by summoning them there.) Folks weren’t required to talk to us when we messaged them, so we couldn’t assume a lack of response was verification of them being a bot. The most frustrating thing about that job is that we were sworn to absolute secrecy. No one could know about our position as a GM, under threat of termination. So, a job that I was very excited about at the time had to be absolutely mum.
Oh my god, I had NO IDEA this was your first real video. Just based on the level of production and obvious effort put into it, I would've guessed you've made dozens of videos! Awesome video, and I miss the old GMs from back in the day, it was always fun interacting with them. You've got yourself a new subscriber!
I never saw a GM but the best GM I had was trying help my find my character after a batched server transfer. They were bouncing around server with me making new characters with the same name as my Hunter which I had contacted them on each server we went to until they asked me to make a character on a new server where my character was. But because the server wasn't open yet character creation was locked so I lost the GM......Next GM picked up were last one left off and explained what happened to my character. Basically I tried to transfer with my guild to a new server right as they closed the transfers and the system derped out and threw me on the next server in line to open free transfers. I ran around a bit and did dailies while waiting for the second GM. It was very weird walking around a server where you are the only person in the world. At least I didn't have to compete for mobs lol. I logged out after talking to the second GM and within an hour my character was where he was supposed to be with my guild, which imploded a month later..........yay guild drama.......
Well done, bro. Seems like you put more effort into your videos than a lot UA-camrs with over 100k subs. Keep up the good work and I'm sure myself and many others will stay subscribed!
I miss the GM interactions for back in the day. I once saw one in BB and they were flagged for PVP, a warrior tried to attack them, was /laugh at and then promptly murdered. XD
Honestly, I want these GMs back into the game again, it seemed like they would've helped us out way more than now, and we got to see what crazy stuff they could do during that encounter XD I never came across these Game Masters, and honestly, I hope I do, that is just incredible.
i remember doing the achievement where you had to kill both kolagarns hands in a specific timeframe in ulduar about 12 years ago our raidlead put up a timer and we killed both hands in time, but we didnt get the achievement so he submitted a ticket, which is when a GM showed up, made us stand in a line and gave everyone the achievement one after the other
I have so many fond memories of GM encounters over the years, it’s a real shame these things don’t really happen anymore. I remember sending in a ticket because I wanted a WoD beta code and I had a nice convo with a GM. no code though :(
To clarify on this video, there are Game Masters with Customer Support and Game Masters that are part of the Development Team. Two different branches that do different things. The times back then when you saw a GM show up and show themselves off and making them go big or spawn mobs are all the Developers. The ones you generally speak to in game about general help are the GM's with Customer Support. They don't show themselves in the game or make mobs spawn randomly for them as doing so could cause server problems that the Devs would need to monitor which is why the Devs are the only ones that do that stuff. They have changed how they assist people now so it's more about player responsibility because people needed to take ownership of their own actions instead of thinking if they make the mistake, the GM's would just fix it, but when they were told no, like in your video, the player base gets up because it's kind of human nature for a lot of people to not accept a no answer and the mentality of "The customer is always right" comes in.
This is 100% correct to the best of my knowledge. Players can get lazy and request assistance with simple problems that waste a GM's time. The worst part is when they don't get what they want and call the GM a "fag" or "insert slur here" when ANYTHING doesn't go their way. There are actual people on the other side of the screen who have to take that abuse. People don't seem to understand that much. That doesn't mean that a lot of the times people call on a GM isn't for a worthwhile cause, but it at least means that if you care enough to wait a week to get it fixed, it's actually a problem worth getting corrected and not just a problem a hearthstone can fix, y'know?
I developed a private server almost a decade ago and there is no ill effect from mob spawning unless it's done at a massive scale in the hundreds. Npc attributes weren't saved to the database unless they were adjusted via the database, and would reset when the server did. Almost no in game command outside of object spawning had any permanence or performance effect
@@StreetForged Private servers don't exactly have much impact compared to doing it to a server that thousands of people are playing on. So like if you run a Private Server and you have GM character show up and spawn a random mob in the zone. It could effect the stability of that zone if let's say hundreds of players started showing up to attack the mob. In comparison to a private server, there isn't much negative impact for you to just reset the server and everyone jumps in because they aren't paying you to keep the servers up. If this happened on a actual Blizzard server and the server somehow goes down, how you are causing those who pay for the service to not be able to login and play and impacting those who weren't even part of that situation where a GM would spawn a mob in a major city and etc. They have to take in account that there are others who playing the game and actions like that could effect their ability to play unless they are doing a stress test on those realms by spawning those mobs like that.
@@Crimpson2003 the point you make of people swarming a zone to see the fuss is reasonable. You'd be surprised just how much stress a zone can handle with modern infrastructure. A lot of servers in the past had thousands of online members and had mall zones with dozens of added vendor NPCs and objects spawned, and would often be the spawn location for new players. It would cause framerate losses on the extreme end but server instability was pretty rare even despite that. Warmane/molten, the largest pserver group, has had player limits larger than blizzards by a few thousand since 2015 and manages really good stability while hosting custom events and having crossrealm bg/arena/dungeons. Servers easily maintain 1+ week uptimes while dalaran is so packed with people it's hard to find the npcs you need to use
I was one of the people who would abuse the old texturing system to climb to places you weren't supposed to. Going under SW was always the super fun one until your HS was on cooldown. Got stuck in that perpetual falling void with a group of people once and had to have a GM teleport us out. He just told us not to do it again. Only other time I dealt with a GM was logging in during one of the anniversary events and one of my characters didnt get the goody bag in the mail, only dealt with the GM through text though, didnt see them.
You didn't need to modify anything to get under SW though. In fact, it's still possible today, since it's simply gaps in the terrain. Sounds like you did that instead of modifying files, cause if you were caught by a GM using modified files, you'd definitely get banned. Exploration was usually only met with a simple slap on the wrist.
@@spuugvuur9633 Oh yea everything I did was within the live, unmodded code of the game. Old textures were blocky and triangular instead of smooth so you could climb near vertical walls. Never spawned anything in like the one person did to get to GM island.
This is the kind of stuff that made vanilla WoW special. GM's made a comeback on the classic PTR's which was cool to see. Things like this go a long way. PS I had a guildmate who was a GM in vanilla but hardly anybody knew about it aside for a half dozen of us and he never once used his powers for our benefit or for fun so I'm surprised to see all these interactions in this video between players and GM's!
I remember back in the day when I met my first GM in game. I can’t remember the reason, but I remember inspecting him and they had a sword with some crazy stats on it. It was basically able to kill anything with one hit. I met GM’s in several games starting back in EverQuest. That was 22 years ago lol gosh i feel old now!
I stood in darkshire for like a half hour talking to a gnome gm. They were cool in explaing they didn't know why i wasn't getting credit for killing stiches. Then they just auto completed quest for me.
I once had a GM roleplay as a furbolg when responding to my ticket when I had to undelete my character. One of the most wholesome experiences I've ever had 😅
I used to do a lot of wall-climbing back in vanilla, I loved the feeling of exploring places we were never meant to see, or just getting to fun places like up in the rafters of the Stormwind AH, having people ask "how did you get there!?" was always fun :P one time I was climbing on a hut in Crossroads and a GM appeared and asked what I was doing. I confirmed I was just having fun, climbing around. He said that was fine and not to abuse any places I found, I said I wouldn't and he disappeared. Not even particularly interesting, but that's still a core WoW memory of mine.
The truth is they fired around 800 GM's before classic 2.0 came out and replaced the system with more automation to save money just as most of them were fired i know this because i knew some of them and went to visit some of them once in Cork in Ireland :).
The 2000's were the golden age of gaming in more ways than most would initially think, i cherish every hour of the vast and varied experiences across all mediums and playercounts i got to take part in. We knew it wouldn't last, but never expected it to become this bad.
I once was a gm in a wow private server called Miranda's wow server. Maybe around 2010. You could pay around $30 to become a gm with full access. I was trained to use commands in a group of newcomers and from there would help out players in need and more. That's where our freedom went crazy. Would spawn as big monsters in storm wind and org for players to attack. Was great times. would spawn and also help players with bug issues and more. I also took the personal time to create a gm village with vendors and more but it got wiped lol.
This video seems to lean towards the lighter, fun side of GM interactions. Back in 2004 they were more police than friendly neighbors, often responding to griefing, player harassment, or even if you swore in general chat (yes, it was THAT ANAL back then). I got 24 hours once for telling someone to fuck off, which is a joke by today's standard of crazy stuff said in gen chat. The only time we ever saw a GM in person was because I dragged Lord Kazzak to Stormwind on my hunter (pro-kiter here) in Vanilla, whom promptly began to slaughter the entire town and guards. A GM showed up to despawn Kazzak and that was it. My only other time interacting with a GM was during TBC when while raiding, our Chess event bugged after completion and no chest spawned for our raid. My entire raid stayed an HOUR later waiting for a GM to come help, only for them to say they're aware of the bug causing it but could do nothing for us. GMs were mostly useless in the early years, so to hear they suddenly became these knights in shining armor for the community years later is actually kinda tilting. Seems like the game not only got more carebear, but the GMs did too.
What really happened ? Bobby needed another boat, so most of the GM's lost their jobs. Now they have a hand-full of part time GMs doing all the work, and this is why it takes 20-30 days to get a reply. And never in person like in the old days. Another win for this "amazing" company. Also the GMs went from more or less "do anything" to "do nothing" now. In the last 10 years I dont remember when I contacted a GM for something that he/she actually was inclined to assist and help. Usually do a copy-paste reply to something I did not even ask about... top lvl frustrating.
Blizzard should have gone a different Direction with this. Like a Theme Park which WoW in a way is, with the Dungeons being Rides. They should have created Entertainers that go out into the World and surprise Players with cool stuff. Kinda like going to Six Flags and running into one of the Looney Toons who will either play Game of Trivia with you, or get in on a Group Photo. I remember saying to myself during the Years of Vanilla that WoW feels like a Theme Park, and I can't wait to try all the Rides.
I asked a GM why when I logged to my 35 druid in southshore the innkeeper killed me along with some guards. The GM did not know what I was talking about and closed the ticket.
There have not been active GMs since at least Pandy, possibly earlier, interacting with folks directly. The support GM staff is minute, most of their work is following up on what the AI/Bots that WoW uses reports/do. They are poorly paid and under NDAs to not talk about their work.
Reigning champion of MMOs? Isn't FFXIV bigger at this point with *actual* players and not the inflated all-time number that is ridiculously high for WoW because it has been around since the stone age?
Christian Finnish Frostiis not buyng WOTLK Classic with my BFF to play it on RP server because of DK Bots overun PVP BG:s, GM is needed says Asmogold too
My brother worked as a GM for several years, but quit when abuse from people demanding stupid things and being refused basically took over too much of his job. Once again, a few idiots spoiled it for everyone else with their entitled idiocy.
6:30 Lol that's me ^_^ Had several similar experiences since then. Honestly can't remember a single instance of a GM actually helping me in the past 8 or so years. Not even sure why I'm trying...
0:34 open a ticket, EU "Wait time 42 Days" then after 15 it auto resolves saying "we could not answer your ticket at this time" bullshit company we pay monthly for
i had a few gm encounters back in the day, i always enjoyed them very much. i would get my issue resolved and they put a smile on my face whether it was from jokes or great role playing. you will be forever missed gms
My brother was a gm on a private server when I was 10 or so, I remember sneaking onto his account and giving myself gear there was no way a 10 year old would've been able to achieve
One thing I see people missing is that GM’s support more than just WoW, so the ability to focus on one game is no longer possible, and with that came the loss of many of these interactions.
I was a GM from BC through to the start of Mists. You'd think that but there generally wasn't a great range of "in-game" support GMs could give to the other games like Starcraft, Warcraft or Diablo (I imagine it's the same with Overwatch and Hearthstone). For the other games it was mostly account/payment issues and replying to tickets saying things to the effect of no we won't unban your d2 account. There were, however, seniority levels of GM as well as separate account & billing agents so most GMs would not come across non-WoW issues unless it was reported in a WoW ticket. The most senior level of non-team lead GMs also had to handle account & billing issues, do emails, phones + plus all the regular GM stuff (as well as approve many actions for less senior GMs such as large suspensions or bans) so it's true that some GMs did handle issues outside of WoW but not enough to be disruptive. I don't know how much has changed since then apart from a lot more being automated. I would imagine it has evolved but probably not super different in a lot of ways either :D Anyway, hope that's informative :)
Simple answer is they realized an automated script could tell people to delete their WTF folder and it didn't require hiring actual people to read the complaint to ignore the content.
I remember when I was about 10 years old I fell into the lava inside black rock mountain, there was no way out so I ticketed a GM and then went afk, came back to find my hunter had respawned on the ledge and a GM was sat in a deck chair with a parasol and my character was just dancing! Good memories.
The whole game experience was 100% different 10 years ago.. we had less stuff to do, but we actually did more than now.. we did our 1-2 raids per week, which took most likely 3hours. And the rest of the day we had some Arena Groups going hard the whole day, some were leveling and most of em were farming mats for the guild. I was doing achivements all day with an another group and at the end the whole guild had something to do. No struggle to find ppl for raids but there was also sometimes zero room for failure. No boosted rio ppl in dungeon groups and no need to be the best counted by some number. Gearscore, Mounts, Pets and cool Tmog was everything and having a good time.. its still a game for 98% of us, enjoy it.
I was once gifted a fey drake during Pandaria (last time i played wow) due to a big bug fcken me up which i don't remember now but the guy was very friendly and the fact that I was a mount collector and the mount's ever changing color looked phenomenal on my shadowform. My past interactions were also full of support and jokes etc. I guess ever since wow went downhill. I'm glad I quitted my addiction at it's pinnacle of rapid change.
I've talked to GMs a few times and have them appear. One time it ended up with my whole guild getting banned. We found a way to make a boss in Ulduar easier but they called it exploiting. They banned everyone including the people that were not in the raid.
Me and my guildies encountered a gm during tbc. We got to fight a giant chicken, oh and our doomkin (moonkin) insulted the gm, so the gm asked us if we ever seen a moonkin fly? He flung our moonkin up high and killed him, the. Respawned and did the same over and over until he apologized. Was heaps of fun. Find memories 😃
I was a GM for Blizzard for 5 years, between 2015 and 2020. We were still doing some fun interactions with players up until I left, even though it wasn't anything quite as dramatic as transforming an entire raid into animals or anything like that.
My favorite story was, back in Warlords of Draenor, there was a secret hunter pet named Gara, and I got a ticket from a player who's flags for it were broken, so they couldn't tame Gara, nor restart the process. They were logged into their priest when I got the ticket, so I logged into their hunter and talked to them in-game while I was fixing it. Eventually, once I got everything reset for it, I sent them a message that just said "Ever taken a selfie with yourself?", teleported over to them, made their hunter visible, and let them get a selfie of their hunter and their priest together.
Those little interactions made the job alot less tedious, though they were few and far-between. They started scaling back more and more on how much we could do to make interactions special, but any time you could, it was great. Plus, writing some horrible dad jokes for GM jokes was fun!
Why did the hipster murloc move from the Southfury River to the Wailing Caverns? He wanted to leave his main-stream to get a bit more underground!
How could you login on their hunter? As far as I know GMs don't have access to player accounts and Blizzard frequently states that GMs never ask for passwords...
@@ara9914 They wouldn't be on their actual account, more likely they can just load into any player character for dev purposes.
@@ara9914 They actually did that to me once. I had a bugged Recruit a Friend mount (the devs forgot to update its use-lvl from 40 to 20) so they told me they would log in to my character and check if this was true. It disconnected me (of course) and just like I was told I couldn't log back in for a minute or so. After that, the moment I got in the item was replaced with the updated one.
@@ara9914 They can connect to the server with your account's unique identifier using their own auth token, they don't need passwords. That in itself is the main reason they would never ask for one.
@@ProjectPrologue alright, thanks for clarifying.
I once had a GM appear and watch me AoE farm the orc camp in arathi highlands. I was so scared I thought I was doing something bannable at first but they were just like “ nice pull” and vanished lol. I miss those days.
They were sending a message lmao!
I used to swear someone was leading random mobs to me because I'd get into a fight with a mob and randomly another mob just jumps me and ik its set route wasn't near me.
Maybe he was checking if you were a BOT.
@@Epsyk I know people that were whispered to by GM's just to see if they were botting so that's very possible.
@@Epsyk A complicated classic mass pull will never be by a bot
Player: "Tell me a joke"
GM: "Your Arena Rating."
Holy crap. Utterly savage.
Have to open up another ticket just to recover from that burn.
Bro gotta get a new subscription for that burn.
Back in Classic, we as a guild celebrated our one year anniversary. It was just like the usual chat we had with eachother everyday in the evening, but with alcohol and meeting ingame in the tavern in Orgrimar. About 15 minutes before the party started, I got killed by a guildmate in a duel (sometimes that happened when a dot kept on ticking even after the duel was already over) and there appeared no window to revive myself. Other players weren't able to target my cow carcass either, so I had to ask a GM for help. She decended down from the sky and rezzed me in front of all the people dueling outside of OG with a whole extra show on top to make it fun for all the bystanders to watch.
I then thanked and invited her to our party and told her to bring as many of her GM friends with her as she wanted. Seven of them showed up. They fucking lighted up OG with all sorts of stuff, they spawned in mobs for people to fight, one of them sat at a campfire and answered people's questions regarding the secrets of WoW, they publicly advertised our guild with some fanfic about us being the chosen ones of the GM gods, etc. etc.
Thanks to them, our anniversary had been 10 times better than we could've ever imagined and after that day we had an unbelievable influx of new players, everybody present that day either wanted to join us or become friends with us. :D
I stopped playing the game a few years ago, but man, I'll never forget those seven GMs that stayed in the office for one extra hour after their shift had already ended just to entertain a bunch of strangers. That's dedication. :D
That sounds amazing! Sure would have been a memorable experience!
That's gaming right there.
"Seven to the Horde-lords in their Valley of Honor"
They should have GMs focused on issues and a couple of role player DMs that focus on this kind of stuff, some sort of in-game God that from time to time mix with humans
imagine none of the 500 players recorded anything of it.
I was a GM between 2008 and 2012 in the EU, let me shed some light on how stuff changed from the early days. I started as a GM towards the end of TBC, I think the Sunwell patch had just released. When I started there was two types of GM, your regular GM and a Specialist GM, the Specialist GM's where usually the ones who had been there since the start and had proven to have good customer communication skills, so they were given more leeway to do things, like turn into a dragon to kill a bugged mob, stuff like that. Regular GM's would actually rarely need to log into the game.
But then WotLK hit, and the playerbase skyrocketed, all of a sudden we were flooded with tickets for all sorts of stuff, mainly phasing issues at the start of LK and the specialist GM role kinda got phased out as it just took too long to resolve the issue. By the end of LK is where it started getting bad for GM's as mentioned in the video, players started getting demanding, specifically with the Argent Tournament. In the past if a player sold something to a vendor we'd happily return it or refund it if they bought the wrong thing (within reason) but with the Tournament, players were buying weapons, using them for a few days then going, "Nah I don't like this" and asking for a refund, we'd usually do the first one no problem, but then they'd be back saying they bought another weapon used it for a few days and would rather have a different one. These kind of tickets took up the bulk of our work, so players who had actual issues with quests or bugs were left waiting as ticket assignments where filtered on a first come first served basis. Blizzard realised that something had to be done (in the EU at least, we'd always get conflicting reports that the US was doing something different, eventually it all balanced out) so the in-game 2 hour refund system was introduced, we'd still help the first time if they went over the 2 hour window, after that it was tough titties %n (that's what we called players, cos in our chat tool, you could type %n and it would populate the players name.)
Over the next couple of years, Blizz started implementing systems to control the ticket volumes, letting players undelete a character and so on, we'd still get tickets from players asking to undelete a character that they deleted like 5 months ago, and sorry %n, that shit is gone, as deleted characters and items would only be held on the servers for like 6 weeks and then be purged. We did our best to try and educate players on being more careful, especially when buying or selling items and deleting characters, but it took a long while before this actually sank in as the playerbase still had this misconception that GM's could fix everything, we couldn't we were still limited in what we could do.
But that essentially the reason why you don't see GM's anymore, we just got too busy to be spending way too long farting about fixing an issue that could be resolved in 2 seconds. I actually interupted a specialist GM when I first started, it was in Shadowmoon Valley, I had gotten a ticket saying that a quest specific mob was stuck in the terrain and you couldn't kill it. So I logged into the game, used the /kill command, wished my player happy questing and was gone. My player was happy, and I guess anybody else that came along would be too as they could do the quest also. After like 5 minutes I get a message from a specialt GM saying "did you just /kill that mob?" I was like yeah, and he told me he had been on that for like 15 minutes with his player setting up this elaborate situation of turning into something, giving a grand speech and then I killed it like half way through. So while that may have been awesome for that 1 player he was dealing with, it sucked for the hundreds of other players who had probably raised tickets about it.
My takeaway from my time as a GM, was that we shouldn't be there for the players amusement, we were there to fix shit and keep things running smoothly so that all players could enjoy the game.
The Devs made the game, the GM's kept that shit running smoothly, at least we tried to. :D
I'll leave you with my favourite ticket, Player had been in the Storm Peaks and the Time Lost Proto-Drake litterally spawned in right next to him, and back then it was a ridiculously rare spawn, he managed to kill it but it bugged and died on a rock or something and he couldn't loot it. I logged into the game, had a quick look at the logs to see if he tagged it first, he did, so the loot was his, summoned the corpse to his feet and he was able to loot it. He was so happy and couldn't thank me enough, he thought that his chance to get the mount had come and gone. It was tickets like that that made all the whiny refund requests bareable. :)
this is definitely the best comment here, really sucks it's not at the top. thanks for the read :)
It sure fixed the ticket response time, too!
My Naxx lockout bug got resolved yesterday, a mere 11 weeks after filing a ticket about it. (Current Actiblizz mindset is very much "Hire three guys for this and make sure they work shifts so there's zero predictability in response time.")
Love how years ago back in vanilla, had a dwarf hunter named cloudx, name got deleted for being a "copy righted name" then someone ended up using the name lol. Brought it up to a gm who was giving me shit and told me some smart ass thing like "its not related to his case so I should sent in a separate ticket " lol
while you state "we shouldnt be there for the player amusement" you obviously enjoyed being able to be there directly for the players on occasion. A GM actually spawning in was always an occasion, i faintly remember GM's showing up stopping bitch wars in town. Also GM's just randomly spawning some mobs in town added some flavour events that the game normally doesn't have.
But yes, it is additional workload that needs to be dealt with and ofc there will always be ppl who get demanding when they can actually directly interact with GM's.
Still, from a player perspective i still think it was a really nice touch to have "the gods walk among us" rather then writing some text on a website and getting a text as answer.
Ideally you'd want both types of GMs, since they are both good for the game. Specialist GMs to create those memorable moments that spawned this fan video, and Regular GMs to get tickets out of the way as efficiently as possible. Too bad those two roles conflict with each other.
Former WoW GM here. I came in towards more the stricter side of things but it was still a great job, at least for me. We always wanted to do the most we could for each player, we helped everyone that we could as fast as we could. There were some great interactions and some not so great but that's just how the world is. My favorite thing was telling player WoW jokes, as GM's we'd come up with them and share them internally with each other. Even if it was a little "haha" or a "ROFL" it made my day because I know how much that interaction meant to players around the world. Unfortunately myself with a lot of great people were affected by the layoffs. Shout out to the people and users on WoWhead, MMO Champion, and the WoW Forums you guys and your info really did contribute to the community. Thank you to the players, even though it was work it was one of the highlights in my life being able to help you guys through your journey in WoW.
That's awesome! Thanks for sharing and for helping make the game that much more special back then.
We miss you guys!!!
Just curious . what was the compensation ?
omg thats awesome!!! i loved the jokes too!!! By any chance, it is a small world i have to ask but have you or maybe you've heard it from another gm but when i was 11 yrs old my toon colbiw i did brewfest boss and didnt get the mount but i DC'ed and didnt see who won or if i did and couldnt loot it LMAO and a GM was like sorry no didnt win... but its brewfest and ive had one too many pints... hic! and told me to not tell ANYONE and said to check my mailbox, teleported me to a mailbox and BOOM THE KODO WAS IN THE MAIL! lmfao it was the coolest thing ever and is still my fav mount because of it! when i ride it i feel like im riding a one of a kind, did not come off the boss came from a gm lol super nice of the gm! that was like around 16 yrs ago ish xD ( so i think im safe to say, blizz wouldnt take away something that drops like 100% now hopefully and my account is safe xD )
What perks did you get for your personal account? any? I could never get an answer with any of my tickets
Meeting a Game Master in game as a kid was one of the biggest gaming moments of my life.
It really did feel like such a big deal!
@@Jaggro What topped it was the fact that I just wanted a name change. (At a time paid name change didn't exist.) The game master landed next to me in Elwyn Forest, we both hid in nearby mountains and discussed my request. Meanwhile I was frantically linking his items (the robes etc) in the chat to my friends.
@@1OnlyOneOnlyOne1 LMAO I miss those days of being enamored with little things like that. Good times!
@@Jaggro one teleported me to the GM isle on purpose because i asked him. though he did say he woulden't :P then he said OOOPS in the chat 5m later and teleported me back
Yea getting banned for spamming inappropriate words changed my life when I was 11
I once got stuck in Durotar as alliance during Noblegarden farming eggs on a PvP server. Literally stuck between two rocks and very killable by horde. My HS was on cooldown and I begged a GM to unstick me and port me to safety. They appeared above me and laughed at me in full Noblegarden garb carrying an egg basket as a weapon, and kindly ported me back to stormwind.
Guess you could say you got stuck between a rock and a rock place
That's cruel but pretty funny ngl
I got stuck in limbo after the Great Raiding Crash of 2004 when my then pvp server called Sunstrider crashed everything during peak Raiding hours. Everything disappeared and went black, we then spent a few minutes falling. Though no one could tell until we all hit the bottom of the game zone.
Most people just respawned back at Ironforge but I guess I was trapped in a non world. All I could see was sky above and sky below. Relogging didn't help, my character was effectively dead.
It took 2 days before my ticket was responded to due to the amount of damage the crash caused. But finally the GM turned up and teleported me home. It wasn't much of an interaction, but the GM was funny and made a story upto say I was in heaven and my time wasn't done yet and I was being sent back to see out my destiny. All in humour. I miss them days
@@Ooshgaar That is an amazing story, thanks for sharing!
I remember getting stuck somewhere in outside molten core and being unable to retrieve my body, back when there was no return to graveyard option. Had to wait for a GM to res me lol
GMs had the power to give accounts 2 weeks+ play time as well. I remember being a kid and putting in a ticket and asking for a couple days more time before my account time ran out waiting for birthday money lol. Made me feel like Blizz cared.
I opened a ticket few months ago and they gave me 3 days to try it out
they still do but much less like 3 days in legion was 7 also they still care but i think they dont have the power anymore
@@gamatos9797 TL:DR the GMs still care but their ultimate "God" (Blizzard itself) doesn't
No, this is a lie.
One of my fondest memory from my first time in WoW, a year or so before TBC, was trying to put a group together to run SFK. For those unaware, back then there was no Dungeon Finder. If you wanted to do a dungeon, you'd go to a major city and announce it it the Group Finder chat, then two in the group had to ride to the location to summon the others most of the time. This time around, I was one of the people who was tasked with summoning. I was already at the location waiting for the second person. Bored, I went to the village just south of SFK and started jumping around on the rooftops. Eventually I fell down a chimney and couldn't get out. At this point I'm freaking out, because maintaining a group can be difficult. If any single person gets sick of waiting and bails out, it's bound to cause a chain reaction. Instead, they all got engaged giving me tips on how to get out. Finally we settle on me deleting my Hearthstone, which is bound to Orgrimmar, and to use the /unstuck command. One of the guys told me that if the /unstuck command couldn't find my Hearthstone, it would just teleport me a short distance away. I tried it and... obviously it didn't work. Now I was truly stuck, and the only way to get me would be if a third person showed up and summoned me. I thought that would split the group for sure, so I sent a ticket about the issue instead. 5 minutes later, a tiny dragon appears in front of me. I don't get enough time to process what I'm even looking at before the dragon starts laughing at me. It introduces itself as a Game Master, and between laughs and jokes about Christmas coming early, he managed to teleport me out and restore my Hearthstone. I thanked the little winged creature, and he proceeds to thank me back, saying that I totally made his day. An amazingly wholesome and funny interaction that I retell anytime I get the opportunity. :)
I'm very glad you took this opportunity to retell it. Great story!
the Summoning Stones infront of Dungeons coulnd't summon players till tbc. So there might be somethin off in your memories. But yea the Chimney thing, i understand 100%. Alterac Ruins.. fell into a few of them at this pont. :D
@@divaythfyr8643 must be somthing off with my memory too. maby its a mandela effect or what ever that things called.
It represented a time when Blizzard still had a soul. When they still loved their game and the people who played it. But I believe those people are gone now, replaced with marketing executives, content calendars and engagement metrics. Sure it was messy back then, but it had charm. Things are so formulaic now.
It certainly feels that way. I'd pick messy and real over corporate and, honestly, not any more efficient!
it sounds like it was more so that gms would abuse their power.
Command abuse by GMs was indeed an issue. You can't hire 200 GMs and let them play it by ear without the most insane (and insanely expensive) abuses happening.
If my account got hacked and I had to wait 7 days for an answer from a gm, because he was busy clowning around wow with cheats on. I'd just quit.
It's like this in almost every game now. Report system are automated, no one is reviewing anything. GG gaming
I remember a GM partying with us in goldshire. We had a massive party going on and a GM showed up (assuming cause we made some lag not 100% sure). Instead of ridiculing us, they turned into a 2 headed orc made themselves huge and started talking in all kinds of different languages. They spawned in fun party related items and eventually they vanished never to be seen again. This was back in burning crusade, and I've always wished another instance like this would happen.
Pretty sad they removed the interactions. I can understand the reason behind it, but I wish they brought back something similar. Perhaps not as GMA but perhaps “living NPCs” have some staff show up once in a blue moon on some random map and get up to some shenanigans with the players around. More “community service” type stuff and just rotate who among staff gets to okay that day, all use the same character so they don’t get their ego caught up in the hype
I agree, even just handful of them would be nice. Hopefully we get something similar in the near future. We could always play classic I guess...
Smaller games still do it. In Elite: Dangerous (sci-fi), staff had to handle the alien ships for special events, there was no AI for them. I've definitely heard of similar things in other games, too, but can't remember their names right now.
@@Nitidus There were UFOs in Dark Orbit that were played by Admins/Staff. If I remember correctly they dropped tons of resources when killed.
@@xdgg4433 I played from 2007 to 2009 or so on Global America when it had a massive and amazing community.
was in the top 10 ranking with 3 stars in EIC that was destroyed when they released the galaxy pay gates. A guy i knew who loved the game and community so much he went to work for Bigpoint and he hated it due to the complete disrespect they had towards us as a community. Not to mention the pure greed that caused it to become what it is today, dead space and bots.
@@Nitidus I'm just laughing at the idea of the programmer going "Boss, we don't have enough budget to fix/make the Artificial Intelliigence (AI)" and the boss just going "Then hire Non-Artificial Intelligence"
Former GM here. Worked 5 years for Blizzard and loved it. Especially the ingame contacts.
A few clarifications though: While GMs generally had a lot more freedom during WoW vanilla (So I heard...as i started just short befor BC came out), that was taken pretty much off the plate for a fair few years until, at a certain point, it was decided to introduce a special team back into support, that would pick tickets that lend themselves to ingame direct GM support and being visible, to, I guess, make us feel more approachable. The team was on a type of rotation, with GMs handpicked by their general quality of support for it. I was part of, I think, the second round of people doing this and really enjoyed it. Mostly we picked quest or raid issues, that would require us to go ingame and fix them anyway, but while we would usually do so invisible, we were allowed to show ourselves and use some very specific spells created for just that type of support.
There was once even a screenshot from a guild with my GM character, solving one of the stuck quests, which was very fun to see.
What was not part of it was giving items to players for free (unless as restore of course) or killing them, unless needed to solve the issue. We were not supposed to interfere with the game in other ways than plain cosmetic (the transformations you could see) or solve the issue and basically appear to "work magic" to do so.
I saw a comment somewhere that the GMs you could see were only Devs. That is not correct. Though I'm sure there were some Devs having fun around Vanilla time and the pre-expansion patches.
I left in the first wave of redundancies, figuring (rightly so, it turned out) that there wasn't much room for career advancement after. I'm sad to hear that special way of interaction got abused and had to be abandoned later. It was such a great thing for us and the players.
The white room on GM island was, at least in my initial training, used as a target to practice our GM "flying through walls" skill, so we'd learn to navigate to a location that wasn't reachable otherwise.
I still feel the training I received at Blizzard was one of the best in the industry. Despite now working for a huge IT company, that of course offers a lot of training.
The tools we had, how the training was delivered and how they were improved to make more and more complex issues easy to resolve is incrdible and many companies could learn from it.
Thanks very much for your input. I'm loving how this video is resulting in more GMs talking about how thing used to work. There was so little online when I was researching this video that I had to go back as far as 2009 for some first hand accounts
@@Jaggro We weren't allowed to talk even to our friends in WoW about our job while working for Blizzard. Really top secret verything. ;-)
I still feel weird posting here, but hey, they can't fire me for it anymore. 😛
@@ForThePleasureOfEating in a way that’s probably a good thing. One of your friends might accidentally spill the beans,and you’d get hounded on your personal account. Or have someone pressure you to do something you weren’t supposed to do.
IIRC the hidden room was originally supposed to be "GM Jail," with the idea being that players could be sent there for bad behavior. For obvious reasons though, this never was something that actually was done in live - though I do recall some of the oldtimers (pre-Vanilla GMs) saying that they had used it during the beta, but I can't confirm that. Def agree about the tools and training at Blizzard - though I'm definitely biased on the latter, as I was somewhat involved in training. Although a lot of people complained about it initially, when Atlas got its legs it was SOOOO much better than the old days with GM Tool.
This is exactly what I meant when I commented about WoW feeling like a Theme Park and Blizzard creating a special Team of Theme Park Entertainers.
No one ever believes me when I tell them this story but I don't care and continue to tell it because it's a memory of mine that I will never forget. I got randomly messaged by a GM when I was a noob to the world. Apparently there was a mix up and they meant to contact someone else. Either way they continued the conversation for a bit before telling me they had to go. At this point I realized they had powers because they were toying with me throughout those few mins by going visible shushing me and then going invisible again. I asked if they can show me something cool before they left. They teleported me to GM Island went visible, waved goodbye, went invisible, said Bye! In the local chat, then I disconnected, Only to log back in and find myself back where I was originally. I bet they did this because they knew I didn't know any better. It wasn't until much later that videos were released and I saw the castle that she brought me in front of on GM island that I realized where it was she took me.
It's like that scene from Brooklyn 99. "Why are you doing this to me?" "Because no one will believe you"
I believe you. Taking a player to GM Island was forbidden, but I can totally imagine one people or the other doing so anyway. I was bold enough to do things nearly as forbidden, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@Dunwael ohh, what are your juicy stories
@@knivesron I have tons. I was a specialist of killing player in duels, making giant enemy chickens appear on raids, walking as a demon around bots during investigation. I had only 3 rules : Never give an advantage to a player, never annoy someone who is not willing to have fun with me, never spawn mobs unless needed.
In nearly tens years, I have fucked up a character only once. (And fixed it.) So that's fine.
@@Dunwael cool. Very interesting
Thx for sharing
I still remember an interaction I had with a GM where they introduced themselves by saying that the clouds parted and light shined through the opening, and down descended the GM from the heavens. I remember smiling at the fact that they put that much effort into their writing and how much they wanted to preserve immersion. I miss old GM interactions.
You’ve unlocked a core memory within every Veteran WoW player, including myself.
I thank you for bringing me back to the glory days of Azeroth
[Achievement Earned]
IMPORTANT! - I've been made aware of a spam bot replying to comments on this video using a variation of my name. I'm doing my best to remove the comments and block the channel but please note I'll never ask for any of your details or try communicate with you outside of this video. Thanks and always be vigilant!
Thank you all so much for the beyond overwhelming support. I really never expected the video to be this big in my lifetime. I wanted to like and reply to every comment but now that Asmongold has reacted to it I think I'd need to it be a full time job to do so! Just know I'm reading all of them and I appreciate all of your support. I'll be aiming to upload every 2 weeks so please subscribe if you liked what you saw! Thank you all so much.
saw this vid on asmons stream today and i loved it good shit bro, hope you keep doing what you love
W video
Also just saw this late on a recap on asmon’s youtube and had to come say I thought this was a really well-done video. Great content, well thought out, well edited, and you are well spoken. Earned a sub from me for this for sure. Looking forward to your next video! Love you
awesome video my man! keep it up!
You have a great narrator voice. Keep it up bro.
When I was 9 and first started playing, a random guy came up to me in the nelf starting zone and asked if I wanted to go on an adventure - obviously I said sure and we ran all the way to dark shore together while he protected me from higher level mobs on the road, being the first time I experienced Darnassus and the portal, the boat showed up right on time and boated over, then ran down the far end of the dock from town as a different boat from the first time arrived (the model I later saw again as very similar to the boat to Exodar) and the boat took me through a loading screen and dropped us off at an island without NPCs and human architecture and he just said something along the lines of “hang out as long as you want, but you have to hearth back” and vanished
I tried to take some other poor random guy with me again and was so confused why the boat didn’t come again, but that interaction with the GM is to the day one of my gamer highlights
I was questing in the Stranglethorn Vale/Booty Bay area back in Wrath and teamed up with a Gnome to take on one of those [3 Players recommended] quest targets - we died a couple of times trying and the Gnome mentioned that they were chatting with their GM friend. I asked jokingly if the GM friend could help us - They turned up, turned me and the Gnome into pirates and healed us through the fight so we could complete our quest! I wish I had taken screenshots.
That would have been insane to see!
So basically you and your friend were coddled cause you were cry babies that couldn’t get the job done?🤔
Huge shout out to all my Guides who take time and energy out of their lives to handle all the low level questions new players have even though they are not GMs and not getting paid or kickbacks.
They're the real heroes!
100% Kudos to this comment 🙌🏻🙌🏻
I only got to see a GM in person once, and I was legitimately surprised when it happened. I was questing an alt through Winterspring back in the original wrath days, and encountered a hunter bot doing the usual yeti farm. I reported him assuming I'd get the standard "thank you for reporting" response but instead the GM actually appeared near me and went to observe the bot in person.
he said anything?
@@phelim301 Not in character, just did a /wave. He was talking to me via GM whisper though at the time
Investigating bots manually on reports was a standard thing up to 2016 or 2017, the automated systems would find them, but who knows when? - After that, we had to let it to the automated systems anyway. Some old rebels (hum hum) never left checking them though.
GMs were a real humans back then, now they are mostly an automated responce system.
no gms, garrisons, man when i returned in wod it was depressing the game felt dead. glad they got us back to social based gaming prob thanks to twitch streamers
They are still people answering tickets and surveys are indeed important, but going in game is rarely necessary these days.
I wish they still did, it really helped to foster the sense of community when they came to your rescue in game lol.
I still remember our first Illidan kill, somehow the server crashed and dropped nothing, we were kicked out the raid party so no one was able to loot, we opened a ticket, a GM came, spawned another Illidan let him kill everyone of us, then kill him and mass ress us.
Then started dancing and spam chickens.
What a troll way to help out. Prime classic GMs
The same thing that has happened with everything else under Blizzard: they stopped giving a damn.
Twice I've had the need of a GM's help. Both times stuck in a chimney. Once in Duskwoods on my old undead rogue, and once in Alterac Mountains near Dalaran dome on a blood elf mage. No runes and both times HS was on cooldown.
In Duskwoods I was ported to the middle of Darkshire without getting aggro on guards on a pvp server before he ported me to Org.
In Alterac Mountains the GM spent around 15 minutes just telling stories before porting me out of the chimney and challenging me to a duel and just insta win.
Both GM's just laughed and asked how I got stuck in a chimney, and I've gotten one of those GM's help another time, and he just asked me if I was stuck in a chimney. Only needed help because I fell through the world that time, he did not show up, just ported me to the surface.
That's hilarious! I wonder if you became known as the chimney guy.
My first time talking to a GM was also because I was stuck in a chimney, in Lakeshire. Didn't have a hearthstone because I would often destroy that for an extra slot of inventory space when I was full... They didn't show up in game, they just teleported me out. I was quite young back then and was kind of nervous talking to a GM, so I didn't say much more than thank you and take care ^~^
I wonder how many people they had to rescue from chimneys over the years.
What if you were the only one who ever got stuck in a chimney because not once in my entire wild career did I ever even think to try and go into a chimney lol
@@leonardceres9061 That's fair =p I can't speak for the original commenter but I sometimes just get the urge to see if I can go to places without caring about whether I -should- go to said places. In games, that is... just to clarify that >~>
@@Jaggro I remember also getting stuck in a fireplace in Duskwood. It was I think from the Stalvan the Reaper or something questline. You go around and find clues or something, and then creepy magical effects happen to you. I got polymorphed, and the sheep with the smaller hitbox walked into the fireplace, took fire damage, and then the effect broke, trapping me.
The fire there would still hurt me, but not enough to kill me. So it would constantly interrupt the cast of my HearthStone. Had to ask to be gotten out.
I was a GM back in the day, and when the GM's started getting out of control, I was promoted to a manager. I was more or less in charge of checking the activity of all GM's to make sure their "fun activities" didn't get out of control. And trust me when I tell you that this was a full time job and some new GM's were fired on their first day, they just couldn't keep their hands to themselves.
I worked as a GM at the office just outside of Paris from 2005 until 2008. It was fun but a lot of things outside of appearing in front of players were a bit tedious.
Also we only appeared in front of someone rarely, not all the time. 99% of the issues got dealt with through a ticketing system.
Vélizy is a fond memory (Though I arrived when you left :D )
@@Dunwael It sure was, just the Mcdonalds close to the office was such a bad idea though haha. Good old times. Still missing one of my seniors a lot. R.I.P
C'est marrant, on a peut-être déjà échangé en jeu sur le serveur Dalaran à cette époque là.
J'adorais le style plutôt RP, c'était toujours un grand moment de recevoir un whisp de GM haha x)
@@H0kram
Salutations ! Je suis le Maître de Jeu Gwenyrael, et je vous contacte à propos de votre requête concernant vos souvenirs nostalgiques.
Avez-vous un instant à me consacrer ?
@@Nibashe Pizza Pino FTW. I loved Versailles offices, but I am very nostalgic of the Vélizy period indeed.
I remember holding a Lesson on the Holy Light on a RP Server. A Gamemaster spawned in and made sure no one "ruined" it. He (was a male model) also frequently asked questions and thanked me for my contribution to teaching about the lore and worldviews ingame. Most epic moment in all these years in WoW.
With Dragonflight’s launch, the servers were obviously having issues, and in Stormwind the boat to the Dragon Isles completely broke.
On MoonGuard, my friend told me that he had found a GM flying around invisible trying to get the boat to respawn to let more players jump into the expansion since the boat wasn’t spawning again on its own.
Obviously it was a game bug situation, not a player interaction, but it’s cool to know GM accounts still exist.
How did he find that
How did he know, if the GM was invisible? 🤔🤔🤣🤣
@@Raviis Nameplates and who list. The GM was, presumably, in an invis morph, not actual GM invis.
I remember when it broke LOL. Our sharded group kept screaming: ‘BOAT’ to summon it. I will never forget the Boat cultists.
I had a ingame wedding in wrath where a gamemaster where doing the ceremony. It was on the shore of silvermoon. he even despawned the npc there and made a buffed for us. Great times.
This is how EverQuest GM's did things. A GM married my wife and i in a game called EverQuest Online Adventures. A PS2 MMO. I still have the original video recorded on VHS! on my channel lol. They hosted events, it was so cool. The MMO genre really isn't what it once was. It's not just nostalgia goggles. It wasn't perfect no, but it was NEW, it was EXCITING, it had a more small community feel per server, and it felt like the devs really loved us. I liken it to working for a small family business where everybody knows your name from the owner to the new guy. Contrast that with working at say. . . walmart lol.
Oh and EQOA also had a GM island, we found it much later when rebuilding our world and server. Our devs did an interview with us and we learned a lot. SoE shut us down in 2012, we turn 20 this Feb 11th 2023!
I remember I once got a character stuck in a perpetual instant DC area, and I couldn't get her out. So I sent a ticket, technically I had exploited to get out of bounds but I more so just wanted to see a little Easter egg in northrend dalaran. Keep in mind i was fully open and transparent with the gm about what i was trying to do and saying as it was a pretty well known thing and this was during like, Legion i was unlikely to get in trouble. The GM was super chill, offered to port me back to a major city for my faction, and then I asked if they had any GM jokes I could end the interaction with. They told me one, I laughed, then I told them a joke, and they found it funny too. Over all a great interaction that I recall fondly. I've never had a bad experience with any of WoWs GMs, they are all typically down to earth and understanding people who are genuinely great to talk to.
Thanks for the video, and be sure to keep it up! Sadly some of the WoW community can be harsh and judgemental, especially to OC, but don't let it stop you!
That's very sweet! Thank you kindly :D
@@Jaggrodid you mean for this video to hit 300k
I remember when they bugged out an NPC and I had to despawn it. This was right before they removed unarmed as a skill so people were trying to get their skill up. Someone yelled GM run! And everyone scrambled away.
A friend was on the GM isle in 2006, I had him in my guild til just recently where he left, probably because the acc was deleted after 15 years or so idk. I was with him in a group and saw where it was located. If you wrote /who gm isle or something like that you also got the info of said player.
The coolest thing I had was a phone call, not really from a gm, but employee, he gave me a job offer because back then I was very active into having new ideas for features in the game and some abilities are based of my ideas (like the self heal of rogues which back then costed combo points). I declined the job offer tho because I was studying computer science at that time.
I also had multiple encounter with GMs ingame. It was just great, you felt like a real part of the game and company behind it. That was the best quality any game ever had.
I've wrote a support ticket today and got an automatic reply that there are currently many tickets and they closed it. I've no issues waiting for days but automatically closing it isn't nice. The quality went down, as it goes down in the whole gaming industry. :(
did not happen
Can't wait for the GM xpac where they come back in full force and try to take over azzeroth
Raid wide stun called "Ticket Response Time" stuns everyone who fails an item restoration mechanic for 6 days
Ex GM here also. Played since release of TBC and became a GM towards the tail end of WOTLK into the Cata launch.
From speaking to a lot of people that I worked with and were there before and after me...up to the layoffs, they had said there were no major changes but overtime there was more pushback on those type of gm interactions and 'familiarity' with players. Many saw this as something that was push more from the activision side.
In general the majority of people I still spoke to said it the job started to become more like a standard call center/tech support job. Some people were ticket/ingame support and others did phone support for billing/account issues. They started to merge those and it seems that was the beginning of the end for many of them.
Being a GM meant something different but for many in the end it became a standard and less enjoyable tech/cs role.
The point made at around 5:25 mark is correct, I had heard of people getting really into the 'fame' side of being posted about online. If you got a mention on wowhead/forums etc it would be talked about in a 'ah thats cool' type of way. Buy it seemed others were getting a bit obsessed with it. Thats where professionalism has to take over but you knows it can be the 'one person to spoil it for all' type scenario.
Side story, in my first year I got really sick around xmas and had to be brought to hospital... while waiting on the stretcher to be seen a nurse started asking me questions (name/dob etc). When she asked me what I did for a living.. for a split second younger me said to me (this is you time.. DO IT).. I proudly (with as much as i could puff my chest out) stated.. I'm a Game Master 😏
I still chuckle to myself about that every now and then 😁
/%n
They have team lead/managers. All activity is monitored just like anything else.
It was more done for some light fun and the sense of 'wow i saw a gm today' type of thing for the community. It is why the role of a gm was seen as different to your standard customer support type role.
But like anything .. once ego's enter the chat and people saw it as bragging rights.. it quickly descends into a mess and as such stopped.
Its the old line of 'this is why we can't have nice things'
Went to GM island in 2008 on retail, got banned for 30 days. Worth it though
Definitely! That's something you can't do in modern day retail!
Back in TBC Classic 2021 i was doing TK on last boss Kael'thas Sunstrider , we wiped multiple times and a GM appeared, cheering us up in chat
i think they're too busy in PTR nowadays.
That's still really nice that you got that experience this late in the game. I appreciate that they tried to emulate the experience in classic though.
I remember when I played this game a long time ago I filled out a support ticket for a problem and some guy came swimming down from the clouds through the air.
When the issue was resolved, he swam back up into the clouds.
The interrogation room was reachable; however it was from my understanding very rarely used. I personally was pulled in there by a GM way back in 05. I was being a jerk to someone online by making alts to bypass the ignore system to bother them and the alt I was on got instantaneously teleported into a textureless room with a chair. The GM told me to sit down and wanted to know why I kept doing what I was doing and went on to explain how I should be more understanding of people's requests to be left alone. The whole experience was very shocking, as I felt like a kid who just got put in time out by their parents. I'll never forget that room or the GM, because the talk he had with me made me take better consideration of how I interact with others online.
I was a GM around 2006. We could get to the interrogation room by swimming down through the ground, but it wasn’t used for anything other than the occasional making sure someone was a bot (by summoning them there.) Folks weren’t required to talk to us when we messaged them, so we couldn’t assume a lack of response was verification of them being a bot.
The most frustrating thing about that job is that we were sworn to absolute secrecy. No one could know about our position as a GM, under threat of termination. So, a job that I was very excited about at the time had to be absolutely mum.
Oh my god, I had NO IDEA this was your first real video. Just based on the level of production and obvious effort put into it, I would've guessed you've made dozens of videos! Awesome video, and I miss the old GMs from back in the day, it was always fun interacting with them. You've got yourself a new subscriber!
2:43 Aw man, instantly recognised Hayven's footage, I still tear up whenever I think about him 😭
I never saw a GM but the best GM I had was trying help my find my character after a batched server transfer. They were bouncing around server with me making new characters with the same name as my Hunter which I had contacted them on each server we went to until they asked me to make a character on a new server where my character was. But because the server wasn't open yet character creation was locked so I lost the GM......Next GM picked up were last one left off and explained what happened to my character. Basically I tried to transfer with my guild to a new server right as they closed the transfers and the system derped out and threw me on the next server in line to open free transfers. I ran around a bit and did dailies while waiting for the second GM. It was very weird walking around a server where you are the only person in the world. At least I didn't have to compete for mobs lol. I logged out after talking to the second GM and within an hour my character was where he was supposed to be with my guild, which imploded a month later..........yay guild drama.......
Well done, bro. Seems like you put more effort into your videos than a lot UA-camrs with over 100k subs. Keep up the good work and I'm sure myself and many others will stay subscribed!
That is very kind of you to say. I appreciate the support and hope you and everyone else finds my future videos as enjoyable!
*Been frozen in ice for decades and still getting used to this overwhelming technology!!*
Was fun going to GM Island and having my guild asking "how the hell I got to it" I did not stay long as I did not want to push my luck and get banned.
Smart choice!
I miss the GM interactions for back in the day. I once saw one in BB and they were flagged for PVP, a warrior tried to attack them, was /laugh at and then promptly murdered. XD
GM don't do anything these days.
If the automated system or item restore fails you. Then you fucked.
It's so different to how it used to be. I remember getting the wrong item from the vault once. It took 6 days for a reply and I was told no!
@@Jaggro they always say no now.
@@Jaggro I bought 2 level up's off the store and only needed one asked for a refund and was told no. took 15 day's to get told no.
@@FinalByteGaming sad times
@@matt2244 that's ridiculous! You absolutely should have gotten a refund
Honestly, I want these GMs back into the game again, it seemed like they would've helped us out way more than now, and we got to see what crazy stuff they could do during that encounter XD I never came across these Game Masters, and honestly, I hope I do, that is just incredible.
i remember doing the achievement where you had to kill both kolagarns hands in a specific timeframe in ulduar about 12 years ago
our raidlead put up a timer and we killed both hands in time, but we didnt get the achievement
so he submitted a ticket, which is when a GM showed up, made us stand in a line and gave everyone the achievement one after the other
I used to be a GM in Everquest. It was by far one of the most rewarding fun I ever had in gaming.
I have so many fond memories of GM encounters over the years, it’s a real shame these things don’t really happen anymore. I remember sending in a ticket because I wanted a WoD beta code and I had a nice convo with a GM. no code though :(
Shame about the code, yay for the convo tho!
To clarify on this video, there are Game Masters with Customer Support and Game Masters that are part of the Development Team. Two different branches that do different things. The times back then when you saw a GM show up and show themselves off and making them go big or spawn mobs are all the Developers. The ones you generally speak to in game about general help are the GM's with Customer Support. They don't show themselves in the game or make mobs spawn randomly for them as doing so could cause server problems that the Devs would need to monitor which is why the Devs are the only ones that do that stuff. They have changed how they assist people now so it's more about player responsibility because people needed to take ownership of their own actions instead of thinking if they make the mistake, the GM's would just fix it, but when they were told no, like in your video, the player base gets up because it's kind of human nature for a lot of people to not accept a no answer and the mentality of "The customer is always right" comes in.
Thank you for that detailed clarification!
This is 100% correct to the best of my knowledge. Players can get lazy and request assistance with simple problems that waste a GM's time. The worst part is when they don't get what they want and call the GM a "fag" or "insert slur here" when ANYTHING doesn't go their way. There are actual people on the other side of the screen who have to take that abuse. People don't seem to understand that much.
That doesn't mean that a lot of the times people call on a GM isn't for a worthwhile cause, but it at least means that if you care enough to wait a week to get it fixed, it's actually a problem worth getting corrected and not just a problem a hearthstone can fix, y'know?
I developed a private server almost a decade ago and there is no ill effect from mob spawning unless it's done at a massive scale in the hundreds. Npc attributes weren't saved to the database unless they were adjusted via the database, and would reset when the server did. Almost no in game command outside of object spawning had any permanence or performance effect
@@StreetForged Private servers don't exactly have much impact compared to doing it to a server that thousands of people are playing on. So like if you run a Private Server and you have GM character show up and spawn a random mob in the zone. It could effect the stability of that zone if let's say hundreds of players started showing up to attack the mob. In comparison to a private server, there isn't much negative impact for you to just reset the server and everyone jumps in because they aren't paying you to keep the servers up. If this happened on a actual Blizzard server and the server somehow goes down, how you are causing those who pay for the service to not be able to login and play and impacting those who weren't even part of that situation where a GM would spawn a mob in a major city and etc. They have to take in account that there are others who playing the game and actions like that could effect their ability to play unless they are doing a stress test on those realms by spawning those mobs like that.
@@Crimpson2003 the point you make of people swarming a zone to see the fuss is reasonable. You'd be surprised just how much stress a zone can handle with modern infrastructure. A lot of servers in the past had thousands of online members and had mall zones with dozens of added vendor NPCs and objects spawned, and would often be the spawn location for new players. It would cause framerate losses on the extreme end but server instability was pretty rare even despite that.
Warmane/molten, the largest pserver group, has had player limits larger than blizzards by a few thousand since 2015 and manages really good stability while hosting custom events and having crossrealm bg/arena/dungeons. Servers easily maintain 1+ week uptimes while dalaran is so packed with people it's hard to find the npcs you need to use
Great video! I miss old WoW, a simpler time with some great interactions all around, good memories.
I was one of the people who would abuse the old texturing system to climb to places you weren't supposed to. Going under SW was always the super fun one until your HS was on cooldown. Got stuck in that perpetual falling void with a group of people once and had to have a GM teleport us out. He just told us not to do it again. Only other time I dealt with a GM was logging in during one of the anniversary events and one of my characters didnt get the goody bag in the mail, only dealt with the GM through text though, didnt see them.
That's so cool that they didn't ban you!
You didn't need to modify anything to get under SW though. In fact, it's still possible today, since it's simply gaps in the terrain. Sounds like you did that instead of modifying files, cause if you were caught by a GM using modified files, you'd definitely get banned. Exploration was usually only met with a simple slap on the wrist.
@@spuugvuur9633 Oh yea everything I did was within the live, unmodded code of the game. Old textures were blocky and triangular instead of smooth so you could climb near vertical walls. Never spawned anything in like the one person did to get to GM island.
"Would you like any assistance?"
"Tell me a joke"
"Your arena rating"
Life's rough.
This is the kind of stuff that made vanilla WoW special. GM's made a comeback on the classic PTR's which was cool to see. Things like this go a long way.
PS I had a guildmate who was a GM in vanilla but hardly anybody knew about it aside for a half dozen of us and he never once used his powers for our benefit or for fun so I'm surprised to see all these interactions in this video between players and GM's!
That's awesome, fair play to them for not showing off.
Somehow youtube algorithm reccomend me a channel with 33 subscribers. A very good video with only 33 subscribers.
Thank you very much! That's kind of you to say
I remember back in the day when I met my first GM in game. I can’t remember the reason, but I remember inspecting him and they had a sword with some crazy stats on it. It was basically able to kill anything with one hit. I met GM’s in several games starting back in EverQuest. That was 22 years ago lol gosh i feel old now!
Luckily, MMO's are timeless! Hope you're still playing. Thanks for sharing!
I stood in darkshire for like a half hour talking to a gnome gm. They were cool in explaing they didn't know why i wasn't getting credit for killing stiches. Then they just auto completed quest for me.
I once had a GM roleplay as a furbolg when responding to my ticket when I had to undelete my character.
One of the most wholesome experiences I've ever had 😅
I used to do a lot of wall-climbing back in vanilla, I loved the feeling of exploring places we were never meant to see, or just getting to fun places like up in the rafters of the Stormwind AH, having people ask "how did you get there!?" was always fun :P
one time I was climbing on a hut in Crossroads and a GM appeared and asked what I was doing. I confirmed I was just having fun, climbing around. He said that was fine and not to abuse any places I found, I said I wouldn't and he disappeared. Not even particularly interesting, but that's still a core WoW memory of mine.
man i almost forgot about the gm's interaction's. they were some fun people.
Nice Video!
Thanks!
The truth is they fired around 800 GM's before classic 2.0 came out and replaced the system with more automation to save money just as most of them were fired i know this because i knew some of them and went to visit some of them once in Cork in Ireland :).
You can tell that's when the major shift in service happened too...
this video deserves much more attention. this is some real high quality stuff. take my upvote!
That's a very nice comment, thank you!
The 2000's were the golden age of gaming in more ways than most would initially think, i cherish every hour of the vast and varied experiences across all mediums and playercounts i got to take part in.
We knew it wouldn't last, but never expected it to become this bad.
I once was a gm in a wow private server called Miranda's wow server. Maybe around 2010. You could pay around $30 to become a gm with full access. I was trained to use commands in a group of newcomers and from there would help out players in need and more. That's where our freedom went crazy. Would spawn as big monsters in storm wind and org for players to attack. Was great times. would spawn and also help players with bug issues and more. I also took the personal time to create a gm village with vendors and more but it got wiped lol.
This video seems to lean towards the lighter, fun side of GM interactions. Back in 2004 they were more police than friendly neighbors, often responding to griefing, player harassment, or even if you swore in general chat (yes, it was THAT ANAL back then). I got 24 hours once for telling someone to fuck off, which is a joke by today's standard of crazy stuff said in gen chat. The only time we ever saw a GM in person was because I dragged Lord Kazzak to Stormwind on my hunter (pro-kiter here) in Vanilla, whom promptly began to slaughter the entire town and guards. A GM showed up to despawn Kazzak and that was it.
My only other time interacting with a GM was during TBC when while raiding, our Chess event bugged after completion and no chest spawned for our raid. My entire raid stayed an HOUR later waiting for a GM to come help, only for them to say they're aware of the bug causing it but could do nothing for us. GMs were mostly useless in the early years, so to hear they suddenly became these knights in shining armor for the community years later is actually kinda tilting. Seems like the game not only got more carebear, but the GMs did too.
What really happened ? Bobby needed another boat, so most of the GM's lost their jobs. Now they have a hand-full of part time GMs doing all the work, and this is why it takes 20-30 days to get a reply. And never in person like in the old days.
Another win for this "amazing" company.
Also the GMs went from more or less "do anything" to "do nothing" now. In the last 10 years I dont remember when I contacted a GM for something that he/she actually was inclined to assist and help. Usually do a copy-paste reply to something I did not even ask about... top lvl frustrating.
Blizzard should have gone a different Direction with this.
Like a Theme Park which WoW in a way is, with the Dungeons being Rides.
They should have created Entertainers that go out into the World and surprise Players with cool stuff.
Kinda like going to Six Flags and running into one of the Looney Toons who will either play Game of Trivia with you, or get in on a Group Photo.
I remember saying to myself during the Years of Vanilla that WoW feels like a Theme Park, and I can't wait to try all the Rides.
I asked a GM why when I logged to my 35 druid in southshore the innkeeper killed me along with some guards.
The GM did not know what I was talking about and closed the ticket.
There have not been active GMs since at least Pandy, possibly earlier, interacting with folks directly.
The support GM staff is minute, most of their work is following up on what the AI/Bots that WoW uses reports/do. They are poorly paid and under NDAs to not talk about their work.
It's really sad, I know that's pretty much the story for all support agents but GMs just felt different...
Reigning champion of MMOs? Isn't FFXIV bigger at this point with *actual* players and not the inflated all-time number that is ridiculously high for WoW because it has been around since the stone age?
Christian Finnish Frostiis not buyng WOTLK Classic with my BFF to play it on RP server because of DK Bots overun PVP BG:s, GM is needed says Asmogold too
My brother worked as a GM for several years, but quit when abuse from people demanding stupid things and being refused basically took over too much of his job. Once again, a few idiots spoiled it for everyone else with their entitled idiocy.
6:30 Lol that's me ^_^ Had several similar experiences since then. Honestly can't remember a single instance of a GM actually helping me in the past 8 or so years. Not even sure why I'm trying...
0:34 open a ticket, EU "Wait time 42 Days" then after 15 it auto resolves saying "we could not answer your ticket at this time" bullshit company we pay monthly for
i had a few gm encounters back in the day, i always enjoyed them very much. i would get my issue resolved and they put a smile on my face whether it was from jokes or great role playing. you will be forever missed gms
My brother was a gm on a private server when I was 10 or so, I remember sneaking onto his account and giving myself gear there was no way a 10 year old would've been able to achieve
One thing I see people missing is that GM’s support more than just WoW, so the ability to focus on one game is no longer possible, and with that came the loss of many of these interactions.
That's an angle I hadn't thought of actually, good point!
I was a GM from BC through to the start of Mists.
You'd think that but there generally wasn't a great range of "in-game" support GMs could give to the other games like Starcraft, Warcraft or Diablo (I imagine it's the same with Overwatch and Hearthstone). For the other games it was mostly account/payment issues and replying to tickets saying things to the effect of no we won't unban your d2 account.
There were, however, seniority levels of GM as well as separate account & billing agents so most GMs would not come across non-WoW issues unless it was reported in a WoW ticket.
The most senior level of non-team lead GMs also had to handle account & billing issues, do emails, phones + plus all the regular GM stuff (as well as approve many actions for less senior GMs such as large suspensions or bans) so it's true that some GMs did handle issues outside of WoW but not enough to be disruptive.
I don't know how much has changed since then apart from a lot more being automated. I would imagine it has evolved but probably not super different in a lot of ways either :D
Anyway, hope that's informative :)
Any other OG's who used to get the message "Please move to a secure location" ;)
It's simple--they stopped caring about their game--or, I should say, they started caring more for profits than they did their game.
Yes. "Make them happy" was definitely incorrect way to have in a game. It should've been "make them spend money".
Simple answer is they realized an automated script could tell people to delete their WTF folder and it didn't require hiring actual people to read the complaint to ignore the content.
And Blizzard wonders how they lost touch with the player community...They isolated themselves from us.
Are GMs paid or are they just community members? Haven't seen a "blizzard seekign GM" job application before.
I remember when I was about 10 years old I fell into the lava inside black rock mountain, there was no way out so I ticketed a GM and then went afk, came back to find my hunter had respawned on the ledge and a GM was sat in a deck chair with a parasol and my character was just dancing! Good memories.
The whole game experience was 100% different 10 years ago.. we had less stuff to do, but we actually did more than now.. we did our 1-2 raids per week, which took most likely 3hours. And the rest of the day we had some Arena Groups going hard the whole day, some were leveling and most of em were farming mats for the guild. I was doing achivements all day with an another group and at the end the whole guild had something to do. No struggle to find ppl for raids but there was also sometimes zero room for failure. No boosted rio ppl in dungeon groups and no need to be the best counted by some number. Gearscore, Mounts, Pets and cool Tmog was everything and having a good time.. its still a game for 98% of us, enjoy it.
i remember a gm interaction, and it was fun. However, blizzard hates fun thats why they nerfed the gm's.
I was once gifted a fey drake during Pandaria (last time i played wow) due to a big bug fcken me up which i don't remember now but the guy was very friendly and the fact that I was a mount collector and the mount's ever changing color looked phenomenal on my shadowform. My past interactions were also full of support and jokes etc. I guess ever since wow went downhill. I'm glad I quitted my addiction at it's pinnacle of rapid change.
I've talked to GMs a few times and have them appear. One time it ended up with my whole guild getting banned. We found a way to make a boss in Ulduar easier but they called it exploiting. They banned everyone including the people that were not in the raid.
I guarantee you that was the guy that DESIGNED that encounter. 🤣 Butthurt.
Classic has 40day ticket reply times you cant tell me there is any meaningful customer support or gm in it.
Me and my guildies encountered a gm during tbc. We got to fight a giant chicken, oh and our doomkin (moonkin) insulted the gm, so the gm asked us if we ever seen a moonkin fly? He flung our moonkin up high and killed him, the. Respawned and did the same over and over until he apologized. Was heaps of fun. Find memories 😃
GMs are always there around hiding. if you go to guild wars 2 they can be found in Lions arch regularly.
tl;dr bots are so profitable banning them is not a good move anymore and as such GMs were unnecessary.
i miss the days we could call them over the phone to have issues resolved. made life easier!