What was it like as a Game Master in World of Warcraft? A YouTuber reveals this and shares some quirky stories.
Game Masters in World of Warcraft have become a bit of a myth. When thinking about ‘back then’, during the time of Vanilla, players supposedly met Game Masters all the time. Nowadays, the blue robes are rarely seen, and if one is to believe Reddit or the official forums, the responses to tickets are often automated or written by AI.
A YouTuber now shares his daily life as a Game Master. He dispels some myths, reveals the details that Game Masters can see in the game – and also which users were particularly annoying.
Curious incidents in WoW can be seen here:
Where does the information come from? The YouTuber “Not Your Friend”, whose real name is Clyde, discusses various incidents from the gaming scene on his YouTube channel. Although the videos sometimes seem a bit sensational and contain a lot of opinion, he explains quite factually in the video “Two years as a Game Master broke me – Here’s the whole story” how his daily work as a Game Master for World of Warcraft looked in the years 2011 and 2012.
Tying shoelaces as a test explanation of whether players can be helped
The job interview itself was a bit peculiar. After the usual questions, Clyde was given a rather unusual task. The HR manager wanted Clyde to describe to him how to tie a shoe – in all details. This was presumably to test how well one could explain a problem-solution step by step. Something that would later be particularly important for assisting players.
Game Masters couldn’t freely choose their names
The YouTuber also mentions that Game Masters were rarely allowed to choose their display names for work. This explains why many Game Masters often have names that sound a bit like gibberish.
The reasoning behind this was, according to Clyde, that it had to be a name that brought up no results in a Google search.
The insight Game Masters had
The capabilities and insights of Game Masters were quite extensive even back then. Basically, it was just as one might have imagined. With the tools, Game Masters could trace almost all activities of accounts.
Blizzard stored this data for all accounts and all characters for 90 days back then. Every single transaction, every gain of honor, every purchase at an NPC, every login to the game, and the entire chat log – everything was logged for 90 days.
Therefore, it was usually quite easy to restore hacked accounts back to their original state shortly after a hack. If someone wrote a ticket saying their character was suddenly naked and all their gold was gone, it was a bit of work, but everything was logged and therefore possible.
It was worse with “zombie accounts”. When inactive accounts were hacked and the corresponding owner returned many years later to find that someone had been misusing their account in the meantime, restoration was nearly impossible. Everything outside of the 90 days was hard to trace.
The most annoying tasks: PvP players
While Clyde reports many tickets describing just minor problems or sometimes simply “I just want to talk to a Game Master”, there were also annoying issues. The most irritating by far were PvP players insisting that they had not received the correct amount of honor for a kill.
Because then, all honor gains of the respective character had to be reviewed and manually calculated to see how much honor they received and whether that value was correct. In most cases, the value was correct, and the players themselves were mistaken. This took a lot of time.
Permanent visual performance representation led to burnout
One thing that particularly bothered him was the permanent visual representation of his current performance. On the second screen, not only his work tools were displayed, but it was also permanently highlighted how productive he was. If he processed the required tickets per hour (8 were required back then), it was good and displayed in green or blue. If he managed much more, there was even an epic purple.
However, if he fell below this quota – which could happen with more extensive problems – the screen turned white, gray, or even red, and he usually received a request from the supervisor asking what was wrong. This contributed massively to his burnout and ultimately to the incident that led to his resignation.
Fired because he found too much stolen gold
The reason Clyde ultimately resigned seems curious because he took too much stolen gold out of the economy. However, he was not an “unsung hero”; rather, he was not fulfilling his actual job.
Because the bosses wanted him to process current tickets that were in the queue. However, through his work, Clyde had discovered how to reliably detect stolen accounts and the associated illegal gold trade. Since such incidents often involved many accounts and thereby many different individual cases, he could “resolve” quite a few problems that were good for his statistics.
Technically, Clyde could handle a lot of problems per hour – but not the acute issues of current players that he was actually supposed to address. This led to his boss summoning him to the office after two weeks and giving him quite a piece of his mind.
In response to the last words that he should change his behavior immediately, Clyde told him that he was resigning effective immediately – and he left the office.
The entire video is definitely worth watching and offers some interesting insights into the daily life of a Game Master. However, please also keep in mind that these are the experiences of one individual and that it does not necessarily have to be representative of all Game Masters or other Blizzard locations.
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