Why, no of course I'm lying to you!

[PepperElf]

i'm surprised you could tell them the respawn time tho
in the one i use to play the staff wasn't allowed to give out that info

[Arm]

My experiences with WOW in the early days were very hit or miss. As were a lot of folks I knew and played with- if something glitched and you lost your stuff, goodbye, it was gone. And at release it was even more of a grindfest than it is now, going by what some of the current players tell me. So losing something meant hours/days/weeks of your life gone.

But it's nice to see that folks like Panigg have become the norm there. Good to know it's turning into a more decent virtual world, ya know?

[Fire_on_High]

i'm surprised you could tell them the respawn time

It's common knowledge is why, I bet. There's no fiddly backroom secrets, everyone and their brother knows it.

[Geek King]

First thanks for being a good GM. It does make a difference.

I think the worst GMs I ever ran into were the ones on D&D Online. Imagine going through a two-hour quest ending in a difficult boss fight and the loot chest* doesn't spawn. Without leaving the quest, we summoned a GM. The GM listened to us, and agreed the chest had not spawned, but his sage advice was basically, "Too bad, so sad."

And this happened more than once.

Nothing turns a group of players off of a MMO quite like being screwed out of a fairly earned reward. I know none of the folks I played with at the time kept with the game.


*D&D Online didn't let you loot individual baddies. You only got loot at the end of the quest, it the form of a tresure chest that spawned when all requirements were filled. Each person in the party could loot their items seperately, so no crying about someone ninja-ing the good stuff.

[Calud]

but his sage advice was basically, "Too bad, so sad."

To be perfectly honest, that is what we do a lot of the times too.

It's not we don't want to help you, but sometimes we just can't. May it be technical limitations or just policy constraints. If it's not possible, they can't help you.

We got a TON more ways to help than we did in 2005. And it's only getting better.

[cawaker]

LOL i should show this thread to my GF, she's dying to be a GM. she sent in a resume a couple weeks ago.

[Fire_on_High]

Thing is, the WoW GMs have always been very polite. EQ GMs were helpless, useless, and quite often rude and fond of throwing their weight around. Even when WoW GMs couldn't help with the problem at hand, they were unfailingly polite.

I've mostly only had to petition a few small things before, cash discrepancies when the server crashed as I was training and a rather rude (and thoroughly bannable) game played in trade. The GMs were total pros about it each time.

Compare that to EQ...EC would crash leaving half the guild stuck as we'd been en route to MMs or doing LDoNs, and the chat GM crew would threaten, curse, or accuse us of lying, even with quite a few others reporting the same zone crash we had and asking for the same thing (which was to have our stuck chars moved out of the downed zone).

They flat out *expected* grovelling ass kissing if you wanted anything done. "Hey, EC on Quellious is down again, can you please punt *toonname* to another zone once you get a moment?" wasn't considered respectful enough. They also didn't seem entirely fluent with English, spoke rather awkwardly so...

[AccountingDrone]

Thing is, the WoW GMs have always been very polite. EQ GMs were helpless, useless, and quite often rude and fond of throwing their weight around. Even when WoW GMs couldn't help with the problem at hand, they were unfailingly polite.
.

Winterkiss the Cookiemaker, Mith Marr chiming in. I was cs for EQ. I was polite, I am fluent in english, and I did a lot for people who were rude entitlement whores and the suckiest of customers. We got lied to, cursed out, and complaints emailed in about us on a daily basis.

we *do* have logs to look at, and can tell when the other person is blatantly lying. We had rules we *had* to follow. No, I cant just *give* you the water sprinkler, hell I had to quest my own on my play character ... no I cant just give you X plat .... I couldnt even magically give myself plat [or convince one of my cs buddies to do it...] Technically *yes* i can trigger any mob to spawn, but NO i am NOT going to do it for you so you can get your epic toy. If I cant get the mobs spawned for me, I am certainly NOT going to do it for you ... and yes we can tell you didnt kill that mob so I am not going to give you the quest drop. Kill it and earn it yourself.

Though I really loved doing weddings .... I miss weddings and wish you could get married and share surnames in WOW or EVE ...

[Fire_on_High]

Winterkiss the Cookiemaker, Mith Marr chiming in. I was cs for EQ. I was polite, I am fluent in english, and I did a lot for people who were rude entitlement whores and the suckiest of customers. We got lied to, cursed out, and complaints emailed in about us on a daily basis.

You musta been early on. The cool ones seemed to vanish off the face of the earth sometime around the time stuck char chat was established. We had this cool Iksar GM in green on Quel, think his name was Marc, really awesome, and a few others whose names slip my mind right now who were also really great.

I won't get into the poor guy who had to sort out my poor mage's 1.0 after the Dagnor's turn in + cold meds turned rather bad, the guy earned his halo fer sure.

That said, I'm sorry but the chat GMs stank after a point. They were snotty and rude, at best. They'd flat out accuse large groups of ppl of lying about zone crashes, or even server issues.

If there are 35 ppl all getting "World Server Unavailable" don't tell us we need to get out and everything is working fine. We know you can't fix it, but not threatening would be nice.

If a single zone (or small group/continent) goes down, don't tell the 20+ ppl in SCC that it's fine, and to quit lying or risk suspension. If the rules say you can't do squat til someone higher approves it, np. Again, it's not the inability to do anything, it's the attitude. And yes, the particular crew I'm thinking of from that night were speaking very, very poor English filled with misspellings and awkward or wrong word use. I've spent enough years on IRC to recognize someone who just doesn't speak it natively.

*You* may have been one of the decent ones, but near the end things just got bad, and the difficult ones made it a hell of a lot worse for the cool ones.

[Calud]

And yes, the particular crew I'm thinking of from that night were speaking very, very poor English filled with misspellings and awkward or wrong word use. I've spent enough years on IRC to recognize someone who just doesn't speak it natively.

Just out of curiosity... can you recognize I'm not a native typer?

[Fire_on_High]

You speak well :-) I'm talking really weird broken stuff, using has for have and the like.

Hmm...I think in hindsight those EQ chat GMs were LOLcats!

EDIT: There's casual usage by someone who speaks English well, and is knowingly, habitually using slang or less formal word choices, vs non native speakers who don't have nearly as much experience to realize they're using the wrong tense or don't have subject-verb agreement. From what I've read of you so far, you speak as someone who knows English well enough to choose to be formal or informal, and get it right whichever you choose. Make sense?

If I had to venture a guess on the GMs mentioned above...I'd actually make a very non-stereotypical stab at it and say Norwegian. The grammar put me in mind of some of the less-practiced tries I've seen from Norwegians and Danes on IRC.

[Calud]

Make sense?

Very much, yes. I'm still getting things wrong.

On that note I remember some other things...

The tickets are all done in German, as that is the language we support, but the ticketnotes a GM leaves are all in English as that is our office language.

You should be familiar with Onyxia.. well, she has a quest item that she can leave you... her head. So, once she didn't and a player wrote a ticket.

So, the Ticketnote simply read: Onyxia didn't give head.

[Fire_on_High]

Haha, that rules! Should've told them not to bash it up so much, or go see if Thrall would let them have it back for a bit.

[Jetfire]

I'm still an EQ player, and even the EQ GM's are a lot better. Certainly people gripe about the new petition system (using the web interface), but generally speaking, they've been polite in responding and quick in reacting to things like accidentally deleted items, misloots (My coworker boxes a zerker and bard and has mislooted in his group a couple of times and gotten the loot swapped over) and so forth.

Even server crashes/zone crashes they're pretty quick at responding, thouhg often time they don't have much more info than we do. (Crashes are in the hands of the Ops team who when a server crashes are generally busy trying to get it back up ASAP and may not have any ETA's themselves yet)

[zzapp the witch]

EQ2 player here, still have my eq1 account (lol 10 years of wasting time) and I want to give the OP some kudos for actually providing proof to the customer.

I was unfortunate enough to make friends with a gal that apparently thought I was male no matter how many times I told her I wasn't. I was endlessly harassed and cybered with, but I felt sorry for the gal and just learned to tune her out. Surprise surprise when she learns that I am, in fact, female and just. goes. nuts.

Claims to be dating a GM (so why's she flirting with me?) and after months of horrid treatment and some mysterious encounters, I logged in to find my account permabanned. Customer Service still won't tell me what's going on and I have been told that they won't escalate the call. Used their petition system and they just close the ticket and won't talk to me. Quoted to me that I was a vile and disgusting person, too. (Still don't know what that's referring to).

She's more than happy to gloat about it, wasn't too happy when one of my ingame friends gave me another account, has been trying to get that one banned as well, but I'm screenshotting and logging everything.


But still, kudos for actually providing info to ppl with questions, cause I know I'd love to see some about me.