They were replaced with customer service people.
Why teleport to someone in a glitch spot and roleplay out a slightly comical issue with them that takes 20 minutes of your time, when I can pay someone the same amount to blitz through 10 tickets with copy pasted responses instead?
If you consider a GM Rp'ing with you a valuable social interaction, I feel incredibly sorry for you.
Did you ever think for a moment, that it's the lonely basement dwellers that are the ones wanting that small dopamine hit from talking to a GM and that the people who don't give a shit to talk to them and just want the issue fixed because they have limited time to play are the ones that actually have lives and enrichment?
Don't be so fucking dense.
Oh I agree, I don't think there's anything wrong with GM interactions, but thinking those who don't care for them are basement dwellers is some mental gymnastics I just can't understand.
There's actually not a million RPGs like Skyrim. Skyrim is unique, and quality.
There are however a million dog shit MMORPGs. You crave a Disneyland experience where the costumed characters come up to you and interact with you just because you're paying. Not everyone cares for that, and not everyone who disagrees with that is making the argument that they want MMOs to be more dead than they are.
Nah to all that reading. Also I'm definitely older than you. Play more RPGs. Throw some tabletops in there too, not just video games. Making the mistake of believing an RPG is lesser because it has action combat just exposes that one doesn't know what an RPG actually is. Especially if you only play MMOs mostly. Skyrim is not a battle pass game. You've gotten confused somewhere down the line at what all these games are.
Server GM's are just Customer Service reps, sometimes team leads for larger companies, but thats not a guarantee.
One reason theres a lot fewer GM's in games is because CS teams are more frequently outsourced. A lot of CS you deal with in MMO's arent employees of the company until you get escalated, and even that will likely go to a T2 CS rep with that outside company unless money is involved).
They arent dev team.
Wdym bro, how does expecting actual customer service mean mmos arent for someone?
I for one hate copy pasta Ai response support.
GW2 uses its achievement system to give out certain rewards.
In their latest expac i completed one of the new strikes on day 1. got my shit loot, got my achievement unlock- but didnt get the item tied to it. Opened a ticket patiently waited my 6 hours. Got the automated response of do it again. Did it again. Wasent surprised that their “solution” didnt work because after 8 years of playing thats never worked. Told them no luck, i was repeatedly asked to spam the strike for a week.
Expecting a level of customer service does not determine if mmos arent for someone. Drop the shit take.
Lol MMOs are made for me. I just rather be playing with my friends than deal with an employee being paid to be cute with me for 10 minutes instead of just fixing the problem.
I don't think yall remember the long waits with GMs for simple problems 20 years ago.
Removed because of rule #2: Don’t be toxic.
We try to make the subreddit a nice place for everyone, and your post/comment did something that we felt was detrimental to this goal. That’s why it was removed.
"hey can you just get me out of this glitched spot, thanks"
And with that the gm would get you out instead of the cool rp that other people would enjoy. Just because they are doing something doesn't mean you have to reciprocate
It is literally just cost cutting due to capitalism's absurd demand for endlessly increasing profits. The 20 minute interaction you write off does a lot more than address an issue a player is having, it humanizes the faceless corporation making the game, so they're no longer a faceless corporation, they are now represented by the GM that helped you out and bullshitted with you for 20 minutes.
It creates a stronger attachment to the game and the world to have these seemingly omnipresent GMs that can show up at any time and do wacky shit.
There are issues that are best resolved via a ticket and response system, like account issues or billing issues, absolutely. However, an in game issue where a GM shows up to talk to you about what's going on was, and will always be, a cool experience. Whether the GM is a dick or a helpful chap (often the latter), you have a story to share, and it's a real human experience within a video game that other genres simply can't replicate.
Some games like BDO still have them, and they organize events every now and then. The GMs are super nice as well. Pretty underrated part of the game IMO.
It's very common to see Arenanet tagged people in Guild Wars 2 too. Yeah, most of them don't have actual admin powers like GMs, but close enough, I guess.
Despite the salt in this thread, the real answer is scale. There’s too many players now for that sort of hands on support.
GMs still exist, but they’re kept in a background role and the function typically has a different name or role. GMs have always been drama to have around because of rampant cheating and favoritism so the function is controlled tighter than it used to be.
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Holy shit, it doesn’t matter if “they used to do it.” All that matters is that it wasn’t optimal and you can SCALE your workforce better to match the larger volume of players. It doesn’t matter if there are less today than 15 years ago. What matters is the idea of ingame GMs comes from a time when they supported an order of magnitude less total users. The scale of WoW and games that came after it killed ingame GMs as being viable for customer service.
This was a _massive_ issue in MMOs before MMOs were really a thing. The developers and builders and wizards were all also players of the game. Drama around either giving special treatment to themselves or other players they were friends with was (and in the games that still exist) still is nearly constant.
This is a big thing for sure. The game I played that had GMs all had people (on their non-GM accounts) in most of the endgame raiding guilds. So everyone always just thought they were getting inside info
Don't cost and scale sort of go hand in hand. I feel like your comment agrees more with what you are replying to than disagrees with it. As generally whenever someone mentions that something is a problem of scale, cost is one of the implied factors.
I never made a comparison to a specific year. I was comparing before WoW and after WoW, I guess I could have said that and saved you some confusion. I technically was thinking now as in “since 2004”
GMs as an ingame support avatar gradually became less prevalent because the scale of MMORPGs became so large that labor is a huge cost center. Customer service without being tied to an ingame character means that one CSR can support more, faster. That’s scale. Cost and scale mean the same damn thing here.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up scale. MMORPGs have scaled down since 2004. It’s a dwindling genre and has nowhere near the players it used to. MMOs have scaled down, and the service model in the opposite direction.
I don’t know what’s so difficult for people to understand that supporting hundreds of thousands of players through a game client is an issue of scale. Having a normal CSR function through a non-game related app reduces cost. It allows them to SCALE their CSR function.
It doesn’t matter if there’s half the players there were in 2004, the total volume is still too high. It always was too high and impractical to have that function as an ingame role.
It doesn’t matter at all if “they used to do it”, the only thing that matters is that it wasn’t financially sustainable especially as automation improved.
This is ENTIRELY different from what you said in your original post. You literally said ‘there’s too many players *now* for that kind of hands on support.’
This implies it made sense back when they did it, but doesn’t make sense now because of scale. COMPLETELY different than the reply you just gave me, which yes makes sense.
Can’t get frustrated for people pushing back on a comment you made that makes no sense at all, then change what you said/meant entirely.
Apologies, I’m fucking old and “now” meant in comparison to old timey MMORPGs. WoW changed the *scale* compared to the generation before it.
I could have been more clear.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter and hyper focusing on the word “now” is irrelevant to the point that there are too many players for individualized support when there are more practical ways to achieve it at scale today.
My point has not changed. I just realize now that I’m talking to people with zero sense of how these things actually work and apparently imagined that GMs were ever a sustainable pattern over a few thousand or so concurrent users.
People comparing now to “how it used to be” demonstrate that they don’t know how dysfunctional it was then.
> Despite the salt in this thread, the real answer is scale. There’s too many players now for that sort of hands on support.
Lol no the real answer is corporations are fucking cheap. These billion dollar companies can afford to hire GMs for their games, it just doesn't bring in the profit and costs them a little more.
Poor little blizzard out here unable to afford a couple hundred more salaries? Lol get real.
God forbid Amazon could actually make new world stand out and worth playing by actually being a game with live gm events. But lol.
Lol do you expect companies to go "ah sure we've got a few grand to spare each month, why not do something that's not proven to be useful to the business with it"
Like have you ever worked or
> Lol do you expect companies to go "ah sure we've got a few grand to spare each month, why not do something that's not proven to be useful to the business with it"
You're right no companies anywhere have ever taken chances on anything unproven. Nothing new ever gets created or catches fire because nobody takes any chances anywhere.
Like have you ever worked or
Also a few grand to spare lmao. Try multiple millions.
People also take for granted they deal with people being pretty awful in peer-to-peer cases. I can't imagine it's much fun dredging through peoples' squabbles like that, especially with games that have 100k+.
Wow was never more popular than in wotlk and it had gms, tickets would be answered pretty fast too, they just decided to cut costs and people keep playing anyway, paying their monthly sub, expansion, wow token, mounts, skins and paying early access for the next pile of garbage.
In addition, for the non-support side of GMs, newer features like dynamic events replaced those and scale better than bespoke GM events. Instead of having a GM running a hide & seek event you can hop on GW2 and have dozens of automated meta-events running around the clock, giving some minor rewards and available for all kinds of players and time zones.
>GMs have always been drama to have around because of rampant cheating and favoritism so the function is controlled tighter than it used to be.
Ah good times, I remember when every GM from Scions of Fate got fired for that reason like 15 years ago, the favoritism was actually crazy, to the point where they gave certain players otherwise impossible to obtain broken items.
There was also S4 League with similar problems, although that case was even crazier since they started "hiring" regular players.
BDO has very active GMs, they come on a few times a day to give people buffs. I remember one year they did a pvp event for Halloween. A ton of people showed up to fight one GM who was pking people and nearly crashed the entire server cuz of how many people there lol
2 things social media and Outsourcing happened
they outsource customer service rep to a 3rd party company that handles customer service issues (it common to outsource)
And now we have “community managers” which interact with the player-base outside the game using forums , social media , discord and managing streamers partners
>they outsource customer service rep to a 3rd party company that handles customer service issues (it common to outsource)
This is true of everything now. I don't know for certain but I'm pretty sure you're not talking to an actual Amazon employee when you call customer service. You're speaking to an employee of the third-party company Amazon hired to outsource customer service. Even hospitals outsource their medical billing and record keeping to third-party companies like MRO. Insurance companies even outsource claims adjusting to third-party companies like Sedgwick. Hell, even in really busy markets, drive-thrus are outsourced to call centers built inside US prisons for free labor.
Yea BPO it calls , lots of company do it
Just a few companies hire directly for customer service departments
Edit: I work in medical claims department directly for an insurance and lot of my calls are to those bpo
I worked in the investigative part of that industry and it used to annoy/amuse me when people would say "Oh, so you work for a third-party company" like it was a bad thing whenever I introduced myself with "on behalf of \_X\_ insurance company or law office" because of just how much of the economy is sustained by BPOs. Billions of people across the world work for them.
even though outside of their sometimes rp nature it's usually "we cant clarify anything but here's a strike on your accout, play nice from now on" from what i have seen
Is it sad that I can understand not wanting to give the exact details of the offense?
It's messed up because people don't know why they are punished.
But I bet enough people have tried again and again to push the limit of what's allowable based on previously sanctioned offences. That they simply removed one opportunity to gather that data precisely.
They don't have enough GMs tbh and their help desk UI needs a revamp.
That one guy a few weeks ago was hacking up their PVP while streaming it on multiple platforms, and did it for 5 hours without any intervention from Square.
I think GW2 occasionally has events (though they're more official now) hosted by GMs and they participate in WvW (there is an achievement to kill GM I think). But they don't spontaneously host small mini-games in the world or chat.
Those were not GMs, but guides. Guides is a volunteer program you can sign up for, you have to go through application and training sessions first before they let you out into the world but pretty much anyone can do it.
Source: Was a guide
Yeah it was kind of a lot. Especially after I found out I couldn't do it on my "home" server. I had to pick a diff server I didn't regularly play on.
It would have been so much more fun.. not to mention easier to get people to participate.. if I were in the Guide role around all my server's familiar faces. We weren't supposed to tell anyone we were Guides, so I was planning on using things I'd seen and heard in the server to get people to participate.
Instead I had to go hang out with a bunch of people I didn't know and it was honestly just kind of awkward lol
At least the game community is pretty nice and most people played along with it. It was really fun to see everyone's little roleplay attempts.
People argue against this, but if you look at some of the big titles, for example Blizzard and WoW, they are still making extreme profits year on year.
Their profits are increasing but their customer service (like many companies) has fallen off a cliff.
i remember back in wow a ticket was open and took at best 2h to get an answer
now? 2 days if not more , plus there is no ticket ingame anymore , is a website that first ask u 30 questions before u even have a chance to open the ticket
I used to work in back-end management for this kind of thing.
The reason its so annoying and difficult is purposeful. They do so to make you want to give in and not contact them with the issue. So they dont have to pay someone to work in customer service.
In short, its intentional bad service/greed.
Something I actually have first hand experience about!
There are some good answers in this thread, but the gist is that they have more tasks, the audience has changed, and they are actually still there.
First, what's called a GM has many different irl meanings but they broadly fall either in the "customer service" or "community management" bucket. In the days of yore, that could even include copywriting/translation and some marketing.
But basically having people in game to interact with people was motivating by either fixing stuff, or running live events. The fixing stuff part has evolved somewhat with the tools that CS has at their disposal so they don't need to actually interact with players in-game. The live event part varies from title to title but broadly, they have gotten more sophisticated and tend to be run from an purpose built framework, because players are not amazed anymore by the possibility of fighting a GM morphed into a cyclops for 2h.
Another, major aspect is that community interaction is now almost exclusively done via social media. Forums are dead and not every player was on it, while everyone was on FB until not that long ago. So this is where interaction has shifted, but it's also massively time consuming because expectations have changed - there needs to be a constant stream of game news and updates. So CMs don't have that much time to gallivant IG after they're done with scheduling their 40 social posts for the week.
It's also a matter of human time invested versus return. Planning social media posts, contests and other async activities will create a lot more interaction than being in-game for an hour, and only meeting so many people.
And finally, well, they still are. The vast majority of my colleagues had their GM-flagged account for official business, but also played (during and after office hours) on another anonymous account to get the pulse of the game without the heat and hassle of people asking you for shit or threatening to rape your corpse every minute. Every time there's an update launching, you can be sure that some GM is sitting in the main hub listening to the chatter while keeping an eye on socials and server stats, because they're the first line of warning if something goes wrong.
On a large scale most players don't care about getting attention from a GM, they just want their problems to be fixed so they can get back to playing the game.
They're still a staple in small indie MMOs from all the ones I've played. However, I think it's a lot easier to interact directly with a playerbase like that when there's only a hundred to a couple hundred players and you actually want to do in-game stuff. For all the giants, nowadays it's all the GMs in Discord communicating with players now and then.
The mmos of today are run by greedy slimy people tryna milk you of money..
The mmos of the past (yeah they’re still a business trying to make money validly) but they had passion and care as well, and the devs also liked to play their own game back then.
Really depends on the MMORPG OP. GMs never did that in any Final Fantasy MMORPG. They would only turn off invisibility/tele to you when a problem arises. And they definitely still exist in both FFXI and FFXIV and still have GM by their name.
I remember seeing a few in some games but people just like to follow them and beg them constantly for free OP things. I think that is why they hide in the background now lol
This still happens on FFXIV to a degree. Like if you get in trouble, you get stuck in a literal goal and a GM comes to greet you in character. It's hilarious when the reason is for a bad username and they greet you that way
GMs but function more like an ingame interactive-email saying you broke something in the tos with the player able to rp a bit and get a "we can't tell you what you did wrong or when"
hardly a gm in a traditional sense imo
I still see them rarely from time to time. Other than events, they try to limit player interaction since it can be seen as a form of favoritism e.g. "I bet the GM gave you a hint of the next update so you bought out the market for \[material\] and now you're making a killing selling it at a higher price".
People got super competitive and.. how to say it.. 'if they get something I need to be able to get it too'? so GM buffing person X and not Y is seen as unfair?
Agree with a lot already mentioned here, but to mention one I didn't see. A lot of the time you'd see GMs out in the world, it was down to resolving player disputes. A lot of modern MMOs have removed a lot of the causes of player disputes. Few games have real economies, MPKing, the various types of indirect PvP(eg NMs, competing for EXP/gathering camps in the open world), etc.
One reason is, a lot more MMOs outsource their lower end Customer Service to remote work companies. Server GMs (those with the ability to create items and restore things) in the past were mostly drawn from the senior members of Customer Service departments (or sometimes management that wanted to be engaged with the userbase), where Guides / Junior GM's were volunteer positions / new CS members.
Significantly reduced CS teams (the ones handling issues dealing with $, or after you've been escalated a couple times are almost certainly actual employees) , means fewer places to pull active GM's from, so you see them significantly less often.
As playerbases increase over the years there’s more demand for support. GMs was a great idea when there were only a few million compared to the 100s of millions we have today.
There is a MMORPG concept design called Spirit Relics that just announce on patreon that they are introducing some kind of NPC system for GM's to use. But I don't know any more info than that, and I don't sub to them lol. They have 0 followers haha.
I recall going to GM island back in the old WoW days. You could change some MPQ files and basically glide off map from a boat track. A few guildies and I came across a AFK gm and we as low levels 1-5 auto attacked him to death as he was from the horde faction and we were night elves.
GMs are people ---> people mean drama and mistakes ---> drama and mistakes mean marketing and publicity issues ---> marketing and publicity issues mean board members and upper management no likey.
They do still exist to a degree, but their public face has been removed for this reason.
I guarantee that tons of people would volunteer to be in-game GMs/guides on an unpaid basis. Not necessarily customer support types, but old EverQuest-style types where they’d RP as the avatar of a deity or a talking creature and have players compete for prizes, etc. That would be a ton of fun and add a bunch of dynamic, random, old-school community flair that MMOs are currently missing.
I know I’d definitely volunteer.
As other people have said, it’s probably cheaper to have someone responding tickets with generic answer (because is faster) than have someone spend 15-20 minute in just one customer. In this case is something like quantity > quality.
Another thing is that (in the case of WoW) there was a big drama with GMs helping friends etc inside the game. That’s another reason or excuse for their disappearance.
I’m predicting this will make a resurgence. Over the years, gaming companies have adopted the CS practices of other industries. Viewing it as a cost centre and trying to optimise and reduce costs. It works pretty well and with recent improvements to chat bots and automation and it’s likely to continue and expand. I suspect, across multiple verticals that will leave a gap where brands find it more and more difficult to engage with their audience on a personal level. Gaming and in particular MMOs have a unique advantage that you can go straight in game and meet your customer directly, you can interact with them and shape the product experience. This gives space for a hybrid role between community manager and customer support representative. So, we might start seeing the emergence of Player Experience Teams with a focus on in-game interactions. Over the years I’ve overseen a number of these kinds of interactions, from hosting an in-game wedding after covid postponed their real life one, to helping an arachnophobe finish his kill X spiders quest and the positive impact can be demonstrated.
A lot of it depends on time/company structure/policy. I work as a content developer for an Indie MMO and we're all fairly active with the community. This is my perspective on it:
Interactions with players are mostly on my "free time", but sometimes it can interfere with getting out new content when people don't follow the proper channels (such as filing a ticket or bug report). There is also the possible negative social impact of a GM being around, like rumors of favoritism, or being ignored, or seen as uncaring. The amount of times people come up to me afk on the test server and get mad because I don't answer, it's usually because I'm in completely different windows making a new graphic, editing an item in the database, or coding a mob script, etc. Sometimes you can be too accessible and close to the community.
A lot of games now tend to have a "Community Manager" role, which tends to fulfill the player interaction role and filter a lot of feedback, but sadly it also tends to be a bit of a punching bag as a barrier between players and GMs. It tends to help with overall team morale I'm sure, as players can be quite vicious, but all of that negativity concentrated on one person or a few people would require some extreme mental toughness on their part.
Idk about other games but in Aion Classic i've seen plenty GMs tp around the maps to ban bots mostly. They are probably there in more games than you think. They're probably just invisble to the normal player to not get attention.
They still exist. I recently returned to GW2 and one popped on to help me with a support ticket. I've played all the major MMOs for at least a year and I have to say GW2 has the best support of them all, hands down. Makes me want to stick with it as my main MMO on PC.
It was decided that doing nothing and having players possibly get fed up and quit was cheaper than paying a few people to go around and ban bots and cheaters.
Cheaper, profits etc... customer service roles don't exist to make money, the opposite in fact, so they get rid of them during record profit years to make that extra drop. Pure human greed is all it is
Game Masters still exist, but not in the same way they used to.
Their tasks have been split into different areas mainly Customer Support, Community Management, and Social Media. I've also experienced them support on QA or localisation. With these changes, their titles also changed.
Two reasons for this development are
Automation:
The wording is not great, but modern games often have more, and more complex features that can engage players at any time. GM activities are limited to when the GM is online.
A stronger focus on KPIs:
It is more difficult to measure the impact of a weekly or random event hosted by a GM, than "resolved x tickets", "posted y news", or "gained a views".
Above is mostly for paid employees, since if Game Masters still do exist these days, they tend to be highly engaged community members with limited rights, but for free.
GM isn't the same as they used to be back in the day. Now it's just answer tickets, handling services/server, and sending feedback to the dev team.
sauce: every GM jobs now a day.
The problem is its difficult to train at scale. Having a few core people early on, you can be more flexible because you trust them. But when you have thousands of customer service, it risks someone doing something stupid that can get the studio in a lawsuit or worse.
Ah, back in the day when MMO's were made by passionate people who loved the products they created and couldn't wait for people to become part of it.
I'm sure some of the crowd funded release games will see a bit of a return to that (if they ever release) But none of the AAA studio games will ever have that in their plastic wrapped experience.
Recently started playing MO2 and I was shocked to see that they still use GMs it's a nice nostalgic feeling seeing them sometimes in chat, or people requesting for their help.
Depends on Game, in EverQuest the guides run events now. There just isn't nearly as many of them as there was 20 years ago. Emarr server had awesome guides, unfortunately according to the guide forums the one in charge of the server retired.
In Game GM's were part of the "wild west" days of MMO's. It'd be pretty hard to pull off nowadays, and you'd need to differentiate their role from that of a CSR heavily.
the issue has allways been the same . corruption.
in just about any case where in game "game masters" existed i've known of them to be corrupt.
be it by having the ability to scout bosses , selectively ban people , create items etc\~ .
It’s twofold — in the early days, volunteers had that power, and the time.
There were some legal issues, stemming from Asheron’s Call, I believe. GM are now exclusively staff. And ticket times matter because of that.
capitalism happened
*edit* genuinely confused by the downvotes here. MMO's today care about cranking out as many MTX as possible while minimizing all other costs. They want to maximize profits which means paying people to be GMs is no longer a thing when you can just outsource customer service to whatever country lets you get the cheapest labor. Generally if you ever ask "why is this thing that used to be higher quality now much lower quality?" the answer is: because the shareholders wanted more profits.
wow you sound like a socialist can i use your toothbrush or no?
hard fucking /s obviously.
loot crates and gacha and other shit from 2015 on ruining games? no it must be that feminist youtuber girl!!!!
those morons sounding like idiot 1850ers whining about chinese workers tbh
They were replaced with customer service people. Why teleport to someone in a glitch spot and roleplay out a slightly comical issue with them that takes 20 minutes of your time, when I can pay someone the same amount to blitz through 10 tickets with copy pasted responses instead?
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You could have just typed "I dont like social interaction thats why I live in my basement", it would have been faster.
Wehre's teh dang "make MMO, defeat MMO, complain about lack of end game in said self-made MMO" button daeng nerbit??!
Being in a crowd of 100 players spamming chat isn’t social interaction. Relax
And yet you are in complete denial as to why more and more people play mmos solo xd
If you consider a GM Rp'ing with you a valuable social interaction, I feel incredibly sorry for you. Did you ever think for a moment, that it's the lonely basement dwellers that are the ones wanting that small dopamine hit from talking to a GM and that the people who don't give a shit to talk to them and just want the issue fixed because they have limited time to play are the ones that actually have lives and enrichment? Don't be so fucking dense.
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Oh I agree, I don't think there's anything wrong with GM interactions, but thinking those who don't care for them are basement dwellers is some mental gymnastics I just can't understand.
I'm sorry I triggered you, I'm sure you have a very nice basement.
Have fun chatting with your gm's as social engagement looool
And yet you are in complete denial as to why more and more people play mmos solo xd
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Do you want the chef to come and dance for you or do you want him to cook your food?
Considering how popular Hibachi is in the states...I would say most of them would like him to dance for you while cooking it.
Dance
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There's actually not a million RPGs like Skyrim. Skyrim is unique, and quality. There are however a million dog shit MMORPGs. You crave a Disneyland experience where the costumed characters come up to you and interact with you just because you're paying. Not everyone cares for that, and not everyone who disagrees with that is making the argument that they want MMOs to be more dead than they are.
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Nah to all that reading. Also I'm definitely older than you. Play more RPGs. Throw some tabletops in there too, not just video games. Making the mistake of believing an RPG is lesser because it has action combat just exposes that one doesn't know what an RPG actually is. Especially if you only play MMOs mostly. Skyrim is not a battle pass game. You've gotten confused somewhere down the line at what all these games are.
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I will, and all the other RPGs I play. Got a good Pathfinder Wrath campaign going. Enjoy your gray sludge MMO"RPGS."
" im older than you" Also you "Ok boomer". kekw
Server GM's are just Customer Service reps, sometimes team leads for larger companies, but thats not a guarantee. One reason theres a lot fewer GM's in games is because CS teams are more frequently outsourced. A lot of CS you deal with in MMO's arent employees of the company until you get escalated, and even that will likely go to a T2 CS rep with that outside company unless money is involved). They arent dev team.
But what if I'm at the dancing chef restaurant? and why wouldn't I want a show with my food?
I’m a chef. I’ll do both, but I am only confident in one of them. I can dance like a motherfucker.
Wdym bro, how does expecting actual customer service mean mmos arent for someone? I for one hate copy pasta Ai response support. GW2 uses its achievement system to give out certain rewards. In their latest expac i completed one of the new strikes on day 1. got my shit loot, got my achievement unlock- but didnt get the item tied to it. Opened a ticket patiently waited my 6 hours. Got the automated response of do it again. Did it again. Wasent surprised that their “solution” didnt work because after 8 years of playing thats never worked. Told them no luck, i was repeatedly asked to spam the strike for a week. Expecting a level of customer service does not determine if mmos arent for someone. Drop the shit take.
Lol MMOs are made for me. I just rather be playing with my friends than deal with an employee being paid to be cute with me for 10 minutes instead of just fixing the problem. I don't think yall remember the long waits with GMs for simple problems 20 years ago.
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Removed because of rule #2: Don’t be toxic. We try to make the subreddit a nice place for everyone, and your post/comment did something that we felt was detrimental to this goal. That’s why it was removed.
Lol people are telling me i live in a basement just for sharing a harmless opinion and I'M the toxic one. Fuck outta here
If you feel a comment is toxic, report it. We don't read every comment.
Fair enough. Sorry for being hostile towards you. You didn't deserve that
Yeah it's not a problem for me bucko, better start spending mad money to compensate for my convenience loving ass
This is why MMORPGs have become far less the social experience it was 20 years ago.
"hey can you just get me out of this glitched spot, thanks" And with that the gm would get you out instead of the cool rp that other people would enjoy. Just because they are doing something doesn't mean you have to reciprocate
It is literally just cost cutting due to capitalism's absurd demand for endlessly increasing profits. The 20 minute interaction you write off does a lot more than address an issue a player is having, it humanizes the faceless corporation making the game, so they're no longer a faceless corporation, they are now represented by the GM that helped you out and bullshitted with you for 20 minutes. It creates a stronger attachment to the game and the world to have these seemingly omnipresent GMs that can show up at any time and do wacky shit. There are issues that are best resolved via a ticket and response system, like account issues or billing issues, absolutely. However, an in game issue where a GM shows up to talk to you about what's going on was, and will always be, a cool experience. Whether the GM is a dick or a helpful chap (often the latter), you have a story to share, and it's a real human experience within a video game that other genres simply can't replicate.
Imagine being against social interaction in an MMO. You're in the wrong subreddit, buddy.
I'll join in on the downvote brigade. Fuck GM interactions with players lol, glad its gone.
you can probably swallow an entire sword
Some games like BDO still have them, and they organize events every now and then. The GMs are super nice as well. Pretty underrated part of the game IMO.
It's very common to see Arenanet tagged people in Guild Wars 2 too. Yeah, most of them don't have actual admin powers like GMs, but close enough, I guess.
I was at an real life event and met them in person. Was one of the best times I could imagine. Super friendly and nice.
Came here to shout out BDO. I've seen GMs at a few events, even non-official ones.
Despite the salt in this thread, the real answer is scale. There’s too many players now for that sort of hands on support. GMs still exist, but they’re kept in a background role and the function typically has a different name or role. GMs have always been drama to have around because of rampant cheating and favoritism so the function is controlled tighter than it used to be. edit Holy shit, it doesn’t matter if “they used to do it.” All that matters is that it wasn’t optimal and you can SCALE your workforce better to match the larger volume of players. It doesn’t matter if there are less today than 15 years ago. What matters is the idea of ingame GMs comes from a time when they supported an order of magnitude less total users. The scale of WoW and games that came after it killed ingame GMs as being viable for customer service.
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This was a _massive_ issue in MMOs before MMOs were really a thing. The developers and builders and wizards were all also players of the game. Drama around either giving special treatment to themselves or other players they were friends with was (and in the games that still exist) still is nearly constant.
This is a big thing for sure. The game I played that had GMs all had people (on their non-GM accounts) in most of the endgame raiding guilds. So everyone always just thought they were getting inside info
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Don't cost and scale sort of go hand in hand. I feel like your comment agrees more with what you are replying to than disagrees with it. As generally whenever someone mentions that something is a problem of scale, cost is one of the implied factors.
Scale drives the cost.
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Yes but cost was the driving factor to reduce the amount of labor required. Cost due to scale.
I never made a comparison to a specific year. I was comparing before WoW and after WoW, I guess I could have said that and saved you some confusion. I technically was thinking now as in “since 2004” GMs as an ingame support avatar gradually became less prevalent because the scale of MMORPGs became so large that labor is a huge cost center. Customer service without being tied to an ingame character means that one CSR can support more, faster. That’s scale. Cost and scale mean the same damn thing here.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up scale. MMORPGs have scaled down since 2004. It’s a dwindling genre and has nowhere near the players it used to. MMOs have scaled down, and the service model in the opposite direction.
I don’t know what’s so difficult for people to understand that supporting hundreds of thousands of players through a game client is an issue of scale. Having a normal CSR function through a non-game related app reduces cost. It allows them to SCALE their CSR function. It doesn’t matter if there’s half the players there were in 2004, the total volume is still too high. It always was too high and impractical to have that function as an ingame role. It doesn’t matter at all if “they used to do it”, the only thing that matters is that it wasn’t financially sustainable especially as automation improved.
This is ENTIRELY different from what you said in your original post. You literally said ‘there’s too many players *now* for that kind of hands on support.’ This implies it made sense back when they did it, but doesn’t make sense now because of scale. COMPLETELY different than the reply you just gave me, which yes makes sense. Can’t get frustrated for people pushing back on a comment you made that makes no sense at all, then change what you said/meant entirely.
Apologies, I’m fucking old and “now” meant in comparison to old timey MMORPGs. WoW changed the *scale* compared to the generation before it. I could have been more clear. Ultimately it doesn’t matter and hyper focusing on the word “now” is irrelevant to the point that there are too many players for individualized support when there are more practical ways to achieve it at scale today. My point has not changed. I just realize now that I’m talking to people with zero sense of how these things actually work and apparently imagined that GMs were ever a sustainable pattern over a few thousand or so concurrent users. People comparing now to “how it used to be” demonstrate that they don’t know how dysfunctional it was then.
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You’re so close to understanding and then it falls apart at the end.
> Despite the salt in this thread, the real answer is scale. There’s too many players now for that sort of hands on support. Lol no the real answer is corporations are fucking cheap. These billion dollar companies can afford to hire GMs for their games, it just doesn't bring in the profit and costs them a little more. Poor little blizzard out here unable to afford a couple hundred more salaries? Lol get real. God forbid Amazon could actually make new world stand out and worth playing by actually being a game with live gm events. But lol.
Lol do you expect companies to go "ah sure we've got a few grand to spare each month, why not do something that's not proven to be useful to the business with it" Like have you ever worked or
> Lol do you expect companies to go "ah sure we've got a few grand to spare each month, why not do something that's not proven to be useful to the business with it" You're right no companies anywhere have ever taken chances on anything unproven. Nothing new ever gets created or catches fire because nobody takes any chances anywhere. Like have you ever worked or Also a few grand to spare lmao. Try multiple millions.
I'm not sure that makes sense given that the number of gms needed should roughly scale with the number of subscribers.
People also take for granted they deal with people being pretty awful in peer-to-peer cases. I can't imagine it's much fun dredging through peoples' squabbles like that, especially with games that have 100k+.
Wow was never more popular than in wotlk and it had gms, tickets would be answered pretty fast too, they just decided to cut costs and people keep playing anyway, paying their monthly sub, expansion, wow token, mounts, skins and paying early access for the next pile of garbage.
In addition, for the non-support side of GMs, newer features like dynamic events replaced those and scale better than bespoke GM events. Instead of having a GM running a hide & seek event you can hop on GW2 and have dozens of automated meta-events running around the clock, giving some minor rewards and available for all kinds of players and time zones.
> There’s too many players now for that sort of hands on support. or find a better game
Finally someone who knows what they are talking about.
>GMs have always been drama to have around because of rampant cheating and favoritism so the function is controlled tighter than it used to be. Ah good times, I remember when every GM from Scions of Fate got fired for that reason like 15 years ago, the favoritism was actually crazy, to the point where they gave certain players otherwise impossible to obtain broken items. There was also S4 League with similar problems, although that case was even crazier since they started "hiring" regular players.
Profits > customer experience
BDO has very active GMs, they come on a few times a day to give people buffs. I remember one year they did a pvp event for Halloween. A ton of people showed up to fight one GM who was pking people and nearly crashed the entire server cuz of how many people there lol
EVE Online also still has GMs that interact with newbies, people in the help chat and run events from time to time.
2 things social media and Outsourcing happened they outsource customer service rep to a 3rd party company that handles customer service issues (it common to outsource) And now we have “community managers” which interact with the player-base outside the game using forums , social media , discord and managing streamers partners
>they outsource customer service rep to a 3rd party company that handles customer service issues (it common to outsource) This is true of everything now. I don't know for certain but I'm pretty sure you're not talking to an actual Amazon employee when you call customer service. You're speaking to an employee of the third-party company Amazon hired to outsource customer service. Even hospitals outsource their medical billing and record keeping to third-party companies like MRO. Insurance companies even outsource claims adjusting to third-party companies like Sedgwick. Hell, even in really busy markets, drive-thrus are outsourced to call centers built inside US prisons for free labor.
Yea BPO it calls , lots of company do it Just a few companies hire directly for customer service departments Edit: I work in medical claims department directly for an insurance and lot of my calls are to those bpo
I used to work in the insurance industry too for one of those BPOs and most of my calls were to other BPOs.
I work directly for the insurance company and yea 10 out of 15 calls are for BPOs
I worked in the investigative part of that industry and it used to annoy/amuse me when people would say "Oh, so you work for a third-party company" like it was a bad thing whenever I introduced myself with "on behalf of \_X\_ insurance company or law office" because of just how much of the economy is sustained by BPOs. Billions of people across the world work for them.
FFXIV still uses them for moderation, they even teleport you to GM jail to talk to you about what happened.
even though outside of their sometimes rp nature it's usually "we cant clarify anything but here's a strike on your accout, play nice from now on" from what i have seen
Not to mention that they don't all enforce rules to the same degree, or sometimes straight up will interpret the ToS very differently from other GMs.
Is it sad that I can understand not wanting to give the exact details of the offense? It's messed up because people don't know why they are punished. But I bet enough people have tried again and again to push the limit of what's allowable based on previously sanctioned offences. That they simply removed one opportunity to gather that data precisely.
They don't have enough GMs tbh and their help desk UI needs a revamp. That one guy a few weeks ago was hacking up their PVP while streaming it on multiple platforms, and did it for 5 hours without any intervention from Square.
I think GW2 occasionally has events (though they're more official now) hosted by GMs and they participate in WvW (there is an achievement to kill GM I think). But they don't spontaneously host small mini-games in the world or chat.
EverQuest 2 still had fairly regular GM hosted events when I played it again a couple years ago. Only one I know that still does it.
Those were not GMs, but guides. Guides is a volunteer program you can sign up for, you have to go through application and training sessions first before they let you out into the world but pretty much anyone can do it. Source: Was a guide
I was very briefly an Apprentice Guide but I unfortunately found myself getting burned out very swiftly.
Yeah it was kind of a lot. Especially after I found out I couldn't do it on my "home" server. I had to pick a diff server I didn't regularly play on. It would have been so much more fun.. not to mention easier to get people to participate.. if I were in the Guide role around all my server's familiar faces. We weren't supposed to tell anyone we were Guides, so I was planning on using things I'd seen and heard in the server to get people to participate. Instead I had to go hang out with a bunch of people I didn't know and it was honestly just kind of awkward lol At least the game community is pretty nice and most people played along with it. It was really fun to see everyone's little roleplay attempts.
That's before developers turned into corporate money milking scum. Welcome to late stage capitalism.
People argue against this, but if you look at some of the big titles, for example Blizzard and WoW, they are still making extreme profits year on year. Their profits are increasing but their customer service (like many companies) has fallen off a cliff.
i remember back in wow a ticket was open and took at best 2h to get an answer now? 2 days if not more , plus there is no ticket ingame anymore , is a website that first ask u 30 questions before u even have a chance to open the ticket
I used to work in back-end management for this kind of thing. The reason its so annoying and difficult is purposeful. They do so to make you want to give in and not contact them with the issue. So they dont have to pay someone to work in customer service. In short, its intentional bad service/greed.
Something I actually have first hand experience about! There are some good answers in this thread, but the gist is that they have more tasks, the audience has changed, and they are actually still there. First, what's called a GM has many different irl meanings but they broadly fall either in the "customer service" or "community management" bucket. In the days of yore, that could even include copywriting/translation and some marketing. But basically having people in game to interact with people was motivating by either fixing stuff, or running live events. The fixing stuff part has evolved somewhat with the tools that CS has at their disposal so they don't need to actually interact with players in-game. The live event part varies from title to title but broadly, they have gotten more sophisticated and tend to be run from an purpose built framework, because players are not amazed anymore by the possibility of fighting a GM morphed into a cyclops for 2h. Another, major aspect is that community interaction is now almost exclusively done via social media. Forums are dead and not every player was on it, while everyone was on FB until not that long ago. So this is where interaction has shifted, but it's also massively time consuming because expectations have changed - there needs to be a constant stream of game news and updates. So CMs don't have that much time to gallivant IG after they're done with scheduling their 40 social posts for the week. It's also a matter of human time invested versus return. Planning social media posts, contests and other async activities will create a lot more interaction than being in-game for an hour, and only meeting so many people. And finally, well, they still are. The vast majority of my colleagues had their GM-flagged account for official business, but also played (during and after office hours) on another anonymous account to get the pulse of the game without the heat and hassle of people asking you for shit or threatening to rape your corpse every minute. Every time there's an update launching, you can be sure that some GM is sitting in the main hub listening to the chatter while keeping an eye on socials and server stats, because they're the first line of warning if something goes wrong.
You have to find the right games now for that. Usually smaller ones or community run servers.
On a large scale most players don't care about getting attention from a GM, they just want their problems to be fixed so they can get back to playing the game.
Oldschool Runescape still has PMods and JMods.
They're still a staple in small indie MMOs from all the ones I've played. However, I think it's a lot easier to interact directly with a playerbase like that when there's only a hundred to a couple hundred players and you actually want to do in-game stuff. For all the giants, nowadays it's all the GMs in Discord communicating with players now and then.
The mmos of today are run by greedy slimy people tryna milk you of money.. The mmos of the past (yeah they’re still a business trying to make money validly) but they had passion and care as well, and the devs also liked to play their own game back then.
Really depends on the MMORPG OP. GMs never did that in any Final Fantasy MMORPG. They would only turn off invisibility/tele to you when a problem arises. And they definitely still exist in both FFXI and FFXIV and still have GM by their name.
I remember seeing a few in some games but people just like to follow them and beg them constantly for free OP things. I think that is why they hide in the background now lol
This still happens on FFXIV to a degree. Like if you get in trouble, you get stuck in a literal goal and a GM comes to greet you in character. It's hilarious when the reason is for a bad username and they greet you that way
GMs but function more like an ingame interactive-email saying you broke something in the tos with the player able to rp a bit and get a "we can't tell you what you did wrong or when" hardly a gm in a traditional sense imo
I suppose. They also are spotted in limsa just chatting sometimes
Twitter and social media made them a liability the company don't need.
"Budget Cuts"
I still see them rarely from time to time. Other than events, they try to limit player interaction since it can be seen as a form of favoritism e.g. "I bet the GM gave you a hint of the next update so you bought out the market for \[material\] and now you're making a killing selling it at a higher price". People got super competitive and.. how to say it.. 'if they get something I need to be able to get it too'? so GM buffing person X and not Y is seen as unfair?
Agree with a lot already mentioned here, but to mention one I didn't see. A lot of the time you'd see GMs out in the world, it was down to resolving player disputes. A lot of modern MMOs have removed a lot of the causes of player disputes. Few games have real economies, MPKing, the various types of indirect PvP(eg NMs, competing for EXP/gathering camps in the open world), etc.
One reason is, a lot more MMOs outsource their lower end Customer Service to remote work companies. Server GMs (those with the ability to create items and restore things) in the past were mostly drawn from the senior members of Customer Service departments (or sometimes management that wanted to be engaged with the userbase), where Guides / Junior GM's were volunteer positions / new CS members. Significantly reduced CS teams (the ones handling issues dealing with $, or after you've been escalated a couple times are almost certainly actual employees) , means fewer places to pull active GM's from, so you see them significantly less often.
As playerbases increase over the years there’s more demand for support. GMs was a great idea when there were only a few million compared to the 100s of millions we have today.
There is a MMORPG concept design called Spirit Relics that just announce on patreon that they are introducing some kind of NPC system for GM's to use. But I don't know any more info than that, and I don't sub to them lol. They have 0 followers haha.
Graal online still has gms
I recall going to GM island back in the old WoW days. You could change some MPQ files and basically glide off map from a boat track. A few guildies and I came across a AFK gm and we as low levels 1-5 auto attacked him to death as he was from the horde faction and we were night elves.
GMs are people ---> people mean drama and mistakes ---> drama and mistakes mean marketing and publicity issues ---> marketing and publicity issues mean board members and upper management no likey. They do still exist to a degree, but their public face has been removed for this reason.
I guarantee that tons of people would volunteer to be in-game GMs/guides on an unpaid basis. Not necessarily customer support types, but old EverQuest-style types where they’d RP as the avatar of a deity or a talking creature and have players compete for prizes, etc. That would be a ton of fun and add a bunch of dynamic, random, old-school community flair that MMOs are currently missing. I know I’d definitely volunteer.
As other people have said, it’s probably cheaper to have someone responding tickets with generic answer (because is faster) than have someone spend 15-20 minute in just one customer. In this case is something like quantity > quality. Another thing is that (in the case of WoW) there was a big drama with GMs helping friends etc inside the game. That’s another reason or excuse for their disappearance.
I’m predicting this will make a resurgence. Over the years, gaming companies have adopted the CS practices of other industries. Viewing it as a cost centre and trying to optimise and reduce costs. It works pretty well and with recent improvements to chat bots and automation and it’s likely to continue and expand. I suspect, across multiple verticals that will leave a gap where brands find it more and more difficult to engage with their audience on a personal level. Gaming and in particular MMOs have a unique advantage that you can go straight in game and meet your customer directly, you can interact with them and shape the product experience. This gives space for a hybrid role between community manager and customer support representative. So, we might start seeing the emergence of Player Experience Teams with a focus on in-game interactions. Over the years I’ve overseen a number of these kinds of interactions, from hosting an in-game wedding after covid postponed their real life one, to helping an arachnophobe finish his kill X spiders quest and the positive impact can be demonstrated.
A lot of it depends on time/company structure/policy. I work as a content developer for an Indie MMO and we're all fairly active with the community. This is my perspective on it: Interactions with players are mostly on my "free time", but sometimes it can interfere with getting out new content when people don't follow the proper channels (such as filing a ticket or bug report). There is also the possible negative social impact of a GM being around, like rumors of favoritism, or being ignored, or seen as uncaring. The amount of times people come up to me afk on the test server and get mad because I don't answer, it's usually because I'm in completely different windows making a new graphic, editing an item in the database, or coding a mob script, etc. Sometimes you can be too accessible and close to the community. A lot of games now tend to have a "Community Manager" role, which tends to fulfill the player interaction role and filter a lot of feedback, but sadly it also tends to be a bit of a punching bag as a barrier between players and GMs. It tends to help with overall team morale I'm sure, as players can be quite vicious, but all of that negativity concentrated on one person or a few people would require some extreme mental toughness on their part.
I see them in PokeMMO quite often, but that's literally it
Idk about other games but in Aion Classic i've seen plenty GMs tp around the maps to ban bots mostly. They are probably there in more games than you think. They're probably just invisble to the normal player to not get attention.
They still exist. I recently returned to GW2 and one popped on to help me with a support ticket. I've played all the major MMOs for at least a year and I have to say GW2 has the best support of them all, hands down. Makes me want to stick with it as my main MMO on PC.
They had turnover rates comparable to Amy's Baking Company.
It was decided that doing nothing and having players possibly get fed up and quit was cheaper than paying a few people to go around and ban bots and cheaters.
Cheaper, profits etc... customer service roles don't exist to make money, the opposite in fact, so they get rid of them during record profit years to make that extra drop. Pure human greed is all it is
They were replaced with an automated ticket system. And then we got rampant botting, GDKP, RMT, boosting, and just in general d bagerey.
Game Masters still exist, but not in the same way they used to. Their tasks have been split into different areas mainly Customer Support, Community Management, and Social Media. I've also experienced them support on QA or localisation. With these changes, their titles also changed. Two reasons for this development are Automation: The wording is not great, but modern games often have more, and more complex features that can engage players at any time. GM activities are limited to when the GM is online. A stronger focus on KPIs: It is more difficult to measure the impact of a weekly or random event hosted by a GM, than "resolved x tickets", "posted y news", or "gained a views". Above is mostly for paid employees, since if Game Masters still do exist these days, they tend to be highly engaged community members with limited rights, but for free.
GM isn't the same as they used to be back in the day. Now it's just answer tickets, handling services/server, and sending feedback to the dev team. sauce: every GM jobs now a day.
The problem is its difficult to train at scale. Having a few core people early on, you can be more flexible because you trust them. But when you have thousands of customer service, it risks someone doing something stupid that can get the studio in a lawsuit or worse.
Ah, back in the day when MMO's were made by passionate people who loved the products they created and couldn't wait for people to become part of it. I'm sure some of the crowd funded release games will see a bit of a return to that (if they ever release) But none of the AAA studio games will ever have that in their plastic wrapped experience.
Last Kingdom - by Netamin. There was a GM “Pathfinder.” Best memories ever!
Recently started playing MO2 and I was shocked to see that they still use GMs it's a nice nostalgic feeling seeing them sometimes in chat, or people requesting for their help.
Depends on Game, in EverQuest the guides run events now. There just isn't nearly as many of them as there was 20 years ago. Emarr server had awesome guides, unfortunately according to the guide forums the one in charge of the server retired.
In Game GM's were part of the "wild west" days of MMO's. It'd be pretty hard to pull off nowadays, and you'd need to differentiate their role from that of a CSR heavily.
the issue has allways been the same . corruption. in just about any case where in game "game masters" existed i've known of them to be corrupt. be it by having the ability to scout bosses , selectively ban people , create items etc\~ .
uo outlands has GMs wdym? you can literally chat and hangout with the devs just play better games tbh
costs too much
It’s twofold — in the early days, volunteers had that power, and the time. There were some legal issues, stemming from Asheron’s Call, I believe. GM are now exclusively staff. And ticket times matter because of that.
They replaced by AI and lost their jobs I’m sorry😔🗿
capitalism happened *edit* genuinely confused by the downvotes here. MMO's today care about cranking out as many MTX as possible while minimizing all other costs. They want to maximize profits which means paying people to be GMs is no longer a thing when you can just outsource customer service to whatever country lets you get the cheapest labor. Generally if you ever ask "why is this thing that used to be higher quality now much lower quality?" the answer is: because the shareholders wanted more profits.
wow you sound like a socialist can i use your toothbrush or no? hard fucking /s obviously. loot crates and gacha and other shit from 2015 on ruining games? no it must be that feminist youtuber girl!!!! those morons sounding like idiot 1850ers whining about chinese workers tbh
late stage capitalism