Game Masters - Whats the point of them?

Whats is the points of Game Masters in this game. Its surely not a customer service aspect because i have submitted 4 GM calls , all met with an automated return messages of "sorry not our job". We all know they dont do anything about illegal player actions, so they do not stop cheating , they do not assist players * correction make that 5 automated messages*. After a 6th gm call demanding to speak to a SGM i finally received a response in game.

Now ive had YEARS of interactions with GM's and in my entire time of playing ive seen 2, instances where GM's were actually not useless and or a waste of time.

First being a gm who showed up had a good laugh with messing with me in Upper D's Tower years ago when i submitted a GM call about monk mobs swinging to damn fast.

The second being at a Tiamat a rival shell was trying to troll us into flailing *long story short* we took claim @ 2% due to blms letting it go white got full drops. GM called it fair game on white mobs.

Now to the point, Bastion is an even that's highly flawed already poor set up with mobs AOE's Point allocations etc , horrible npc menus etc. So i made a simple but human mistake after farming for 5-7 ish hours in abyssea to get the 9000 bastion points for a trial weapon. I picked up Twilight instead of Daybreak souls, simple mistake albeit a shitty one to make. Now lets run through this situation in pretty much ANY MMO, currently on the market.

*submits gm call* Hey i fucked up with xyz bought the wrong item , its the same exact price and from the same npc as the item i ment to buy and they are even similar in name. If possible could i trade you the 30 wrong item for the 30 right item?!

Lets use WoW GM's *they are fucking awesome* : Response: Sure , sorry that happens to the best of us just trade *more likely MAIL* me the items and ill send you the correct one in the mail in just a second.

Same convo on FFXI after 5 gm calls
http://images.bluegartr.com/bucket/g...b0294809bb.png

TLDR: why do GM's exist if they do NOTHING

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Originally Posted by Gokku

Whats is the points of Game Masters in this game. Its surely not a customer service aspect because i have submitted 4 GM calls , all met with an automated return messages of "sorry not our job". We all know they dont do anything about illegal player actions, so they do not stop cheating , they do not assist players * correction make that 5 automated messages*. After a 6th gm call demanding to speak to a SGM i finally received a response in game.

Now ive had YEARS of interactions with GM's and in my entire time of playing ive seen 2, instances where GM's were actually not useless and or a waste of time.

First being a gm who showed up had a good laugh with messing with me in Upper D's Tower years ago when i submitted a GM call about monk mobs swinging to damn fast.

The second being at a Tiamat a rival shell was trying to troll us into flailing *long story short* we took claim @ 2% due to blms letting it go white got full drops. GM called it fair game on white mobs.

Now to the point, Bastion is an even that's highly flawed already poor set up with mobs AOE's Point allocations etc , horrible npc menus etc. So i made a simple but human mistake after farming for 5-7 ish hours in abyssea to get the 9000 bastion points for a trial weapon. I picked up Twilight instead of Daybreak souls, simple mistake albeit a shitty one to make. Now lets run through this situation in pretty much ANY MMO, currently on the market.

*submits gm call* Hey i fucked up with xyz bought the wrong item , its the same exact price and from the same npc as the item i ment to buy and they are even similar in name. If possible could i trade you the 30 wrong item for the 30 right item?!

Lets use WoW GM's *they are fucking awesome* : Response: Sure , sorry that happens to the best of us just trade *more likely MAIL* me the items and ill send you the correct one in the mail in just a second.

Same convo on FFXI after 5 gm calls
http://images.bluegartr.com/bucket/g...b0294809bb.png

TLDR: why do GM's exist if they do NOTHING

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The GMs are not bug-report liasons, nor do they correct your mistakes. They exist to handle issues related to breaking of the terms of service/user agreement/code of conduct, and getting people unstuck if they get stuck in the terrain somehow. When you make a call in relation to one of these issues, you will get an answer much more easily.

Your GM call had nothing to do with this and is beyond the scope of what they do. They don't exist for your entertainment (even though sometimes they do say amusing things).

I wouldn't have answered your calls either, because I already know they don't compensate people for their own mistakes (with the exception of the one-time item restore). If you lost items due to a bug or something, then you might have had a leg to stand on.

While I feel bad for you, and agree GMs should do much more for players in this game, your attitude with the GM was not what it should have been. Any time I talk to a GM I do my best to be polite, respectful, and accurate with both spelling and speech. The reason is because people often do not want to help people who are being rude to them, some of what I read in your convo did look rude, such as the shitty game design comment, while I agree the event is poorly designed, it sounds anger driven and rude, which could possibly lead the GM to care less about helping you. A nice polite person will get farther than a rude insulting person ever will.

That all aside, they really do need to allow GMs to be of more help. GMs are simply not very helpful in this game at all, I have had many cases of having been told to go to a community site rather than receiving real assistance. I have had a friend get locked up on a cut-scene, but was unable to assist them because the GM would not help unless my frozen friend placed the call, which was literally impossible without reseting their system which actually fixed the problem anyways, just with a chance to damage the game. I have had GMs simply tell me my issue was meant to occur, and I was simply screwed. I have been scammed by players who then had no action taken against them that I was ever notified of, and lost time, gil, and effort, due to, even though I was given nothing back in return.

Simply put, GMs need to have the power and care to assist players. A GM's job should be to assist players and make their experiences within the game better if at all possible. Instead it seems as though the majority of encounters me or anyone I know have had with a GM is more of a directory service, where they take your call and patch you in to where ever you really need, if its info about quests, community site, if its RMT, STF, if its complaints or bugs, to the forums you go. GMs should not be redirecting the problems elsewhere, if possible, GMs should be assisting players on the spot, and getting their problems handled quickly.

I don't feel a GM should have any responsibility other than to enforce the rules. Speaking from experience working with a indie team on a much smaller game, if you give people an inch they'll take a mile, and you end up with a bigger work load than you can handle. IF SE handled the cases where people bought the wrong item from a shop or whatnot, they'd need to drastically increase their staff and therefore drastically increase their costs in order to handle the inevitable much larger case load.

GMs are not a suggestion box. If you think the game needs a buyback/sellback feature, you stuff their actual suggestion box and/or post about it here.

To me the biggest issue is it's not very obvious to the user what a GM will and will not help with, as the messages on the help desk are rather vague (though they mention violations of the user agreement), and if they only help with specific things than they need to do a better job spelling that out to people so they don't flood the system with calls that they can't help with.

Not trying to be rude, but why didn't you take more care in what you were buying in the first place? I feel bad for you that it happened but I certainly would double check before buying, and I also never rely on GM's for anything but have never had a problem. If you bought something from a shop in real life, that didn't give money back guarantees, and you bought the wrong item you wouldn't just be able to get your money back. I know this is a game but it's not that difficult to read what's right and what's wrong, and the penalty for getting it wrong is no where near as significant as in real life due to it being a game. I'd agree if it was the dyna 100 currencies for cheap craft items because that penalty was massive and easy to mistake but they've fixed that issue now.

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Originally Posted by Jaall

I'd agree if it was the dyna 100 currencies for cheap craft items because that penalty was massive and easy to mistake but they've fixed that issue now.

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Thats another whole problem with customer service, the fact it took them YEARS to fix this type of problem is insane when people fell subject to it often by simple mistakes, losing tons of time, gaining a ton of stress and anger, not to mention if you were getting help from your LS, all of the complaints you will have to put up with or even missing out on your relic completely because of such a mistake. These are simple customer service things that should be fixed as soon as they are found to be causing problems for players, be it a game breaking bug, or an angering design flaw which creates an unsatisfactory experience for the player. The fact they allowed it to stay there for years without fixing it speaks volumes for how far they are willing to help the common player avoid tragic mistakes.

Yea but that's more a problem with the dev's rather than GM's. It's GM's job, like was mentioned, to deal with breaches of terms etc not to fix problems. For all we know they picked up all the complaints and forwarded them to head office where the devs just ignored it completely. I would definitely classify that issue as a dev's failure rather than a GM's but yes they should have offered a fix for that if you did make the mistake (I'm unsure if they actually did or not, but I assume they didn't).

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oh i admit its my fault 100% misread the wiki page *wasnt even on the trial yet had pre farmed everything else*

but the above is the major reason i didnt notice my mistake about the 2nd set i stopped paying any attention and just went through the motions, the x50 for domino ops item npc is even worse. And honestly i wouldnt even care if this was something i could just log in spend a few hours redoing and be done with it. but its not bastion is a horrid system and takes forever to farm points for.

One time I got stuck in Altepa without a scroll home, and the GMs made me wait for around 4 hours before I had a friend come over to teleport me to safety. Thing is though, as my friend began to cast the teleport my character was tractored on top of SGM Jhanaka, who was apologizing profusely for leaving me stranded. I responded by slapping Jhanaka and walking away. It really bothered me that my friend had taken time out of his evening to help me, only for that to be wasted at the last second. Never leave home without a warp scroll.

I agree GM's aren't that useful, they used to be much more helpful before the forums came out, now they just have a generic response of "go post a bug report on the forum" but in the situation with souls I don't think GM's have ever traded items based on human mistakes, maybe if you had made the purchase lost your 9k and not gotten any souls they might have refunded you cause it's a bug, but because you bought the wrong thing it's really not a GM issue.

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Originally Posted by Jaall

Yea but that's more a problem with the dev's rather than GM's.

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As I said, thats another whole problem with customer service, but it still shows us all how much SE cares about customer service. GMs are of little help, and be it their job or not, I still maintain the philosophy that a GM's job should be to assist players and make their experiences within the game better if at all possible. SE has left in problems with basic design that has negatively effected player experience for years and GMs are of no help during these problems in many cases. One such is this thread, the inability to reverse a simple mistake which was made, the mistake was admittedly easy to do. The items have similar names, the points are a pain to obtain, the items are annoying and tedious to purchase even. At the end of the day, once the mistake was noticed, nothing was done. I think the problem stems past GMs, and more to the entire customer service ideals of SE as a whole, but just so far as GMs go, they either do not do enough to improve the experience or players, or are not allowed to, and in either case I think it reflects badly on SE from a customers eyes when players are hurt by in game mechanics by an accident and nothing is done to help them.

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Originally Posted by Demon6324236

As I said, thats another whole problem with customer service, but it still shows us all how much SE cares about customer service. GMs are of little help, and be it their job or not, I still maintain the philosophy that a GM's job should be to assist players and make their experiences within the game better if at all possible. SE has left in problems with basic design that has negatively effected player experience for years and GMs are of no help during these problems in many cases. One such is this thread, the inability to reverse a simple mistake which was made, the mistake was admittedly easy to do. The items have similar names, the points are a pain to obtain, the items are annoying and tedious to purchase even. At the end of the day, once the mistake was noticed, nothing was done. I think the problem stems past GMs, and more to the entire customer service ideals of SE as a whole, but just so far as GMs go, they either do not do enough to improve the experience or players, or are not allowed to, and in either case I think it reflects badly on SE from a customers eyes when players are hurt by in game mechanics by an accident and nothing is done to help them.

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this x100 , i wouldnt have been agitated with the GMs if they had responded to any of my 1st 5 gm calls with an actual response not and automated message.

the level of disconnection from players to any kind of in game support is horrid, i mean i wasnt even that mad about my mistake it was a ...shit... i wonder if they will be cool... then ...STOP BEING USELESS CUNTS AND ANSWER ME FFS DO YOUR JOB.

GMs play foosball and drink beer, it's in the job description. I should put in an application.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

I don't feel a GM should have any responsibility other than to enforce the rules. Speaking from experience working with a indie team on a much smaller game, if you give people an inch they'll take a mile, and you end up with a bigger work load than you can handle. IF SE handled the cases where people bought the wrong item from a shop or whatnot, they'd need to drastically increase their staff and therefore drastically increase their costs in order to handle the inevitable much larger case load.

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Yet other games do this functionally. It might simply be that FF11's back-end just does't allow for easy fixing of these problems. It might behoove the Development team to field their GMs to see what these problems are so they could put in systems to deal with the more common mistakes so players themselves can field actions to correct them.

For example: WoW (yeah the EVIL Game) Bind on pick-up items in a dungeon. I picked it up by mistake, Can you give it to the right person? After a long time of these calls what did they do? Put a cool down on the ability to trade these items to people who were there when it dropped. I imagine this put an end to these kinds of calls and thus took the load off.

Another Example: You buy an important item from a reputation Vendor or an important type of vendor. You accidentally bought the wrong item (easy to do, it's a simple point and click system... a muscle spasm and .. oops) The game gives you an allotted time to sell the item back for a full refund. You can then purchase what you want.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

GMs are not a suggestion box. If you think the game needs a buyback/sellback feature, you stuff their actual suggestion box and/or post about it here.

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As people who are in DIRECT contact with your customer base on a daily basis and deal with both the back-end and front-end of your game regularly every single day they most certainly are a great source of suggestions. Should GMs be who /players/ call directly for suggestions? No, absolutely not. Should they be someone Developer's field for suggestions or maybe even someone a player vents at in frustration during a tense situation? Yes.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

To me the biggest issue is it's not very obvious to the user what a GM will and will not help with, as the messages on the help desk are rather vague (though they mention violations of the user agreement), and if they only help with specific things than they need to do a better job spelling that out to people so they don't flood the system with calls that they can't help with.

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Yes, couldn't agree with you more. Better documentation would help out a lot. Maybe in the updated UI they'll update the help desk as well.

We once had a GM uncloak among our group while we were fighting Yilbegan. Not 2 seconds after the GM had appeared, Yilbegan one-shotted the GM with an AoE, and the GM immediately homepointed. Ah, the good old days.

On a serious note, GMs work under a ton of regulations. There are finite things they are allowed to help with, and even the level of help they are allowed to give is severely limited. They are not your mulligan button.

Shall we go over the steps that GM would need to take in order to grant your request? First, the GM would need to make certain you're not being deceptive. They don't know everything about the game, so they'd have to have an internal knowlege database they can use to confirm that twilight and daybreak souls are indeed equal in cost. Then they'd have to go over the log data to make sure you really did earn those souls in the method you claimed to earn them. Then they would have to accept your items, find the item creation code for the items you want, and trade them back. This looks like about 30 minutes of work for the GM to fix your mistake. They'd most likely have to fill out a report for their interaction with the customer after they resolve your issue as well.

Now imagine every player could call up GMs to fix their mistakes just like this one. 16 mistakes would be enough to eat up a GM's entire work day. How many people play this game and how often do they make mistakes? Again, the GMs are not your mulligan button. That's what all those annoying "ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE?!" confirmation boxes are for.

IN response to your thread title's question (what is the point of Game Masters), the point of GMs is to address major glitches (an old example being a spot in Kazham near the Auction House, where you could fall off the wood platform and get stuck -- they would Home Point you away from there) and to address TOS violators, in particular those having a negative effect on other players, such as RMTs that in their heyday caused it to be extremely difficult to purchase certain items from the Auction House which would otherwise have much more reasonable prices, or those players that used POS hacks and the like to monopolize certain Notorious Monsters and their drops, such as (waaaay back in the day) Hoo Mjuu the Torrent and its Monster Signa staff, or Leaping Lizzy and the once exorbitantly expensive Leaping Boots. GMs can and would (and still will, I'm sure) investigate reports of players using cheat tools.

This is the point of Game Masters. They are not the morality police. They are not here to help undo your mistakes. They investigate TOS violations, they hunt down RMTs, and when actual programming glitches occur they can act to minimize the harm you suffer from them.

Dont get me wrong i myself hate the menus in this game and i feel bad for your mistake and yes Bastion really really blows. but having said that, you said it took a long time to farm the points for it but said you spent 7-9 hours? granted that is kinda long but it is by no means as long as it takes to collect money for a relic or whatever for example.

could regain that work in a few days really. and i know bastion sucks and trying to get points aint easy with really short battles. i really dont know what they were thingkin when they made the system it never ever was popular. most i ever seen was like 3 people doing it other than times my LS did it in some down time.

My GM story is pretty minor, but one time i was running thru the dunes heading to gustav to do missions or a party i dont remember. i ran from lathiene thru the dunes and right at the tunnle u zone to gustav, i couldnt get autorun to stop and i ran into the roots of the trees in the water. now somehow i got in there but i couldnt get out of there changed gear, stood up, sat down, tried to run in any direction (i think i could only rotate), logged out ect.

I called a GM and i felt like he came out pretty fast. i told him my story and he said ok one sec i will teleport you out of there. instead of teleporting me 5 feet this way or to himself he teleported me all the way across the zone to the zoneline of lathine and the dunes. I wasnt happy with it and annoyed i had to re run the whole path but i was glad to be out of the roots. I simply thanked the GM and went about gettin back to gustav, and now to this day i am always extra careful around those roots when im in the dunes. It would have been more courteous to just put me at the gustav zoneline if they had to put us at zonelines. i was a few feet from it anyway.

Game Master's don't got time for your crap

http://gaygamer.net/images/CaptN2.jpg

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Originally Posted by Gokku

this x100 , i wouldnt have been agitated with the GMs if they had responded to any of my 1st 5 gm calls with an actual response not and automated message.

the level of disconnection from players to any kind of in game support is horrid, i mean i wasnt even that mad about my mistake it was a ...shit... i wonder if they will be cool... then ...STOP BEING USELESS CUNTS AND ANSWER ME FFS DO YOUR JOB.

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Except for that what you wanted them to do was not a part of their job.

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Originally Posted by Caketime

One time I got stuck in Altepa without a scroll home, and the GMs made me wait for around 4 hours before I had a friend come over to teleport me to safety. Thing is though, as my friend began to cast the teleport my character was tractored on top of SGM Jhanaka, who was apologizing profusely for leaving me stranded. I responded by slapping Jhanaka and walking away. It really bothered me that my friend had taken time out of his evening to help me, only for that to be wasted at the last second. Never leave home without a warp scroll.

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Wow, you're a jerk.

Yes, he should have responded faster, but you don't go slapping people for triyng to help you. That's disgusting. If you were nice, and later asked, perhaps there's an off chance they could have sent your friend back where they were before they came to help you as a friendly guesture. But you weren't nice so you probably threw away any chcance of any good coming out of it. I've dealt with Jhanaka before and he even posts on the forum on occasion (for moderation). He's a nice guy and doesn't deserve that kind of treatment.

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As people who are in DIRECT contact with your customer base on a daily basis and deal with both the back-end and front-end of your game regularly every single day they most certainly are a great source of suggestions.

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No. They are not a great source for suggestions. If you make suggestions, even during a conversation for another reason, they'll tell you the same thing I would tell you: Stuff the suggestion box on the support website.

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Another Example: You buy an important item from a reputation Vendor or an important type of vendor. You accidentally bought the wrong item (easy to do, it's a simple point and click system... a muscle spasm and .. oops) The game gives you an allotted time to sell the item back for a full refund. You can then purchase what you want.

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that's all well and good, but there are two problems here:

1) this isn't a regular NPC shop with a regular NPC shop interface we're talking about
2) As far as I can tell, the situation originally described is not like the situation you describe here. Yes, in WoW you can immediately sell back something you bought without losing anything, but this seems like a case of you didn't actually know what item you needed in the first place and came back later when you realized you got the wrong thing. This is not just accidentally picking the wrong item.

Hello Everyone,

Your concerns have been heard and we will look into both issues you have brought up: The overuse of the message system and the possible new loss of "credits" due to this system.

Please realize our Item Restore Policy limits the items we can help restore and, also, there are limits on the ways you can lose them: Dropped, eaten, thrown. Selling items to NPCs can be helped with, as long as we can get the gil/item you got in exchange.

This type of loss is fairly new and, I must say, yours is the first case we ever received. My GM alerted me to this loss as soon as I got in and he also forwarded the concerns to the SGMs via email. We still need to discuss whether or not we are able to help with these types of losses, but I wanted to let you know it is on our radar.

I do ask, that in the future, you do submit these types of Customer Service concerns through our Email Support or ask for a SGM in game. The Feedback Emails, both positive and negative, are looked into by the Senior GM Team, and we will correct any behavior that is reported. Also, if there is not a Senior on duty, we will reach out to you, and continue to do so, until we have talked about your concern. We also have a Customer Service Survey that sent to your registered email address, so that is another place you can share your displeasure with our current system.

We would all like a bit more power to assist with all of your concerns, rest assured, and we do try our best to help when it is within our policies.

I will close this thread and take your words to heart.

Thank you,

Senior Game Master Jhanaka