Game Masters - Whats the point of them?

[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


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

[Alhanelem]

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


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

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.

[Demon6324236]

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.

[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.

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.

[Jaall]

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.

[Demon6324236]

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.

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.

[Jaall]

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).

[Gokku]

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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.

[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.

[Cabalabob]

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.