I suspect it is likely to student's studying IT/games development or IT graduates.  It is possible they outsource it to a third party too, but given the stability of the GM names, I think this is less likely.
Some of the seniors might be employees.

Keep an eye on their website for vacancies.
http://www.turbine.com/careers
No GM's at present.

Check out the perks:

The Perks!

Competitive compensation packages and benefits including a 401K plan with a generous company match
Flexible work environment
Private advanced screenings of WB movies
Free video games and movies
Game room
Free Fruit Tuesdays & Bagel Fridays
Chair Massages
Weekly dry cleaning pick up and delivery service
Local Food Trucks
Manicures & Pedicures
Regular brown bag learning sessions for all employees on a variety of game and industry related topics

They don't mention Pacman LARP - that has to be a deal closer?

noamineo wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 1:22am:

Perhaps, but some of the senior GM's are quite knowledgeable and have always been the same.  If they were just accounts, you would expect the personalities to change over time.  I think the seniors have been in DDO for many years.

I do wonder whether being a DDO player would be viewed as a positive or negative for the GM role.  yes you know the game, but it also means you have an account and friends and may be more susceptible to abusing your powers.

noamineo wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 1:22am:


Come now - dealing with Vaulties for work would be great.   
It's the Uska, Thrush and Hendrik's that would be intolerable.

For the most part, working in the games industry is about passion more than megabucks.  I think if you want to work in the industry, you have to love what you do, and hope you find a similar minded bunch of people to work with and make it fun.

Yobai wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:27am:


Well he spreads his BS on the forums like a yeast infection.

Hey there!
I know some of the crazies are going to froth at the mouth that I'm popping up here and fling a lot of crap at me for having the temerity to do so. That's cool. Knock yourself out.

Yesterday I interviewed a candidate for a role I'm trying to fill at the studio I work at out here in CA. He recognized me from Turbine, so we got to chatting about how things had been going. It did make me wonder for a bit (morbid curiosity, I guess?), so I checked in. Don't expect me around much.

I do enjoy giving out factual information where possible, though. I left Turbine voluntarily a year ago, so I was never under any legal agreements not to discuss this kind of thing after I left.

I was Game Master "Etymologist" and Game Master "Phoenix" from 2010 to late 2011.
A GM's handle/handles are specific to him or her. They're not shared between multiple people, and are retired when that GM leaves.

First job out of college (I have a degree in political science).
I applied through Turbine's website for both an open QA and customer service positions. My main credentials were experience with DDO- fortunately, at the time, DDO had just went free to play, and they were looking for people who knew DDO.

Also fortunately for me, I never heard back about the QA job, but they nabbed me for customer service.
(QA at Turbine is grueling, miserable, and starts at about $10/hour. Customer Service started at $16.50, and was fairly pleasant, once you got past needing to talk to angry people all day.)

So, about GM's:
Back in my day, Customer Service was split between Account Support (phones and e-mail), In-Game Support (GM's), and Technical Support (e-mail only, only tech support questions.).

All English-speaking customer service was in-house. We were next to the LotRO and DDO dev pits. Sandwiched between them and Quality Assurance.

For the most part, everyone in Turbine's customer service is a gamer geek, but not a fan of Turbine's games. When you work with a game day in and day out, it's hard to play it as a hobby.

I have pretty much every detail of every quest in Lord of the Rings Online memorized (except from the latter few expansions), and I have utterly no interest in playing the game.

Which brings me to another thing- GM's (and customer service in general) aren't specific to one game. They support all of Turbine's games, plus some other Warner Bros. projects.

When I was a GM, I wasn't a GM just for DDO. I was a GM for DDO and LotRO, and technically Asheron's Call as well. In practice, Asheron's Call was neglected, except by +Sparker. (+Sparker later became a designer on Asheron's Call, until the Asheron's Call team was laid off early last year. He got a really shitty deal from WB because he moved into his dream job after 10 years in CS.)

Yes, GM's are required to start every conversation with a boilerplate introduction, and end it with "Is there anything else I can help you with today?".
They're not saying that to piss you off. They're saying it because they get dinged on ticket reviews if they don't.

Another thing to keep in mind:
The attitude you take into a talk with a GM determines the level of service you receive. They're real people, and it feels pretty bad to be in their shoes when they talk to a thousand people a day, and all of those people are verbally shitting all over them.

This is basically universal to customer service anywhere.
When you're rude to a CS rep, they want to stop talking with you. That means they stick to the letter of their department's policy in order to get rid of you as fast as possible.

When you're polite and nice to them, they'll help you work through any problem, give you the benefit of the doubt, and chat amicably with you for as long as necessary until they fix your issue.

Nowadays, I hear that CS at Turbine is one shared pool- it's same people doing account support and in-game support. Staffing and demand are too low to have separate phone and chat support.

Being a Game Master was a pretty cool way to get into the industry. It gave me a better look at what can/will go wrong than Quality Assurance ever could have. (They do repetitive focus testing on specific things- GM's see every way everything in the live games actually broke.)

It also worked well as a bridge into game design. I started out by discussing ways things were breaking with developers, and from there (over games of Magic), started giving Genasi (old DDO dev, works on Skylanders @studio Vicarious Visions now) feedback on loot he was making for various updates. That turned into full out lists for review, plus regular discussions with other system designers on various topics of gameplay.
They picked me up onto the design team while ramping up for Menace of the Underdark. -I did all the game's loot from Menace of the Underdark through Epic Gianthold (after that itemization work was split between multiple people. Since then it's been worked on by at least four different developers.), plus Grandmaster of Flowers.

Last things I worked on before leaving at the end of January of last year were Divine Crusader, and a whole lot of enhancement trees.

In retrospect, I learned a few life lessons.
1: Negotiate on salary, even if it's your dream job. After leaving, I was able to really discover how much they were ripping me off. (The job offer I left for was literally double.)

2: I should have dropped hints that I was thinking about leaving, and stayed a few weeks longer... Huge layoffs hit about three weeks after I left. If I had stayed and made sure I was on the list to be cut, I could have left with a severance package (though, that would have also been accompanied by an agreement specifying I couldn't do things like come visit and chat here, so oh well.)
There wasn't really any way I could have seen that coming, though, aside from the crazy antics management had been doing, and their wildly unrealistic expectations for Infinite Crisis.
That didn't work out well. I have friends who worked on Infinite Crisis who are still looking for work after the last round of Turbine layoffs. =(

Well, that's off topic.
I hope this bit of insight into game customer service helps.
They're cool people. Treat them nicely, and they'll bend (virtual) heaven and earth for you. Or be a dick and get "Is there anything else I can help you with today?" followed by the ticket being closed moments after.

Cya,
-Solar/Etymologist/Phoenix/Plume du Soleil

Oh. And the best part of being a GM was helping out your guildies when they put in tickets, but them having absolutely no idea you were in their guild.
A few times I left them off with "Tell X I said hi." (where X was another random guildie online), and then listened in on their chat channel as they freaked out and discussed why I knew their name.

Seriously, fun stuff. No abuse of power, though. Everything GM's do is logged and reviewed.

*Froths*

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. It's nice to have the insider perspective.

Even if it is coming from The Ghostbane himself.

Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Hey Solar,
Welcome back.
Thanks for sharing that inside info - very insightful.


SolarDawning wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:49am:

Interesting to know and I suspected as much.

SolarDawning wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:49am:

I'm not an expert on US wages, but those rates sound appalling.
Using McDonald's as a benchmark (for unskilled labor) - what do they pay in the US?

SolarDawning wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:49am:

Some interesting inside info.  Thanks.

SolarDawning wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:49am:

I agree with the sentiments about courtesy towards CS reps.
It's supposed to be common sense, but it isn't very common unfortunately.

I have provided positive endorsements for good GM services as well as positive CS experiences.  I find it confounding that there is no easy way to submit feedback on poor customer service.

SolarDawning wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:49am:


My primary and very vocal beef with Turdbine CS procedures is the auto closing of tickets.  This is the one thing that most pisses off players and alienates potential customers.
I realize that there is a need for auto-closing tickets for frivolous tickets and those that cannot be GM assisted, but the auto-closing is really, really overused.  If people take the time to submit a ticket, I guess they just want to be heard.  If handled well, the situation may not be resolved but you may not induce negative sentiments towards your employer.

Most Support centres have control and reporting software to stop the abuse of these functions, as well as random audits, stats review, etc.

From what you said above, it appears that there is GM oversight at Turdbine, so I can only infer that the prolific auto-closing of tickets is an accepted procedure within the orgn?

I would appreciate your thoughts and insights into the auto-closing of tickets.
Thks

lostthenloved wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 5:08am:


I know, being courteous doesn't guarantee you will get service or resolution.  I get auto-closes all the time.

Being discourteous will however ensure you minimise your chances of resolution.
I play the odds and no matter how angry, I try to keep calm in my tickets and comms.

Revaulting wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 3:17am:


A GM's "Hi Welcome!" ?

imho problém is still the same - there are no general guidelines what ingame gms are able, what sort of problems are they supposed to solve and which ones are supposed to be passed to phone CS or just bug reported.

lot of tickets are then closed just as gms are imho unable or not intended to solve those (well, still could pass at least simple message, that they cant and what procedure u should také then)

if there is any kind of info about gms possibilities we d have much less outrage about gm quality.

I personally had probly good luck on fine ones, like Krymux, also trying to keep bit of selfcontrol when dealing with person i never met before (but it seems being polite is uncool these days), and recently aside one screwed LR (no tomes applied) i had no isue worth dealing w GM instead of reset n restart.

Hmm..  Chair messages.  Could be great if they include happy endings.  However, it could be really, really bad if administered by Tolero.  I just ruined it for myself...  even the temptation of fruits and bagels are not enough to erase it.

humerous, Ive only had good results from +Cygnus+

he is one of the guys that I appreciate getting on the horn.

sorry he was a dick for you

SolarDawning wrote on Jan 16^th, 2015 at 2:49am:


Best thing you did was leave that cesspool. Severance would have been nice, but you might not have had your current position.