Quote:Then comes this one day of doom, after I've been raiding with these guys for a couple months all hell breaks lose. All the officers get bans and the guild site turns into a melodrama from hell. Turns out that one of the newer noob players who got into the guild and drank the cool-aid found out that most of the top players in the guild were using piles of duped Otto's to insta-level as well as being duping fiends. This guy had been playing 50-60 hours a week doing everything he'd been told to do and was constantly grinding desperate to keep up with the guilds expectations and not be 'an anchor' dragging the guild down during raids. The added spice was this guy had been ridden by the officers for not learning fast enough, playing subpar flavor builds, holding himself back, etc... As you might imagine when this guy found out he reported all of them.
Gets better, he reports them says nothing to anyone in the guild about it and nothing happens for a week, then apparently he reports them again and still nothing happens, see the officer's friends in Turbine are running interference for them. So this guy must have had enough because he sends in reports on them and even fedex's a letter to Turbine and boom all the bans come down the goodie too-shoes are embarrassed for a couple weeks and the game moves on.
That's the first I'm hearing about this. This would have been a huge deal in the studio, or at least within the CS team, to receive snail mail re: guild drama. I could see it being put on display, like, "Hey, this player's so mad, they sent us a letter in the mail reporting another player."
Quote:But to my point, I found it fascinating that not only were some high profile players protected by people at Turbine, gms I'd assume, but much more interesting was that apparently those connections were good enough that the officers were told who it was that reported them. But later on I've had a notion that maybe then didn't have friends at Turbine but rather they were people at Turbine.
Any thoughts?
I can say with a high level of confidence that any claims from this player that the guild members either had connections to the studio, or were devs themselves, is bullshit. I have even more confidence that the dev team didn't spend their free time actually playing DDO and getting involved with guild drama.
For some added context, at least at WB it was company policy to identify yourself as an employee when interacting with other players. This largely applied to social media, I would assume to mitigate any sort of bias in posting about and discussing games, although it would be suspect to post something like, "I work for WB Games, and let me tell you why this game fucking sucks." That sure as hell didn't stop me from dunking all over Gotham Knights, which came out shortly after I left the company.
At Turbine, I don't know if there was ever a strict "never reveal your status as an employee" to players policy. At least on the CS side, GMs were forbidden from revealing themselves on their player accounts. You can probably imagine the shit storm that would emerge from that. At WB, our head of HR was a Game of Thrones Conquest whale who one day outed themselves as an employee of the company, hours of gameplay and thousands of dollars later. Ideally they should have either identified themselves as an employee from the outset, or just kept their mouth shut. They ended up resigning from the studio shortly thereafter; I wasn't privy to the exact details, but their casual reveal of their status caused an uproar within the leadership team. I never understood the logic behind any of it.
Quote:No, I still see MAC members running around pretty regularly, it was The Helpers Guild.
That name sounds familiar. I think the kid I banned in the PvP dojo was part of it. I don't remember his character's name but I wouldn't be shocked if this is the same kid claiming everyone in the guild was "friends" with people at Turbine.