Rothgar wrote on Nov 30^th, 2024 at 11:37pm:



Interesting.

Were you ever asked to search for/monitor cheating? If so, what kinds and how would you do it?

Great thread idea!

1) Why didn't you play ddo? and did you play LOTRO?
2) How many clients would you deal with in a shift?
3) Was there a informal 'bitch-list' of people who were asking for help too often?
4) Other than GMs who at the company could interact with players?
5) What made you come and offer an AMA after being out so many years?

Cheers!

Rothgar wrote on Nov 30^th, 2024 at 11:37pm:


What sort of oversight did you have on your actions as a GM?

EG was there anyone there watching what you did?

Sasha wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 3:55pm:


In true GM fashion I haven’t yet responded to anyone. I plan to go through questions tonight and follow up. I’d hope my delay would verify my claim, but I’ll upload a pic or two later of some of the tchotchkes I amassed over the years.

Head-Meat wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 2:40am:


With DDO, the only times I recall having to really monitor and action cheating were during dupe glitches. I remember a huge instance of this occurring in late 2014. Basically we'd be given a list of anyone who abused the glitch and wipe their inventories of anything flagged by QA/dev as duped. It would be pretty obvious too; stacks of the max amounts of Otto's boxes, Astral shards, etc. I believe we had a script we could run that would identify and wipe the items in question.

After that initial wave, we would occasionally receive player reports via the ticketing system that folks still had duped items in their inventories. At that point we'd manually check inventories to confirm (the reported player would need to be online, and we would effectively see their inventory via the same UI you would, in real time too so we could see things added and removed.) 9 times out for 10 these reports would be bogus but every once in a while we'd catch someone in the act with duped boxes, shards, etc.

I don't remember exactly what was considered a "red flag" item as players would have alts for storing inventories and such. I recall Otto's boxes and Astral Shards were the ones to look out for since they were MTX.

That's what I remember for cheating in DDO. I don't remember anything else that we would be on the lookout for. With LOTRO it was a lot easier to catch cheaters in the act, especially in the PvP areas. LOTRO had its own dupe glitches too that we'd have to investigate and action.

The Grandest of Fellows wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 12:31pm:


1) DDO didn't really interest me. I played a bit of LOTRO but I lost interest around Moria. I would play just enough to understand the basics of each game. With some of the more complex systems (reincarnation in DDO, legendary weapons in LOTRO) I would study wikis and forum posts.

2) It wasn't uncommon to handle over 100 unique in-game tickets in a single 8-hour shift. That doesn't include tickets where I'd have to mass-close tickets/mass-respond to players, like if someone was getting reported by everyone for a flagrant Code of Conduct violation. That happened more in LOTRO than it did in DDO, but DDO wasn't without its moments.

3) Yup. We could leave notes on accounts in our support software as a heads up to other agents. It was totally fine to ask for help as often as needed, but it would become a problem if someone would submit ticket after ticket about the same issue just because they didn't like the answer they were receiving.

4) The community team, I.e. the forum moderators. I imagine there is a heavier social media presence now compared to a decade ago, so by that logic I figure the community team is active there.

5) I've always wanted to do one, to allow a peek behind the curtain. Obviously the longer I waited, the less I'd be able to remember about the job. At this point I'm nearly a decade removed from DDO, and it's been several years since I got out of the games industry altogether. With nearly everyone I personally knew having moved on from SSG, I figured the number of people I'd piss off there by doing this AMA who I'd actually care about pissing off is minimal.

noamineo wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 2:07pm:


Internally, logs were kept, so if need be we could see what admin commands were ran and when. I only remember two occurrence where this needed to be done. One time was because a LOTRO player was claiming I kicked them out of instance when I didn't; our logs verified as much. The other time was because another GM went and did a bunch of stupid shit that they shouldn't have. I won't go into detail there out of respect for the individual, but for them it was a wake up call that someone is always watching.

Of course, if I or another GM pissed off a player, it would be posted on the forums. I had my share of posts from players grateful for my help, and posts from players wanting my blood. Forum call outs would usually follow up with my superiors saying either "keep up the good work" or "we need to talk."

Rothgar wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 7:21pm:


Was it possible to get a perm ban removed? Cause I remember some people and they claimed they offered money.

Did Turbine - or was it SSG already? - prolonged dupalooza because lots of players came back and bought extra bank and bags and all that shit?

Also
Sasha wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 3:55pm:

Rothgar wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 7:25pm:



There was a massive bug with the reincarnation system that would delete items, sometimes the entire cache. You'd know about it pretty much right away when you went to grab your twink gear. This bug was especially egregious as it hit at a time when the things being erased could sometimes take years to farm.

If I recall correctly at first you needed a list, then they dropped it to just 3 items, then I think just one. Do you recall anything from this time?

I would really love to understand more about the internal politics that decided a game-breaking bug should only get one or two things back.



Of course since we're confessing things I will freely admit I abused this bug to get free shit.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 1:45pm:


I really appreciate your candor here. I always got the impression the GMs gave zero fucks about players, its nice to know it was poor management tying your hands.


Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 1:45pm:


This actually raises up another question.

There's a specific quest called "The Coalescence Chamber" that is very long and EXTREEEEEEMMMMEly tedious. But its worth a good amount of XP and if you have the right group willing to bullshit and laugh the whole way through, its not a bad way to kill an hour.

Said quest had a very nasty tendency to fuck up/bug out on or near the final battle. This as you can imagine was frustrating as fuck.

Back in the days around your tenure(I think this was circa 2014/2015?) we had this happen. Got no reply at eventually gave up. I stayed online and a GM contacted me, agreed to manually complete the quest if I could hop in the entrance. I did and got it and my shroud flagging done.

A few months later the same thing happened to a friend of mine. Except for him it happened during east coast business hours(so when the most GMs were online and working) and he was still online the whole time... and the GM told him "tough shit."

This event would later leave my friend to quite the game.

Can you offer any insights into why we had such difference experiences with the exact same issue?


Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 1:45pm:


Please elaborate on this. The GMs typical refuses to fix bugged raids pissed off just... so many people. 12 at a time at least.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 1:45pm:


It is and it isn't. It is in the sense they've fixed the TR bug and it isn't in the sense there is maybe 1 GM online for the whole game only during east coast business hours who's reply is usually some variation of "fuck you for playing this game, asshole". So, ya know. The game does have marginally fewer bugs.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 1:45pm:


That's what this forum's all about   

Quote:


Ah, "Coal Chamber" as I lovingly called it. As I recall, from a GM's viewpoint, that was one of the easier tickets to handle. As you alluded to, whenever I would load into the quest on my admin character (+Rothgar, but with the single plus sign) I would find players stuck in the same spot. All I did was run a command to complete the quest, ensured the chests spawned, and ran another command to unlock them if needed.

The way you worded your experience - "agreed to manually complete the quest if I could hop in the entrance" - sounds to me like Caergoth helped you out. I took notes from him, and would offer the same degree of help to anyone who wanted it. Caergoth preferred to work the late shift Eastern time, so if your ticket was submitted at night chances are he would be answering it.

To answer your question about differing experiences, there's a variety of reasons. Around the timeframe you mentioned, the CS leadership team had this brilliant idea to consolidate the entire team into a single unit. Prior to this, you had In-Game Support (aka GMs, like myself) Account Support (whom you would call or email for billing/subscription issues) and Technical Support (whom you would email if your game client was crashing.) By then-management deciding to combine everything, not only was I forced to handle inbound calls (more on that later, if you're curious) but the CS folks who typically worked Account Support were now effectively GMs as well. As you can guess, expertise was not shared.

To elaborate, Account Support and Tech Support tickets could be resolved to the players' satisfaction probably 95% of the time. Conversely, In-Game Support tickets had a much lower rate of success, meaning more often than not GMs were either bound by internal policies, or literally had limited-to-no power to do what was being asked of them. An Account Support rep who might have been used to solving problems 95% of the time would be thrown off by how limited their support was as a GM. Meanwhile, me whose experience went in reverse order was flummoxed when I realized how much I could do to help on the Account Support side versus the In-Game side.

Some GMs were by-the-book and would say "no" to almost everything. Others, like Caergoth, would go out of their way to help folks even if it wasn't technically within his "jurisdiction." Myself, I was admittedly somewhere in the middle. Depending on the day, my mood, number of backlogged tickets, etc. I could either go above and beyond, or do the bare minimum. As I mentioned earlier, more often than not I failed to see things from your perspective, so your time and effort in the game was at times lost on me. At the end of the day, I would definitely help you finish "Coal Chamber" and ensure you got your loot, but I might not have asked you to return to the quest had I not reached your ticket in time and had you exited for something else. I hope that makes sense.

Other GMs simply couldn't be pulled away from whatever they were doing that wasn't actually work. When the PC version of GTA 5 came out, half the team decided playing that was more important than doing the jobs they were being paid to do, meaning people like me who gave half a shit picked up the slack. Of course, I wasn't totally immune to this thought process; I absolutely played video games during my shift, but I was much better about managing my tasks and priorities (I also would only play single-player games that I could easily pause and return to.) Ergo, if someone in DDO needed help and time was a factor, there was a high probability of a GM just letting their ticket sit and fester, and then giving a "tough shit" response when they finally answered it.

Any one of these could be why your friend had a much more negative experience with player support versus your own. I will follow up on your other note later re: stuck raids!

Standing Stone Games wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 4:09pm:


When you replied to me in the spammer forum, I immediately wondered if this was Jerry’s account 

Seriously though, I know Jerry isn’t everyone’s favorite here but I have nothing bad to say about him. I got on with him great when I worked with him. Even after WB and SSG split, because our studios were in the same building, Jerry and I would catch up in the hall or outside during smoke breaks, talking about PS4 games and shit. I haven’t seen nor spoken with him in years, so I hope he’s doing well.