To those still playing and searching for exploits, there's something to be learned here about the limitations of GMs relating to their ability to access your inventory when you are vs when you are not online.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 4:08pm:


Certainly plausible. I honestly can't remember a single GM's name. Even the guy who decided giving me a 48 hour ban was a better solution than taking 10 seconds to fix my problem. But fuck that guy.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 4:08pm:



Oooooh. Yeah that's gonna fuck everyone up. Just suddenly requiring everyone to triple their skill set will breed mass contention. This also seems to coincide with when DDO support transitioned from "A crapshoot, but you might get lucky" to utter and complete shit.


Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 4:08pm:



Did you guys work from home or go to an office? This was definitely pre-pandemic. Obviously you had to have a workstation capable of running DDO.

I'm also really curious what the GMs interface looks like. Do you have any idea where your character physically "Was" in the game?



Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 6:41pm:


How big of a deal was this, really? Like did they take it really seriously?

I purchased gold several times, was never caught. Then the meta shifted and there was no more incentive. I have millions of plat but nothing at all to spend it on. I'm curious if gold buyers dropped off during your tenure, since I can't remember exactly when the game turned plat into a vague nuisance.

Strake wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 6:12pm:

Sasha wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 4:00pm:

1) I wasn't too familiar with Lam (and it's LOTRO counterpart, Bullroarer.) It required a separate game client that was configured specifically to access the public test world. Since GMs didn't provide support on these worlds, it wasn't a requirement for us to have it installed; I also couldn't have been assed to set it up and reconfigure every time there was an update, but that's not to say I blew it off completely. Before a major release, I'd configure and fire up Lam to explore the new regions being added, just to have some familiarity with what you were going to experience.

As far as I remember, Lam was mostly utilized by the QA teams, along with players who had access to it. Internally there was at least 1 private test world that was used by QA and dev, while Lam was the larger playground where new (and fixed) things could be tested against a larger player population. Of course, once it all hit production, things would buckle under the size of the general player population.

2. I alluded to it in earlier posts, but during my first couple of years at Turbine, cross-team communication was both almost nonexistent and for some reason, frowned upon. Over time, things improved, partially because I and other GMs began to befriend folks on the QA team. Just having pals in QA helped us understand larger issues, what caused them, and if fixes were in the pipeline. The longer I worked there, the more familiar I became with pretty much everyone at the studio; case in point, when the then-new raid I mentioned broke during release day, I was comfortable enough to approach the dev team directly to ask for help. Shifts in CS management also helped; as "the old guard" filtered out, those who moved up from the frontlines to leadership knew first-hand how important cross-team communication was, and actively promoted it. I'd hope this still exists within SSG to this day.

3. We kept notes everywhere on everything; in our in-house GM ticketing software, our Microsoft-owned CRM for Account/Tech Support tickets, and emails. If you were banned for exploiting a bug, you had a note on your account. If you had a history of being a shit-stain to player support, you'd have a "heads up, this guy sucks" note. If you items reimbursed, gold provided, etc. you'd have notes left for each instance. Having these notes on your account wasn't necessarily a bad thing; it helped give other GMs and support reps a heads up about what to expect when answering your ticket.

Notes were especially helpful for Code of Conduct violations. If you had just gotten off a 7-day ban for dropping hate speech in general chat, came back online and the first thing you did was drop more hate speech, then we'd reference the note left on your account and give you a fresh 30-day ban. Worth mentioning the GM ticket software auto-generated a note for every ban, but it was still a GM's requirement to actually fill out a reason why the ban was being applied.

noamineo wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 7:13pm:


Yup, we worked in the Turbine (now SSG) studio in Boston. I don't remember specifics about our workstations and builds, but the specs were good; new games at the time could be run on the highest settings with few issues. From the time I started until late 2014, all of CS sat in these shitty little half-cubicles we called "veal pens." In late 2014, we moved across the office to the old finance area, and were all upgraded to much larger desks (seriously, the extra room was glorious.) In late 2016 we were moved to the middle of the office in the old Asheron's Call (RIP) dev pit, because SSG was being set up and they were taking over that part of the studio.

We could definitely work from home if necessary, like if weather in the area was bad in the winter. Obviously that entailed having a rig at home that could run DDO at min-spec. I have no idea what it's like today; if it's not all outsourced support now, then it has to be some degree of hybrid work.

Quote:


Oh yeah, our admin characters were just like regular player characters. We had the same UIs as you, and we could see our characters in the world, in your quest, etc. We were "cloaked," effectively ghosts so you couldn't see us, but we could run a command to go visible. Everything was done in the chat window, and more often than not did I type "adminvis" without the "/" into general chat for the world to see.

CosmicCharlie wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 11:25pm:


Sure could! Oh boy, story time.

During my tenure, we hired a new GM. Standard practice at the time was to start new hires on Code of Conduct tickets, namely harassment reports. In hindsight, those required more care and expertise than we assumed. New hires, realizing they were effectively being handed the "ban hammer" on day 1, would go on power trips. Case in point, this new hire banned literally every player that was reported, regardless of the content being reported. Did you say "hi" to someone, and they reported you? You probably got banned by this kid.

We had a talk with him shortly after he started on the job, and he cooled off a bit. However, one day, this new GM bans a player on Argo for a non-violation; an accidental ban, if you will. Turns out, this player was a fucking psychopath. They started creating character after character, posting LFMs along the lines of, "WB and DDO want me to kill myself." I believe his main that we accidentally was called "Argoshaper." This dude went so far off the deep end that I had to work with one of the engineers (super nice dude, always willing to help us) to IP ban them. Some-fucking-how, Argoshaper kept evading the bans; he kept creating alts, and he kept posting LFMs and posting in general chat about how we were driving him to suicide. At one point, the engineer (temporarily) IP banned an entire country in Europe just to nuke this kid from orbit, and yet he STILL found a way around it!

I just did a search after I typed all of that out, and sure enough his name was indeed "Argoshaper" and he was posting stuff on Steam's forums as late as 2018, well after I stopped working on DDO. Holy shit. Is he still around??

https://steamcommunity.com/app/206480/discussions/0/1734333281939683473/?ctp=3

At one point I tried to reason with this kid. I apologized on behalf of the GM that banned him, offered him a bunch of free stuff (Turbine Points, a Starter Pack, etc.) and yet he still continued on with his maniacal behavior.

So that's story number one. Story number two probably isn't as good.

As you probably know, when you get banned, you have the ability to appeal it. In my later years as a GM, I was assigned to respond to ban appeals. As with Argoshaper, I would review the initial report, and chat logs, and determine if the ban was warranted. 9 times out of 10, it was (Argoshaper was a rare outlier that went haywire fast.)

One night, I pull a ban appeal that was along the lines of, "Fuck you, fuck Turbine, fuck WB, kill yourselves." The name they put in the ticket was similar to "Fuckyour Mother" and their contact email address they listed was akin to fuckyou@fuckyou.com. Real original. What Albert Einstein here failed to realize is, his IP was logged in our CRM. I decided to review bans placed around the time this appeal came in (typically, appeals were sent as soon as the ban was placed. Players wasted no time.) I found one ban for what looked like routine harassment, so in our in-game ticket platform I looked up the logged IP address; sure enough, it matched the IP address logged in the CRM. I then effectively performed a reverse account lookup using that IP to find the email address associated with that banned account.

When I responded to the appeal, not only did I increase the ban to 14 days for abusing Turbine staff, but I also sent it to fuckyou@fuckyou.com and copied the email address on the account. That was a risky move, but I was 99% confident I had the right person. My intent was to ensure my response was going to the player, despite their attempt to avoid conflict. Within about 10 minutes the ban appeal was reopened by the player, coming from the CC'd email address, now under the name "John Smith" (i.e. their real name.) The response was something like, "I am boycotting DDO and all Turbine products." Okay bud, good luck with that, see you in 2 weeks.

As an aside, I want to show some of my own gratitude towards the Vault. When I was a GM, I rarely received any feedback from my bosses about my job, unless I royally fucked something up. I always maintained near-perfect scores on my quality metrics, with points taken off usually for not "going above and beyond" (like, how the hell could I with all of these dumb policies in place? When I started adopting Caergoth's "IDGAF" attitude, suddenly I started receiving points in this section.)

I would frequent both the Turbine DDO forums, and the Vault. In fact, Turbine IT tried to block the Vault on our network. We had this hulking IT guy from Russia that came over to my desk one morning, asking me in broken English why I was trying to access this website. I told him it was necessary for my job; he didn't buy it, but later that day a bunch of people in QA complained that they too couldn't get to the Vault. The block was ultimately lifted.

As a GM, it was not uncommon to receive hate on both the forums and social media. Google searching "+Rothgar+" would usually bring up results about how I didn't help someone, gave a lazy response, etc. That was sometimes true, but there were also times where I'd actually either try to help, or feel bad about not being able to due to either some bullshit internal policy or a system limitation that was beyond my powers. Those would be disappointing to read, but I'd resist the urge to create a forum account and defend my actions; instead, I tried to take away what I could potentially do better as a GM. (Fun fact, we had a GM who actually did confront a player in an in-game ticket about a forum post about them, totally out of the blue. It was something along the lines of, "I guess you can update your forum post about me and tell everyone what I a great job I did." That didn't go over well with anyone.)

Posts like this one - https://www.ddovault.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1382917828/4 - were always nice to read. It genuinely made me feel good knowing I was doing something right by your standards. I didn't completely hate my job whenever I'd stumble across positive player feedback. As I got more seasoned, I tried to better my "soft skills" (i.e. being more polite and sympathetic when saying I wasn't able to help due to some reason beyond my control) and improve my "meeting you halfway" skills (i.e. making it clear I couldn't directly assist, but find some way to compensate you for your time and effort.) Sure, the pay wasn't fantastic, and the hours were brutal, but I wanted to do the best I could with what I had.

Of course, I couldn't please everybody. I'd be crazy to think I could. As I've mentioned a few times here, I should have spent more time looking at things from your perspective. Should I ever find myself working in a similar field in the future, I'll do better to keep that approach in mind.

Strake wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2024 at 2:48am:


Ah, I remember that number now, thank you! I never knew why it was that specifically, but it makes perfect sense now.

We could snoop on anyone really. You’d just have to be online, and I’d have to remember your character’s name. For instance if I randomly ran /teleport and you were online, then I could follow you around with my ghost cloak on. LOTRO had a /follow command, but I don’t recall DDO having one.

Three questions :

1. Could you let +Meljonar+ know they were always fucking useless?

2. Could you please also let +Cygnus+ know that he was amazing at his job?

3. Was it obvious to other GM's that some of your peers were so bad, players knew their best bet was to restart their client and log a new ticket to fish for a different GM?

Finally, I remember you. I would like to thank you.  You and Cygnus were both so much better than the rest of the GM team.   But also, fuck you both for your competence and feeding my addiction.

Gunga wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2024 at 7:29am:


PM Epoch.

(Did I do it right?)

Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 10:33pm:


That sounds like the typical attention to detail we've all come to expect from the SSG devs. They might be nice people but god fucking damnit does anyone understand how to build support-ability into a product?

This is ultimately just a disconnect between engineers and humanity, not specific to Turdbine really.


Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 10:37pm:


And apparently no oversight to see if you were just playign GTAV all day? I laugh but then I remember how much time I spent playing minecraft at work yesterday...



Rothgar wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2024 at 10:37pm:


So you didn't have some kinda hidden "GM island" to hang out on? Ah well.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2024 at 2:29am:


Yeah LOTRO probably still has gold as a valid currency. I miss when DDO had a real economy.


Rothgar wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2024 at 2:29am:


Its not hard to look up. Right now you can buy 5,000 gold for about 6 dollars. But I can understand not caring.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2024 at 2:29am:


Which of course you can buy for RTM from SSG. But that's neither here nor there. Also there's nothing to spend it on. Seriously, this game has NO economy anymore.

Flav wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2024 at 11:49am:


I guess an advantage (or disadvantage) to having such a small GM team was that if you submitted in-game tickets frequently, then there was a high probability that I would answer them. I would at least hope you'd see my name pop up in the chat window and think, "Okay good maybe something will actually get done," instead of, "Oh no, not you again" (which is literally what a player said to one of the GMs one night, after which they promptly logged off. I still think about that and laugh.)

I am sorry if you had to wait for me, though. Over the years, I tried to get better about prioritizing tickets regardless of how long they were in the queue. If there was an hour-old "I lost my items" ticket but a five-minute old "My quest just bugged out, there's a Kobold stuck in the wall" report, I'd take care of the time-sensitive issue first. I would feel some disappointing in hearing, "We already left the quest" knowing I could have reached you sooner.