What was it actually like to be a Game Master in World of Warcraft? A YouTuber reveals this and tells strange stories.
Game Masters in World of Warcraft are now a bit of a myth. If you think about “back then”, i.e. the Vanilla era, then players supposedly constantly met Game Masters somewhere. It’s rare to see the blue robes these days, and if Reddit or the official forums are to be believed, responses to tickets are often automated or written by AI.
A YouTuber now talks about his everyday life as a game master. He clears up some myths, reveals the details that game masters can see in the game – and also which users were particularly annoying.
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Where does the information come from? The YouTuber “Not Your Friend”, whose real name is Clyde, discusses some incidents from the gaming scene on his YouTube channel. Even if the videos sometimes seem a bit lurid and contain a lot of opinions, in the video “Two years as a Game Master broke me – here’s the whole story” he explains quite matter-of-factly what his everyday work as a Game Master for World of Warcraft looked like – in the years 2011 and 2012.
Tying your shoes as a test to see whether you can help players
The interview itself was a little strange. Because after the usual questions, Clyde was given a task that was quite unusual at the time. The hiring manager wanted Clyde to describe how to tie a shoe, in great detail. At least the YouTuber assumes that this was intended to test how well you are able to describe a problem solution step by step in an understandable way. Something that would be particularly important later in helping players.
Game masters were not free to choose names
The YouTuber also says that game masters were only rarely allowed to choose their display name for work. This explains why many Game Masters often have names that sound a bit like gibberish.
The reasoning behind it at the time, says Clyde, was that it had to be a name that wouldn’t produce any results in a Google search.
That’s how much insight Game Masters had
The skills and insight of game masters was already relatively extensive back then. Basically exactly how you always imagined it would be. With the tools, game masters were able to track pretty much all of the account’s activities.
By the way, Blizzard kept this data for all accounts and all characters for 90 days. Every single transaction, every honor win, every purchase from an NPC, every login into the game and the entire chat log – everything was logged for 90 days.
Therefore, it was usually relatively easy to restore hacked accounts to their original state immediately after a hack. If someone wrote a ticket that their character was suddenly naked and all the gold was gone, it took a bit of effort, but everything was logged and therefore possible.
It was worse with “zombie accounts”. If inactive accounts were hacked and the owner returned many years later to find that someone had messed with their account in the meantime, recovery was almost impossible. Anything outside of the 90 days was difficult to understand.
The most annoying tasks: PvP players
While Clyde reports many tickets that only describe minor problems or sometimes just “I just want to talk to a Game Master,” there were also annoying problems. By far the most annoying thing for him was PvP players insisting that they didn’t receive the correct amount of honor for a kill.
Because then you had to go through all of the honor gains of the character in question and manually calculate how much honor he received and whether this value was correct. In the vast majority of cases the value was correct and the players themselves made an error. A lot of time was spent on this.
Constant visual presentation of performance led to burnout
One thing that particularly bothered him was the constant visual representation of his current performance. Not only were his work tools displayed on the second screen, but it was also permanently marked in color to show how productive he was at the moment. If he processed the required tickets per hour (8 were required at the time), then that was good and was displayed in green or blue. If he managed a lot more, then there was even an epic purple.
However, if you fell below this quota – which could happen with more extensive problems – then the screen would turn white, gray or even red and you would usually get an inquiry from your superior about what was going on. This contributed massively to his burnout and ultimately to the incident that resulted in his termination.
Fired for finding too much stolen gold
The reason why Clyde ultimately quit seems strange, because he took too much stolen gold out of the economy. However, he was not an “unsung hero”, but rather did not do his actual work.
Because the bosses wanted him to process current tickets that were currently in the queue. Through his work, Clyde had discovered how he could reliably locate stolen accounts and the associated illegal gold trade. Since many accounts and therefore many different individual cases were often involved in such incidents, he was able to “account for” quite a few problems that were good for his statistics.
Technically speaking, Clyde was able to deal with a lot of problems per hour – but not the acute ones of the current players that he was actually supposed to deal with. This led to his boss summoning him to the office after two weeks and giving him a hard opinion.
After the last words that he should change his behavior immediately, Clyde then told him that he was quitting with immediate effect – and he left the office.
The whole video is well worth watching and offers some interesting insights into the everyday life of a Game Master. At the same time, please note that these are the experiences of one individual and do not necessarily have to be representative of all Game Masters or other Blizzard branches.
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