An unnamed Blizzard employee who was terminated last year, did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, the 5th of June.
Even though the community of Reddit mostly asked “legal” or “general knowledge” question, it still shed some light on Blizzard’s methods.
This very sympathetic ex-GM is in fact Horde and PvP-fan (Yeah! a Dwarfkiller!). I picked the most interesting questions that got an answer (and a couple of non-sense one, just in case).
Q: Where does the auction house cut go?
A: Good question. No fucking idea.
Q: I assume it goes into the abyss, but I want to believe it goes the the user, with the userID 1.
A: I’m sure someone is making a fucking fortune.
Q: How easy was it to detected botting.
A: It was pretty easy for the most part. 99% of it was visual. You could tell right away if it was a real player or a bot just by their pattern of movements.
Q: Did you ever busted any people using bots or gold sellers? If so how you dealt with them?
A: Oh yeah all the time as a GM. That was the best part, IMO. With bots you would get a report from a player, hop on the game to check it out, and get a Senior to visually confirm that it was a bot and then slam them with the ban hammer. Same thing went for gold sellers. Those were even more fun because gold sellers got their gold from compromising someone’s account, taking all their shit and selling it, then taking the gold and selling it to other players. What we would do is follow the gold trail, through logs, and take back any gold, or items purchased with said gold, and recover it to restore back to the compromised player. Then we would give a nice fat action to the sellers account, which would usually result in them getting the boot.
That’s what I think people who buy WoW gold never understood. The gold didn’t come from Chinese farmers just using bots all day to get gold. No, it came from Chinese hackers who hacked people’s accounts, stripped their character clean, and then sold the gold to you online at a profit. Shitty.
Q: How close do you honestly think WoW is to reaching the end of its popular lifespan and competitive reign as far as MMOs go? It has to happen eventually.. Five years? Ten years? Am I correct in assuming that the next major expansion will be the franchise’s last?
A: I don’t think WoW is going to stop anytime soon. They have a pretty strong thing going still, even with a loss of subscribers. I think it will pan out for at least another 5 years or so, but there’s really no way to tell for sure. WoW is their moneymaker, so they’ll milk it for as long as possible.
Q: Do Blizzard employees have to pay the monthly fee for WoW?
A: Nope.
Q: Tell us what you know about Titan. Come on.
A: Well it’s been a while since I’ve heard anything, but I will say that if it goes how they were explaining it to us during our Show & Tells, then it’s going to be pretty fucking badass, and may even kill, or slightly hinder WoW. It’s that sweet of an idea. Let’s just hope they don’t fuck it up. >_>
Q: Is it WoW in space?
A: Lol no, although that would be funny. I will say that it’s something you haven’t seen from Blizzard before. A different direction in gaming style.
Q: They’ve said that before, though. Give us some love here, son.
A: I caaan’t. Blizzard likes to sue people.
Q: I know some GMs enjoyed adding a bit of personality to their interactions with players (For instance, I had a bit of a conversation with a GM about GnomeBall, a variant on football/soccer using Gnomes as the ball, with nets weaved with Dwarf beards). How much leeway did Blizzard give you on this? Any kind of story that sticks in your head?
A: Yeah, back in the day we were expected to be “professional” and not get too cutsie with our conversations. We had a department called QC (Quality Control) in which their job was to review our conversations and give us grades on them. I won’t even do into how horrible and useless that department was, but thankfully they don’t exist anymore.
Anyway, later on we were able to personalize our greetings and have more fun with players, so the more creative GMs would create personas that they would use with players. It made things way more fun and a better experience I think, but there were definitely some players who didn’t appreciate it lol. I do remember this one GM had some macro where they were a Gnome or something who would emote throwing glitter in your face. That didn’t go over very well when they got an irate player who was not in the mood to have glitter thrown in their virtual face lol.
Q: I recall chatting with the “glitter throwing Gnome” GM! And IIRC, I think I gave them a perfect score everywhere on the little survey that they prompted us to fill in after each intervention. Thanks for the answer, and thanks for doing this AMA!
A: No prob! Also, a thing to note about that scoring system…it’s pretty fucked up on the internal side. For example: Let’s say you really liked your GM, but weren’t TOTALLY satisfied enough to give the experience all 5’s, so instead you give them all 4’s, or maybe some 4’s and 5’s. Well GMs are graded on how many “perfect survey scores” they get, and are rated with a 1 or 0 point system. Basically if you get all 5’s, you get 1 point, and anything else is a 0. Pretty fucked up right? Well if you get too low of an average score per quarter, you have the potential to lose your job. Yeah…and they think this is an improved rating system.
Q: Do you or any other game masters troll other players?
A: We have in the past, but only if we had permission to.
Q: Horde or Alliance?
A: Both…but mostly Horde.
Q: PvP or PvE? (or RP..?)
A: PvP.
Q: FOR THE HORDE.
A: Indeed.
Q: How do you like your eggs in the morning?
A: Scrambled with bacon and tabasco.
Q: Have you ever used your job position to hook a friend up? and did much change for you personally when Activision bought Blizzard, also do Activision exectutives play a large roll on how Blizzard is run or are they pretty much left to there own devices?
A: I assume you mean hook a friend up by providing benefits in game? If so, we never did that as it would cost us our job, but we could definitely give them any of the free stuff we got from Blizz.
Activision has no direct role in any of the decision making done at Blizzard. When we merged it was no big deal. I do remember them giving us all the Guitar Hero Aerosmith kit as a welcome gift lol.
Q: Why were you laid off? 🙁
A: 600+ of us were. Budget cuts (allegedly).