The work behind the scenes.

Today i'll talk a bit about what is the role of a GM (at least here where i'm working).
I already talked about this in some of my previous posts, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.

First of all we GMs are not players with powers. I'm saying this because often people thinks that we have been chosen among regular players for our skills. While that may be true for some unofficial servers of some games, it is not so when you work for a company.

Being a Game Master is an actual job, with work shifts, rules to follow, duties and so on.

That being said, i'll briefly explain what the job is about.

A Game Master is the game police officer, he makes the rules of the game (inregards to the company policies) and makes sure that people respects them. But this is not all, the Game Master also has the role to entertain the community, organizing events (and believe me, while some are extremely simple and fast to set up, others can be a real pain, like the tournaments) and such.

This is what the people actually gets to see, of course all of this is only a tiny part of the job, there's alot more to be done behind the scenes, and people doesn't get to see it.

A Game Master is in charge of performing game tests, whenever there is a maintenance, he/she's the one who performs all the checks on the game, testing all of the game functions and the various tools used to run the game one by one. A Game Master also tests the patches to the game before they're released, in an attempt to find and signal major bugs to the developers.

Another one of our duties is to publish all the releavant news about the game (at least in this company). They are all written by us, everything from maintenance news to promotions, from patch notes to event announcements. This means that also the pictures and screenshots you see there are taken and edited by us.

The company i work for gets income by selling in game content, like weapons, armors, consummables, costumes and so on. Guess what? No, we don't plan the sales, there's people who stuided for that. But we are the ones who set the descriptions for those items (screenshots and icons are all taken and made by us). Every tiny bit of advertisement about the stuff we sell for the game is made by us, text and images, and you can imagine that's a freaking lot of work.

All of that while also taking care of the customers' support! That's right! Whenever you have an issue and ask for help on the website, who do you think answers to your questions? Right, that's us. Of course we only take care of questions related to the game and it's rules, but it's still quite a bit of stuff.

Now, usually all of this work is handled by a team of people, meaning that the workload is shared among several people, and well, if the workload is shared there isn't much stress at all.

Sadly my team is made up of only myself...