Big Changes Incoming!

Right, things are going to change starting the next month! In fact, i'll be going on holidays (was so waiting for some good rest!).
And when i'll be back from holidays... different game!
That's right, i'm being moved to a different game, before you ask no, it's not a promotion, just a change in roles, but a well accepted change.

Just like before i can't tell wich game i'll be moving on, but i can tell you that it's a MMORPG, a genere i prefer to FPS, even though its a PvP centered game...

Competition... why does it always have to be competition? I certainly prefer to see people cooperate than to fight each other but oh well, generally mmorpg communities are less "angry" if you know what i mean,and that's all that matters to me.

The first (real) issues with the game

It was bound to happen sooner or later, the game isn't working properly, or rather, the servers are acting up.
A few days ago the server started booting people out of the game, not just one or two, but tenths of them at the same time. This thing seemed to happen on a regular basis every hour and half or so, but as of today the random disconnects have become more frequent.

We asked the techs to perform tests to see what was wrong but they couldn't find anything, so now we're waiting for the software house wich made the game to check if there are any issues.

My job however is only affected in the way that i have to explain the above to the players that complain... wich means more work on top of what i already do.

I'm not giving up though!
Even when players ask stupid questions i will answer in an appropriate way, even when players keep asking the same question two or three times, i will give them regular answers!

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...

Wow i'm tired!

Yup, as of late i have been unable to get enough sleep.
It probably has nothing to do with the job, but it surely doesn't help in the concentration zone.
I'm waking up awfully early, and no matter what i do i'm just unable to sleep as much as i'd like to.
Going to sleep earlier doesn't help, i only end up waking up even earlier.
Anyway, don't suppose you people are interested in this kind of stuff.
The game is going decently, it seems like the population has stabilized more or less, these graphs i can see don't really make much sense to me, in fact, according to them, we should have something like 40 thousand users and they're increasing daily, though the average daily connected users hasn't changed by one bit... do we lose as many as we gain?

Tounraments! What a joy...

Some time ago, i decided to organize a small tournament, you know, to get people more motivated to play.
I thought it would be a nice idea, i made it with little to no requirements, and everybody was free to sign up to it.
But i soon understood that it wouldn't have been a popular event...
In fact, since there aren't that many players in this game, i set it up for no more than 40 people. Needles to say, we barely hit the number of necessary people.
So i managed to make the teams and make them even (skill-wise by checking the stats of every player who registered).
And the day of the first match came... but only 5 people (out of 10) showed up.
Pretty much the same happened for every other match till the end of the tournament...
Now i'm going to make a new one, slightly different than the first one, i hope this works otherwise no more tournaments.

What the... ?

I was expecting to find some hostilities towards me from the players, i mean, i've played many online games, and i know that it may happen to not agree with some decisions taken by the companies. I've heard people complain, heck, i did complain myself, but i never, ever offended or insulted anybody, afterall people is just doing their job.
Here i've been insulted and offended more than once, of course it doesn't bother me... huh? You're asking why am i saying all of this then?
Just to ask one question, does people find this practice "normal" or am i just dealing with ineducated people?
I wonder...

The things i do!

Apparently the job as a Game Master isn't quite as i thought it would be.
I was expecting to be doing things like customer support, checking for rule breakers and punish them, create events for the people to enjoy, have fun and make them stick to the game.
Lately though, i've become a designer and an advertisement maker.
In the past month, i've been so overflooded with chores that i didn't even get the time to make a new post here.
Short notice for those of you who care: I'm still alive, just dead tired (pun intended).
I really lost count of how many animated gifs, posters, screenshots, artworks i had to create/modify.
Honestly, i don't believe these are chores a Game Master should be doing, i'm sure the designers we have could do a far better job on that than i could ever do, and i'm no good in marketing either, so asking me to promote sales through news isn't exactly the best idea...
The things i do to live on...