dont worry, im here

Having GMs physically present and visible in the zones, wandering around hoping they stumble across someone breaking the rules is extremely old fasioned. You might as well ask why real life police don't stop wasting time with 999 calls and investigations into criminal activity and spend more time wandering the streets hoping to see someone climbing in a window.

These days developers have much better tools to monitor activity in games - they can track where everyone is all the time, and write scripts to identify things like people who are running exactly the same pattern over and over and are therefore likely to be bots. Whether they choose to act on that is an entirely different discussion (as is whether they ban individual bots as they spot them and risk the people behind them figuring out what gave it away and modifying all their others to be harder to catch or wait until they've found as many as possible and ban them all together).

But at this point having GMs standing around making a show of monitoring the game would be nothing but a PR activity and the staff doing it would either waste more time answering a million stupid questions and requests for gold and items or risk being accused of being AFK and not actually doing anything. (That's what happens when staff show up in other games, I can't imagine ESO would be any different.)

We can't have too much authority running around right now that authority seems to think opposing opinions are hate speech. You could get punished simply for speaking your reasonably opposing opinion.

NordSwordnBoard wrote: »

We can't tell ZOS what to do, but we can tell them what we want.

Last forum post about Game Masters in the game I could find: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/375863/today-i-talked-to-a-game-master-they-are-real/p1 (October 2017)

I was surprised to see the images and video of one on PS4. As many have said before and in the linked thread, GMs have a positive impact on player morale. Apart from eliminating bot farmers, players could demonstrate bugs for the GMs, and toxic zone behavior could be reduced.

I'm not suggesting developer level people play GMs instead of working on the game. I'm wondering if the same employees who moderate the forums could be assigned to do some Game Master work on a regular basis in the game. (On all platforms) They are similar roles, after all.

As much has having gms in game would be nice, it's in no way cost effective. Nor is it as easy as you would think, I use to be a gm for blade and soul, soon and wildstar. Most of my IN GAME time was free, I did not get paid for it. I did it because I liked being interactive with the community. Sadly the community of mmos has degraded as if late to a level where I'm more likely to be flamed and insulted for things out of my control, instead of people simply talking like adults. Anyone who has worked customer service will know what I mean by it.

Ive never seen one on PC EU. Has anyone?

Give me the power of the game master and Stuga will be banned.

From time to time lolol like in 2015

Ooh Ooh pick me!!....PICK ME!!!

lol I’ll kick back n be a GM
GIMME an Uncle Sheo polymorph n watch me deal with ZC Trolls. Heheh

I miss them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bll9maEJtDA

Then again watching the language and toxicity of the community in zone chats could be something a person actually being in-game (aka GM) could tackle better than someone scanning through reported bits of text chat protocols.

That's a double-edged sword however. If GMs start being more present in-game and not just look at bugs or exploits but also watch the tone in zone chats, you would expect them to be present on a regular basis. Not just once in a while. This would be effort and while I don't know about other servers, usually in the zones I lurk around the chats in ESO tend to be more civil than what I see in other games. That's one of the reasons I like ESO that much. So being more present seems not to be a necessity. I'd prefer to put some more effort into fixing bugs and quality control/testing instead of watching something that's running ok.

So my stand is not pro or against more GMs in ESO. I don't mind more presence of ZOS representatives in-game. Tho I'd consider it more valuable to increase effort in other parts of the team (eliminating bugs and testing) from my point of view.

However... What I absolutely hope is that as many ZOS employees as possible actually do play their game on as many different platforms and servers under real-world conditions as possible on a regular basis (maybe a few hours per week during work time). Some things make a huge difference if you experience it first-hand on live servers instead of reading forum threads or bug reports. That does not have to be in the role of GMs. Just play the game, take part in what pays your bills to have a better understanding about what goes on and what actually upsets players or makes them enjoy the game.

NordSwordnBoard wrote: »

We can't tell ZOS what to do, but we can tell them what we want.

Last forum post about Game Masters in the game I could find: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/375863/today-i-talked-to-a-game-master-they-are-real/p1 (October 2017)

I was surprised to see the images and video of one on PS4. As many have said before and in the linked thread, GMs have a positive impact on player morale. Apart from eliminating bot farmers, players could demonstrate bugs for the GMs, and toxic zone behavior could be reduced.

I'm not suggesting developer level people play GMs instead of working on the game. I'm wondering if the same employees who moderate the forums could be assigned to do some Game Master work on a regular basis in the game. (On all platforms) They are similar roles, after all.

Forum Moderation does not equal the skills required to be a game master.
It's actually a difficult job requiring a certain amount of technical skill and training. (not to say forum moderation isn't its own form of difficult.. just that it's not a comparable task)

In general, if a game master is doing their job you will never even know they exist.