My raid team was about to enter a raid in LOTRO when a GM turned up and wiped the entire group. We all got insta-rezzed with no death penalty, so it was all in good fun. We didn’t see GMs often in that game, but every now and then they were around. In ESO, I’ve never seen one.

Saw a GM once in Daggerfall who waved at me after I waved at it. Was back in the very first few days of ESO launch when botters where everywhere.

Xbox here, been playing for 6 years and I've never seen one in ESO, or anyone that works for Zenimax. Scarce as unicorns, I imagine. It's sad so many game devs generally stay disconnected and aloof from their player base, but I think that's just a reflection of the world we live in now. Game companies didn't use to be that way...

Back in the day, (2009-2016) BioWare devs posted on their forums all the time, and community regulars knew them quite well. Many wonderful discussions took place on story and lore of their different games, as well as books, movies and games that inspired them. Game launch days were times of extreme excitement. Many of us were beta testers for all kinds of stuff they wanted opinions on. I personally got to be an early play-tester for SWTOR and also beta for the Dragon Age Keep before Dragon Age Inquisition released. I opened a twitter account just to chat with BioWare devs and voice actors who were very engaged with the fan community. Greg Ellis and Raphael Sbarge especially, just really lovely people, and Mark Meer and Jen Hale too, to a slightly lesser extent.

When Mass Effect 3 came out, devs had regular multiplayer events with the community and those were super fun times when there was so much dev and player interaction. Player and dev meet-ups happened regularly at Game-cons and other planned happenings. I don't know what all the reasons were, probably a lot due to trolls and toxicity, but EA decided to close the BioWare forums completely in 2016. There were a couple of BioWare fan-run forums that opened up after that, but the community felt fractured, many of us were heartbroken and ended up drifting away. It just wasn't the same anymore.

Bethesda also had a nice community and good forums for a while, but when things started changing there for the worse too, I stopped going. No idea if they still even have forums anymore. This is the only gaming forum I visit anymore, and not super often. Usually when some new content is announced and being discussed pre-release, or to see what's happening if servers are down or an event is going on.

This is a nice community though, on the whole, and I think ZOS has done a good job keeping things on track around here. I do miss the old days though, of Bungie's Halo series, Bethesda's Elder Scrolls, and BioWare's everything. But change is the only constant in life, and I guess gaming is no exception.

P.S. You kids get off my lawn!

Sometimes, late at night, after a great session of helping and slaying, or just going at it in Cyro pvp for 12 hours I feel like a real game master. Not to be confused with that zos mythical creature. But a game master with a z Behind my name. It's ok to feel that way. We are all z minus game masters. We play this game, ZGMasters don't. Enjoy.

Soriana wrote: »

Way back in the day, 2014 I think, there was a super short quest in Riften that garnered a little over 300g, iirc. Bots would create accounts, run the quest, collect the gold, delete their chars, rinse and repeat. Was running by the quest turn in spot and noticed characters getting decimated by the pile! Ten or so would run up, start to interact with the NPC, and boom...dust on the floor. I asked in say if anyone else saw this happening to which a Gamemaster came out of invisibility, waved at me, went back to being invisible, and continued nuking bots!!

It was a beautiful thing to see!! LOL

Windhelm. There was another one of these in The Hollow City. This is why we have a 3 characters per day deletion limit, by the way.

Last night I fast travelled to Rimmen Wayshrine, and before I moved I believe I spotted the tag "Invisible Gamemaster".
I moved away from the WS and turned back to see if it was a legit GM and couldn't find the tag again. There were a lot of player characters coming and going, though... so idk if it was an actual GM or someone with that gamer tag... most likely the latter, obvs.

Well they DO exist... this is from recently some time this year

You’re more likely to run into Herobrine.

Used to in beta. Helped to discern the real peeps from the scammers

Technically, there isn't much advantage to having actual GM-characters. The chat system might need a character to interact with players, but actual GM activities are better done on a backend level.

Appearing as an actual character in front of the player is a nice touch when the GM helps a player, but showing up with a flashy display of godlike powers to ban someone (or just to flex your GM state) is pure vanity.

This also leads to another problem with special GM characters: GMs are people too, it needs a bit of trust to pay someone to essentially play your MMO in god mode. In order to make sure the GMs (or someone who got their login) don't abuse their powers, they need to be monitored, so you end up with extra staff watching the watchmen.

Alucardo wrote: »

wild_kmacdb16_ESO wrote: »

I suspect there is little reason for them to take a physical form.

Little reason? Reports aren't always helpful. A lot of the time you need to see for yourself what's happening in order to pass judgement. For example, someone sends in a screenshot of bots. How do you know they are botting and aren't just legitimate players farming a node?

You're right that they need to investigate reports, but there's more practical ways to do that than standing in the map watching (invisible or otherwise).

A few years ago I read an article about managing bots in MMOs (not about ESO specifically) which said one of the things they'll do is look at logs of the character's activity, checking not just the actions but the timings. Humans aren't good at perfect repetition so a player running a farming route or going through a rotation will do it differently each time, the path they run will vary, the timings between skills will be different. Whereas computers aren't good at randomisation so a bot will do things exactly the same way each time. Even when they program in 'mistakes' or variations it will be the same mistakes and the same variations each time.

Someone behind the scenes looking at logs like that can check hours of activity in far more detail than they could gauging it by eye in the map and in far less time.

Same with things like reports for verbal abuse in chat, by checking logs they can see what happened before the report rather than what players claim happened after a GM shows up.

It's like complaining that police don't spend enough time wandering around towns hoping someone is stupid enough to commit a crime right in front of them. It might be a good PR move to be seen out on the streets sometimes but it's not an effective enforcement strategy.