What is a GM?

The Future's So Bright...

Perhaps I should start by explaining what a GM is.  A Game Master works to ensure that an online game is running smoothly and that players are enjoying their time inside the game.  We help players with difficulties, create events, arbitrate disputes, and help weave players into the history that forms around each and every game server / realm that we manage.

It sounds pretty vague and epic, doesn’t it? 🙂  Actually, for the most part we spend our days watching numbers that measure how a particular game realm is performing.  That’s the management part of it.  We watch those numbers and create plans / projects to ensure that those numbers fall within a healthy range.  It’s pretty mind-numbing what these metrics are–churn rates, session times, level distributions, registrations, activations, concurrent users, unique logins… about 52 metrics in all.  And growing all the time.

But the fun part is having to actually deal with the players.  Many of the activities we do to ensure that a server community is healthy revolves around the creation and organization of in-game events.  This is really the best part of our work–where we get to interact with our playing community!

As GMs, our in-game characters are designed to support players.  We can teleport players, summon them, instantly appear at their side, make in-game announcements, and for those who are authorized, some GMs can even summon monsters.  A very special type of GM is what we call a Community Manager (or a CM).  A CM is a GM with an expanded role of specifically ensuring that our community is healthy.

Other GMs will focus on technical support for our players.  These GMs man our ticketing system, and respond to issues in-game, including but not limited to gameplay issues, problems with items, broken quests, etc.

As for me?  I’m just a GM with a big hammer. ^^  I’ve been a GM for over 2 years, so I guess I’m pretty experienced as far as GMs go within the region.  I’m particularly lucky because in addition to my past experience as a GM, I also played Ragnarok Online for two years. So even though I’m still young, I’m considered a Senior GM in Tahadi Games!

Why the hammer?  Well… sometimes when something is broken, you just have to whack it as hard as you can and hope for the best. ^^