Took a look at the Nexon "careers" page

http://www.nexon.net/corporate/careers/open-positions/

JOB TITLE: Sr. Game Master

DEPARTMENT: Customer Relations

REPORTS TO (Title): Manager, Customer Relations



SUMMARY OF POSITION:

The Sr. Game Master is responsible for overseeing and managing game events, game monitoring and taking company-wide requests in regards to event and user investigations.



JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

Train and manager outsourced GM team work flow with game related tasks. Including: in game training, tool training and communication regarding present and possible issues.

Act as a liaison between Customer Support team and outsourced GM team.

Assist with coordinating volunteer programs, patrolling, GM account creation and tool setup for GM use.

Investigate users in regards to game events and in game issues.

Assist with mentoring and coaching of Customer Service Representatives.



JOB QUALIFICATION STANDARDS

Work Experience

• 2 – 3 yrs of work experience

• Gaming customer support experience preferred

Knowledge/Skills

• Good communication and interpersonal skills

• Excellent writing skills

• Good project management skills

Well that must explain why the MWLB died. There hasn't been anyone "coordinating" volunteer programs.
I guess that also explains why so many GMs don't have a clue. They aren't "connected" with us, the community. The majority of them are just overseas grunts.

Pretty sad.

A massive company outsourcing so they can pay their employees dirt cheap?

*gasp*

Outsourcing does not always equal to offshoring.

Outsourced doesn't always mean overseas. I used to work at a place that received this type of work from gaming companies.

As for them not knowing anything though. That's probably true. These are minimum wage jobs and there's constantly new people on the team, and the people doing them are not maplestory fans by any length.
Can you put yourself in their shoes, if you were Gm for some game you don't even like or know, and the emphasis is on meeting banning quotas or answering a specific number of tickets, how would you behave?

Outsourced doesn't always mean overseas. I used to work at a place that received this type of work from gaming companies.

As for them not knowing anything though. That's probably true. These are minimum wage jobs and there's constantly new people on the team, and the people doing them are not maplestory fans by any length.
Can you put yourself in their shoes, if you were Gm for some game you don't even like or know, and the emphasis is on meeting banning quotas or answering a specific number of tickets, how would you behave?

so is there a complex somewhere filled with low class workers who are GMs for multiple games at one time?

Can you put yourself in their shoes, if you were Gm for some game you don't even like or know, and the emphasis is on meeting banning quotas or answering a specific number of tickets, how would you behave?

I can't put myself in their shoes, sorry. I always try to do a kick-ass job.
I'm going to assume the answer you're looking for is "complain and ask if the quota can be lowered".

MWLB died the day it began they did nothing useful, made no difference in the game.

MWLB died the day it began they did nothing useful, made no difference in the game.

And why do you think that is?
Here's what I'm seeing here as qualities that were offered by them

• Extremely involved and engaged in the game, somewhat directly benefiting from their work by having each other's servers purged of filth
  
• Actually know the ins-and-outs of the game, hacker hot-spots
  
• Free labor
  
• Gullible / obsessed enough to actually do it for free
  

But it looks to me like something like that would just open up the floodgates for reports, and the GMs who actually review evidence and issue the bans would be swamped.

so is there a complex somewhere filled with low class workers who are GMs for multiple games at one time?

Something like that. They usually do testing work, game certification etc as well. We wouldn't do multiple games at once, but teams were constantly changing.

I can't put myself in their shoes, sorry. I always try to do a kick-ass job.
I'm going to assume the answer you're looking for is "complain and ask if the quota can be lowered".

When you're being paid less than your skill level, it's quite discouraging. But there is no incentive to let you learn the game, since you won't be there long. Example: I'm hiring you as a GM for Hello Kitty Online, You'll be working this game for a month, you must find x amount of people breaking rules and answer x amount of tickets a day. Once you're there you'll ban anything that looks suspicious, and ask questions later, since more than likely by the time the ban needs to be reviewed you'll be long gone.

And it's not that people would complain for lower quotas, it's even if you tried to do a kick-ass job and spend more time actually solving the problem, you would be reprimanded since you could have done twice as many "half-assed" solutions.

The environment isn't great, and it's usually management's fault not so much the labor (though there is some of that too).

Yes, outsourcing doesn't mean offshore. Look at Aliens: Colonial Marines. Gearbox, a Plano, Texas game company outsourced the single player campaign to TimeGate Studios, a Sugar Land, Texas game studio. It is still classified as outsourcing. A more interesting idea is exactly how they acquire new GMs. Does Nexon headhunt? Is there another company that they pay for training GMs? Are all Gms employed by Nexon or are some of them outsourced to other companies? All these questions I have based on absolutely no proof at all because I haven't looked for any. SO MANY GROUNDLESS ACCUSATIONS AND QUESTIONS I HAVE!

I was very active during the time they announced that volunteer group and saw no involvement from them other than those lame introductions they would post about themselves on the main site. The game was still in very bad shape then and Nexon is actually better right NOW than they were when MWLB was out. If they interacted with 1% and you were part of that then that's cool I guess, but other than that their presence was barely felt.

Though I am not so sure about them being better now anymore though ever since the anniversary patch. But prior to this everyone could say Nexon has stepped it up and patched some major public stuff that was very damaging to the game amongst other things.

When you're being paid less than your skill level, it's quite discouraging. But there is no incentive to let you learn the game, since you won't be there long. Example: I'm hiring you as a GM for Hello Kitty Online, You'll be working this game for a month, you must find x amount of people breaking rules and answer x amount of tickets a day. Once you're there you'll ban anything that looks suspicious, and ask questions later, since more than likely by the time the ban needs to be reviewed you'll be long gone.

Well, that's the good thing about Nexon, I guess, since according to an interview I vaguely remember reading, they require evidence to be collected in a case file before a ban is issued.

I was very active during the time they announced that volunteer group and saw no involvement from them other than those lame introductions they would post about themselves on the main site. The game was still in very bad shape then and Nexon is actually better right NOW than they were when MWLB was out. If they interacted with 1% and you were part of that then that's cool I guess, but other than that their presence was barely felt.

Though I am not so sure about them being better now anymore though ever since the anniversary patch. But prior to this everyone could say Nexon has stepped it up and patched some major public stuff that was very damaging to the game amongst other things.

I reckon those weren't actually even typed up by the brigadiers themselves. Those posts have such a "Nexon community temp employee" feel to them, and they match in prose with a lot of the other blogposts of the same era.
I'm looking at some old forum archives, and it seems like the MWLB was designed to be really -- ah, clandestine, I suppose. That might explain why we never got to see or hear much anything from them.

Well first off, the intros were a mix of self made and Nexon made intros. I wrote my own, as did many others, but for a few who didn't care, they ended up having it written up for them. As for the clandestine nature of things, that's just the way they wanted it. They didn't want any risk of us being influenced by friends or popular guilds/people who might be hackers.

Thus we weren't allowed to have accounts on our own servers. Of course the problem with patrolling other servers was not always knowing who the hackers might be or where they might be at currently. Some areas were classics, but others were more server to server based on where they felt safe to hack. That doesn't even begin to describe some of the early problems with the program, but it does help explain why it didn't work out as well as they had wanted it to.

I will say that of the GMs I interacted with, they did care about stopping the hacking, just they were fighting a losing battle with very few resources, and our own ability to help was severely constrained. I sometimes wonder if the program would have been more successful treating it more like a job, and less like a volunteer program, though I don't know if that would have made it more of a chore or less at times.

Edit: As for the reasons for people joining the MWLB, they varied, but most of us just wanted to do something to help the game we liked to play. I know I personally just wanted to help stop the rampant hacking at the time I applied, and figured that I might be able to help. I was a relatively solo player, so it's not like I did it for my friends or guild members or anything like that. And honestly, after I was in it for a bit, I did it because I had a lot of fun with the other MWLB and the GMs. I kinda wish I hadn't drifted off from the program before they closed the forums down. There was a lot of history in there that I miss now. Though a good portion of what I miss was the conversations. The meetings were always fun, and funny, and the notes pretty awesome. Partially why I made this account was on the off chance some of them might still be around. It'd be fun to relive old times even if only briefly.

hey! I'm actually qualified for this job LOLOLOLOL Granted I do this but for a not-video game company, so I'm lacking in that regard.

I'd be down to work if I could do it remotely :B Probably wouldn't be making any more money than I do now either.

Man I don't like these rent-a-GMs coming into my Empress runs and dcing me. I know it's them since on more than one occasion I was lagging and I typed something to them then the lag stopped.

MWLB died the day it began they did nothing useful, made no difference in the game.

[COLOR="#cc8899"]
Were you around for this? Guess who got this pomegranate fixed. You're welcome. Don't talk about what you don't know - even for the short while I was "Monticol" I was able to directly talk with a few GMs to get a few problems similar to this one brought to attention and corrected.

[video=youtube;nHi6MycicBY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHi6MycicBY[/video][/COLOR]

Were you around for this? Guess who got this pomegranate fixed. You're welcome. Don't talk about what you don't know - even for the short while I was "Monticol" I was able to directly talk with a few GMs to get a few problems similar to this one brought to attention and corrected.

Well thats news to me!

'Perrians, we are in the presence of royalty!

Were you around for this? Guess who got this pomegranate fixed. You're welcome. Don't talk about what you don't know - even for the short while I was "Monticol" I was able to directly talk with a few GMs to get a few problems similar to this one brought to attention and corrected.

[video=youtube;nHi6MycicBY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHi6MycicBY[/video]

Yeah! They were so helpful and made a difference! For the 6 month's they were actually alive .

Thanks for your hard work Maspan ;D

On a related note, according to Youtube all the MWLB did was summon a few monsters and play Omok with people. JUST LIKE REAL GMs! I'm surprised that summoning and omok are not mentioned at all in the job posting xD

-snip-

I'm still around.

Anyway, as one of the first MWLBers, I too can vouch on his word. It may seem like nothing much happened while the program was in place, but like a GM's job... we did what we had to do with discretion. We all signed up for the program with the spirit and will to make the game better in the shadows, even if the contribution would seem like a drop in the bucket.

Sadly, among the reasons that the program didn't last was that hackers kept punching new holes into the bucket, and we simply did not have enough resources at our disposal to deal with them all. We, MWLBers and GMs, all cared about the state of the game. It just wasn't nearly enough.

In the end, you have to admit that the idea was good on paper. It's just the execution that failed.

Also, surprised you decided to reveal yourself, Maspan.