2005-12-31, 01:19
#1
Skrämmande??? Men inte speciellt oväntat.
I’m writing this, not to get revenge or trying to sabotage or leak information about Blizzard Entertainment Europe (Vivendi Universal Games) But to provide you, the reader, with information about how this is actually being managed, as well with the hope that things may change for the better for my friends that I left behind in this machinery.
Before telling this story I would like to introduce myself. I used to work as a Game Master at blizzard Europe, this story is just my view of the life/procedures at blizzard and is not presented as facts, just from the view of a GM and dedicated player.
As many of you might have read on wow-europe.com you are promised to stay at a hotel until you succeed in your search for an apartment. This is not the case as they will only pay for one month. They do, however, pay for the services of a relocation agency to help you out in this new and foreign country. For me, however, the month was not enough as my apartment got delayed so I had to pay the hotel for myself for a while. This was, however, fair enough. The only thing that bothered me was the lack of information. I will get back to this later in this text.
When I arrived at Blizzards offices I was greeted by a man that was/is in charge of the training of the GMs, he was very friendly and really helped me blend in.
This first day was spent reading policies and “EULAs” and other documents regarding blizzard and the game itself.
I managed to finish this a bit early, so I was presented with the tools the GMs use (and no I will not describe them or give out any information regarding such as I feel this is unnecessary information and is only for Blizzard and its employees, and this text is after all not supposed to be a spoiler of any kind). The rest of my first week was basically the same. What stroke me though was the lack of intense training/education of the issues the players might encounter. This is apparently something that you will have to learn by actually trying to help players. I feel that this is way off and a crucial factor to the poor service the GMs are able to provide. More is also that each GM has a quota of tickets he has to complete a day. This is also something I will come back to later. My first weeks flew past and I tried to brush up on all the different problems the customers could encounter to be able to provide as good of a service as possible. This helped me a lot since I had my quota to fill and if I had to ask my colleagues about every single problem I wouldn’t be able to reach this goal.
The best memory I have of this period in my life is all the great friends I made, and the many nights out at the pub. This and only this kept me from breaking down and going home since the job itself didn’t really offer any challenges. It took about 2 months before I had properly settled down and started to become bored. It was also during this period that I became aware of the total lack of management, above me I had a “Senior Game Master” who I will refer to as the “SGM” and above him was the Lead GM and Assistant Lead GM. I come from a background of fairly strict professionalism and I too, have worked as a team leader and received training for that. Over at Blizzard however, this is not the case. None (maybe one or two) of the SGMs actually got a background of managing teams or management over all. Apparently the one who stays the longest in the “blizzard family” gets promoted to SGM. This became painfully obvious as the experience started to become more of a classroom with a teacher than a place of professional business where you get yelled at for coming in five minutes late after a cigarette break or for drinking at your desk (even though this apparently is allowed when the “big boss” is not in). The lack of management skills/professionalism also showed itself as the SGM brought his personal life in to the office. This is probably because the whole Blizzard crew is a big family where everybody knows each other and spend their spare time together as well. I will not bring up any examples since I wish for everybody to be anonymous but these incidents are really horrific and in any of my previous jobs this would not be accepted (However it would never happen since the managers usually got the needed experience, social skills and training to handle their tasks).
This whole situation escalated in to a hate war between a couple of my team members and the SGM, but instead of having a meeting about it and trying to solve this it was handled in a primary school manner with petty “bullying” more or less. This is when we brought it to the Lead Game Master to be able to put an end to this, a meeting was held and the SGM promised that everything should change and that we would try to weld the team together with meetings and social events outside work. (No, in the two months that passed we had one meeting regarding the team or our personal progress) This started out well with two or so meetings during the following weeks. And a dinner was planned where we all were to socialize, however the lack of spirit became painfully clear as only half of the team showed up for various reasons.
Like any other company of this size there is of course a department whose job is to check up on the employees and their progress as well as their abilities to handle the customers. In my case, when my report came, I was not permitted to read it and my SGM wrote one of his own instead, which, in my eyes, was far from objective. What should be added though is that I did NOT do my work perfectly at this time due to the stress and pressure from the quota and the SGM. The case is that every single GM has to fill his quota, and has 8 hours to do so during the day. However, the shift I was on had no tickets for the first 4 hours, but even so we had to fill our quota.
I will come back to my own progress after a few words about the general atmosphere.
The flaws I have listed regarding the management is fairly obvious and well known by the employees, (I will and can not write anything about the other departments as the technical support or billing and so forth, but from what I have heard they are managed in a completely different manner and seem very professional) What, however, has to be kept in mind is that for many of the GMs this is their first real job and it is an adventure for them to leave for a foreign country, thus they are not really aware of what the business world is like, but the people who can refer to other working environments mostly agree on the fact that this is the way it is being handled.
Another fairly vital thing to understand is that the “normal” GM is never told about anything, it is highly likely that you know more about the game than he actually does since no information is ever passed down to them through the “normal” means of communicating, we even had to read the US forums to be able to stay even close to updated about the game and upcoming issues/fixes.
I’m writing this, not to get revenge or trying to sabotage or leak information about Blizzard Entertainment Europe (Vivendi Universal Games) But to provide you, the reader, with information about how this is actually being managed, as well with the hope that things may change for the better for my friends that I left behind in this machinery.
Before telling this story I would like to introduce myself. I used to work as a Game Master at blizzard Europe, this story is just my view of the life/procedures at blizzard and is not presented as facts, just from the view of a GM and dedicated player.
As many of you might have read on wow-europe.com you are promised to stay at a hotel until you succeed in your search for an apartment. This is not the case as they will only pay for one month. They do, however, pay for the services of a relocation agency to help you out in this new and foreign country. For me, however, the month was not enough as my apartment got delayed so I had to pay the hotel for myself for a while. This was, however, fair enough. The only thing that bothered me was the lack of information. I will get back to this later in this text.
When I arrived at Blizzards offices I was greeted by a man that was/is in charge of the training of the GMs, he was very friendly and really helped me blend in.
This first day was spent reading policies and “EULAs” and other documents regarding blizzard and the game itself.
I managed to finish this a bit early, so I was presented with the tools the GMs use (and no I will not describe them or give out any information regarding such as I feel this is unnecessary information and is only for Blizzard and its employees, and this text is after all not supposed to be a spoiler of any kind). The rest of my first week was basically the same. What stroke me though was the lack of intense training/education of the issues the players might encounter. This is apparently something that you will have to learn by actually trying to help players. I feel that this is way off and a crucial factor to the poor service the GMs are able to provide. More is also that each GM has a quota of tickets he has to complete a day. This is also something I will come back to later. My first weeks flew past and I tried to brush up on all the different problems the customers could encounter to be able to provide as good of a service as possible. This helped me a lot since I had my quota to fill and if I had to ask my colleagues about every single problem I wouldn’t be able to reach this goal.
The best memory I have of this period in my life is all the great friends I made, and the many nights out at the pub. This and only this kept me from breaking down and going home since the job itself didn’t really offer any challenges. It took about 2 months before I had properly settled down and started to become bored. It was also during this period that I became aware of the total lack of management, above me I had a “Senior Game Master” who I will refer to as the “SGM” and above him was the Lead GM and Assistant Lead GM. I come from a background of fairly strict professionalism and I too, have worked as a team leader and received training for that. Over at Blizzard however, this is not the case. None (maybe one or two) of the SGMs actually got a background of managing teams or management over all. Apparently the one who stays the longest in the “blizzard family” gets promoted to SGM. This became painfully obvious as the experience started to become more of a classroom with a teacher than a place of professional business where you get yelled at for coming in five minutes late after a cigarette break or for drinking at your desk (even though this apparently is allowed when the “big boss” is not in). The lack of management skills/professionalism also showed itself as the SGM brought his personal life in to the office. This is probably because the whole Blizzard crew is a big family where everybody knows each other and spend their spare time together as well. I will not bring up any examples since I wish for everybody to be anonymous but these incidents are really horrific and in any of my previous jobs this would not be accepted (However it would never happen since the managers usually got the needed experience, social skills and training to handle their tasks).
This whole situation escalated in to a hate war between a couple of my team members and the SGM, but instead of having a meeting about it and trying to solve this it was handled in a primary school manner with petty “bullying” more or less. This is when we brought it to the Lead Game Master to be able to put an end to this, a meeting was held and the SGM promised that everything should change and that we would try to weld the team together with meetings and social events outside work. (No, in the two months that passed we had one meeting regarding the team or our personal progress) This started out well with two or so meetings during the following weeks. And a dinner was planned where we all were to socialize, however the lack of spirit became painfully clear as only half of the team showed up for various reasons.
Like any other company of this size there is of course a department whose job is to check up on the employees and their progress as well as their abilities to handle the customers. In my case, when my report came, I was not permitted to read it and my SGM wrote one of his own instead, which, in my eyes, was far from objective. What should be added though is that I did NOT do my work perfectly at this time due to the stress and pressure from the quota and the SGM. The case is that every single GM has to fill his quota, and has 8 hours to do so during the day. However, the shift I was on had no tickets for the first 4 hours, but even so we had to fill our quota.
I will come back to my own progress after a few words about the general atmosphere.
The flaws I have listed regarding the management is fairly obvious and well known by the employees, (I will and can not write anything about the other departments as the technical support or billing and so forth, but from what I have heard they are managed in a completely different manner and seem very professional) What, however, has to be kept in mind is that for many of the GMs this is their first real job and it is an adventure for them to leave for a foreign country, thus they are not really aware of what the business world is like, but the people who can refer to other working environments mostly agree on the fact that this is the way it is being handled.
Another fairly vital thing to understand is that the “normal” GM is never told about anything, it is highly likely that you know more about the game than he actually does since no information is ever passed down to them through the “normal” means of communicating, we even had to read the US forums to be able to stay even close to updated about the game and upcoming issues/fixes.