How do you become a GM?

I recently got contacted by a GM, he/she was sooooo friendly and that raised the question...How does someone become a GM?

Do you know?

You can check the open position at ArenaNet on the official ArenaNet site (link below). You can submit a resume for consideration.

Good luck.

So you don't need to be a FX Artist, or design programmer... there's a small chance you can get the role just by "wanting to help the community" ?

I would image having game security experience would be most helpful.

According to the Job Listings, there are no positions open in Security at the present time.

But, there's always this:

For career interests,please send correspondence to:careers@arena.net

Good luck.

Anyone on else who has got experience with this?

GW2 doesn't have GMs who are players volunteering their time to help out, they are all Anet staff. And yes, its way dedicated role, they're not artists or programmers or whatever acting as GMs occasionally.

So it is something you could do, but it's a job: meaning you need to be legally allowed to work in the USA and need to either live near Seattle (where their office is) or be able to relocate. You also need to have the right qualifications and experience and will need to go through the application and interview process to get it. On the plus side it also means you get paid and get benefits.

I don't know what the qualifications are for the customer support people, but I'd imagine some experience in customer service and knowledge of how the video game industry works would be helpful.

If you want to do it the best option now is to keep checking their job openings for things you can apply for, and maybe look for similar jobs at other companies to get experience (if necessary, you might have it already) and hopefully move to Anet later when a job comes up.

Although there are no specialised degrees, both experience and degrees in the direction of customer service or technical support will help a lot. Specially if you also have degrees and/or experience in security.

Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

@Mutaki Novayo.5613 said:I recently got contacted by a GM, he/she was sooooo friendly and that raised the question...How does someone become a GM?

Do you know?

make a blood sacrifice to Santa.

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

Yeah if you just want to show people around or answer questions in-game anyone can do that. You don't even need a mentor tag, that's only really useful as a map marker.

But that's very different to what the GMs do, they're the people who answer support tickets and can do things like restore lost items or fix problems with your account.

@Danikat.8537 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

Oh right. So GM is more like employ at office answering e-mails etc

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

More or less.GM's are the term for arenanet employees who work in ticket handling and/or security. But the term GM is commonly used for their PC in the game. This is cause they have special powers. Many of these powers are unknown to us in detail, but they include tools to suspend or ban accounts and also to reverse an account to a previously saved version (e.g. to undo the work of hackers)

The other tools are mostly unknown to us, but likely include tools to monitor and watch us and also to look into log files. Their PC are recognisable cause their name starts with GM and they can sent mails to players without the warning that it is sent to you by another player. They are also part of the Arenanet guild and have the arenanet logo next to their name

Make sure that when you encounter a GM you verify it really is one. Ask them sent you an ingame mail or come to you. It is a very common scam to impersonate a GM for fraud and swindel.

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

You seem to know a lot about GM's, how if I may ask?

@Mutaki Novayo.5613 said:

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

Experience from interactions and information freely given by anet themselves. Most of what is said here is common knowledge to dedicated veteran players

@Mutaki Novayo.5613 said:

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

anyone who has played long enough and does more then just playing games knows all that, i used to make mods for games and even tried a total mod.it's kinda common knowledge, play long enough and it becomes obvious.

@Mutaki Novayo.5613 said:

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:Isnt mentor tag made for helping ppl out?

I've played both GW1 and GW2 for many years. Also I work as a support engineer for a multinational in agro-culture.

Is there a position open for meme'r?

@Danikat.8537 said:GW2 doesn't have GMs who are players volunteering their time to help out, they are all Anet staff. And yes, its way dedicated role, they're not artists or programmers or whatever acting as GMs occasionally.

So it is something you could do, but it's a job: meaning you need to be legally allowed to work in the USA and need to either live near Seattle (where their office is) or be able to relocate. You also need to have the right qualifications and experience and will need to go through the application and interview process to get it. On the plus side it also means you get paid and get benefits.

I don't know what the qualifications are for the customer support people, but I'd imagine some experience in customer service and knowledge of how the video game industry works would be helpful.

If you want to do it the best option now is to keep checking their job openings for things you can apply for, and maybe look for similar jobs at other companies to get experience (if necessary, you might have it already) and hopefully move to Anet later when a job comes up.

Do GMs work from home?

@Hot Boy.7138 said:

Do GMs work from home?

I don't believe so.

I don't know but as far as I remember all the jobs I've seen Anet advertising say you have to be able to get to their office, so you have to live nearby or be willing to relocate.

Just to add an air of caution, to realize that this is "Customer Service" job, and that this type of work REQUIRES the ability to deal with all kind of different people. And by "all kinds" I mostly mean rude, uncooperative, and sometimes belligerent people. You have to be thick skinned, level headed, able to tolerate some really stupid policies and/or management decisions, and a level of interpersonal communication skills that rival that of a crisis negotiator...... For without them, it becomes the most soul crushing of soul crushing jobs, when 80% of your interactions are with customers who are, or are about to be upset about something You had no involvement with until that moment.

I've done phone support, enterprise support, user admin, technical support and did a stint as a field tech...... and in that time, my bar for the average human being has been lowered substantially. And its not so much that people are bad (even though they are)..... but you are very much exposed to the lower half of the average, and prolonged exposure leads to some philosophical and existential crisis. But if you can get past all that, then the only thing you need to worry about is minor depression, with an increased academic interest in the principles of natural selection.

Cheers!

Oh god,

Be a GM is much more than help the community.

Be a GM is also : hunting bots and remove em, reviewing ALL the reports and do what's necessary. It's also answer to all the players tickets (the bulk of their work I guess, especially nowadays). I really think it's a much harder work than some imagine. x)

Of course, you have to be passionated, by the game, by the desire of help the community. But I'm sure you also have to be though sometimes, because a day may be hard at work (Lot of tickets, conflict with players for a ticket, a contested suspension...)

I personally regret that GMs are so focused on tickets and reports treatment, I'd love to see them more in game to remove AFK farmers, keep the chat under surveillance, or even to talk a bit with the community and answering to players' questions in the chat.

@Danikat.8537 said:GW2 doesn't have GMs who are players volunteering their time to help out, they are all Anet staff. And yes, its way dedicated role, they're not artists or programmers or whatever acting as GMs occasionally.

So it is something you could do, but it's a job: meaning you need to be legally allowed to work in the USA and need to either live near Seattle (where their office is) or be able to relocate. You also need to have the right qualifications and experience and will need to go through the application and interview process to get it. On the plus side it also means you get paid and get benefits.

I don't know what the qualifications are for the customer support people, but I'd imagine some experience in customer service and knowledge of how the video game industry works would be helpful.

If you want to do it the best option now is to keep checking their job openings for things you can apply for, and maybe look for similar jobs at other companies to get experience (if necessary, you might have it already) and hopefully move to Anet later when a job comes up.

There's EU GMs and I don't know where the office is I think there's two different ones, I think one is in England, but I remember I read a tweet that they were looking for people in EU positions that spoke more than one language. And surely for the EU servers they would need someone online during EU hours.

@"starlinvf.1358" said:Just to add an air of caution, to realize that this is "Customer Service" job, and that this type of work REQUIRES the ability to deal with all kind of different people. And by "all kinds" I mostly mean rude, uncooperative, and sometimes belligerent people. You have to be thick skinned, level headed, able to tolerate some really stupid policies and/or management decisions, and a level of interpersonal communication skills that rival that of a crisis negotiator...... For without them, it becomes the most soul crushing of soul crushing jobs, when 80% of your interactions are with customers who are, or are about to be upset about something You had no involvement with until that moment.

I've done phone support, enterprise support, user admin, technical support and did a stint as a field tech...... and in that time, my bar for the average human being has been lowered substantially. And its not so much that people are bad (even though they are)..... but you are very much exposed to the lower half of the average, and prolonged exposure leads to some philosophical and existential crisis. But if you can get past all that, then the only thing you need to worry about is minor depression, with an increased academic interest in the principles of natural selection.

Cheers!

And yet, somehow, there are people out there who genuinely like doing it. At least in the right context.

I'm a biologist by training and I work for a wildlife conservation organisation but a major part of my job over the past 7 years has been basically customer service - dealing with enquiries from the public about our work. The people and the queries both cover a wider range than I suspect most people could imagine, from the most wonderful, kind, enthusiastic people to some truly horrible or incomprehensibly stupid individuals. (On more than one occasion I've had to warn someone that they just told me they're planning to break the law, and sometimes I've actually had to report them to the police.) Or it can just be dull, repetitive and frustrating (e.g. feeling like I've spent all day telling people how to log into our website "yes you need to type in your entire username...if you normally just type the first letter and then it comes up it's because your browser had saved it, no I can't change your browser settings, no I can't read your password to you over the phone...")

And yet I love my job and sometimes my favourite enquiries are the ones which start off negative or frustrating or totally incomprehensible because they can be the most rewarding when you finally get it sorted. I think it helps a lot though that it's something which is important to me and I know the people I deal with are usually so...passionate because it's important to them too, even if we completely disagree.

Which is a big change from when I worked in retail. It's a lot harder to care when someone is screaming in your face (literally) about something which, even for them, is pretty trivial like a game they want being out of stock or non-existent (you would not believe how many people wanted to buy Mario Kart for the Xbox) or because they couldn't be bothered to read more than 3 words of a poster and guessed at what the promotion was based on that. (2-for-1 on selected DS games is not the same as 2-for-1 on everything in store and no law requires a retailer to honour every insane interpretation of a promotion you can dream up).

I imagine customer support for GW2, at least for me, would fall somewhere between those two.

I never saw any anet worker or had any contact with a GM in game.