The Daily Grind: What's the best service you've received from a GM?

Fallen Earth had the best GM experiences I've ever had by far. They gave their GMs actual authority in game and leeway to do their job. You could PM them directly, they'd swoop in and immediately take care of something or let you know they wouldn't do something and left.

What was crystal clear was that they knew the game. There wasn't a huge lag after each statement while they either documented or looked up documentation about something, they just asked what was going on and did something about it and moved on. Everyone I knew had similar experiences there.

Age of Conan delivered some good experiences as well. The volunteer program worked well and while they didn't have a lot of power to do things they were responsive where they could.

Why is World of Warcraft the article picture? Horrible GM service with my experience with them.

My overall opinion of GM's is solid. At least in all the games where I've needed assistance. In EQ a GM was happy to help me get my corpse's out of Sol B when I forgot and left myself bound in a room full of Fire Giants. A GM in DDO did get a tad disgruntled with me due to my particular choice of name and subsequent alternatives. All in all when someone is dealing with (hopefully) a large base of people, just some common courtesy is all it takes. I have yet to have a "bad" experience with any GM's per se, though I do agree with Grumms. Blizzards GM's are mostly "hands off" and their decisions seem to be mostly scripted.

Other than queue times being too long at times, my interactions with the WoW GMs have been efficient, polite and effective.

That said, my favorite interactions with GMs _were_ those times in EQ when they would pop in and interact with you, pass out vanity items and, yes, spawn dragons on top of you.

I'm not advocating powermad griefing so much as I'm nostalgic for a world where new things happen.

Anyone remember 'Bloody Kithicor'? We don't have GM events like that nowadays.

I"ve had interactions with GM's on a few games, but as far as I'm concerned, WoW GM's have been some of the best.

Deleted item by mistake? Here it is back, with a gentle warning that the service is limited.

Lost your authenticator? Call us and we'll help you out... heck, even if your phone call is cut, we'll call you back!!

Stuck? Lost? Glitchy? I've reported all, and each time I have been helped with a virtual smile. Blizz may fail at some things, but GM help is not one of them.

At least in my experience.

Lotro, took about 5/10 minutes but they helped you in a jiffy when they arrived, and you could always have a good chat with them :P

Fallen Earth, WoW and AoC.

Fallen Earth ones are just awesome, AoC ones were informal but helpful and WoW ones actually had a lot of personality if you got them in the right mood.

I don't know if this counts as service, but one time, a GM named "Hightower" showed up in the middle of one of our raids. He was a giant blue Sarnak. He showed up becuase a [ratonga] guildmate had petitioned that his special "a wheel of finely aged Roquefort cheese" was missing from his backpack. Who does this in the midst of raiding? Crazed ratonga. Well, of course we were all curious and we began to banter with the GM. He froze one of our guild officers in place, who threatened to do a drive by in Gorowyn, and then had a dance off. The Sarnak were the new race at the time, so none of us understood what the heck he was doing when he started dancing (watch the Sarnak dance, you'll know what I mean.) Our guildleader's wife then called the milk and cookies (a GM staples in EQ2) he was handing out "nasty" and demanded something better, like a master spell for herself, before doing the /rude emote. The GM told our guildleader that if his wife were nicer next time, we might get something better.

Honestly it was the most awesome GM encounter I've had.

Can't say I've ever had a bad experience placing a GM call in WoW, but my issues were never that complicated.

+100 Awesome Points to Eliot for linking GM Dave in the article. =D

Coolest:
Vanguard - Had trouble with finding a quest giver, who turned out to be bugged out. The GM appear near me in the shape of a shaman (bear), and lead me to an area where he spawned the quest giver. I thought that was pretty cool, since i've never directly interacted with a GM like that.

Most helpful:
WoW - I transferred off a server a while back. When i transferred back to the same server, my name was taken. I did some research and noticed that my original name was given to a sub lvl 10 character that hasn't been played in months. I explained it, and the GMs changed my character's name to the original one i had, free of charge.

I know for a fact that they don't do that every time, so that was pretty much the most helpful assistance i got.

FFXI has by far the best GM experiences, and probably the biggest image for a GM team. GM Dave is amazing haha awesome reference. I've been warped to GM jail in FFXI a few times. Also had a few GMs in my old FFXI linkshell. Good times. Had a buddy from Titan server play a few practical jokes on GM's sending in messages saying he was a RMT and how he was finally done with his ways. Fun stuff. GM's always took it light hearted and thanked us for the laugh.

I've had great service in Lord of the Rings Online. Once we failed at killing a boss and one of the adds wouldnt despawn so we were stuck in combat. I filed a ticket and a GM showed up almost instantly and one shotted the problematic mob for us. I asked him/her if I could have that skill as well and the GM told me it was tool of Sauron so I couldnt handle it. Helpful and funny!

WoW. Credit where credits due, say what you like about the devs and community but I have always found their GMs to be helpful and knowledgable. However there are some games where I have filed a request/ticket/tech support and not heard anything back at all whihc is disgusting (most recently APB Reloaded!)

Fallen Earth. Without a shadow of a doubt. There is no ticket system at all. You simply talk to a GM, they are tasked with all manner of things to do but remain amazingly helpful in game at a one to one level.

They're not just some faceless, random CSR at the end of a stock pre-prepared one size fits all ticket reply. You can get to chat with them, kinda get to know them a bit and feel that they are truly...Game Masters. They can alter things in the game, often run little events and such.

I once had a gm told me that he would never gonna give me up, never gonna let me down, never gonna let me run around, and hurt me.

Fallen Earth, no doubt.