8/13/98-10/2/98 | 5/4/99-5/7/99 | 5/10/99-5/12/99 | 5/13/99-5/14/99 | 5/21/99-6/9/99 | 6/11/99-6/28/99 | 6/29/99-7/2/99 | NOW

Rant Archive Seven, 6/29/99 to 7/2/99

7/2/99 (even later yet) - Aha, a travesty is averted.  Lum was asked by someone claiming to be GM Gabriel to remove the pic from the Darwin section, since it was in fact him and not Darwin.  Or so he says...  In a humorless, very official-sounding request, GM Gabriel cited the possibility of personal endangerment if he were to be recognized as "GM Darwin" outside of the OSI offices and maybe beaten up for his lunch money.  In this spirit, I would like to lay all the blame for the mistake on the anonymous source for telling me it was GM Darwin in the first place.  But what the hell... the pic is still funny.

In order to speed the healing process after this incident, I have used all of my graphics mastery and free programs to cobble together the above image.  I hope it becomes widely seen and recognized, so that when GM Gabriel walks out of the office after a hard day's, uh, work, preparing for his bicycle trek home, he will not be hassled by people thinking he is GM Darwin.  Of course, they will still beat him up, but at least they will have their facts straight.

I hope webmasters everywhere take heed to this unfortunate misunderstanding, and make sure we understand the consequences of haphazard reporting and shady sources.  It is a hard lesson, though, and I'm not sure I have grasped the full meaning of it.  To help me out, I hope I get a lot more information from unreliable sources with anonymous Hotmail accounts, until I finally get the point.  Should happen any year now.

What am I doing here?  I just figured out how to take screenshots in Asheron's Call!

7/2/99 (even later) - Had a few email exchanges with Lum, in which the identity of the mystery GM was debated.  Mrs. Darwin insisted it was not him.  Someone else thought it might have been Datura, but I can't imagine Datura going to a player function without an EOD armored bodysuit and a waiting ambulance.  Lum concurred... "If it was Datura I'm sure I would have had to bail Murm out of jail later."  I personally don't really care that much, since as I said, it's just a funny picture of a dorky GM staring off into space.  However, there are more important things to worry about...

... like the Asheron's Call test has entered Beta One, and the NDA has been lifted!

We have reached Beta 1 and the lifting of the NDA:

Good News! Thanks to your hard work, we've been able to reach a new milestone in the ever-evolving world of Asheron's Call -- Beta 1.  Both to celebrate this new stage in development and to respond to your passionate pleas, we have decided to lift the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). However, it is very important to remember that we are still in the early stages of the beta, and problems will likely occur from time to time. It's only through your continuous feedback, patience, and support that we will be able to work through these and future issues in a timely manner and move forward!

Does this mean I can finally cancel my damn UO accounts and do nothing but tell everyone how much more kickass Asheron's Call is, since I happen to be in the beta?  Oh, did I mention that?  Some people think I shouldn't make a big deal out of it, since people might feel left out, but I say BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Enjoy that super massively-multiplayer experience on Atlantic, suckers!  Now if only I can figure out how to macro...

7/2/99 (later) - Muchos gracias to Lum the Mad for providing some positive ID's on some of our suspects.
 

This whelp's identity is as of yet unknown.  The youngest-looking of the bunch and known only as "Babyface", OSI insists that he is not a GM.  Possibly a tailor/miner/crack mule for one of the GM's?

GM Loki, norse god of mischief.  Rumored to have recently been thrown out of Asgard for the crime of twinking his friends' accounts (giving them k3w1 100t).  Why did this have to happen before I could find out and blackmail him for some purple vanquishing weapons and a strength of 200?

GM Jakarta.  The partially cut-off figure behind her, cowering under the black hat, is GM Ironwill, made famous by the "test center people are useless/Senith sucks" incident in which he vocalized some rather disturbing thoughts about players who use the test center.  Forced to apologize by OSI for giving away secret thoughts of the GM world.  I have to talk about him because I really don't know anything about GM Jakarta.

Uh... does anyone really believe he takes calls sometimes as GM Lord British?  He really said that.  The only times I ever got a hint of this d00d in game was when I heard he was hawking his crappy expansion packs through cellular walls, and an AllNames of "Lord British [invulnerable]", who must have been at the Nighthawk rally long enough to say "I cannot help thee with that" before logging into a Texas strip bar.

7/2/99 - A reader who will remain anonymous until he says he really wants his name here (so he can be recognized by the 5 people who read this page) sent in this clipped-out image from BritFest '99, claiming it to be an accurate photographic representation of the former GM of the hour.  He apparently gave himself away via a subtle clue (the name tag that said "GM Darwin"), and gave a short speech on why recalling into banks on Great Lakes had been temporarily disabled before dark-clad bodyguards hurried him into a waiting limo.  Can this be real estate tycoon and ex-red-robed deity known only as "Darwin"?  We may never know, but i still laugh when I look at those GM pictures, so I figured I'd post it.  The presence of a cheesy red arrow just makes me laugh more.

Who could tell?  Staring into those angelic, cherubic, angst-ridden faces, who knows which one might be hiding dark secrets and darker plots yet unhatched behind those innocent eyes?  Could it be...

YOU??!!	Or maybe... YOU??!!	Hmm... possible.  Girls can get away with a lot more in UO...	... nah, too obvious.  He has a rap sheet already.

One thing's for sure... it ain't the poor porky guy on the right.  Look at this sap!  Working at a LOOM.  Sucker!  Enjoy your "player-run virtual economy" there, buddy.  I'll be watching my bids go up on eBay.

All in all, an image of GM Darwin, accurate or not, is basically pretty meaningless.  It's doubtful I'll ever run into the guy in the supermarket and recognize him, and it seems fairly unlikely I'd run into him in UO (besides the fact he no longer works for OSI, I almost never log in).  In fact, most of this particular melodrama really has little direct bearing on most of us saps who still have UO accounts.  Most of us didn't get 2 million gold or a castle from him.  Few of us have had any direct dealings with his GM persona in-game.  I'll bet almost none of us know him personally.  So why the hell is everyone so into this story, to the point that we'd even go read a kid glove interview with they guy's wife?

The reason is simple... this incident allows us to put a face on the feelings that we have basically been crapped on by Ultima Online support for most of our playing history.  While idly chatting with people about the incident, they tend to bring up other incidents which were never really handled to anyone's satisfaction.  "Friggin' GM deleted my backpack when all I needed was to claim a damn boat..." "Some bastard calling me a homo spic and I get sent to jail for paging too much..."  "3 counselors and a seer standing there watching the guy delete a vendor and no GM in 4 hours..."   "OSI was billing me for the last 8 months after I cancelled my account for their piece of shit game..."  Maybe I just know a grumpy bunch of players who happen to share rare experiences of bad support.  I must also randomly run into these people through playing, in IRC, and email a whole lot.  Somehow I doubt it though.

Is it unfair to concentrate all of our displaced anger on Darwin, to use him as the Judas goat for all of OSI's sins against us?  Maybe.  (I bet no Judas goat walked away from his ordeal with a nice lump of cash, though.)  Would we do it again?  You bet your ass.  It's okay to make a mistake in business, such as bad support.  It's NOT okay to make yourself unaccountable through aliases and godlike powers for your bitter support waifs, poor availability to deal with customer problems, and just flat-out runarounds.  Richie Garriott is always off in his real-life castle #2 or some expensive strip club, pausing occasionally to make some sort of generalized luncheon speech about how great his next game is going to be, so you'd better fork out again losers.  LadyMOI is a public relations interference runner, expected to improve relations with the players without actually being able to do anything.  Raph Koster and Sunsword do reply to messages in the newsgroups sometimes, and they seem to be nice guys, but nice guys can lie through their teeth as well.  Who remembers necromancy?  The good/evil system?  All the issues they waffled back and forth on continuously, sometimes with different OSI authorities spouting contradictory statements at the same time?  Can SOMEONE please claim responsibility for all this crap?  (Okay, maybe a few people... there's too much that's broken with Uo at this point for any one human being.)  If only someone would say, "Guys, we really messed up in a lot of ways and screwed you a lot, and we're sorry," I would be moved enough to think about logging in again.

Here's a dumb thought which just occurred to my sleep-deprived brain:  how about the abolition of the GM system.  It was a cute idea, making the support staff integrated with the game, except they shouldn't be integrated with the game.  When I'm in trouble with the product, I want someone with a telephone headset and low-level admin authority on the server to be working on my problem.  I don't want some chump in a Superman costume getting around to me when he feels like it, then take some time to decide whether I'm worth helping or if I should be banned for daring to disturb his castle-duping exercises.  I think most UO players would give up the chance to take a screenshot of "me adn gm nubikilla" they'd only fail to post correctly on the UO Stratics picture forum, for the chance of getting a more professional level of support.  I'd trade just about anything for the feeling that I was being helped by a professional person with a name, and a supervisor I could talk to if push came to shove, whose job it was to help clients who \were having problems.

And don't even start with the "red robed GM's help the immersive roleplaying aspect" thing.  Nothing breaks that illusion like a bunch of eBay jokes being told around the training dummies.

6/29/99 - Late as usual.  If you don't know what's going on in the world of crooked GM's, I suggest you go over to the Official OSI Announcement, which is pretty much useless.  Then jump over to Dr. TwisTer's for more details.  Finally, you can read an interview with GM Darwin at Lum's.  I was going to comment on this situation beforehand, since I had heard a few rumors but, uh, it kinda happened fast and I was busy playing a game that didn't suck.  The summary statement, as it appears on Dr. TwisTer...

"GM Darwin was creating house and castle deeds online, handing them off to a character and then selling those deeds for REAL US$ MONEY on Ebay."

The bizarre phenomenon of buying and selling virtual property on eBay has turned Ultima Online into a cottage industry, sometimes a profitable one.  It's easy really... get an account, macro up a good character or two, make some cash to go with him through macro mining or whatever, and wham... "I hope you will have as much enjoyment playing this great character as I did making him!"  Now take the power of a GM, to instantly fabricate the items that people are willing to bid on, and you have an instant moneymaker there.

If you take a look at the amount of stuff he was selling on eBay, it's completely staggering.  How could he expect NOT to get caught?  Apparently, he told his buyers that he and his friends just muled a lot, but on almost every damn shard?  Even if you had an army of macro tailors in a house and 2 guys running around selling the stuff 24/7, 2 million gold takes quite a while to accumulate.

I find the Darwin interview is raising the most hackles, so might as well dissect that one.

well, most of what the little jerk said was true..

Not sure who he's talking about here.  Nighthawk?  His boss at OSI?  TwisTer?  I'm not sure I really care that much.  Let's move on to the part that gets everyone rallying behind Darwin... the SOB STORIES!

A really good friend of mine was and is going through a very very rough spot in life... he is having marriage troubles... and needed to get out of debt fast in order to try and save his marriage.

Uh, okay.  Since no other details of this problem were given, I can only assume that these marital troubles are nothing that I give a crap about.  If someone has problems, he has problems, not you.  If this guy has a marital problem that can be *ahem* solved by paying some bills, feel free to give him some cash.  The means by which you lay your hands on the cash is the question.  If someone had the same excuse for a jury while on trial for electronic credit card theft, would it hold up?  Negative.  It's nice as a point of information on why he did it, but is no cause for a pity party.

Oh, by the way, I hope your friend is putting the cash to good use, like you.

But, if I had to do it all over I would do it again... a friend needed me and I stick by my friends.

See above.

Nah, we make $10 an hour, and I had been there 10 months the day I was fired and was still a temporary employee.

Now, some people may say, well no wonder our support sucks so much!  Why don't they give the GM's raises?  Look at the job of being a GM.  You are a support person who is supporting ONE product.  If you have ever used the GM interfaces for FUSE or Grayworld (UO server emulators), you know that basically you have a list of commands you type in to accomplish certain things, like deleting someone's tower out of spite.  It's not that difficult from a technical standpoint; the support GM's are not crunching code or making sure the hubs are streaming data.  OSI looks at the job description, and decides that the most economic way to fill this role is to get a bunch of kids who were basically begging for the job (thinking it would be good or abusable or something) and pay them peanuts.  This is a conceivable mistake.  What is NOT, however, is that they would ignore thousands of complaints about their shitty support and worse, give it to the same kids to handle.  Imagine you are a whiny disgruntled kid in a crappy job where you have godlike powers over the people who say you suck.  Not hard to see why Boo deleted Nighthawk's tower.  They should at least spring for some hookers for their GM's, or some weed, or a trip to Disneyland... anything to keep the rugrats content.

Luckily, OSI makes up for crappy personnel with quantity...

I mean there are times when there is one GM for 2 shards... that makes response times crappy and slow

So is this the isolated incident some people would have us believe it is?  Lessee...

When that first account was sold, they warned us about it and said not to do it. But, the lure is always there... I mean, I am sure others GM's have done it or are doing it.

Conjecture, of course.  Just like GM favoritism.

While this was happening, after he was banned, one of the Lead GMs deleted his (Nighthawk's) tower and other items, so when he was unblocked, he had nothing.

What a shock that is.  Ex-GM Darwin doesn't particulary care for Nighthawk, though...

Know the Nighthawk guy? Anyway, he was supposed to be banned for calling someone a Jap or something... anyway, someone from upstairs ie. the dev team or the community people said to unban him since he had all his friends protest... He is the one that actually turned me in. What does he get for all this? A placed Castle and much more... I heard over 5 + million gold. You can see how strict they are about racial harassment there.

Uh, I find the 5+ million gold pretty damn hard to swallow.  There might be about 20 million gold on all of Baja*.  As far as a new building, I hope he DID get a castle.  It would almost cover the cost of the tower that was wrongfully deleted, plus the hassle to him and all of his friends, plus lost items.  Moreover, I hope they made GM Boo pay for it by tailoring.  MANUALLY.

And as far as racial harassment... I can see how serious they are when every damn time I find myself unfortunate enough to be logged in I get hit with the full range of slurs, from "FUCK YOUR MAMA NIGGER" to "fuckin stupid japs" to "what r u a fukin mexican?"  (I did hear all of these in one walk around Vesper.  I hear a lot more.)  Every time I see someone start complaining because some jackass is smapping shit at them and a GM tells them, "Just put the person on ignore or leave the area..." I can see how OSI feels about harassment.

Again, I am not upset or mad with OSI about my my termination as it was my fault, just the way it was handled and now this bullshit letter they post on the site... that is just plain classless

As opposed to creating items with powers entrusted to you for customer support purposes and selling them to fools on eBay.  The useless letter posted at owo.com was professionally vague, and tried to cushion the blow that they knew would be coming as the public found out about Darwin's little antics.

Here's an interesting bit about other GM's being fired.  Note that poor support, favoritism, twinking accounts, and deleting towers out of spite are not reasons to fire GM's.  Oh this reminds me... FUCK YOU DATURA!  (Haven't said that in a while.  Feels good.)

A couple of GMs were fired for getting, err, personal with counselors. You see, they had a rule that we could have no relations outside of business with any UO player. Total bullshit if you ask me.

Uhh, first of all, since counselors are people who report to the GM's (although they are volunteers), such relations could be construed as gross misconduct.  Plus, given that the counselor requirement is now 25 years old, and judging from the pics of the GM's, such an involvement could potentially put the counselor in danger of statutory rape charges.

So Darwin is out of OSI, Nighthawk allegedly has a home to replace the one that some fucking moron deleted, and UO still sucks.  I really don't have much to say besides that in wrapup, since although this revelation might shock some people who are wondering wtf is going on with people paying cash for make-believe objects, it's all pretty much old hat to me.  Almost everyone I know who is not a nincompoop and plays/played UO expects corruption, favoritism, crappy support, and behavior appropriate to a 12-year old from the GM staff as a whole.  It makes me sick.  Look soon for the ultimate Mu chronicle, "Musashi Cancels His Account".

*This estimate may be a bit conservative.  With the unexplained appearance of massive amounts of money on every shard, the current estimated amount of gold on Baja may be closer to 150 billion, since late May of 1999.