Is this the loudest fired Blizzard employee ever?

Unnamed Blizzard employee, who was terminated last year from Blizzard in Irvine & Austin, did an AMA (ask me anything) on reddit last night. He'd spent last 6 years of his life serving Azeroth, and while technically still under NDA, he wasn't very shy about answering the questions. Even though the community at reddit asked more of a "legal" and "general knowledge" type of questions, they still managed to shed some light on Blizzards misconceptions and methods. This AMA revealed to us that indeed Blizzard still isn't on-point about gold selling, and that there is some major friction between GMs and developers. It also revealed our ex-GM, who calls himself "BlizzardThrowaway" is in fact a Horde and PVP fanboi. Here are the most interesting questions that got an answer, as well as some non-sense ones:


Question: Are you happy with the direction Blizzard is taking with World Of Warcraft?
Answer: Honestly I never really cared about WoW too much, but since I actually just started playing again in over a year, I have seen the many changes they've made to it and I'm overall pretty impressed. Coming from the internal side of things and knowing how many issues we had to deal with as GMs with the old game, it's great to see how automated a lot of the issues have become. I like that players are now able to solve most of their issues themselves. I still feel like most of the issues lie within the GM department, though.

Since our friend claims here worked as a Game Master, Tech Support and then in QA, this question was expected, but reveals how GMs are really treated by Blizzard.

Question: Of the three job titles, which one did you have the most fun performing?
Answer: QA without a doubt. It was like night and day compared to being a GM. The atmosphere was more relaxed and I felt like I was treated like a human being rather than another "number".

Like all the other mortals, our GM here got jokes!

Question: May I hear one of the highly revered game master jokes?
Answer: How many GM's does it take to change a light bulb? None, it's working as intended.

Queston: Tell us what you know about Titan. Come on.
Answer: Well it's been a while since I've heard anything, but I will say that if it goes how they were explaining it to us during our Show & Tells, then it's going to be pretty ****ing badass, and may even kill, or slightly hinder WoW. It's that sweet of an idea. Let's just hope they don't **** it up. >_>
Answer 2: I will say that it's something you haven't seen from Blizzard before. A different direction in gaming style.
Question update: They've said that before, though. Give us some love here, son.
Answer 3: I caaaaan't. Blizzard likes to sue people.

Question: Where does the auction house cut go?
Answer: Good question. No ****ing idea.

Question: I think I gave them a perfect score everywhere on the little survey that they prompted us to fill in after each intervention. Thanks for the answer, and thanks for doing this AMA!
Answer: No prob! Also, a thing to note about that scoring system...it's pretty ****ed up on the internal side. For example: Let's say you really liked your GM, but weren't TOTALLY satisfied enough to give the experience all 5's, so instead you give them all 4's, or maybe some 4's and 5's. Well GMs are graded on how many "perfect survey scores" they get, and are rated with a 1 or 0 point system. Basically if you get all 5's, you get 1 point, and anything else is a 0. Pretty ****ed up right? Well if you get too low of an average score per quarter, you have the potential to lose your job. Yeah...and they think this is an improved rating system.

Prepare your palms and faces everyone, here's the big one!

Question: Did you ever busted any people using bots or gold sellers? If so how you dealt with them?
Answer: Oh yeah all the time as a GM. That was the best part, IMO. With bots you would get a report from a player, hop on the game to check it out, and get a Senior to visually confirm that it was a bot and then slam them with the ban hammer. Same thing went for gold sellers. Those were even more fun because gold sellers got their gold from compromising someone's account, taking all their shit and selling it, then taking the gold and selling it to other players. What we would do is follow the gold trail, through logs, and take back any gold, or items purchased with said gold, and recover it to restore back to the compromised player. Then we would give a nice fat action to the sellers account, which would usually result in them getting the boot.
That's what I think people who buy WoW gold never understood. The gold didn't come from Chinese farmers just using bots all day to get gold. No, it came from Chinese hackers who hacked people's accounts, stripped their character clean, and then sold the gold to you online at a profit. Shitty.
Answer 2: Oh yeah reports helped a ton because we were never really in game the majority of the time, so there was no real way of knowing who was botting or being a dick unless someone reported it to us. Believe me, banning people like that was our favorite thing to do, so we loved getting those reports lol.

Question: What's your/Blizzard's stance on them, though? (private WoW servers)
Answer: We don't approve, but aren't going to really do anything about it.

So you are in the clear! No Blizzard lawyers knocking on your door anytime soon, at least according to our friend here, who seems to share the opinnion that all gold for sale is hacked. Nevertheless, he did reveal some interesting facts we probably didn't know about Blizzard, working for them and all the teams involved. During the AMA, it was also reveal how big Street Fighter is for the QA/CS teams. We all know where that is going!

So, what do you think about this AMA? Has it revealed something you really needed to know or did he just share general knowledge with some sweet, but not important, inside info?

You can read the entire AMA here: http://bit.ly/15O6XGD
Or check out the table of all questions answered: http://bit.ly/14jj4Me