WoTLK Midnite Sales in Ireland?

I rerolled belf and played to 18 in beta, so fairly sailed through the starting levels and was ahead of the curve for the most part.

From my perspective, TBC was hella smooth. My NDA from my previous job has ended also, so I'll give you a little insight as to what it was like in work from that perspective...

I worked in Sitel in Swords, who were subcontracted for Blizzard, in my opinion, based on what I have witnessed since; in order to allow Blizzard enough time to invest and build up their cork HQ and quite possibly to also allow them to save a bundle training a work-force for the new building.

Sitel recruited people, trained them and then baptised them through fire. Those that were left and that were willing to move to cork were as rocksteady GM's as you are likely to find anywhere. Mind you, they did recruit anyone that applied for cork directly from Sitel so you gotta wonder

Still, I've somewhat side-lined my original point. In work, TBC was the most terrifying example of the blind leading the blind 2.0 was worse, but thats an entirely different story.

To put things in perspective, Blizzard werent very forthcoming when it came to passing information to us in Sitel. Meaning a large part of what we did was, to quote one of the GMs who worked there; "Human spam filters". We cleared out the, "Can I get my name changed", "Why havent you banned X bot and Y gold seller already?" to "Can I see a GM and have epixlol?".

Dont get me wrong, there was a lot more to it than that, but the work satisfaction wasnt there. People called in sick just to have moments of 'stillness', if that makes sense. Course then others came to work sick and mandatory desk-swapping would cause plagues to sweep through entire teams...

But again I digress. The night and subsequent week after the launch of TBC, I, like very few others; had booked a weeks holidays. Playing from the morning of launch and stopping only to refill my body with the nearest confectionary goodies needed to tie me over to the next pit-stop, intermingled with the emails/phone conversations and text messages from the poor saps who were still at work, reporting the bloodbath that was Hellfire Peninsula crammed with ~7k players.

Multitudes of bugs came in, without any known causes, fixes or even voodoo chants left most GMs feeling impotent and altogether ineffective. Meanwhile, I was safe and warm at home; exploring Azeroth through a new set of eyes as a freshly created paladin. Rolling in cash due to picking up mining and skinning, filled with beta knowledge as well as experiences of leveling 3 characters to 60 pre-TBC although more importantly with Joanna's leveling guide, meant I managed to hit ~54 before I went back to work a week and half or so later. Of course, once I actually started back at work I barely got to play and I stayed fairly stagnant around the 54 mark for a good few weeks.

But things were different when I got back to Sitel after my holidays. I felt fresh, renewed and also somewhat naieve to boot. While many weary folk were all that were left of the veterans that started with me, their wills ground down by "We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause." and "Are there any more issues I can help you with" The carts carrying fresh meat for the grinders, came bi-weekly and couldnt really keep up with the staff turn-over in that place. At least at that stage. By the time I started to feel frustrated again, there was a nice tidy list of known bugs some of which I had experienced although most I hadnt. Some had solutions or fixes like the mechanar door farce, whereby we actually pioneered the solutions but werent allowed to put them into effect until days later when Blizzards QA departments had signed off on it. However, most issues didnt have any solutions, at least not on our end, simply because Blizzard didnt trust the spam filters with any button, let alone one that could blow stuff up. However, by this stage, we were handling a large volume of the European tickets. Paris had been down-sized significantly and it was really only the senior GMs that were left there. This meant where we once ignored item reimbursement requests and left them for Paris, instead became exercises in the Withdrawal technique or Coitus Interruptus if you will. Sitel GMs would receive the players complaint/request and let him/her bitch them out for 5-10 minutes. Once the required information had been sucked from the player through a very small straw it was then collected in the ticket notes and account notes and then "Escalated" for the Paris GMs to deal with, with 90% of the work done and the credit for closing the ticket going to the egg-head who might as well have been in his pyjamas and pressed the Y key every 45 seconds.

It actually got pretty funny at one stage, when a Sitel GM wrote up the details for a reimbursement and then sent it off to Paris for "further investigation" and the eventual reimbursement. You could be forgiven for thinking, just another run-of-the-mill ticket, until a few weeks later we in Sitel got another ticket stating that "Player X was equipping some Tier 5, when no guild or player had stepped foot in that level of content by that stage on that server." After some quick investigations we had confirmed it to be true, it was impossible for the player to have received that item on that server. Transfers turned up nout and we quickly realised that some new Sitel GM had made a mistake and mixed up a T4 reimbursement with a T5 lottery win. The Paris GM didnt look too hard and just hit the loot vending machine button and moved onto the next ticket to deal with. In the end they let the player keep the item as it would have been more hassle to remove it than to let him/her keep it. Decide from that what you will

All in all though, it was a novel experience. It gave me simultaneous experience in Customer support and in a computer gaming environment, opening the door to work for Dell or Activision's game testing department alike. Similarly, I made some life-long friends. Many of whom I'm still in contact with and some of whom are right now in cork, with pyjamas of their own... pressing the Y key

Hai guyz, kek. Fruity Pirate Grok says hi, crusty toe-nails all round, just dont forget the milk

Any questions, just ask, although I probably wont answer any of them, especially if they are "Can I have epixlol?" or some equivalent Will consider a seperate thread tomorrow, if there is any interest.



For the culturally impaired:

belf = blood elf
NDA = non-disclosure agreement
TBC = The Burning Crusade
2.0 = the patch that was released in november or so, that included much of the new changes from TBC and was intended to reduce complications come TBC but instead caused tickets queues in excess of 15,000 in one night
The Withdrawal technique = as made famous by the Catholic Church for it's sheer simplicity and Billy Connelly for it's sheer stupidity
Pyjamas and press the Y key = Reference to a simpsons episode where Homer puts on weight to work from home and wears pyjamas while pressing Y repeatedly on a computer