The Anatomy of an OM Shift

Ahoy, mates!  This is not yer cap'n speaking.  It's Eurydice, and I've hijacked this blog.

It's evening (at least it is in MY timezone), and I'm about to start a shift.  I thought I'd give you all a blow-by-blow of how a typical Ocean Master shift goes for me.

To start:  I like to prepare for a shift a bit in advance of its start so I can dive right in when it's my turn to take over.  So first, I get roaring drunk some soothing tea and read the Puzzle Pirates forums.  It is often the case that things I'll want to keep an eye on during my shift are mentioned there.  I also catch up on the recent changes log on YPPedia and read my YPP email and PMs.

In addition, I launch YPP on the oceans I'll be covering, open up the support events so I can see complaints and petitions, and fire up my chat program so I can heckle and annoy communicate with my coworkers.  Last but not least, I deploy my two secret weapons.  During the course of my shift, they will try to eat everything I have on my desk, fight with each other, and advise me on iffy ship renames.  Hey, if Hypnos gets to post about her hair, I'm gonna show you grainy photos of my cats.  That's just how it works.

I'm going to timestamp my entries from here on out, but please note that I'm not on "Pirate Time."  The times are just there for frame of reference.

7:55 - I'm covering Viridian and Hunter tonight, so I hop on.  I'm a couple of minutes early, so I stop by Dragon's Nest on Viridian to empty some pineapples and rambutan out of the palace.  Then I move back to my ship on both oceans.  That way I can work in quiet, without a lot of chat.  To be frank, I won't see a lot of in-game chat during my shifts anyway; a large portion of my time is spent with my head in petitions and complaints.  That's why I use an /afk message:  "Ahoy!  To contact an Ocean Master, please go to your 'Ye' panel, click the 'Help' button, and select the option appropriate to your situation.  Thank ye kindly!"

8:00 - I'm on duty.  The Ocean Master I'm relieving says that things haven't been too crazy tonight, and so far it's just some standard petitions and complaints.  The complaints so far are some valid swearing complaints, one "ban him bcuz he told me 2 shut up," and one "shes being mean."

8:30 - The questions I'm getting are still the usual:

• "If I upgrade my stall, do I lose all my stock and orders?"  (Nope.)
• "If I successfully blockade Typhoon, do I get to keep it?"  (Nope, it's an event blockade island.)
• "How do I make money fast in this game?"  (Pillage, or purchase doubloons.)

Greeter chat on Viridian, while I was working on the above and other petitions, exploded into activity and became silent again.  They were conferring on how the Refer-a-Friend system works.  I think it's coincidental, but now there are a ton of "How do I become a greeter?" and "Why am I not a greeter?" petitions in the queue.

8:45 - Amidst all the regular complaints and petitions, this gem:  the gentleman who asked about Typhoon island has petitioned again about its event blockade island status.  He wants to know whether we gave it that status because we're scared we'd lose in a real blockade.

9:00 - I'm surprised there haven't been any ship rename requests yet.  Ah, but here's a yucky petition where someone lent a friend their monkey, and that friend is never around anymore.

9:20 - I've just looked in my chat window, and there are about seven messages from someone asking me if I will give them "koinz."  They've also petitioned about the matter!  Persistence, in this case, will not pay off for them.  I let them know this.  Apart from the familiar matter and a bunch of standard complaints and petitions, I've also become embroiled in tracking down a person who scams people out of their accounts by tricking them into giving out their account information.  He just claimed another victim.  Luckily, someone caught on and complained.  I'm digging through our records to see what else he might have done.

9:35 - Another victim of this guy's scam.  She was about to hand him her account information when I banned him.  This is like a giant game of whack-a-mole, but I'm gonna win it.

9:55 - I win.  Moles = whacked.  Okay, so, the moral of this story is:  NEVER give anyone your password, EVER, for ANY reason.  Just don't do it.  The other moral is:  Don't scam people, because you won't end up getting away with it.  I like tracking this stuff down too much, and so do many of my colleagues.

10:00 - End of shift.  I've briefed the incoming Ocean Master on the account scamming issue and given him the necessary records.  The major time suckage during this shift was in familiar tracking and dealing with the scammed accounts, but while that was going on I also had 39 complaints to investigate and 23 petitions to answer.  Five of those petitions were multi-part, back-and-forth sorts.  (There wasn't a single ship rename petition, how weird.) 

This was an easy shift.  Sometimes Ocean Masters get shifts where three events come in per minute.  I've done those before, and you can feel the burn in your forearms from trying to type so fast.

That is all, mates!  Thanks for reading along, and fair winds for now.  It's time for my nightly spam session on a greenie alt beauty sleep.

- Eurydice