Original content created by community member: Arbalister

For many people, the first interaction they will have with support personnel for LOTRO will be the In Game Support personnel, known as GM's or Game Masters. There seems to be a lot of confusion over what GM's are there to help with, and that seems to be causing a fair amount of player angst that's really unneccessary.

Game Masters

GM's are probably misnamed - they should probably be referred to as Player Liaisons, since their main function is to smooth out disputes between players. They can help you with complaints against people exploiting the game, being abusive, cheating or other unfavorable interactions with other players. They won't answer questions about how to accomplish in-game tasks, but will refer you to the Knowledgebase and the Lorebooks.

There are multiple tiers of GM in the game, so if you feel that you're not getting the results you should, you can ask for the ticket to be escalated.

GM's also can't help you with game defects or bugs. If you find a bug in the game, the best thing to do is to use the in-game bug reporting tool - /bug - to submit a report, with as much detail as you can on how to reproduce it.

But a GM reset X for someone I know!

From a thread about "why can't Turbine GM's reset an instance that's bugged:

Originally Posted by Patience 
The GMs do have the technical capability to do a
lot of things. The incident where a GM spawned and
smited Thaurlach was a long time ago; we went against
our own policy and made an exception in that case.
After review, it was decided that this was probably
not the best course of action which is why it's no longer done.

The GM team has undergone some structural changes over the
past couple of years (including, in case no one has
noticed, we no longer outsource any of our in-game
customer service; it's all handled in-house by teams
in our offices in MA). I can't promise anything, but
we're seeing if we might be able to post some general
guidelines or a Q&A series about what the GMs can and
can't do.

One of the reasons we've never posted the guidelines before,
and are hesitant to do so, is once they're posted our players
will start looking for loopholes when they don't get the
answer/action they wanted. Much like what happens every
time someone posts a screenshot or video of Thaurlach as
evidence that we should do that again, or something similar.

I'm closing this thread for now, but know that the
conversation is continuing on our end.

-Meghan

Help with Bugs

Using /bug bypasses *all* the GM's and drops a report directly into the laps of the QA team. Give as much detail, including any steps to try to reproduce the bug, as you can. QA will evaluate your report, try to reproduce it, and assign it a priority rating, and dump it into the development queue. *THEN* it's ready to get fixed - where actual coders are looking at the code and making changes to be added to upcoming content patches. That is the only way to ever get a permanent fix.

The /bug tool lets you drop your problem in the hands that are going to fix it. It's the exact same tool that they used in beta, and that they use internally and on the test servers. If you want something fixed, this is the route. But it's not going to be instant - there's no way to fix it, instantly, in a persistant game. Just think for a moment, what they'd be looking at if they let GM's tinker with code - there'd be massive differences between the code on each server, and any new code coming down the pipe. Patch days would be nightmares - you'd get different results on every world, things that were fixed on live would now break, again, things that weren't broken could become so, due to bad interactions to an on-the-fly live world "fix" and new code. New code fixing a reported problem could bugger up, or be ruined itself, by live on-the-fly code changes.

Basically, this feature will not give you support, however it will report the issue to the people that will get it fixed...eventually.

Restoration of Lost Items/Money

Turbine's policies on replacement of lost items is as follows: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?375587-In-Game-Support-Reimbursement-Policy-Update

Character Restoration Policy

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar has implemented a system by which deleting a character is extremely difficult to do without intention. However, Turbine does offer a policy where a deleted character may be restored.  This service is known as Character Undelete, and is one of the paid services offered by customer support.  For more information on Character Undelete and Turbine's other paid services, please check thePaid Services sticky, located here.

Compromised Character/Account Restoration Policy

Turbine has implemented a policy for those users who have had their accounts compromised by a third-party. In these situations, Turbine is able to restore lost items and characters that have been deleted or sold by the third-party. For more information on the Compromised Account policy, please see this thread.

Destroyed Item Restoration Policy

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar has implemented a system by which destroying an item is extremely difficult to do without intention. Due to this system and the technical difficulty of restoring an item after it has been deleted, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Game Masters will not restore items that have been destroyed.

Dropped Item Restoration Policy

Items dropped and lost in the game world by players will not be restored.

Experience and Skills Restoration Policy

Character experience, levels or experience points will not be restored. This policy applies to all scenarios including, by way of example, the following:

Character death due to the natural course of gameplay
Character death due to another player’s actions
Character death due to Internet lag or other external anomaly
Account compromise
Extreme situation of character and/or server rollback
Accidental purchasing of skills/items

--Arbalister 23:58, 18 December 2007 (EST)