I miss that. Sometimes they’d do a bit of corny RPing, describing a scene and how they’d enter. I’d get the little black box in my chat, answering a questing or asking to clarify something I said in the ticket. Back then, they didn’t discourage sending a ticket to get something resolved.
I was never fortunate enough to SEE a GM in the wild - I’ve heard of those black-and-brown robed figures. I wish I could have seen them once. Back then, they seemed MAGICAL, even if they still were just Customer Service Reps. And I do think they had many more people in customer service (some summary for the upcoming Jason Schrier book describes how Mike Morheime fought with Bobby Kotick over trying to keep the WOW CS team intact, as Activision encroached more and more into Blizzard) as well as more leeway to help the customer in various ways. Now, we have AI and probably low-paid, understaffed staff with scrips and form letters, I’m guessing.