The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Here’s an SEC filing for Vivendi, who of course owns Blizzard. I’m a tad busy at work today so I can’t give it the dissection I’d like to, but this number popped out at me:
Over 1,300 Game Masters provide 24×7 customer support in 6 languages directly to players while playing the game.
That’s a whole lot of “I cannot help you with that” – 1 GM per every 5000 paying customers, if my math is correct. That’s a serious commitment to providing and maintaining a high level of quality service.
Early indicators is that Blizzard is stepping away from their stance, calling it an ‘unfortunate interpretation of their policy’ (perhaps by an overzealous GM). Link from the offended guild posting the news can be found here. Kotaku notes that this began happening simultaneously with pressure for prominent gay-rights legal crusaders from Lambda Legal. WoW further goes on to say that the policy is ‘under review’ – where that leads, who knows.
Reading responses from the various threads gets kind of wearisome after a while, but they actually explain something succinctly – why would someone want to advertise their guild as GLBT friendly? Solely so you don’t have to group with the idiots spouting their opinions on this matter.
Design doesn’t always agree with Customer Service. We live in the ivory tower, and they live in the trenches. They have to deal with the script kiddies, the racist jerks, and the epiphets against their mother. We get to play in clouds, and fix the design when they finally say ‘enough, this is a problem, make it go away’.
Still, it’s unfortunate to read about World of Warcraft’s decision to ban ‘gay-friendly’ guilds (InNewsWeekly broke the story, Terranova’s got commentary). The short form is: guilds who advertise that they are Gay Friendly might invite abuse and discord upon themselves, so better off they just keep things quiet. Continue reading
Will Leverett and Rob Simpson of NCSoft recently did a lecture to our local community college about the ins and outs of running the service side of MMOs (customer service, account management, etc). J. over at Damned Vulpine went and took copious notes, and the result is a good primer on this oft-forgotten and underestimated aspect of running an online business. Included is a breakdown of how calls get routed through an outsourced India office, and the difference between supporting a PVE game like City of Heroes and a PVP game like Lineage 2. Come to think of it, I wonder how the introduction of City of Villians will change that equation.
One interesting nugget: according to Will and Rob, the customer service costs of running Guild Wars is considerably easier than for CoH and Lineage 2. They attribute that to lower expectations due to the lack of a monthly fee.
An interesting read. And I’m not just saying that because he p1mp3d my upcoming panel.
For companies running an online game, one of the strangest concepts to learn is that Not All Customers Are Created Equal. In an MMO. one customer’s ten bucks is not equivalent to another’s 10 bucks, if the first is actually driving people away. This seems like common sense to anyone who has played an MMO for more than a week.
But it runs contrary to all business logic. Your first instincts is to think that The Customer is Always Right. Learning otherwise is almost impossible to do until an organization has a game running – until you experience the problems for a while, your first instinct is to Try To Save Them All. Some aren’t worth saving. 3DO went through that learning process. When I moved to Origin, the UO management team was in the middle of learning it as well. Then I came here, I found that both Wolfpack and Ubi were still getting a handle on the concept – despite having many other games come before them.
It’s just a lesson an organization has to learn the hard way.
The interesting thing is that the concept that maybe, just maybe, the customers AREN’T always right is starting to bleed into other businesses. Continue reading
Apparently, 3DO has a tad of an image problem.
Their games prove they hate gamers, so its fair.
In case you ever wondered why GameMasters (and other Customer Service people) seem so tense. (Oh, yes, OSI and 3DO both got emails that looked a lot like that sounds).
R.I.P to another online gaming pioneer. 10Six had a difficult time in the massively multiplayer arena, falling short of its moniker by two or three orders of magnitude. It’s main problem was that it added skill-advancement and stuff acquisition to the first-person shooter arena, resulting in an insurmountable gap between the hardcore player and the casual user. Hopefully, those who follow those same footsteps will have been paying attention.
Die-hards (both of you) can hold out hope, however. The core team has claimed on their boards that they are going to try to relaunch it again, free from the borg. I don’t know how likely it is to happen, but it is certainly possible.
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