Customer Support: Dude, Where's My Tools? One of the reasons online games have lousy reputations for CS is because, so far, they have tended to have lousy CS. One of the reasons for this is because development teams neither design nor build tools to facilitate the process. In most cases, lip service to the concept may be expressed , but what the CS reps end up with is whatever the developers use to check and manipulate character stats, abilities , and inventory via the database. If tools are actually designed during the game and technical design document stage, they are almost always the first features cut when crunch time hits. Quite aside from the incredibly scary and non-secure concept of giving lots of employees access to modify pretty much anything in the game database, there are important tools needed by GMs, account reps, and technical support folks ”tools the game as a service just cannot function without. See Part III, "Launching and Managing a Game," for more information. Among the more important tools and commands normally left out are these: -
Kick out and ban ” There are always "bad actors" in any online game, and this is not a reference to poor role-playing technique. Grief players, jerks, chat spammers, bug exploiters, and racial harassers will all make appearances . GMs need a way to kick these players out of the game and lock their accounts from access to the game. This should be a minimum, default power of all GMs and game management personnel. Amazingly, most games have to retrofit the command in after launch. -
Squelch or mute ” Simply turning off a player's ability to chat with other players in the game for a time works wonders for calming down the temporarily deranged player, unhinged by a frustrating experience or just having a bad day. Use of a "Mute" command can prevent the need to simply ban a player from the game, which is a touchy situation in the best of times. -
Account management ” Billing and account management people need to be able to look up billing histories, access a player's name , address, and phone, make reimbursements and charge-backs, and so forth. You'd be surprised at how many games launch with a billing module that was built, literally, two days before launch day. You would not be amazed at how unstable such a module is, with only two days of thought and coding put into it. For example, Funcom's AO launched with a web page billing module that didn't use secure socket layers , basically opening subscribers' credit card numbers to any so-called script kiddie or bush-league hacker with the proper ”and easily available ”script. This deficiency was corrected quickly, but you can imagine the public relations nightmare it created. -
The harassment button ” As discussed earlier, there is a portion of the online population that thinks nothing of harassing other players "verbally" in the game, simply for their own amusement or to take advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to act out their "anger issues." This most often takes the form of racial- or gender-based slurs, extreme profanity, or simply " spamming " the screens of everyone in the local gameplay region to prevent anyone from holding a public conversation. If the live team doesn't put a clamp on this type of activity from the outset, the game can quickly become inhospitable to the average player and drive him/her to the competition. Since no one can afford to have enough personnel on-board to monitor all conversations and nip this in the bud, clamping down is tough if you don't give the players a tool to record and report harassment. At a minimum, this tool should grab the reporting player's last two to five minutes of chat and activities logs and send them as an email to your support team for later investigation. |
