Transitioning from the Development Team to the Live Team

"I think most other publishers are going to be reactive rather than proactive in developing strong CS for their games , and if they minimize the importance of CS , their games will suffer enormously."

” Kelly Flock , former president and CEO of Sony Online Entertainment ^[1]

^[1] See the full interview at http://EverQuest.station.sony.com/hht/features/standards.jsp.

If you organized things correctly during the development phase, your live team is already trained and in place, ready to take on the task of post-launch management. The basic team will look something like Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1. Live team composition and general responsibilities.

A live team has three main responsibilities:

• Manage the expectations of the players by carefully managing the flow of communication between the live team and the players.

• Respond to and resolve player help requests quickly and efficiently .

• Continually refresh the game content and features and fix problems in the code.

Experience has shown that the most efficient structure for meeting those responsibilities is the one shown in Figure 11.1. Let's look at each of the three areas in more detail.

Community Relations

"One of the huge problems that faces online community relations personnel right now is when players get information from bad sources ”rumors ”or from a GM who was just thinking aloud , or (and I've seen it happen a lot) a player makes a suggestion that other players feel is so exciting that they feel entitled to its implementation (no matter how crazy, unfeasible, or inappropriate that idea may be). A huge, often hidden challenge for the community relations department is gently defusing these ideas without the players charging your offices with torches and pitchforks."

” Damion Schubert

The Community Relations department is probably your smallest in terms of personnel, but it is the single most important group on the team. These are the frontline troops that set the tone of your dealings with the players. The team is responsible for the web site and message forums (where players get the official word on changes and additions to the game and have questions answered by the community relations and development teams ), and coordinates with unofficial fan sites to keep the buzz and word of mouth about the game constant and good. They also collate important information about players' wants, needs, and attitudes and pass it on to the other members of the live team.

Most large online games have a community relations staff of between two and five employees , and may use volunteers to help moderate various categories in the message forums, especially those relating to guilds and other player organizations.

Player Relations

This department contains most of the employees on the live team. It includes the in-game support people, commonly called GMs, technical support via email and telephone, and billing and account support.

Gamemasters

Gamemasters (GMs) almost certainly make up the bulk of this department. The total number of them varies from game to game, but the larger games featuring 100,000 “500,000 subscribers and 20,000 “80,000 simultaneous players should have at least 30 “100 of them on-staff. The GM has to be a number of things, not the least of which are: (a) comforter: being sensitive to the attitudes of the paying customers when problems occur and providing commiseration and a venting point; and (b) air-traffic controller: quick on the uptake in handling the problem/help request queue quickly and efficiently.

While each game has specific needs and peculiarities , general GM responsibilities include:

• Helping players who are "stuck"; for instance, a character is physically stuck somewhere within the game and can't move or escape

• Investigating and dealing with harassment issues, such as " grief " players intentionally ruining gameplay for others, racial slurs, extreme profanity, and so on

• Investigating bug reports and passing them on to the development team

• Assisting with player-run events such as weddings and skills competitions

The GMs also represent one of your greatest danger points. Along with the community relations team, they are on the front lines, dealing with your players on an intimate, live basis each day. What they say and do impacts the attitude of every player in the game because the players talk among themselves and post on fan sites. If one or more of your GMs is regularly rude, caustic, or insensitive, the whole game suffers.

GM corruption is another problem. Most GMs are gamers; many come from the very community you service. It is very easy for them to retain community loyalty and do favors for in-game friends, such as scouting other players for them; creating and giving friends "uber-items" such as excellent or rare weapons, armor , or lots of in-game "cash" such as gold or credits; and taking part in raids on in-game quests or other players' property, if PvP combat is allowed in the game. They can also use their GM powers to create items or characters that can be auctioned off on Internet auction sites such as eBay.

The players always find out about these incidents, and it is always damaging . How you handle the inevitable incidents ”and there will be incidents, count on it ”can have a major impact on your players' confidence in the company and the fairness of the game.

These problems occur because GMs for most games have full access to all commands, including access to the database that allows creation of new items or manipulation of character statistics. Most help requests in games are of a basic level and don't require such broad powers. You can limit the scope of this kind of problem by structuring several levels of GMs and GM powers and by adding a knowledge base that allows players to help themselves to information.

Gamemaster Levels

GM levels can be implemented as in the following:

• Level 1 GMs: The easy stuff ” Somewhere between 50% and 80% of all in-game issues are going to be fairly quick and easy to handle, requiring only one or two minutes to deal with. They won't require deep thought or intricate solutions; they'll be as simple as cutting and pasting a pre-written answer or moving a player a short distance to take care of a "stuck" issue.

  Thus, Level 1 GMs should only handle issues that can be dealt with almost exclusively with basic communication tools, not with database manipulation such as changing a player account or creating or deleting items. The Level 1 group should act as traffic cops and gatekeepers, addressing the simple issues themselves and routing the more complicated issues up to Level 2 or 3 GMs.

  As the knowledge base grows and standard responses for issues are written and included, the issues that the Level 1 GMs can handle will increase.

  Level 1 also includes GM trainees.

  Level 1 responsibilities include the following:

  • Reviewing and classifying help requests in the queue

  • Handling any issue that has a pre-written response

  • Routing more complicated issues, such as player name changes or problems that require database access, to a Level 2 or 3 GM

  • Making small changes that affect player/characters, such as moving them short distances to deal with "stuck on the map" issues

  • Evaluating terms of service and rules of conduct violations and complaints

• Level 2 GMs: Dealing with problems ” Level 2 GMs deal with issues that require some action on a player, such as kicking the player out of the game, suspending gameplay privileges, changing offensive names , temporarily squelching a player's ability to "speak" in-game, or "jailing" a player/character to stop harassment of other players.

  In the main, Level 2 GMs handle those issues escalated by Level 1 GMs and have a broader set of tools and/or permissions to work with. They are expected to work customers through issues that require more than the one or two minutes generally needed for a Level 1 problem.

  Level 2 GM responsibilities include the following:

  • Handling issues escalated by Level 1 GMs

  • Changing offensive player/character names

  • Squelching, suspending or lifting a suspension, jailing or unjailing, or submitting an account for permanent ban from the game to the Level 3 GMs

• Level 3 GMs: Making changes ” Level 3 GMs handle issues that require manipulation of the game database in some way and are the final arbiters on player bannings, in-game reimbursements of items, skills, and/or abilities , and changes to the game state, such as database rollbacks .

  They are also responsible for the GM training program and maintaining the GM policies and procedures.

  Level 3 GM responsibilities include the following:

  • Banning player accounts

  • Reimbursing game items or data that players have lost due to bugs or a GM error

  • Making game state changes, such as removing or adding terrain, rolling back the database after a bug is found and corrected, and so on

  • Developing and revising GM support policies

  • Developing and revising the GM training program

Knowledgebase

One reason why PWs see high help petition rates in-game is that official information about gameplay, player/characters, goals, game mechanics, and so on is not readily available. Players should at least be able to research their own issues out of the gameplay environment on the game's associated web site. Even better, if the knowledge base is accessible in-game, many basic questions can be answered immediately by the GMs by either cutting and pasting the proper link to the player or by the player searching it out on his/her own.

Technical Support and Billing/Account Support

Your out-of-game support will generally be composed of two main elements: phone support and email support. Generally, this type of support will cover three subjects:

• The player can't get into the game. Usually this is an installation or connectivity issue and is generally handled on the telephone or via email.

• Email that is used for bug, harassment, or account/billing issues.

• Billing and account management issues, which normally entail telling a customer on the phone that charges on his/her credit card were denied , which is why his/her account was suspended .

The bulk of this support is done through email, and many publishers find that offering no or little phone support works well for them. It is certainly more cost-efficient to perform email or online chat support; phone support takes time and has a hard cost attached to it, especially if you offer 800 “number, toll-free service.

Gamers are social creatures , and some gamers are really social (and at times, a tad lonely and in need of a human voice). These people, though loyal customers, will eat up the time of your telephone representatives with small or even nonexistent problems, just to have some company and social contact. Some will call you several times each month, each time with a different problem or complaint.

Between the cost of telephone services and the time taken by the service representative to handle the call, it only takes 15 or 20 minutes on the telephone to turn a $10- or $12-per-month customer from a profit center to a loss item; another 10 or 15 minutes, and that one caller has just turned some other customer into a profit loss for the month.

If you're going to have telephone support, we suggest you use a local number, not a toll-free one. This will at least do some pre-qualifying of support calls; people tend to think twice about frivolous calls if they have to spend money to make them.

The Live Development Team

The development team should be your second largest division on the live team. These are the people who will fix bugs, fix balance issues, create new tools for player and community relations as needs become apparent, and add content and features over time to keep the game fresh and alive .

The number of developers will vary, depending on your particular needs. For example, Ultima Online ( UO ) in 2001 had about 20 “24 people on the live development team, including 2 producers , a couple of content designers/scripters, several client and server programmers, 2 “3 artists , and 3 "story events" designers. Other teams have as few as 5 and as many as 30 to 50.

The responsibilities of the live development team will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 12, "The Live Development Team."