Player Relations: The In-Game GMs

No online game launches without some problems or fails to experience them later on. There are so many issues involved in games this complex and containing this much data exchange, they can't all be listed here. As an example, almost every PW of any size will experience "stuck" issues, spaces on the game map where player/ characters become physically stuck and can't move or become stranded in a sector from which they can't remove themselves back to the rest of the world. If a player is "stuck," someone has to go there and teleport him/her away from the area and fast , or you just lost a customer. Consider some other examples: A grief player may be harassing other players by standing in a crowd and spamming the screen with obscenities, just because he/she can; or, you may be experiencing login delays and/or player disconnects from the game; or, you can have any one of a dozen other issues, all of which players expect to be handled as fast as possible ”not first thing tomorrow, not even later today, but right now , dammit! What am I paying you jerks $10 a month for, anyway?

Someone has to be around to help the players when the problems show up. That someone is a GM.

How Many GMs Do You Need at Launch?

This is the big question for any supported online game. If you plan to support an online game, this will be your largest department, by far. Determining how many GMs you need at launch, and how to grow the number of GMs gracefully as the subscriber base grows, can determine whether or not you have a respectable profit margin. Hybrids and free web-based games don't have this issue; any support beyond pure technical support and bug fixes is left for the consumer to find from other consumers.

The effectiveness of your marketing and the participation in and response to your open Beta tests should give you a pretty good idea of how many GMs you will need on day one of commercial access. As a gauge, even marginal, niche games such as World War II are seeing retail sales of 35,000 and more on launch day; that means 35,000 people are going to be trying to crowd your login servers on the first day. Or, you could be like Blizzard's free service, battle.net, which shipped two million units of Diablo II in 2000 and saw sales estimated by some sources at over 200,000 units on the first day. Needless to say, battle.net had a hard time staying stable for a while.

The size of the GM crew should also be relative to the stability of the servers and client during the Beta tests. If you experienced a bunch of "stuck" and harassment issues during the Beta and weren't able to fix most of them, you'll need a larger crew. Also, remember Patrovsky's Rule: It isn't just that you have to make a good first impression ; in a crowded market, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. Historically, most players churn out of an online game in their first month of play. If you short-staff the GM team under the misguided notion of early cost savings, players will have to wait longer to be helped and more will leave early. Short-staffing means you're simply leaving money on the table for some other developer to pick up.

So, how many GMs will you need? For a game that expects to hit 100,000 subscribers fairly quickly, say, within the first two to three months, you must expect a heavy load of potential subscribers to check out your game in the first two weeks and be prepared to meet that load. The experience of most games launched in the period of 1997 “2001 has been sales of 30,000+ units the first day of availability, reaching 100,000 sales in the first month to six weeks. Experience has shown that launching with one GM per 5,000 paid (or anticipated) subscribers, or 20 GMs trained and in place at launch, is the absolute minimum necessary to do the job for most such games. One GM per 2,500 anticipated subscribers is much better, especially for the first month, and most especially if your game runs into technical problems at launch.

How Many GMs Do You Need to Add Versus Subscriber Growth?

How many GMs to add during the initial growth stage depends very much on the technical stability of the game. If the game is fairly stable, "stuck" issues will be the bulk of your calls initially, followed closely by harassment help calls. In this stage, one GM per 2,500 “5,000 subscribers should work fairly well. If the game is very stable and the stuck and harassment issues are few, you can trend toward one GM per 5,000 subscribers.

Figure 11.5 shows a basic flow line of GMs to players, based on both optimal and unstable game conditions.

Figure 11.5. GMs needed versus the subscriber base of an online game. Note that instability equals more GMs.

Instability on Launch or Patch Day

If the game is unstable at launch, all bets are off. Hire temps, dragoon management and chain them to a computer monitor, and train the janitors and get them answering calls, too; you'll need all hands and then some. If your game remains unstable for two to three weeks from launch, even this probably won't help; about the only thing that can save you at this point is the direct intervention of a deity, which is well beyond the scope of this book.

If the game is fairly stable during normal operation but tends to become unstable on patch days, which is not a rare occurrence these days, you'll have to figure out a rotation for adding GMs for the hours immediately following the reboot and activation of the patch. You should also consider putting the GMs on the phones, answering emails, and in chat rooms, if you have them, in case the patch takes longer than expected. This is another fairly regular occurrence, unfortunately .

Scheduling Issues

Online games have peak hours of play. These peak hours are centered around common societal leisure time; not surprisingly, that means most play happens during off-business hours. You can count on the weekday hours of 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. local time and about 9 a.m. to 12 a.m. Saturday and Sunday being the busiest.

Check that phrase, "local time," again. Now that the Internet has made online games a global phenomena, a publisher has to be sensitive to the fact that "local time" in Asia and Europe means the game servers will see usage spikes several times a day, not just in the evening and weekend hours in the US. Not only does this make it more expensive to staff, because you have to have GMs available for these international players too, but the scheduling can become a nightmare. Do you have call centers in Asia, Europe, and the US? Do you centralize in the US and try to have American GMs handle the language difficulties? Can bilingual or multilingual GMs be hired for $9 “$13 an hour ?

These are questions a publisher must answer in the design stage and implement gracefully in the Beta and launch phases. Experience has shown that it's better to have local language speakers service the local community, but not everyone can afford to do that. At the minimum, it pays to make certain that all hours, 24/7, are covered by GMs.

Another good reason for 24/7 GMs: Any GM downtime is when exploiters and grief players will plan and implement their reigns of terror. If you have no GM coverage from 12 a.m. to 8 a.m. local time, you can expect substantial abusive activity during those hours. It won't stop completely even with GM coverage, but having some GM presence will give the abusers pause.

Handling Email

It is not unusual for a PW with 100,000 “200,000 subscribers to receive an average of 500 emails per day.

Now that you're properly scared to death, you have to figure out who is going to deal with all that email. Usually, no one wants to do it, especially if the game has problems, so this duty normally falls on the GMs by default. Online game email tends to fall into four categories:

• Frontline Technical Problems (FTPs), or "Hey, I can't get this *&^%$! thing to work!"

  FTPs involve any technical problem that prevents the player from installing the game on his/her home computer or from connecting to the game via the Internet. Among the problems faced are conflicts with the Windows operating system and peripherals such as video and sound cards, and conflicts with other software on the computer that have taken over a piece of required memory or IRQ switch.

  These emails are time-consuming and often involve an exchange of several emails and/or a phone call or two to figure out why the game client won't install or connect. It is not unusual for FTPs to account for the bulk of trouble tickets, especially during the first three months post-launch .

• Billing and Account Management, or "You bastards double-billed me!"

  About 90 “95% of all billing for subscription games is done by credit card. Credit card billing is a funny and touchy process, and all subscription games have had trouble with it. The emails in this category normally fall into two categories: (a) claims of apparent double- or multiple billing on the card in any one month, and (b) the card was denied by the bank and the player's account was suspended .

  Game company billing programs are horrible. This is because they are often built at the last minute before launch, when someone suddenly notices they don't have one. You can imagine how stable something flung together at the last moment would be. If the billing program doesn't burp and cause a chunk of the player base to receive notices they've been billed twice for the month and thank you very much for playing, someone notices that some player's card hasn't been billed for four months and hits the card for all of it at once.

  Bear in mind that double-billings almost never truly occur and, when they do, publishers are quick to refund any overcharge. You are more likely to see the second issue: charges denied by the bank. This happens every month and it really upsets the player to whom it happens. In almost all instances, it is not the fault of the publisher, but caused by two other reasons.

  Just because a credit card is valid and has enough unused credit left on it does not mean that Visa, MasterCard, or whoever will actually approve charges to it. In any one month, as much as 5% of attempted charges fail for reasons such as data transmission errors, database errors at the credit agency, the card owner changed his/her address but failed to change it in the game's billing database, and so on. In these instances, automatic player account suspension procedures usually take hold until the publisher can retry the failed card number, in effect locking the player out of the game for hours or days.

  Credit and debit cards expire. Most cards are issued for two- or three-year periods, after which they are automatically turned off and have to be renewed. Even if you assume three-year periods for all cards, when you have a user base as large as that of EverQuest ( EQ ) or UO , this amounts to thousands of expiring cards and denied charges each month. The percentage on this can be as high as 10% in a month, though it more often tends to be in the 1 “2% range.

  Even though neither of these problems is the fault of the publisher but that of the bank, the player, or random chance, that doesn't matter to the players. After all, they don't deal with your bank ”they deal with you , and isn't the customer always right? They aren't going to call or email the bank; they are going to call or email the publisher.

  These emails are usually easy to handle technically (although the customer may have a right to be irate), but they do take five or fifteen minutes each. These should go directly to accounts management; if they come to the GMs first, they should be forwarded to accounts management, along with a quick GM reply to the player that the mail has been forwarded to the right people.

  At the end of the monthly billing cycle, when most of the billing and account management problems appear, it can get quite hairy and strained around the Accounts Management department for a few days.

• Harassment, cheating, and reimbursement issues, or "Johnny called me a wanker, and then used a hack to kill me and steal my horsey. Please kill him and give me back my beloved Trigger."

  This category will drive your GMs buggy . Some players are problem children. The number of them is usually small ”only one or two percent ”but the problems they cause are legion and each instance affects a number of honest players. If the problem kids aren't harassing other players with racial or sexual epithets or spamming the chat screen so other players can't get a word in edgewise, they've gotten hold of a cheat program someone wrote for the game and used it to kill other players and loot the corpses.

  Harassment is easily dealt with if you use the method Gordon Walton set up for UO . He had the live team create a "harassment button" in the client interface; when used by a player, it saved a block of the chat text going back several previous minutes. This log was then sent by email to the proper GMs, who investigated the matter and issued a ruling on who should be suspended.

  Without such a mechanism, you either have to ignore the harassment issue, which is not a good idea if you want to keep your player base happy, or spend hours tracking down witnesses and trying to pull the relevant text out of the server log files, which is not an efficient use of your GM's time. See Part II, "Design and Development Considerations," for further advice on this.

  Cheating through hack programs and reimbursing lost or stolen items are trickier matters. Unless you've built the code into your server and client to track and report unusual events, catching a cheat hack is a very tough proposition. Worse, claims of cheat hacks by other players are almost always false, either due to not understanding how a player legitimately used game mechanics to gain an item or just outright lying to gain revenge on a player who bested them. Unless the GM recognizes the problem immediately and determines that no hack was used, you have to investigate the matter, just in case, because nothing erodes player trust in the game and company faster than the feeling that the playing field isn't level. The lesson here is this Design logging and tracking features on everything you can think of into the game during the design and development stage. It is the best way to track unusual events that might be cheat hacks.

  The best advice that can be given on reimbursement is this. If your game is of sufficient size, say over 150,000 subscribers, you probably aren't going to be able to reimburse lost or stolen items except in select cases, in which a programming bug or flaw was the cause of the loss. Make sure your policy on reimbursement is published widely and frequently to the players, and that the GMs handling email know that policy.

• Second-line technical problems, or "A bug teleported me across the game and now I'm stuck in a cave!"

  If you have your tools set up correctly, technical support and billing and account management questions will go to the right departments automatically and the GMs will never have to bother with them. On the other hand, there will always be plenty of bug and exploit reports , "stuck" issues, and other items that the GMs can and should deal with.

  Most of these can be resolved fairly quickly. Some, such as bug reports, take longer because an investigation needs to be done. But, most bug and exploit reports can usually be handled with the customer with a simple, "Thanks, we're on it," and passing the report on to the security team or the developers on the live team.

The 24-Hour Response Rule

Many online GMs ignore the importance of answering email in a timely manner.

Most issues can be handled by a GM ”especially in-game issues. Remember that the GMs probably know the ins-and-outs and idiosyncrasies of the game far better than anyone on the staff, with the possible exception of the leads on the development team. They are certainly in-tune with player concerns and know which problems are recurring issues. The GMs are a damn good resource for the whole live team; just talking to them to get the top five issues of the week can determine what fixes the development team should make to reduce the email and in-game petition queue loads.

Sadly, email tends to be a low priority for most game managers. They allow player mail to stack up in the queue for days at a time while attending to other, more "important" tasks . This creates player angst and anger; no one likes the feeling that he or she is being ignored. A point to remember is that your players talk to each other; if one player's email goes unanswered for 24 hours, 30 “100 other players will know about it at 24 hours plus 1 minute.

And the 24-hour rule is only the minimum guideline; following it will keep you out of trouble. To help create good word of mouth about the game, you need to be much faster in responding. A good methodology to follow is the response/resolved method. It takes a bit more work but achieves incredible results in terms of good word of mouth:

• Each shift, one or two GMs are dedicated to email. The email GMs prioritize the incoming email and answer the priority issues first. Priority issues are things that prevent the player from being in the game or moving about the game world (stuck issues).

• At the very least, each player email should receive a short, personal note within two hours, even if it will take longer to resolve the player's issue. This can be as simple as a cut and paste of, "Hey, we received your email and we're working on it, and I'm the guy following up for you," signed by an actual person. It is important that such "response" emails not be signed with "From the <game> Team" or similar impersonal signatures. The player will just assume it is an auto-generated email. The personal touch is vital here.

• If the GM cannot handle the issue, he/she routes it to the proper person.

• Within 24 hours of the first response, the player receives a second email with either a resolution or an acknowledgement that the trouble ticket is still open.

Follow-Up!

It is extremely important for whoever gets an email to follow up with the player as soon as possible. Even a simple, "Hey, we haven't forgotten you!" email will work wonders in gaining player patience when a problem takes some time to resolve.

The keys are quick response, follow-up response, and resolution response. Note that this means, after the initial player contact, actually communicating with the player before the player finds it necessary to email you a second time with an irate, "Hey, what's going on?"

Phone Support

How many phone representatives you need is an interesting question that really depends on how stable the game is. If the game is fairly stable and you have fewer than 250,000 subscribers, you can probably get away with five to eight phone reps during normal business hours. If the game is in a perpetually unstable state, all bets are off; you'll probably need to constantly dragoon GMs into the phone queue to help out.

Technical Phone Support

Your technical phone support will closely mirror your FTP email and billing and accounts management email requirements.

Accounts Management and Billing

You'll receive the greatest load of billing and account questions at the end of each month, when the end-of-month billing is run and expired credit cards cause some accounts to be suspended for non-payment. The end-of-month billing resolution cycle will probably require some temporary help from GMs or others for two or three days. It is important to handle these problems quickly; the sooner you get new credit card information from the player, the sooner he/she is back in the game and paying you a subscription fee.