Customer Service Jeopardizes Online Gaming?

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their new opinion piece suggesting poor customer service infrastructure is the biggest obstacle to to the growth of online gaming. According to the piece: "The biggest threat to online games today is the industry's neglect of the customer - usually a subscriber. How can a group so focused on giving the customer what they want, fulfilling their inner desires and fantasies in an online game be accused of neglecting this customer?" The writer also advocates partnering with an external subscription management solution if it makes sense, saying: "..overlooking those operational details that support the subscriber (billing, authentication, marketing, etc.) can mean the difference between disaster and success - even for a very good game."

Comments

You don't really need to be a paying subscriber...

[ihatesco]

to feel screwed from the Management.

I remember when I used to play on an unofficial Ultima Online shard

Origin: before continuing please note

• I aknowledge that it breaches your TOS contract
• That shard anyway closed and disbanded and I am not informed what their admins are doing now
• I am not advocating with this article to play on unofficial servers (rather: che contrary, play on official ones dudes, or play free games like muds or free mmorpgs)

Back to us...
I can remember playing on this unofficial UO shard. There the Admins tought the following things:

1. They were the admins and they were going to decide what was the best for the Shard, including:
   • Sudden Gameplay Changes (many of which undocumented or really far far far from the original UO experience)
   • Insane rules about guilds (like this one: "your guild space is sacred and no one can enter into it, HOWEVER, if someone manages to enters in it via a gate and mark the territory, you have to pay them a ransom"... that doesn't make any sense at all)
   • Some GMs really liked to unnerve you asking to stick to roleplay mode (they jailed a group of four girls who entered in one of their houses with their horses and stayed there for some time, just to avoid the horses to be killed by a group of PKs) and the minute later other GMs summon strange beasts inside guilds for entertainment (a red/black flametrowing Oclock which also liked to make jokes), or makes NPC bankers say funny out of character things to people around (yeah so much for the "RPG Mode ON" in the Message of the Day... my a$$).
2. A really childish management of the forums (replying to a professional pk and troll, which was 13 years old at the time, with the :rolleyes: smiley at every single post... and the admin/moderator doing replying with those spammy :rolleyes: was 24...)
3. The ban of the two most clever admins and making a third one to suspend herself temporarily because she was tied to the other two and did not want to impede the management... and all of them were people who really liked to work on the shard and who really did their questing job well (the third of them is a girl who was even neglecting other hobbies, and other friends for that damn server... but she was the one that answered all the Pages, all the damn subscription requests and mails, no Origin... she went to live to Venezuela with her boyfriend some months ago and I haven't heard from her since). All of this why? The comeback of the original founder of one of the two shards that have merged into the one I played.

What is my point with this rant?
I arrive to it in a minute.

Before that experience I loathed Ultima Online since it was sucking my friends in and I found myself alone... but when I started playing it on Christmas, I managed to understand why they liked it, and I began mining, hacking, chopping stuff for hours like them because I wanted my PC become stronger, and I wished to do quests with them.

I also found a very good game guild, I also found "my role" in there and my "part". Everyone else liked my PC and we exchanged our stuff, I repaired stuff for them and they gave me ingots... so I became part of that world.

Unfortunately the Game masters were too much involved in making the game a "continuous experimentation in serverside scripting", a "living lab of game design failures and unfixed bugs", and a "political chess game".

They managed to ruin an otherwise good experience.
Why?
Poor communication, poor understanding, and a really scarce level of humilty.
This is what happens with nowadays companies.
Why, for example, my "railroad transportation authority" has to put loud, clearchannel/disco music at the train stations (yes, in Italy we have Clearchannel radio stations... I am not surprised by it). Does it enhace the service or is it only eye candy?
Is it

Re:Surprised this isn't a repost

[the_ed_dawg]

Anarchy Online actively recruits ARKs for in-game help. I believe the only requirement is to have at least one level 50 character, though I imagine they can be as selective as necessary.

However, having sat in a petition queue for over two hours without advancing in priority, I'd like to mention that they should be less selective in their help and look for more quantity. I mean... I was only stuck inside a mission. Beam me up, Scotty!