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

Do not play well with others...ever.

[silentbobdp]

I always thought other annoying players would be the biggest obstacle to MMORPG success.

Ultima Online

[RealityMogul]

One of my biggest complaints about Ultima Online was that they never sent out any notifications that your subscription was about to expire. They just left it to you to remember to pay them more money as needed.

I wasn't a hardcore gamer so I would easily forget about such things as I did have many other aspects of my life that didn't revolve around the game.

It always bugged me that they couldn't bother to setup a small machine with a 20 line perl script to churn out e-mails.

A year ago I forgot to pay and when I went to logon my account was dead, so I just said screw it and uninstalled it. The in-game problems were enough to make me want to quit, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The real culprits

[lightspawn]

• Buggy, exploitable software
  
• Developers unable or unwilling to fix bugs
  
• Servers shut down either periodically or permanently (hi SEGA)
  
• Boring, repetitive gameplay
  

Re:The real culprits

[Ty]

Developers unable or unwilling to fix bugs

While many online games are very slow to fix bugs, you should not directly blame it on the developers. SQA's are usually in control of what (if any) bugs are fixed. At times, in large companies, the development team may not even know a bug exists.

For example, we had a major exploit in PvP in Everquest on one of the servers with special rules for combat. Two years went by without it being fixed. The actual dev team didn't learn of the exploit until they doing Q&A with a public audience, and were confronted with it. The devs claimed the SQA team had never notified them. However, the exploit was patched shortly after.

Quite true

[Kethinov]

This article is quite true and I can support it with experience. I used to play Ultima Online and had been a long time player. I was part of the PVP (player vs player) niche of the game. While it is true that we were the minority, we still payed our monthly fee and deserved to have fun. Gradually over the years, the developers continued to make changes forcing PVPers to quit. Instead of listening to the overwhelming cries to make a server just for us, they continued to make the game cater to people who enjoyed farming gold and items. The casual PVPer was left in the dust

To make a long story short, they did try to make a server just for us, but they failed to listen to what the PVP customers were trying to tell them. We wanted casual PVP; we didn't want to spend 10 hours a day trying to farm gold and items in order to compete! So because of developer ignorance and failure to listen to customers, they've all but lost their PVP minority. Now the difference between UO and Everquest is minimal and UO's days are quite numbered now that SWG and FFXI are rolling in.

If they wanted to save their game and make it unique they should have offered what no other game had: casual PVP. But it seemed they were more concerned with the short term business model than the long term business model. Drop an insignificant minority here, gain some newbies there, raise subscription rates for 3 months. Seems okay on the surface, but by shunning long time players and relying on a constant flow of newbies, your game is destined to fail.

Re:Quite true

[achacha]

Casual PVPer is like saying a casual serial killer. The only benefit to the MMORPG is that they can be used as a self policing aspect when reputation system is inadequate.

PvP is the scourge that prevented UO from growing and why EQ has over 300,000 subscribers. PvP is a small subset of players that somehow feel that they need to be supported while they drive away many of casual gamers. And there are 50x more casual gamers than hardcore gamers, from the financial point of view, the companies would rather cater to the casual gamers rather than the hardcore ones. Casual gamers still pay the same amount per account and play far less reducing the load on the servers and in the long run reducing bandwidth costs of a hardcore player. Hardcore players are actually financially the worst type of a customer they use up way more resources than their monthly payment "allows".

Most PvPer tend to be griefers, PKers and generally annoying people. Having played UO, I was unable to do anything in the game without someone attempting to kill me, the game became 1 domensional, leave town and run hoping you don't get killed. The only option was to become a PKer and prey on the clueless newbies and ruin their experience, and I chose not to do that.

If people want to PK then they should be playing Quake/Halflife/etc. where the environment is set up for them to kill each other and leave the rest of us MMORPG players to explore the world, group up, research, tradeskill and try to have a good time.

PHBs

[pmz]

Until corporate accounting evolves to properly label customer service as a means for profit rather than expense, this will always be a problem.

On rare occasion, I've had a company blow me away with tremendous customer service, and that almost guarantees I'll be a repeat customer. At least, I'll think of that company, again. Customer service really should be viewed as advertising, where it is the company's chance to define their image to customers. Even though the total number of people exposed are few, the power of word-of-mouth should not be underestimated.

The last couple of times I've bought from lesser-known retailers listed at Pricewatch, I'll do a google search for "company-xyz sucks OR 'poor service'", for example. The results can be suprising and help me determine whether a vendor is an acceptable risk.

What a surprise!

[PapaZit]

Check out the "So what can I do?" section. The answer: "an out-of-the-box subscription management solution". Other tips: don't do it yourself, expect it to take time and cost a lot of money.

Now, skip down to the bottom of the article:

Dale Munk is CEO of subscription management software provider Sandlot - www.sandlot.com

A subscription management software provider recommending that people spend a lot of money on subscription management software. Who'd have thought?

Re:You don't really need to be a paying subscriber

[Schezar]

Here's what killed UO for me.

Macroing.

Macros make MMORPGs fun. Without them, you'd actually have to waste your time clicking on the tree ten-thousand times. With a macro, you can let the computer do the repetitive, boring, tedious tasks while you're at work, and then have fun playing the game when you get home.

If a task in a game can be reliably done with a non-intelligent macro, that task is only worthy of a non-intelligent being.