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

Re:The real culprits

[lightspawn]

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.

I'm sorry, but I'm still bitter about the loss of my Phantasy Star Online character. SEGA knew there was a way for players to completely delete (well, modify beyond recognition) other players' games, but they did not fix the bug and did not disclose it (which would have enabled me to save my character).

They combined this approach with such fine techniques as not letting you back up your game to another memory card and not saving a copy on the server side.

Whenever a software developer knows of a bug that can result in users' data loss, the users should be informed. This should be a law. Any senators reading slashdot today?

Similarities to...

[ae0nflx]

Whenever I think about MMORPGs, I think about the music industry. There are so many similarities, buggy software, restrictive service for exorbantant monthly fees...

The only company, in my opinion that has gotten online gaming right is Blizzard, you buy the game (right...buy...) they provide Battle.net for FREE. hmm. what a novel concept. I would think that most gamers switch from game to game every few months, yes some games last more than others but it is often too much effort to switch gaming services. When I think about what I want in an MMORPG, i think (nerd alert...) of .hack, an anime show. The technology isn't at that point yet, but it wouldn't hurt if the developers could make a little effort to make things more interesting. The MMORPG community needs a savior like Apple was the online music community. And I am by no means suggesting that you have a pay-per-game system, just a more innovative system that would attract more gamers.

Re:Quite true

[Micro$will]

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.

This is true for any service. It could explain why AOL lost over a quarter million subscribers this year.

Surprised this isn't a repost

[Dachannien]

Problems with Customer Service in online games are nothing new. The several people above complaining about CS in UO, of all games, should indicate that.

But the real problem is that CS in an online game is, believe it or not, hard. Reasons for this:

• Customers asking for things they cannot have due to regulations governing CS. These are games, they have rules, and they have to be fair for everyone. If CS grants certain favors to some players and not others, those other people complain. Ironically enough, if CS doesn't grant those favors to some players and not others, the some players are the ones complaining.
  
• Customers asking for immediate gratification through immediate information, even when the knowledge will not gratify them. So the servers are down. "Why why why?" "OMG wehn will tehy b bakc up!!!!1" If you've ever been in an online game's out-of-game chat when the servers were down, you've probably seen your fair share of this. The problem is, there are tons of people asking why, there are tons of people complaining, and many of them will not be sated by the truth anyway. Yes, the servers are down, and the players have reason to be distraught, but unless the company is completely slacking off, someone is working on the problem.
  
• There are usually not enough CS staff for the number of players. This is exacerbated by two factors: one, a small portion of the player base makes an inordinately large portion of the requests received by the CS staff; and two, CS is notoriously underpaid in the MMOG industry. (For reference, EverQuest GMs used to be hired initially as temps, and after the temp agency took its cut, they were making about $8 per thankless hour, while living mostly just north of San Diego.)
  
• Customers suck. Yeah, that's not a very polite way to say it, but drawing from some of the earlier points I made, this summary can be obtained: an inordinately small portion of the customer base complains both constantly and quite rudely to an overworked, underpaid CS team about issues beyond CS's control. Players blame CS for everything, because CS is the front line for a lot of their problems, regardless of where the request should go. CS generally doesn't handle tech support (though this depends to some extent on the company). CS certainly is not in charge of making design decisions. CS has a very limited scope of action, yet customers who do not (or refuse to) understand this continue to levy their complaints against the first people they see - customer service.
  
• Lawyers suck even worse. Ever since the AOL lawsuit regarding volunteer workers, MMOG maintainers have been scared shitless of the implications of being sued. EverQuest was and is, to my knowledge, the only professionally-published online game still to make use of volunteer customer service personnel. While the Guide Program was not the perfect solution to the customer service problem, it provided advantages in terms of cost to the end-user which are unavailable when all of a company's CS staff must be hired. Yes, a company should absorb the costs of customer service when they are making money hand-over-fist, but realistically, no company is going to cut the bottom line to make the customers happy when they have a parent company (with shareholders) breathing down their neck. (Alternatively, shareholders and parent companies suck and will be a thorn in the side of customers until their expectations on return can be brought to a more reasonable level.)

So, yes, CS is hard. Everyone hates you - the customers, the pencil-pushing-penny-pinchers, everyone. Do companies owe us good CS for our money? Yes, of course. For our $14.95 a month, we should be getting the same sort of CS we get from the phone company, the cable company, plumbers, banks, mechanics.......

...and hopefully the irony there was lost on no one.

Re:Quite true

[Shrubber]

The article is completely right, except for the conclusion. All of the outlined problems do exist. They don't stop people from playing, however. To say the future of online gaming is dim goes against all of the evidence we already have. People will play bad games, get treated like crap, AND pay for it in droves. Sure, there's plenty of people who say they quit such and such a game because of the poor service. Then there's the hundreds of thousands of other people who are still shelling out their money month after month, and are showing no signs of stopping now. The only thing that will hurt online gaming will be bad games. And the only thing that will hurt is the individual game, people will happily keep paying someone else.