How The Game Is Played

AoC... the C is for Conan, not Customer Service

Alright,
Last week I gave the new Age of Conan game a rave review. This week I'm going to give it a rant.

The game is really really good. It has the usual launch technical issues but these in themselves are not all that surprising.

Funcom however should be ashamed of how bad their customer support is right now. I want to make it clear that I am not blaming the GMs (the CSRs). They are doing what they can with an obviously and terribly broken system. The system does not and cannot scale to meet the needs of a launching game.

Here's how the system is designed:
(1) The player tells a chat-bot that it wants help. This goes on an (in memory) queue in the chat-bot process.
(2) As GMs come available, they take the next ticket in strict FIFO order. This removes it from the queue.
(3) The GM attempts to contact the player in game. If the player is NOT in game, then they send the player a "Sorry you weren't here. Please resubmit your problem" message and the ticket is deleted.
(4) Next time the player logs on, they see that message and have to start at the back of the queue again.

You see the problem don't you? This is a queue thrash waiting to happen and in fact thats what IS happening right now. The queue gets so big so fast that it takes many many hours for any one persons ticket to get looked at. I'm estimating about 8 to 10 hours in the current avg queue length Im seeing of 200 messages, based on my own experiences in that queue.

This means the vast majority of tickets WILL get read AFTER the user has logged off. Which means the CSRs are spending msot of their time writing "Sorry" messages rather then getting any real work done. This slows the queue down even more so it grows even bigger.

The only release valve for the queue is players who give up on ever getting help from Funcom and stop re-submitting. This is NOT a desired customer service state.

Here is a journsal of my own 3 days spent on that queue:

Day 1:
I get stuck behind a peice of geometry. I try the /stuck command. This makes it worse by actually throwing me behind the building and off the map.

I try "Asura's Recall", it won't work because I am on the "Kill Strom" quest which disables it.

I try an instance change. It wont work because there is only one (personal) instance of any tortage night mission. I look around for some way to kill my character and find there is nothing. I put in a ticket and wait, and wait, and wait, at 1:30am I go to bed cause I have to work,

Day 2:
I log in and the first thing I am greeted with is a message from a GM saying "Hi. You werent here so we deleted your ticket. If yous till have problems please resubmit." I resubmit and discover that I am at the back of the queue all over again.

I resubmoit my ticket and start waiting. I periodically check my ticket, which starts at about 210. Apparently the ticket serve crashes because my ticket vanishes at about 180. I submit it *again* and Im back to 200. This happens once more during the night.

Pissed off, I go to the boards and spew. Someone points me at a buried response from funcom in the customer service part of the web site that says if you have waited over two hours and then gotten one of these messages you can email support@funcom.com for offline support., I do so and get an automated message back with a ticket number. I check but there is no way to tell the status of this ticket-- its write only email based system.

Again after 1 am I log off.

Day 3:
I log in and find Im STILL stuck and another one of these "You werent here so we deleted your ticket." messages. I check my email, still no reply from a real human being for offline support. I put *another* online ticket in and sit off the map chattign with friends staring at my unusuable character feeling pissed off.

One of them suggests I try spamming the /stuck command. Even though that was what got me into this mess, I figure it cant get any worse and I try it. Low and behold, after about 10 min of trying it in every nook and corner I can find in the back-side of th geometry it works!

I delete my ticket from the queue to guive some other poor user half a chance of actually GETTING help and send an email to cancel my offline ticket.

In short, AoC is a great game IF you dont need FUncom's help. If you do, your shit out of luck. I cannot in good conscience recommend this game any more until Funcom fixes some of these fundemental support issues. All it would take is modifying their system so, rather then giving the GM the next ticket in the queue, to skip any tickets where the user isnt online and leave them in place. That way, the next time the user logged on they would be at the ehad of the queue, rather then going abck to the tailall over again.

This sia fix, but its only an immediate fix. The REAL fix is to be able to do CS while the user is off line. I really dont udnerstand why they couldnt move me abck to the start position when I wasn't online. It seems like that woudl be one SQL quey. But I don't know what their back end looks like.

On the bright side, all this DOES point to the need for mature, manageable systems for running online services. Maybe next time, they should look at Project Darkstar as a base. Project Darkstar is in its infancy now but it would (a) give them more time to work on the issues they clearly didnt have time on this time around like customer service and (b) as a standard platform allow them to leverage others work in these areas.

Posted at 11:44AM May 30, 2008 by gameguy in General  |