How The Game Is Played

Cimmeria: A community in crisis (Age of Conan)

Or "How the Game is Lost"

I am afraid Funcom is in the process of proving an old adage-- that any MMo lives and dies on its customer service. And Funcom's Age of Conan has absolutely the worst customer service it has ever been my displeasure to experience.

The game design itself is great, in someways even ground breaking. The art is absolutely stunning.

The game itself, is broken. very broken. Their regression testing is so bad that they actually introduced major new bugs in their last patch. (A starting enemy for beginning characters suddenly started doing thousands of hit points of damage, ensuring that no one could successfully start a new character.)

Amazingly, this alone would not necessarily doom a promising game. Hardcore MMO players are an amazingly forgiving lot, really, and will put up with amazing levels of brokeness if they feel the developers are listening to them and working with them to find a solution.

The secret, is that MMOs are all about community. In that regard they can ALMOST operate like open source projects. But this only works if the players really feel that the developers are actively acting in good faith with the community. This is where customer service enters the picture. The way a developer establishes that good faith is with clear lines of communication. This doesn't mean they have to cater to every player's whim or idea of what would make the game better, but it DOES mean giving the players the feeling that they are being listened to. Responsive customer service is a key bridge piece that engages the members of the community when they are most emotional and most likely to feel ignored. Good customer service can heal all kinds of wounds. But BAD customer service can create just as many.

Funcom right now is becoming the test book case of how to do customer service wrong.

Funcom has customer forums. However they do not deign to actually engage with the customers on those forums, despite many many pleas by a great many customers. For the past few months there has been a growing petition on the forums for a minor administrative change. It has over 600 signees to date. the requested change, to the US servers, is something that already exists and is in operation in Europe. Not only has Funcom not said yes, they haven't even given a reason why not. in fact, they have outright IGNORED all the posts for months and not even deigned to say "no" despite further pleas for at least that much recognition by their customers.

The ONLY communication from the Funcom game team comes in the forum of periodic "pronouncement from the mountains" speeches from the head game designer, full of self importance and lacking any of the information the players are screaming for on the forums.

In game customer service is useless, though arguably slightly improved from when the game originally launched. When the game launched, if you had a problem , you could put in a trouble ticket. If you were unlucky, the system would just drop it. If you were lucky, it would sit in the system for 8+ hours. Finally a CSR would get to it, see that you had logged out, and send you a message that they erased your ticket since you were no longer online. You'd get this infuriating message the next time you logged in.

Now, if you put in a ticket, they will get back to you within an hour or so, and generally tell you that the policy is not to do anything about your problem. They will tell you o email customer support to escalate. This is apparently a bit bucket. I've never even received an acknowledgment of on of these emails arriving let alone had someone respond to it. And no one else I've talked to about this has, either.

So, faced with mounting frustration, what do players do? What else, they go to their friends for support. In this case its back to those self same forums that funcome will not respond to.

Well, will not respond is too strong a term. they WILL respond to criticism... by locking and deleting threads. They respond by any questioning of such actions as follows. (A private email sent to me recently)

Dear Cyberqat,

You have received an infraction at Age of Conan Forums.

Reason: Questioning Moderation
-------
Greetings,

You were given an infraction for questioning moderation in the public forums. If something has been moderated then it's not something to open a new thread about the topic. It will only become closed or removed to a restricted forum.

You now have 3 infractions of 6. When you hit 6 infractions then you will be automatically suspended.

Thank you!
-------

This infraction is worth 3 point(s) and may result in restricted access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.

I guess the "age of conan" is 1984 and I've just heard from the Ministry of Truth.

Ofcourse, this blog is the true meaning of "information wishes to be free." They cannot silence their community and by trying they are only enraging it further. I encourage others who have been so silenced, in whatever venue, to seek alternate means of expression as well. Such expression is the heart and soul of the internet.

Funcom seems to have invented a new concept: Customer Disservice. A systematic way to take already upset customers and inflame their outrage to the breaking point. I'm not sure how useful it is though, except as an object lesson for future game developers on what not to do.

The train is on the tracks and headed for the cliff and Funcom seems intent on blindly shoving coal into the boiler. Sadly, a promising game with a great start will probably die soon from total mismanagement by a company who never understood that a game service is first, and foremost, a service.

Posted at 09:59PM Jul 11, 2008 by gameguy in General  |