damned vulpine

Game lecture: GM Ironwill, GM Mustang

The following is from the lecture Wednesday night in Austin, as part of ACC's video game lecture series, the monthly sort with free admission. The talk was called "Player Relations," though most of it would focus on customer service and non-development administration of games.

Will Leverett and Rob Simpson.

Lecturers for the night were Will Leverett, NCSoft's head of account administration (we'll get to what that means later) and Rob Simpson, the game-master team lead for City of Heroes/City of Villains.

Both have careers in MMOG service starting with Ultima Online in the former Origin Systems office, starting as in-game GMs (and though it didn't come up in the lecture, I've known Will as Ironwill for years now, and I learned Rob was GM Mustang once upon a time. UO old-schoolers might remember them this way.) An unannounced guest, who had been speaker at earlier ACC events, ended up being the third speaker for the evening.

Will was the only one who stayed standing, right above an Ethernet jack in the wall.

Will made good use of the classroom's whiteboard to draw up the organizational chart of the NCSoft division currently known as "Studio Services," which according to the description includes all the services not related to actual development or marketing.

Publisher-developer relations can take many forms, and right now, NCSoft seems to have the range of any that can be named. They have in-house development in South Korea (for Lineage and Lineage II,) an in-house team at the Austin headquarters (Destination Games, for Tabula Rasa, still under development), an off-site subsidiary in Seattle (ArenaNet, makers of GuildWars,) and two independent studios whose games they publish under license (Cryptic Studios in San Jose, makers of City of Heroes, currently NC's biggest game in North America, and its soon-to-be released companion game City of Villains; and NetDevil in Denver, makers of Auto Assault.) Though there might be variations in how the services are provided, NCSoft aims to provide pretty much the same set of services for every game they publish, and Studio Services caters to each of their development teams in much the same way.

The audience, minus a special guest who came in late.

The MMOG space is new, Will said, and many of the services that would be discussed are still being worked out, and even the notion that such services are necessary for a successful MMOG is somewhat novel, though they've all come a long way. Both have relatively short careers in the game industry -- Will was a writer for a small Central Texas newspaper and answered a temp-agency ad for game masters in Ultima Online expecting to be laid off in just a few months, and Rob was a law-school graduate who didn't want to be a lawyer and first got passed for a job at Origin, went to work for the IRS for a while and finally landed at Origin. Neither expressed a great interest in game development but enjoyed their jobs and wanted to explain that there were alternatives to development in the games industry -- though few in the small audience, when introducing themselves at the start of the talk, sounded like they'd given much prior thought to "support" as a career path.

NCSoft's organizational chart for Studio Services, as drawn by Will.

Will briefly touched on quality assurance ("they test the games"), "Account Support" which is aka "billing" at NCSoft, and Online Community Relations ("the front line for our game communities") but most of what he and Rob talked about were from their own departments, Customer Services and Game Support. The separation between the two is the game itself -- CS is "out of game," mostly handled by telephone and e-mail, and GS is "in game," using the game itself to communicate with player-customers and solve problems thereof.

Asked for hard numbers, Rob estimated that CoH generates between 1,000 and 1,200 calls a day on a regular month. Game patches (ed: probably the most jarring event that can be expected to occur regularly in a MMOG, at least that developers can plan for) typically quadruple that call load for the month, he said. Fortunately, Rob added, about 80 percent of the problems raised by customers are considered simple and routine, and can be addressed by the first tier of support by script. Unfortunately, Will said, to handle that call load, 300 employees based in India represent NCSoft's Tier 1. (NCSoft employs 300 people at its Austin office, for comparison.) Will had much praise for the Indian team, though he said they're the only option "financially" (meaning it's considered inviable to pay anything more than one-quarter living wage in America.)

Tier 2 is handled by teams in Austin ("us," as Will put it,") while Tier 3 usually involves problems so bad that developers have to get involved and see about changing the game somehow. Will said the Austin office has a conference call with each developer almost every week. Employees in Customer Services can be generalists, as those problems are often technical or otherwise not directly related to gameplay ("I lost my password" is still a biggie.) Game Support employees need more specific knowledge of each game, and are organized in teams. Both groups typically work 40-hour weeks (as opposed to developers who can expect to work much longer hours), organized in shifts for 24-hour support.

Then came time for Will to explain his job, in the "inappropriately named" Account Administration department. He heads a team of four that do nothing but process account terminations. In other words, "omg b&".

MMOGs are different, and the way they're set up affects how players will behave, and as Rob and Will pointed out, misbehave. Rob put the finest point on it -- player conflict relates directly to how much players will break the rules. "Conflict makes support harder," Will said. For example, in Lineage 2, where the entire game is hardcore player-on-player, guild-on-guild conflict, the instances of harassment and account hacking are much greater than in City of Heroes, where most of the in-game conflict is with monsters not controlled by players. Some players will cheat in any sort of MMOG, Will said, but when the name of the game is competition, the unfairness is more recognizable. Duping, the process of tricking the game server into creating copies of a character's inventory, can be especially damaging, even when controls are put in place to track and fix the dupes. "To Joe-average-player who's in game two hours a day, it's like, 'Hey, this isn't fair. He has a castle and I have a ... hammer.'"

Rob also explained another difference between "casual friendly" and "hardcore" MMOGs, using the same examples. City of Heroes is popular, but most players don't stay very long compared to Lineage 2, where it's hard to attract new players, "but the ones who already enjoy it, they don't want to leave." A lot of that has to do with how hard it is to regain character abilities

Sometimes serious gameplay problems don't get fixed in game for a while after they're found. Will recalled that for a while in Lineage 2, it was possible to stand on rocks and use ranged attacks on other players without being targeted. It was almost six months before it was fixed, but it was labeled an exploit and players could be disciplined.

Sometimes GS serves as a legal liaison. Will said sometimes game cheats are advertised on Internet sites, and the only viable way for a game publisher to stop it is through legal means. Most often, it's through trademark and copyright infringement claims, and often it's presented to the Internet service provider of the site. "Pretty much all the time, they'll pull the site," Will said.

Will never mentioned it directly, only calling it "ongoing legal issues," but NCSoft and Cryptic are the subject of an ongoing legal battle with Marvel Comics, over the alleged use of Marvel trademarks and copyrights by CoH customers wanting to play as their favorite Marvel superheroes. Will said he and his team had spent two weeks of 12-hour days in support of NCSoft's side of the "legal issues."

GuildWars represents a special experiment for NCSoft, being the first major MMOG to be released without a monthly subscription fee. Will and Rob said its success will depend on whether players will pay for the "episodic content" to be released as expansions to the standard game, but the game is considered popular, with one major difference: the customer service is much easier. Rob said NCSoft is cutting back on the support staff for GuildWars as a result. "The expectations of the players are different. They're not asking for as much as those in subscription-based games ... we don't need as many people as we thought we did."

Final notes:

Bob McGoldrick, ACC's High Technology Institute coordinator.

• ACC's High Technology Institute Coordinator Bob McGoldrick, who is exceedingly level-headed and always apologetic about not being involved in the game industry besides his coordination of ACC's game development track, opened the session with upcoming events, including a panel discussion on Aug. 10 at Austin Studios about the "Hot Coffee" mod and resulting scandal, which Damion Schubert is moderating. Bob slipped at first and called it "Hot Chocolate."

• Gordon Walton came to watch after Will and Rob had already started speaking. He stayed silent for the first few minutes, but talking about what to do with players who don't follow the rules is an expertise of his. He's always good for at least one chestnut about how the game industry really works, and this time it came in his explanation of how game customer service differs from other subscription-based services like telephone or cable, because online game have a "connected audience." If something goes wrong with a game service, the customers are more likely to tell each other about it, he explained.

• I asked several questions, but the best answer came when I asked about the hue and cry that players sometimes raise over unpopular policies enacted to control their behavior in game. Has player reaction ever caused a reversal in their policies, I asked. Will had to think to even come up with an example that came close, recalling when player houses in UO could be looted from the outside through walls. At one point it was called a "feature," resulting in a great player outcry and eventual reversal of the policy (and fixing the feature.) Ultimately, though, policy complaints usually don't result in lots of players leaving the game, which would be considered far more significant than gripes from people who keep playing.

• Gordon's follow-up to the above question came when I glibly suggested, "if they don't quit, you don't care." "It's not that we don't care," he retorted, "There are just priorities to follow."

• Rob said there's an effort now to produce a set of tools that can be provided to developers so Studio Services can help administer them, in and out of game. Right now, however, it still depends on developers to build logging features, character name filters and other administrative tools into the game, and NCSoft helps case by case.

• Typing skills are primary for in-game service jobs. Customer service skills learned elsewhere are also useful, as is general game knowledge. Knowledge about the game is not as important, as it can be learned. "Wanting to be nice" is also pretty key, Will said.

  NCSoft uses a temp agency, Capio Solutions for all its GS and CS hiring. It's mainly to protect themselves against bad hires ("and we have had some," Will said) who can be removed within a 60-day probationary period.

• Will didn't say exactly how many accounts his department has closed, but it measures in the "tens of thousands."

• NCSoft logs everything in its games. This makes customer service much more effective than it was when Will and Rob were working on Ultima Online, which for a very long time had no logging at all. Will recalls that solving player disputes as a GM sometimes involved teleporting two arguing players to either side of town and telling them to walk away.

• NCSoft's standard character name filter had about 40 words to guard against. Now it's at closer to 8,000. Will said allowing players to name "pets" in game is one of the most aggravating design decisions he's ever had to deal with.

• Yes, allowing players to filter and block each other's language is important, but it isn't foolproof.

• Consoles represent a huge, "similar but different" game market, Will said, and "it's hard not to look at it ... not to say that our company has not looked at it."

Posted by j at August 6, 2005 01:06 PM