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 “I was not macroing
unattended...seriously my brother has seizures, he was playing on
my account, had a seizure and his head fell on the keyboard..”
Anonymous UO Player
Support Decision: 3 day
suspension
Creativity Score: 9.5
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Tools
–To Code or Not To Code…
E-support
center opens in San Diego
What
Business Are You In?
QUICK TIPS
1) Process
Documentation – Do it right the first time by having a standard
documentation process regimen that includes authors, revision dates
and revision details.
2) FAQ Creation-
Often times the best knowledgebase articles come from those who are
least familiar with the game or project.
MMO FOCUS – Terminology
1) Zone: area of game separated from other areas by
hard lines (such as a gate or a door) that cause the user to unload
the previous zone from memory and load the new zone each time they
cross the door/gate. Usually accompanied by a waiting period while
the zones are loaded.
2) pwned:
The past tense of the word "pwn,"
which means "to kick the ass of (an opponent)."
HISTORY:
Contrary to popular belief, “pwned"
did not originate in Warcraft.
A top Quake player misspelled "owned" and the term
quickly spread to nearly the entire population of online gamers.
The word is usually used in online FPS and RTS games.
USAGE:
Pwned is often said to an individual's
lesser opponent after the greater person or team has defeated his
enemy.
Can also be used when verbal superiority is shown in an argument,
for instance, on a video or computer game message board/forum.
"My druid pwned your wizard, tard
noob."
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Tools – In-House Development
or Outsource?
In
our day to day conversations this question pops up all the time; “do
you feel that developing in-house tools to support MMO games is the
right path or should we just buy something off the shelf”. It’s a
question that’s loaded with “gotchas”. We
usually respond with a few qualifying questions that help the client
and us define what’s best for their particular situation but it really
boils down to this:
·
What are the
resources that are able to be delivered to the platform support
group?
o
Establishing a
billing platform from the ground up is a massive undertaking and we
would only recommend this option to large publishing houses; most of
which have invested heavily in billing already. There are a host of
other tool needs such as CRM, in-game client for item/avatar creation
& manipulation, logging requirements, economy monitoring, server
status, ticketing solutions, bug reporting, etc. Unless you are
committed and have properly planned for programming resources to cover
all these areas it’s a good idea, at the very least, to plan on
purchasing middleware or services from a reputable company.
Obviously the easy answer for us is “outsource
everything” but that is not the fiscally responsible thing to recommend
to clients. Our experience tells us that there are very good solutions
out there that can fill most, not all, needs when it comes to
tools. In the past we have always held that in-game tools and
logging are game service specific
and as such design should be driven by the CS user group, not by the
development team. These requirements should be presented early and work
needs to be tracked in a milestone document just like the rest of the
service. What this means is that you will definitely need to plan on a
tools integration team at a minimum. The good news is that most
programmers like this tour of duty because they don’t get the
4:00am,”the servers are down and you are on call, call”.
We
have really just touched the tip of the iceberg so on this issue. We
could literally write pages about logging and logging capabilities, can
you say logging AI? Please feel free to contact us and we will be happy
to answer any
questions
you may have.
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Game Center Group Opens E-support
Center in San Diego
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Game
Center Group Service Offerings
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Domestic/offshore
CRM Services & Management
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Multimedia
Production China
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Localization/Programming
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On-demand
billing
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Quality
Assurance
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CPC
- Cost per contact; weekly report criteria that provide Producers
and live teams data on which issues are driving the largest
support costs.
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Variance
Report – Weekly reports that give
clients a clear picture of where SLA marks were attained or missed.
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AHT
– Average Handle Time; the amount of time an issue takes to complete
to resolution
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Game Center
Solutions & Investment Group is proud to announce the launch
our flagship location in San
Diego, California.
Set to open November 1. The e-support center will house technical,
account and in-game customer service agents. Coupled with
state-of-the–art technology GCG is poised to provide premium
domestic based support to its clients. “The investment we have put
forward in technology, and more importantly in our people, will
enable us to provide our clients with an affordable domestic based
turn-key CRM solution” said D. Scott Mattson, Founder. The 7,000
foot support center features an “always on” digital vid-con link so that clients can see and
communicate with the center staff 24x7. “We want our clients to
feel as though this support center is an extension of their operation.
Giving them this kind of accessibility and on-demand communication
is a testament to our level of commitment to them, their products
and their services”. Mattson said.
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“What Business Are You In?”
If you answered
this question with “we sell video games” you are probably product
oriented vs. market oriented. As Theodore Leavitt pointed out in
"Marketing Myopia," his classic Harvard Business Review article
published in 1960, the presidents of American railway companies in the
early 1900s, if asked, would have answered the question like this:
"We are in the business
of operating trains."
The result of this narrow,
product-oriented thinking was that virtually every US rail company went bankrupt
or faced serious problems because they missed out on the rapid growth of
the airlines and the development of a sophisticated highway system as a
way to get things and people from place A to place B.
For the railroads, a better
answer would have been:
"We are in the
transportation business."
But now the politically correct
answer is to cite Peter Drucker and say:
“The true business of our
company is to make and keep customers"
This idea--the essence of
Customer Relationship Management--is also not new. Even Mahatma Gandhi
said many years ago:
“The customer is not an
interruption of work, but the purpose of it.”
Do you believe that getting,
keeping and maximizing the profitability of good customers is essential for the continuity of your business?
If you are not getting the
absolute best support your customers deserve…contact us now.
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