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Austin Game Conference 2006 in Depth
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Sep 14, 2006 10:28 AM
from the retro-specting dept.
from the retro-specting dept.
New games site OGX has up an overview of last week's Austin Game Conference. The piece touches on the big talks (Rob Pardo, Jon Landau, Vernor Vinge), and gives some informational tidbits about the always-interesting panel discussions. From the article: "Community was also a topic that was frequently the primary driver behind a panel, or as a secondary topic that rose up in relation to the topic at hand. Gordon Walton, Studio Director for Bioware Austin held a particularly radical presentation entitled 'Rethinking Service Offerings.' Walton noted that the player perspective about customer service amounted to 'No matter how we do service, we suck.' and questioned why companies spend energy on a perception based challenge that they have not been able to overcome. Walton's premise was that since the customer service infrastructure for a MMORPG eats the most revenue and generates less than favorable results, it may be entirely possible to cut customer service offerings down entirely to a set of automated tools and save the money spent designing for satisfied customers."
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How They Made World of Warcraft 140 comments
SiliconJesus writes "Rob Pardo, VP of Design at Blizzard, gave an interesting keynote at the Austin Game Conference outlining the Blizzard philosophy on designing game content, core and casual players, and why story should always drive the game." From Raph's writeup: "If you extend the leveling curve too far, it becomes a barrier. You hit a leveling wall. Our walls are shorter and there are less of them. The short leveling curve also encourages people to reroll and start over. We had some hardcore testers who would level to 60 in a week. There was much concern within the company. But I would tell them that we cannot design to that guy. You have to let him go. He probably won't unsubscribe, he's going to hit your endgame content or he'll have multiple level 60s. In games with tough leveling curves, it discourages you from starting over." More is available from the conference, with Gamasutra having a rundown on Mark Terrano's writer's keynote, and Gamespot's piece on the MMOG Rant session. Paneled by the likes of Matt Firor, Lum, Rich Vogel, and Jessica Mulligan, that must have been entertaining to see live. One more thing - WoW has 7 Million subscribers now.
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Thursday at the Austin Game Conference 33 comments
Much talk yesterday in Austin centered around Rob Pardo's keynote, but there were several other events you might be interested in. Dell Chairman Michael Dell talked about that company's gaming plans in a 'fireside' chat. Movie producer Jon Landau spoke on the role of gaming in the entertainment industry. Gamasutra has several pieces from smaller talks, with titles like The Death of Cinematics, New Models for Game Stories, and Writing for Digital Actors. Finally, Raph Koster offers an ultimatum to the games business: evolve or die. From that article: "The end result, according to Koster, is the current hit-driven state of the game industry, which focus on the top 20 percent of games. 'The particular adaptation that we've made to this is to not bother making or stocking or selling the other 80 percent,' Koster said. 'So when you walk into your friendly neighborhood GameStop, you won't find the game that is 21 on the charts. Because of limited shelf space, they just don't want it around. It's just not worth having it compared to game number 20 twice, or better yet, The Sims and all of its expansions.'"
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Friday at the Austin Game Conference 9 comments
This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup: "The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."
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Satisfied customers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Customer service's job is to turn unsatisfied customers into satisfied customers. Since everyone will eventually have some issue they need customer service for, and most everyone hates automated systems, this sounds like a great way to guarantee failure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, it isn't CSR's job to turn customers. I'm not sure what industry you are talking about, but this is about MMORPG CS. MMORPG Customer Service is about mitigating customer expectations. Outside of a cancellation call, a CSR is dealing with a satisfied MMORPG customer that has expectations outside of the norm or is dealing with an irregular event. This is what MMORPG CS data has shown. Saying reality is someth
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The satisfied customer does not feel the need to have any issues solved. They do not call up customer serv
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Customer service is EVERYTHING (Score:3, Interesting)
This sucks! When it comes to customer support for online games I am very enthusiastic about the human touch.
The first MMOG I played, There, sported truly revolutionary customer support - players could summon a support technician to "physically" appear before them and help guide them through their issue. People could volunteer to be virtual caregivers to help those with more common and non-pressing issues. Talking to one of these individuals really made me feel like my business was appreciated.
Guild Wars, with no monthly fees, has the best customer support of any software product I've ever owned. A human always gets back to me within 24 hours and their reply always contains personal assistance from a named and individually accountable person, accompanied by 5 automatically chosen "best fit" FAQ links that are suggested by some kind of algorithm (hit and miss). On more than one occasion they have thanked ME for bringing my issues to their attention, and thus, on several occasions I have taken the time to write back to express my great satisfaction with their business model.
Conversely, I required technical support from Blizzard for an issue in WoW. I couldn't find a customer support link anywhere on their site. All I could find was a user forum. I went to the forum and attempted to ask a question but I was prompted to create an account first. I looked and looked for a link to create an account when I finally glanced in the corner to see that the logon server was completely offline [blogger.com]! My issue was eventually resolved by a friend that I conversed with over my cell phone at my additional expense. That's what you get for $15/m from Blizzard. That and slow-as-molasses Bittorrent P2P distribution of mandatory patches.
I will not resubscribe to WoW due to Blizzard's atrocious service. However, I will very gladly and readily subscribe to ArenaNet and NCSoft games now that I see how dearly they appreciate my business and how important it is to them that I get the most out of my gaming experience at all times.
Re: (Score:2)
WoW chokes $15/month from me and I'm not their number one priority? What kind of sucker are you?
The paying customer is ALWAYS #1 on the list. That's why I'm so impressed with AnenaNet's support. I bought the game for $40 and they've worked their asses off to keep me happy for about 14 months now. In that time you've paid Blizzard $190 so that you can upload patches to other paying customers, and you were locked out o
Re: (Score:2)
I'm speaking from my own experience. I am not wrong, you are just a skeptical fanboy.
And for the
Re: (Score:2)
But that's your experience and I've told mine. Our stories together paint a picture of the company and we have therefore assisted others in their purchasing decisions. Good for us!
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Re: (Score:1)
I have to agree with the parent that the human touch in customer service is a big deal.
Aside from a (hopefully) active group of developers and designers on the game's boards, customer service and support is the public face of the people/company running the game and taking your hard earned money each month.
My main experience is with City of Heroes. In playing for about 10 months I only had a couple times in-game where I needed to contact support and deal with a GM and both were very positive and left me sati
Re: (Score:2)
There [there.com] knows its clientelle well and devised the perfect way to ensure people are nice to noobs - they created a "Noob Helper" skill that you can level up in! It simply checks the seniority of the person you're talking to and looks for keywords, and if you talk to new people long enough you gain experience in the skill. Gaining a level earns you free stuff like clothing and hair styles. Positive reciprocity is the way to go, not cutting costs on a percieved lost cause.
Re: (Score:2)
A stupid ruling against AOL practically made this illegal. After said ruling, the owners of Ultima Online were sued for a very similar thing to what you describe. However, there is hope because I believe both entities were sued for providing some compensation but not treating them as employees. So, a new company could do it, but they couldn't compensate at all (I think all UO did was let the people play the game for free). Oh well, that's what you get in
Who needs phone support? (Score:1)
This does require a little more attention be paid to security, however. Not just sec