[MUD-Dev] Reach out and bitch at someone

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Brian Green wrote:

> Here's something I've been wondering for a while.  Why do players feel
> it is acceptable to abuse administrators of MUDs?

No mystery here. Customer service on most games sucks. Our customer
service certainly is far from perfect, but I will also say that I rarely
get any abuse at all from the players. Perhaps the fault lies with the
administrators rather than the players. Of course, probably part of the
reason I don't get much abuse is that if a player decides to push me, I'll
just remove his/her voice or, if it's really bad (like a player
threatening to track down one of my Goddesses in real life), I just turn
them into shrubs.


> In many player complaints, they always seem to throw out the phrase "I
> pay for this" or "I pay your salary!" when they talk to administrators
> and CS representatives of commercial games.  This perplexes me, because
> you rarely see this happening with sane people in other situations.

Eh? I worked for my Congressman for awhile and we used to get letters
exactly like that all the time. "I pay your salary, so do what I say,
asshole." 

 
> If I read a novel that I didn't like, I don't contact the author and
> say, "Look, buddy, I didn't like that book of yours.  I bought it, so
> I'm paying your salary.  Next time, you better darn well write a book
> *I* do like!"  If I were to run up to a McDonald's employee and yell, "I
> ASKED FOR EXTRA PICKLES.  GO BACK THERE AND BRING BACK EXTRA PICKLES,
> BEEYOTCH!!!!1!!" my friends would have a special name for me: "asshole".

Major difference here I think. Books and McDonalds are products, not
services. Online games are services. Having said that, if I asked for
extra pickles at McDonalds and didn't get it, you bet I'd demand they go
fix the problem. I wouldn't yell at them (unless they refused to accede to
my reasonable request), but then, I'm also not a teenager. 


> Why is this?  Is it because of the relatively easy access to company
> spokespeople/developers?  Is it because of the time and money investment
> that players feel they need to make?  Is it because online anonymity
> provides a buffer to be more rude to others?

I think it's both the fact that you are paying for a service (not a
product) and thus you should reasonably expect service, and the online
anonymity. I know a lot of teenagers who are all brash and loud online,
but if I phone them up, boy, is it a different story (I just had one
little punk charge $1000 on a stolen credit card. When I caught him, he
denied it, was rude, etc etc. When I phoned him to tell him that I will
ensure he is prosecuted, he was meek as can be. Geeks don't do well in
voice communication I've noticed.)

> 
> Admittedly, the vocal rude people are in the minority in MUDs, but they
> seem to be a bit more common than in other areas of entertainment. 
> Wondering what other people think.

My experience has actually been that people on online games are slightly
LESS rude than on the internet generally. One only has to go to any
message board where some stupid issue is being discussed to watch people
acting towards each other as if their families had racial feuds going back
10 generations.

--matt




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