[MUD-Dev] FW: [uodevlist] OT - Lawsuit on Lum's

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Freeman <skeptack at antisocial.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Thursday, September 21, 2000 11:35 AM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] FW: [uodevlist] OT - Lawsuit on Lum's


>At 12:07 PM 9/20/00 -0400, Dave Rickey wrote:
>>    Volunteer programs are dead,
>
>I think most of the functionality could be integrated into the game so that
>players who want to help other players can get all the same abilities and
>restrictions that they had under the volunteer program, but without being
>labeled as anything other than "a player/customer", themselves.
>
>This question came up on the UO newsgroup:  Other than hospitals, are there
>any for-profit companies that use volunteers?  I couldn't think of any,
>other than AOL.

    A ridiculous proportion of all the "Community" sites on the Internet use
them in some fashion, whether for-profit or not.  In fact, it's fundamental,
the "community" is other players, just by participating at any level above
passive lurker you're "volunteering" in a way fundamental to the business
model of that company.
>
>>    What I really love about the interview is where the
>>bottom-fe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers say that they don't *want* to destroy the
>>industry, but they don't think it deserves to exist.  At least, not if its
>>continued existence get in the way of a fat payday for them....
>
>Hm.  I don't know why any industry would "deserve" anything.  It's either
>viable or it's not.  If it isn't viable without a small army of unpaid
>workers, then why should it exist?

    Online communities can't exist without small armies of unpaid workers,
because they *are* small armies of unpaid workers.  Any business model that
depends on the formation and maintenance of online communities is threatened
by this.
>
>Related question:  Do you think Dark Camelot can employ enough GMs to catch
>all the grief-players skirting around the PK-switch code, or will you be
>looking to implement social controls, player-policing, etc. instead now?
>
    Certainly we can, because the volunteers never had much to do with
handling grief players.  The only useful response to a grief player is
banning him, and such an action is rarely taken if a GM doesn't witness the
activity personally.  What volunteers mostly handled was routine questions,
and the occassional stuck player.  They also filtered the qeue for the
issues that *required* GM intervention.  This gave the GM's the time needed
for "Grief" and exploitation issues, which normally require a lot of time
observing (and tools that no volunteer could be trusted with).

    Without them, the qeue will have to be handled the way I handled it on
graveyard shifts in EQ (when I was the only GM on duty, and would cover 10+
servers with no Guides on them): Ruthlessly.  Get a petition that asks for
help you can't give?  Delete it and move on, the time you'd spend arguing
over whether they should get help could be spent handling the petitions of
several people you *can* help.  Get a petition that doesn't explain what the
problem is?  Delete it.  Got a petition about "So and so is saying bad
things to me"?  Delete it, that kind of situation takes 15-60 minutes to
handle, during which you can do little or nothing else.  Get a petition that
says "Help, I'm stuck in a corner!", teleport to that player, unstick him,
and *go*, time spent chatting with him is better spent helping the next one.

    The choice becomes "Do you handle requests that will take a long time
and/or can't be resolved, and have a lot of people you could actually help
get no assistance, or do you focus on the ones you can actually do something
for?"  You can't pay enough GM's to be nice and chatty, and handle every
petition fully no matter what, so you go to a pure "Churn 'em and burn 'em"
CS approach for your front line GM's (and I'm talking about "burn them out
in 2-4 months"), do the minimum required to clear the petition and move on,
ignore requests that can't be effectively resolved quickly ("Sorry, I cannot
help thee with that" *poof*).  Watch them like hawks, these are not valued
employees, they're cannon fodder temps you *expect* to quit.  Then you have
a senior grade of GM that handles "grief" and exploitation issues.  "Play
nice" policies become history, you can't justify the manhours required,
cheaper to have them yell at each other and occasionally quit.  Lost
equipment is just so much tough luck, bug-related or not.

    In other words, you take everything currently wrong with the customer
service programs in these games, and you ratchet it up a notch or two.
Think "First 6 months of UO, or first 3 of EQ", but it never *ends*.

    That's the short term.  Long term, we'll figure out a way to get the
"Players helping players" system back in, in some fashion that fits with
whatever interpretation of labor law comes out of the AOL/OSI lawsuits.
I've got a few ideas on ways to do that, that couldn't *possibly* be
vulnerable to legal challenge, but they practically require that games be
designed around them.

--Dave Rickey




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