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

[KevinL]

>>> "Norman Short" wrote
> badly.  Speaking personally, I wouldn't pay to play a game that treated
> people like you depict any more than I'd knowingly buy clothes made with
> sweatshop labor.  Since I don't know which company is doing things right I
> just don't buy much.
> 
> >
> >     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*.
> 
> I don't think a game that works with that level of customer service will
> remain viable.  I could be wrong and often am, but I think it's disgusting
> to think about.

Got bad news for you - your ISP is probably doing exactly this.  Your telco is 
almost certainly doing this.  As others have pointed out, "churn and burn" 
customer support policies are not at all unusual, or restricted to online 
games.

The basic causes seem to be that a) you can get really cheap labour that way, 
b) people have a tendency to burn out on support anyway - if you treat them 
well, you find yourself pouring more resource into supporties just to maintain 
the level they start at.  So, if you write a good FAQ/guide to support (which 
you can get the supporties themselves to do while they're young and chirpy), 
then you provide it to each young new support staff to give them the illusion 
of knowing what they're doing (enough to answer 80% of questions), then work 
'em hard while they've still got stars in their eyes and are producing 
optimum, and throw them away when they start costing you more - there's always 
others out there to replace them with.

This is in stark contrast to volunteer systems, where your volunteers really 
do care about the (game/system/whatever), and are actually part of the 
community themselves rather than just being paid employees of the company.

Dunno whether it's a case of the volunteers being <insert local appropriate 
denigration here>, or whether UO/AOL really have "treated the volunteers badly".
That would make a difference - but I would have thought that if UO maintained 
a policy of "providing tools to volunteers to help them build community" 
instead of "requiring volunteers to perform x, y, and z duties", they'd never 
get these complaints - I may be (horribly) wrong - I'm apparently not of the 
correct mindset to fathom suing the company in the first place anyway.

KevinL
(and yeah, it's atrocious, and yeah, your high-end knowledgeable support 
suffers - but once you've got a good layer of disposables, one or two good 
higher-end support staff can manage anything that slips through the 'net (and 
add it to the FAQ for next time ;)




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