[MUD-Dev] Biz: Game support

[Damion Schubert]

From: Peter Tyson

> Anyone considered moving their game support to India/Asia? At
> first glance, while cheaper, it does provoke issues of
> understanding the subtleties of English, gaming and MMORPGs in
> particular as the support is rarely formulaic phone/email
> answering.

> I believe UO moved some support to India, anyone have any
> experience of it?

India may be appropriate for low-level calls earlier in the life of
the project (i.e. how do I attach the shiny circle thing to my glowy
box), but you will definitely need an escalation path that leads
into your office.

  1) You will have a lot of calls based upon cultural differences.
  Non- english speakers, for example, might not know why a
  particular name is offensive.

  2) You will have a lot of calls that require a really tight
  understanding of policy, and how to deal with 'grey areas', such
  as whether or not something is an exploit or not.  You'll need to
  be sure that your foreign satellite is in step with what your
  development team is saying.  You'll also experience slow-downs,
  when these CSRs hit situations they don't know the answer to
  immediately, and have to call the home office in the States to
  get.

  3) UO took a large community hit for moving the support to India.
  "Handling" of this in the community is probably required.  Given a
  seemingly disproportionate number of members of your community
  will seem to be unemployed former IT jobs displaced by job
  exporting, and now playing the game to avoid job interviews, they
  can get cranky.  But then who else has the time for our
  treadmills?

  4) Having your CSRs be in a different place than your developers
  means a delayed reaction if (when) something goes horribly awry on
  patch day.  Shadowbane has devs in Austin and our frontline
  support is in Montreal.  Until I had worked in this environment, I
  had never fully appreciated how nice it was to walk up to Meridian
  59's CSRs on patch day and say "So...everything going okay?"

--d
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