It's definitely a little bit on both parties. Developers don't really know what players expect from customer support. There's a general idea, yes, but specifics have yet to be hammered out. Players can often times be overly critical, but one way to fuel a fire is to make those players feel like they're being ignored or disrespected. The Marweas comment was a prime example of making players feel disrespected. As stressful as the job "may be" (read: "is") attacking player concerns is never a good idea. At the same time, I don't think they should be hanged for off the cuff remarks. A sincere apology would be enough for players to move on. The job is hell. Most of us know that.

I think that if CS reps can maintain a level of humor, sympathy, and acknowledgement with players the chances of unnecessary anger or frustration will be minimal. Alot of CS is dealt completely without humor which I think is a mistake. I'm not suggestion sarcasm or ridicule as forms of humor, but rather a decent balance between addressing player concerns and keeping tensions low by keeping topics light. There are plenty of cases where a petty subject grew into a flame war because developers choose not to respond to what is rationally seen as insignificant. It's almost like a good way of players testing to see if the developers are listening. More often than not, a simple two sentence reply would suffice.

Players, on the other hand, cause much of the problems themselves because there are so many differing opinions between them. Game balance is always a heated subject because of this. Players complain, developers modify the game to avoid complaints, but inadvertantly degrade the experience for other players. Ultimately the game goes from being the developers baby where they have control of every aspect (during development) to the players pet where they might want things handled differently (after commercial release). Should developers side with the majority of players just because they say so? It's not such an easy question.

The biggest issue, honestly, has to be funding. How do you pull together a quality team for customer service for potentially hundreds of thousands of players? Volunteer programs produce volunteer quality. A small, easily managed, high quality team will produce great results but will be slower to respond. Outsourcing causes problems with consistancy because the customer service does not have first hand knowledge on a lot of detailed issues and also may imply to the player that they're being tossed away from the true knowledge base because they're concerns aren't important.

Didn't know I had that much to say about the subject. Hah, sorry if my comment dwarfs the article :P

Good feedback, I agree with all the points, especially how most companies currently spend far too little on hiring and adequately training customer service staff. I know of some companies who've even hired temps on occasion to fill in or for heavy demand times like the launch of a new product.

One of the problems with customer service (and we ran into this all the time when I was doing tech support for an ISP) is that there is no clear demonstrable-to-management link between the amount of money that they spend on us and the amount of sales. This meant that when it came to cut budgets, the customer service department stood out like a tempting red candy on the ledgers.

On top of that, from a business perspective, there comes a point where providing good customer service is a bad idea. I remember one of my managers explaining to me that it cost the company about $12.00 for every two-minute call (that was my wages, my managers', support staff, computers, network, power, floorspace etc.). This meant that if a customer paying $10.00 a month called us once a month, they were a business liability. We had certain problem customers who would call us several times a day and there would come a point where we would be told "just get them to cancel".

These issues get compounded by the fact that most game purchases are all-or-nothing affairs. Ie, you either pay the full $x or you don't buy the game. This, combined with the fact that a lot of stores have very strict return policies for software (due to piracy, they say) means that it is very difficult indeed to vote with your dollars.

If I buy Kickass Game X and in three weeks run into some terrible problem with it, is it really in the company's interest to pay money to make me happy? They aren't going to make any more money off of me for that game, anyway. And what am I going to do? Refuse to buy Awesome Game Y? How will the publisher know that low sales for Y are related to problems with X?

Actually, I have no problem with SWG's Customer Service. I find it effective and swift. But, I find the developer input on the forums very valuable. I think gamers and developers need to learn to take things with a grain of salt. The developers have a particular point of view, just like the gamers. There's no viable reason for people to get all pissed off about these things. In the end, it's just a game and we still have to live with each other. Marweas's response was wrong, plain and simple. His message was simply to piss off the people who pay his paycheck, namely, us.

I think the point about the poli sci degree is actually very telling. SWG's population is, after all, comparable to that of Newark, Birmingham, Las Vegas, St Petersburg, Akron, Baton Rouge... what customer service response time do we expact from those cities, and at what budget?

Players have pretty high expectations of the degree of service they should be getting. Right now, the industry sees no clear path to providing it. And the political skill of most of the community management practitioners is nowhere near that of the political industry. :) It's a recipe for dissatisfaction.

I do believe (and have written) that there are general principles common to politics, management, and leadership that can be applied to community management. But I don't see community management as being the same thing as customer service, either. To some degree community management is a hybrid between pollsters and press secretaries, whereas customer service is, well, customer service.

I wonder if more MMPOGs in the future will attempt to implement ingame legal and political systems to help bridge the growing divide between players and developers. As playerbases grow increasingly larger and players still demand a sense of involvement with the development of the game, there will come a point where message boards and IRC chats simply don't cut it anymore (and some may think many large MMPOGs have crossed this point already). Already the signal to noise ratio of communication between those who play the games and those who make them is so poor that the chief duty of most community managers is to sift out the wheat from the chaff.

While establishing an ingame political system opens up a whole other can of worms, it does allow for the opportunity for players to police themselves on a wide-range of issues. Just the feeling of involvement and self-impowerment usually reduces the amount of rants about developers not listening and making arbitrary decisions. Players are unlike to complain about policies they themselves had a direct hand in creating and implementing.

I've been an advocate for player policing and player governments for a very long time, but I don't think that most of the issues players want to gripe about are necessarily the types of issues in the purview of player governments...

That can be true. In ATITD, we had the problem of players proposing laws that were actually feature requests (which we eventually built a separate feedback mechanism for) and trying to pass laws that would make the game easier for themselves.

However, things like "play nice" anti-griefing policies, freedom of speech versus justifiable censorship, and establishing other community standards seem to work well in player governments.

I'm looking forward to see how SWG implements player cities, which from what I understand, will have elected officials and appointed militias. It takes a great deal of faith to let players police themselves since the chances of them being able create a utopian society are just as slim as they are in real life.

"As playerbases grow increasingly larger and players still demand a sense of involvement with the development of the game, there will come a point where message boards and IRC chats simply don't cut it anymore (and some may think many large [MMOGs] have crossed this point already)." - Jia

I've thought about that more than once.

First, I should note that the idea of an excessively massive MOG is ridiculous (if only for the fact we would need an even uglier acronym to describe them). If there was a MMOG one day that somehow had the population of earth, heaven, the voices in my head, and mars it would be nothing more than just a popular game. Developers strive for that higher population notch, but I think more importantly they should strive for non-mmog players (that's another topic altogether). The idea that I could talk to potentially millions upon millions of people is nice, but the reality (even for a virtual world) is that a person will only talk to a few hundred at most. That doesn't effect how much fun the game is. As long as a game has a few hundred people, none of us will notice the difference. I think MMOGs catering to only 200 people per server or even a few hundred total could (should) become very common place and still offer great gaming expierences.

Aside from that, though, what if that hypothetical situation arises? What if a MMOG is released that has a following of millions upon millions? Where do we go from there (in reguards to customer service)? Would there come a point where, like mentioned in comments before, sometimes it's better to have no support at all? Would it require an elaborate system that combines solid fan sites, outsourcing, and in-house teams?

I'm interested to know what people think would handle the best in that situation. I'm leaning towards a combination of all that works today. Such as outsourcing for account related issues that never or rarely change, providing an online FAQ script instead of a message board or chat room that allows players to submit a question to see if it has been answered before (elaborate text parsing), depending on (and developer involvement with) fan sites to boost morale, etc.

I think Customer Service is a strange thing when it comes to MMPOGS. Never have I called a non-gaming company custserv line and asked for an update on the latest item, what's in the pipeline or why a certain functionality was eliminated or changed. Custserv for me is not a comments/suggestions service, it's a place for me to get things fixed.
Admittedly, my experience with MMPOGS has just begun with me having joined a ORPG. The forums are awash with complaints about this level or this cap or the looting system or mobs not giving enough xp or not enough loot or the content is terrible or the pop times are too long or my body rots too fast....etc. These are complaints or suggestions concerning in-game mechanics. In my mind the developers have set up rules, tested them (presumably) and settled on something that they thinks works well. What right do I have to complain when something isn't in my favor? I can just cancel my subscription and join a different game.
On the other side, I do think asking devs to reevaluate a rule is okay...but not at all related to cust service. That's much more of a customer satisfaction concern. If my game crashes too often, I expect the CSR to help me out. If I'm not leveling fast enough or my favorite weapon was modified, I don't expect a CSR to fix it.

Pedro was pretty close to the mark on my feelings of CS in an ORPG. The ease of using Customer Service in a game like SWG is simply too tempting for most players to respect it for what it is. Instead, they try and use it as a means of making suggestions, or whining about something in the game that really has no basis as a Customer Service complaint. If you buy a computer and it stops working, you call the manufacturer's CS department. If you're playing SWG and you feel your rifle is underpowered, for some reason people do the same thing.

With the way the boards over at SWG progressed through the development stage, I think that SOE set themselves up for some serious headaches. By being so open with the gamers before the game came out, and professing that they wanted the gamers involved, they openned the door for those same gamers to be upset when their suggestions aren't implemented. A frequent accusation I see on the SWG forums now-a-days is "You don't know how it is? Do you Devs even play the game any more?" How many people would have accused Carmack of not knowing a game he made even 2 years ago?

As Draigon pointed out in the first comment, there's no easy, almost no viable solution to the CS problem. But, this is a problem faced by all companies who use CS. However, with software, you have a whole new ball game. When you purchase a product, like a computer, the computer is warrantied, stating that the computer is not defective. If the computer turns out defective, you have the warranty to fall back on.

When and how do you define software as defective? Right now, you really don't. Software companies make no intrinsic warranties that a piece of software will perform a certain way, or that the customer will be satisfied using it. There are no immediate repercussions for the software company if something goes wrong. In most cases, they made their money just selling the disc in the box. With an MMORPG, like SWG, there's bound to be a cut-off period where the company says, "we've turned a profit off this customer, whatever happens from here on out is no big deal." Can you really build a valid CS regimen based on a product which can't really be called defective, wherein you know a customer is no longer with maintaining? I don't think so.

"I think Customer Service is a strange thing when it comes to MMPOGS." - Pedro

Pedro, made some good points. Customer Service becomes more of a general term for almost any interaction between developers and players for MMOGs. If I had a problem with my VCR, I would probably not even call customer service. I'd just chunk it or repair it. If I had a problem with an offline game, I might complain to the myriad of gaming fan sites and vent with other players, but I probably wouldn't go searching for the company site or contact e-mails. Online games are, well, online. That sounds obvious, but the point is it's a video game that rests on a communication technology. That's a key difference and why the customer service umbrella spans outward for online games. I think, given the convenience, most people would complain/suggest to developers (gaming or otherwise) if they viewed their product as broken.

"I think, given the convenience, most people would complain/suggest to developers (gaming or otherwise) if they viewed their product as broken." -Draigon
I agree. If my view of the game is that it is broken, then I should have every right to flame in a forum and shoot off some emails - I am a paying customer after all. The issue I'm seeing is that when I do (and I have done it), I forget that I'm part of a social community, one with as many opinions on the game as there are members. How does a customer service rep (in some cases the development team itself) address these kinds of complaints/suggestions? What I've seen is some compromise and some tough command decisions...most of which the more vocal part of the playing community will most likely hate.
This is where the political science degree comment becomes interesting. Players seem to want an ORPG to be democratic, i.e. enough votes on something and it is included in the system. Often the suggestions are designed to protect the existing community, be it the power levelers or the hardcore roleplayers. They want more servers to stem overcrowding, rules to prevent cheating, better benefits for the themselves or their guilds and above all, players seem to want to make sure that the things they do have now stay the way they are (i.e. no nerfing!). Here is a perfect example of the elite attempting to ensure they stay that way via "laws" and processes in their ORPG. So they harass their public servants (custserv), they go to the media (boards) and basically do whatever they can to get what they want.
The weird thing to me here is that in my mind there is no way an ORPG could possibly be a democracy! I played pen and paper games as a DM/GM and every helpful guide I ever read about GMing said "In a contested ruling -though the players may not like your decision- make it and move on in the adventure. You can go back and evaluate it afterwards and explain why, but you must be sure to be fair and consistent." Why do we now think that developers must listen to us without thought for their own creations? I can see requesting an explanation for a particular decision, but flaming and yelling until the developers throw up their hands goes to far. Especially with a game that you can leave at any point.
So...back to the original point (in a roundabout fashion, I guess), how does a company put out customer service in a MMOPG? I would love an online help forum to answer what is surely a FAQ. When I played MUDs, every one of them had a /idea submission command to suggest something you think might be better or more interesting - often builders would have an online bulletin board with a summary of the most relevant ideas and whether or not they were going to incorporate it. Often /bug and /typo would come into use and help the builders and admins address the concerns of those that want the game to work good and look good. Above all, I think developers need to separate themselves from customer service. Sure, they need to always be aware of the level of customer satisfaction, but they should not be so beholden to the community that they lose sight of the story and work they are creating. At the end of the day, it is the developer's game...I'm only playing in it.

I had an idea that could relieve some of the pressure. As far as I know, this doesn't already exist. Not an end all solution, but what if downtime was utilized to give players a voice and/or educate them to what the issues are. I know games shouldn't have much downtime, but even if a game has no downtime there'll still be those odd moment when players are just sitting around chatting with their friends.

I'll use EQ as an example. Instead of staring at a spell book, I pop open a /survey command window. It lists a number of popular topics that have recently been brought to the attention of developers. I'm concerned about game balance for my Troll, so I check game balance and I see a survey exists for Troll changes. Open up the survey, and I'm presented with a number of checkboxes and a few "Rate from 1 to 10" drop down lists. A vocal minority has been ranting and raving about something I disagree with, so I fill out the survey. The end result, developers can see that the majority of players disagree with those complaining. This could add alot of weight to the CS agents when shooting down suggestions for change ("Majority of players disagree, sorry.")

That example is very specific, but you get the general idea. Key points:
• Non-intrusive: Does not require players to answer polls or surveys before they can play the game.
• Convenient: In-game function that is available at all times means I don't have to journey through cluttered forums to stay on top of things.
• Formatted: For both players and developers. Checkboxes, drop-down lists, and the rare textbox would make it a quick, easy thing to do. The data can easily be dropped into a database which means results are instant instead of having to sift through thousands of posts for public opinion.

Results should always be secret since players don't always know best, but something like this could give developers a good indicator for what a bad idea might be. If they suggest something and find 90% of players would hate it, might want to rethink it some more. Just a thought. :)

Absolutely brilliant. Keeping the results secret may cause a separate hosts of issues...though I can see the need for it. It could even be extending to assist players in providing the developers some direction. Eg. On a scale of one to ten, please rate the importance of the following pipeline ideas:
1. Add a new server
2. More content for higher levels
3. Added skills sets
4. Less crashes.
etc. Then they can tally the results and focus their testing/patches in the direction players want...Really. This idea is excellent.