Azaroth

Ever played a free MMO and been pissed off with the customer service? I have, and the reason tends to be that they’re all volunteers. I believe I was once told shut my ‘pie hole’, as the person attending to me was “doing this for free”.

Makes perfect sense. Any profit analysis I’ve ever seen regarding free MMOs says they generally average about $1/month of income per actual active user. Consider that multiplying concurrent users by ten usually results in your amount of total active users (or so they say – there are actually a million and one variables, with a large one being whether the game is more casual or more time consuming thus changing the amount of hours an average active user is an average concurrent user), and that, from my experience, you’d have to have at least one GM on per 1-2000 player server. Stretching their time more than that would cause the customer service to suffer exponentially.

Unless you have counselors. That is, volunteer customer service. A Game Master can ultimately be called for only the most serious problems while the volunteers have friendly chats with newbies, the disgruntled, or the just plain chatty. In fact, if I’m making $1/user and paying three people on eight hour shifts to make sure there is a GM on each server at all times, here’s what my profit looks like:

$1 * ~10,000 = ~10,000
$3750 * 3 = 11, 275

OOPS. Where’s a midi of that “wha wa waa waaaahhhh” sound from The Price Is Right?

This is why your customer service sucks on a free game. See, it makes perfect sense to at least have a reasonable level of GMs and other customer service people on duty when you’re making $15/month from each player. This is because while traditionally your maximum number of users may rise when you’re giving people a game for free, the cost per user of providing professional customer service remains fixed. As your users rise, if you want to provide customer service to them, the costs rise the same way (or almost the same) as they would if those users were paying $15/month. In fact, they probably expect it to. Providing customer service time to one user is providing customer service time to one user regardless of whether they’re paying a monthly fee or not. That’s the disconnection between the business models. They expect you to be profitable regardless

This raises the question of whether or not the free MMO industry riding on the backs of the volunteers. I’m not answering, I’m asking. Very clearly it’d be quite a game of… I don’t know… Jenga?… no, that sounds stupid… well, a game of SOMETHING that ultimately ends up in shit falling all over the place and people being disappointed if you attempted to turn those volunteer workers into paid workers. For instance, you might consider paying your people the same and extending their hours, then leaving early hours unstaffed and going with two GMs to cover 24 hours. Or, when that tiny slice of profit that was $1/user now looks like $.25/user after only one expense, you might consider only using one GM on a 10 hour shift each day and then you might be able to take a look at addressing your other expenses and…

Ahhhh, Jenga!!!!!! LOL!!!!

Now, that’s okay. I’ve always been a huge fan of the guy in the blue robe. But that’s old school. Back in the day of counselors in Ultima Online, the people doing the job tended to, you know, care. That’s why they were valuable. That’s why they provided something to the community that Game Masters didn’t, and using them made all kinds of sense until some of them decided they wanted back wages.

These days, volunteer customer service is a little different. Even if you’re going to use volunteers, there need to be people to lead the troops and make good and damn sure they’re acting like customer service representatives and not assholes trying to make you see what a favour they’re doing you by answering your call for help at all. Training. Easy reference manuals. Extensive logging of chats and actions. Hell, a big fat user feedback button every time a player deals with customer service.

Or you could outsource to India.