I got an email recently from an Achaea player whom I was helping with a large credit purchase of 8000 credits (or a bit Pie! over $2000) after my reply containing an apology for the delay in response time got to him about 18 hours after his previous email had arrived in my box. 18 hours might not normally seem like a lot, but I always feel bad when we can’t have near instant response to customers regarding real money matters, and, of course, as some customers will tell you, we fail at that too often. In any case, he wrote:

“Delay, are you kidding? I have to say you’re far more accessible than I think most people in your position would be… you always seem to have time to help. You’ve certainly created a fun game, but if it wasn’t for the personal touch that you and those working for you add by your prompt responses, I wouldn’t be as willing to spend money on it.”

That got me thinking a little about why I’m still handling billing support for Achaea, our largest MUD. I don’t handle billing support for the other three MUDs, and I handed over day-to-day control of Achaea a year ago, to its current, and extremely capable, producer, Minae Lee. Since then, I’ve been telling her that I intend to, in the “near” future, hand over Achaea’s billing support to her. In our other MUDs, the producer of the game handles most of the billing support issues that arise, ensuring that customers who have credit card problems or who are inquiring about large purchases get to talk to someone with actual power rather than some CS drone who barely even knows what product he’s doing billing support for.

The response of the above customer really drove home why I’ve been reluctant to give up billing support in the past year: It’s my only direct contact in an official role with our customers these days. Sure, I read the forums and post on them occasionally, and pay attention to what’s happening in-game, but none of those are really connections with the customer/player in a formal, real, “What can I do for you?” service role, and frankly, I like that role. I like that part of our niche charm is that we’re able to deliver personalized service to our customers, and I like believing that I’m capable of and willing to do virtually any job in the company (the exception being the more difficult engineering/coding problems).

Is that important to a company running a larger game? Probably not so much. It doesn’t scale. But as I like to think of our current products as boutique hotels compared to the big corporate Best Western-style hotels, it is very important for us. It makes me wonder how well I’m going to be able to balance the desire to deliver personalized service with our aim for one of our next games to be, well, bigger. If we achieve our goal, the only real option for something like billing support is a farm of the aforementioned, admittedly low-level CS folk. I can “keep my fingers in the pie”, so to speak, by routing some portion of support mail to myself, but the effect it’ll have on the psyche of the players is going to be significantly lessened, given that only a small portion of them will end up getting to talk to “the boss.” I could route the email of bigger customers directly to me, but we try to treat all players as customers, and all customers the same both because it’s easier and because those who aren’t customers yet may be customers someday, particularly if we treat them with the same care the paying customers get.

There’s not really a practical catch-all solution to this: In a game with a higher player population, the ratio of high-end staff (whose attention is high-values from a player’s POV) to players is drastically smaller than in less-large games. It’s just a fact of life. I’ll probably try to find a variety of ways to keep myself it, ranging from playing the game anonymously to personally handling a portion of the support mail (especially at launch), to forum participation, and to directly addressing the players on this blog.