05/29/2009    |    Devlog    |    BrianV    |    Discuss

The last time we did a Customer Service devlog, Nutch mentioned some changes we were implementing to the CS department to improve communication and response times on support tickets. Those changes helped us clear a backlog of tickets and allowed us to respond to new support requests much more quickly. Since then, I’ve taken on the role of CS Manager here at FLS and with the guidance of Nutch and Misha, am carrying on what they started. I’d like to talk about a few recent changes we have made to further improve the level of customer support.

As you may be aware, our in-game GM support was originally outsourced to a company located on the East Coast of the US. While they were able to effectively monitor support tickets, there were sometimes communication challenges between our internal Customer Service team and theirs. This could sometimes lead to service requests taking too long to be resolved.

About two months ago, we decided to bring our GM support in house. This enables GMs to work side-by-side with Customer Support Representatives, the QA department and the rest of the teams. Each CSR is now also able to go into the game to research support tickets or administer reimbursements. Since CSRs can do that investigation themselves, GMs have more time to catch spammers, answer questions, watch for server issues, make announcements and so on.

We have also taken this time of transition as an opportunity to review some of our policies and have decided to make a few changes.

We’ve had a policy against cross-teaming for a some time now. Cross-teaming is the practice of using multiple accounts to have characters from different nations on the same server. Since cross-teaming can enable people to grief other players or abuse game systems, we have traditionally penalized players for doing it.

We will continue to respond to reports of cross-team griefing or malicious behavior in game. But, our research shows that players often have multiple accounts to play different nations on the same server for non-nefarious reasons. They tend to have multiple accounts to either gain an economic advantage, whether it is to own more structures or to produce nation-specific raw or manufactured materials, or from a desire to be involved with another facet of the server’s community. We feel that these are legitimate ways to play Pirates of the Burning Sea, but they have, until now, been technically against the rules. After much discussion with the developers, community team and FLS management, we’re going to remove the policy restricting players from having multiple accounts of opposing nations, but with some caveats.

You may not:

• Participate on both sides of a port battle. If you receive an invite to multiple nations for the same port battle, you may only accept one of those invitations and must let the other one expire.
• Use alternate characters to grief other Nations and/or sabotage battles with other players, including shot blocking.

We will consider violations of these rules to be griefing/harassment and we will use our griefing/harassment policies to police any incidents that arise. If you witness any of these occurrences or feel you have been wronged by someone breaking these rules, please file a support ticket and we will investigate. We expect everyone to play fair and show good sportsmanship. Our full policies can be found on this page.

As the game evolves, so does the need to keep our policies in line with the best interests of our players. We are constantly evaluating our customer service procedures and policies, so that we may continue to improve the level of service we provide. If you have any concerns about this change, or have any questions about customer service in general, please let us know using the “discuss” link above.

05/29/2009    |    Devlog    |    BrianV    |    Discuss