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I'm not sure if anyone has ever posted this or something similar before, but... So, I used to be a CSR (In-Game customer support) for Sony Online Entertainment. My area of expertise was Star Wars Galaxies, but we also worked in the same office as the Everquest/Everquest2/Planetside/Final Fantasy XI people. Basically it was just this huge warehouse with a bunch of us in it working on our respective games. My best stories are almost all Star Wars related, and I would be happy to answer any questions you guys have. I'll start this off with a couple of stories: 1. Every CSR in SWG got to work the chat room located in the game launcher about once a day. This could either be really amusing and fun when only a few nerds were in there hanging out, or it could be a hell of spam and nerd rage when a server was down, because every angry nerd would rush into chat and spam it. If anyone has seen the WoW realm forums when the servers go down, imagine that, but in a real-time chat room with a few hundred people in it. The only real tools we had as admin in the chat room were to either kick/ban a user, or use a command called /moderate, which would basically restrict all communications to PMs and only allowing the CSR to broadcast messsages. To provide some back story before I go further: For anyone who didn't play SWG or hasn't heard about it, becoming a jedi for the first few months of play was unheard of. The path to becoming a jedi was unknown even to us employees, and we were constantly asked about it in chat and when we were handling issues in-game ad nauseum. People would send in tickets only to ask that question, even when it stated specifically we would not tell them anything. The actual way to become a jedi was later revealed to us: When a character was created, a random set of 5 professions (basically classes) was selected for that specific character. Only by mastering those 5 professions could you unlock your jedi slot. The trick was, the game never told you which professions they were. After it was revealed how to progress, there were people who luckily got it the first 5 professions they mastered, and then there were people who had to grind all the way through all of the professions to finally unlock it. Since a good number of the classes were crafting classes, you could potentially end up spending tons of credits and resources just grinding out a crafting class. On top of this retarded system, the entire jedi class was locked at launch, so even if you did master all the classes in the first few months, you still wouldn't get it. Unkown to us staff, they were going to do an unlock live and the broadcast the message through the game itself and chat. I was working the chat room when the announcement went out. Before I start insulting people let me say this: I have been a lifelong fan of Star Wars. I have very fond, nostalgic memories of the movies throughout my childhood, and I even loved the new ones, flaws and all. If any of the movies are playing on TV, I always stop and watch them, I'm just that much of a fan. That being said, when the announcement was broadcasted over the servers and through chat that the first jedi had been activated, I have never seen such a repulsive mix of fanboys and losers circlejerking in my entire life. There were people in the chat who openly admitted to weeping at that moment. One guy declared this moment to the undoubtedly the best moment of his life, and then told the entire room that they would all remember being here this day for the rest of their lives. It was (to him) the nerd equivalent to Kennedy being shot or 9/11. Everyone made characters on the server where the jedi had been activated to try and find him in the newbie zones, making the game unplayable in those zones for hours. Our ticket cue doubled and then tripled all because retards wanted to know how to make their own jedi. In the end, after revamps and retooling, they made jedi a quest you had to finish to attain, then they just said gently caress it and let everyone do it. I still remember being in that chat room and just feeling like a total loser for even sharing the same interests as those guys. I seriously stopped playing games for my last half of employment there out of disgust. I'm running out of time, but I have other stories if anyone is interested: 1. Armor breaking in a patch and us officially denying it for about a day until we playtested it. 2. Our big boss extorting lightsaber materials out of my co-workers by threatening their jobs. 3. Our office policy on threats of suicide and violence due to past instances. 4. My entire team getting fired because our manager did our reviews wrong, then him getting fired shortly afterwards. I'll be happy to answer any questions as well.
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| # ? Nov 06, 2009 20:40 |
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| # ? Nov 22, 2009 01:48 |
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I would like to read about #2 and #3. When a friend and I played SWG, once we tamed a couple of kimogilas, whatever the large lizards were, and took them while we rode our banthas over to some guild doing some dueling tournament, parking them over the combatants. Only later to have CSRs not even give us a warning but just teleporting us separately to different places in the middle of nowhere in Endor and us subsequently dying. It was good times.
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| # ? Nov 06, 2009 20:52 |
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Remember when the chatroom would be full of about 1000+ people, and it would randomly crash? Know what that was caused by? Yea  Me and two other guildies figured out that by spamming a specific character set in a massive wall of text could crash the entire chat program. You could even pm the text spam crash to individuals which would crash only their client to blow up in their face. It was loving hilarious when Smedley or any of the other retarded management of SOE would enter the room. Me and a few buddies would lock em out for as long as we felt like by continuing to crash their clients-- or the entire room. Over and over again. We did it a lot to CSRs too. Possibly even you =) gently caress SOE for not being able to fix such a simple bug.
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| # ? Nov 06, 2009 21:41 |
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Hondo82 posted:I would like to read about #2 and #3. One of our macros we had in the god client was a string that teleported your target to 0,0,0 (x,y,z) on endor. The way the geometry worked in the game was the highest mountaintops were equal to 0 on the Z axis, and all the surrounding terrain was dug out with negative values. Thus, when we teleported you to absolute zero on endor, you would spawn way the hell up in the air and fall to your doom. We typically did this to griefers and cheaters, but we usually did it while we were invisible. We had a spot on corellias moon where cheaters could get up on a blacony and shoot at things without getting attacked themselves where we would also teleport guys from. About the boss extortion thing: Our big boss, who I will call Gary, because that was his name, cheated and discovered all the professions he needed to master and had a jedi the day they were released on the Corbantis server. This was a big deal, and a firable offense for all of us, but he claimed to be "playtesting" it to better serve the customer and weasled out of it. Gary realized that a few of the guys from the office played on Corbantis and got wind of their Krayt Dragon farming. Krayt Dragons were one of the hardest monsters to kill in the game, but one of these guys was a creature handler and had some high-armor pets called grauls that could tank the dragon while he and his buddy burned it down. The dragons would sometimes drop pearls, which were one of the best crafting materials used for lightsaber construction. The trick with them was, they had to be attuned to see how valuable they were, and only a jedi could do it. The pearls usually sold for a flat fee, and whatever jedi that bought them took the risk of whether they were going to be good or not. Well, Gary decides that he's going to get the best pearls these guys have. Keep in mind, these guys have about 20 or so stored at their house that they were slowly selling off to speculators and other jedi a couple at a time. They were making a killing. I wasn't there for the conversation, but I remember my co-worker coming out of Gary's office and telling the guy he farmed them with that Gary was going to attune all of their pearls, take the best ones, and let them keep the rest. I guess he basically conceded to doing this for no compensation after it was less than subtly hinted that it was good to keep your boss happy. One of the bad things about working in the gaming industry is that management's attitude towards employees is: "Every other nerd in the world wants to be doing what you are. I can fire you and hire a guy just like you by the end of the day." In the end, Gary attuned all of their pearls, took the good ones, and left them with the lovely ones they couldn't even sell because he attuned them all.
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| # ? Nov 06, 2009 21:50 |
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Avalanche posted:Remember when the chatroom would be full of about 1000+ people, and it would randomly crash? Know what that was caused by? More power to you, that game was basically released half-finished anyway. Almost everything was at least a little bit broken in some way, and some poo poo was just outright hosed.
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| # ? Nov 06, 2009 21:52 |
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