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Free Realms: Customer Service: Kids vs. Adults
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh sat down for an interview with Free Realms Customer Service Manager Sharon Morris to discuss the differences between dealing with kids and adults in Free Realms.
In game Customer Service reps in Free Realms are Referees and Enforcers. This concept was actually developed by the early Customer Service Team. The team works across all servers and are “color coordinated” – such as Referee Ruby, Referee Blue, Heliotrope, Tangerine or Charcoal, each developing a role-play persona, and interacting with the players in that manner, whether it’s in response to a Customer Service issue or simply chatting with players. They all wear the black and white striped tunic of sports referees while Enforcers look somewhat like stern Canadian Mounties. Referees and Enforcers basically play good cop / bad cop. When an Enforcer shows up in game, kids know that the boom is being lowered on someone.
Referees are always seen in game, in fact they are on 24/7 I was told. You’ll often find them at the game’s natural gathering places to interact with players, to answer questions and to throw down a boom box for dance parties. Referees also show kids how to put in a Customer Service Ticket so that the issue they are having can be properly taken care of and tracked. Many tickets that come through the system often are requests for a Referee to bring a boom box or to come chat or basically, “come play with me.”
Comments
That is pretty interesting the difference between dealing with children over adults. I like this idea of referees, or at least a payed employee that hangs out with the customer base. I think other games could really learn a lot from this.
I am not in FR often anymore, but every time it gives me a warm feeling to my heart. ^^
I think we kinda need a bit more happyness in our often very dark and bleak fictional worlds.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I dont play FR nor have any plans too, however I absolutely love some of the comparisons between the kids and adults. Such as the kids being more honest about doing something wrong where as the adults try to flat out lie despite it being futile and meaningless. Should be an interesting reference for the next "old gamers", "age restricted" or "mature" server request thread.
I do disagree with the way they handle things such as quest help. I personally hate questing in todays MMO's, its boring and unchallenging. In addition to this, when on the rare ocassion I do a quest and run into a bug, my petition is typicaly met with reworded instructions already so clear and blatantly boringly presented in the original quest text, as it is assumed I mis understood the quest rather then reported a bug associated with it. Because of this, I've encountered bugs that required 3 or more petitions and/or direct chat with a customer service representative to deal with. Understandably so when they deal with hundreds of quest help type petitions rather than what I would consider a valid petition. But hey, just my opion, seems the entire industry is moving towards the casual dumbed down player base simply because there are more of them.
Edit: Just to clarify, in a childrens game like FR I'm sure quest help is probably warranted for kids. My opinion reffers to the CS rep talking about how its a growing trend across all sony games and most MMOs in general.
I also found the difference interesting. Wouldn't it be nice if adults had more of the kids' honesty?
Slineer, regarding quest support, what game was that on? My experience from City of Heroes, where quest bugs are typically "can't continue / can't finish" is that support usually just jumps me to the end (which often I don't want) or helps find that minion stuck in the wall and possibly kill it. Never had quest text quoted at me.