The Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures community has many questions on how the customer service end of Age of Conan might be handled. People want to know what kind of a naming policy and conduct policy might be in place when the game goes live on May 20th. This week, Ten Ton Hammer has the answer to many of these questions and much more. Brian Lee the Customer Service Manager for Funcom was kind enough to spare some of his busy time to answer some of these questions for the Age of Conan community.

The Naming Policy

Martuk: How will Funcom approach the naming policy for in-game characters? Will you enforce any type of policy for regular or role-play servers to prevent the campy names we sometimes see such as UbarRoxorTank or SqueezeMyButtix or those that parody similar modern day media like CoNNNan or Legolasss?

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There will be a code of conduct and naming policy.

Brian Lee: The goal of the naming policy is to promote the feeling of being immersed the world of Conan so we will do our best to make sure all names are in the spirit of the Conan genre. That being said, we will not be allowing names that are considered profane or include copyrighted or trademarked material, and obviously, names with numbers won’t be allowed, characters from the book won’t be allowed, and the usual sort of naming rules you’re used to will be in place.

Martuk: Will there be a naming policy enforced for guild names as well?

Brian Lee: Yes. The naming policy will be applied to guild names as well.

 

Behavior Policy

Martuk: Will you enforce a player code of conduct in-game? Being set in the world of Conan you will find some people on the official Age of Conan forums that think it is ok to harass or even sexually harass others in-game due to the games setting.

Brian Lee: We are trying to remain as “hands off” as possible in regards to how players choose to play their characters, but it will never be considered “ok” to harass another player. Not only will we have a code of conduct, but there will also be tools and game mechanics in place so that players may protect themselves in lieu of requesting GM intervention.

Martuk: Can you give us some examples of unacceptable behavior outlined in the policy?

Brian Lee: Things like harassment, excessive griefing, spamming, the usual sorts of unacceptable things will also be unacceptable in our game.

 

Gold Selling Spam

Martuk: In some of the more current MMOG’s developers have learned that secondary gold selling sites will make use of in-game communication to spam the players with their sites. In many cases they use free trials to post a virtually limitless amount of spam rendering chat channels useless. Can you tell us if you have measures ready to combat chat channel spam when Age of Conan goes live to prevent similar problems with the player communication system being abused and rendered useless?

Brian Lee: The simple answer is “yes, we will have measures to combat the channel spam.” Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in other MMO’s and in our own Anarchy Online, the simple answer will become more and more complex as the game moves out of its infancy and matures. Once spammers learn a system, they change their methods. We are currently working on implementing a system that is easily adaptable to whatever approach they may take and that will have a minimal impact on the regular player base.

 

Customer Service and Game Masters

Martuk: From time to time an issue will arise inside the MMOG world that will require the assistance of a customer service representative that we have come to know in past games as Game Master's (GM). Can you tell us how many GM's we will have in Age of Conan and if each server will have its own GM or team of GM's?

Brian Lee: Our existing GM's are already supporting the ACHA Beta, and we are continually bringing in new staff to bolster our numbers. Because of this constant increase it's not really possible to give the total number of GM's that will be available at launch. We will have a well-organized team in place for release plus plans for scalability should the player numbers require it. In order to avoid server "favoritism" we are not planning to assign GM's to individual servers, aside from the language specific GM's. The number of GM's on given server will be allocated by the shift lead based on the number of support requests.

Martuk: What will the GM Hierarchy be like for each server?

Brian Lee: The hierarchy will be a fairly standard format. We will have standard GM’s manning the servers around the clock. Technically, they should be able to handle all of the issues players may have. If not, we have, in order, Senior and Specialist GM’s, Lead GM’s, the Assistant CS Manager, and, of course, the CS Manager.

Martuk: Will GM’s only be available at certain times?

Brian Lee: GMs will be available 24/7 with a higher concentration at peak hours.

Martuk: Will GM’s be holding world events or simple GM server events for Age of Conan?

Brian Lee: Unfortunately, the details for events in Conan are still being worked out, but in previous titles we have allowed both our volunteers and GM’s to host events for the community.

 

Followers of Asura - Volunteer Program

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The Followers of Asura are volunteer guides.

Martuk: In some previous MMOG’s the games have made use of a guide program of volunteers that aid the GM’s in customer service and running in-game events. Will Funcom be using a variation of the guide Program for Age of Conan?

Brian Lee: Of course! We’ve been very successful with our ARK program for Anarchy Online, and we plan to continue the tradition of our volunteer program with the Followers of Asura.

Martuk: If you do make use of a guide program how will it be implemented?

Brian Lee: Recruitment for the program has already started. Candidates are only being selected from the General Beta at the moment, but open recruitment will start once ACHA goes live. As a matter of fact, a few of the volunteers are assisting players in the beta right now.

Martuk: What will the duty of a guide entail and what sort of guidelines will they follow?

Brian Lee: The volunteers will assist Funcom, on their own time, in helping other players with various in-game issues. These could range from a personal, guided introduction to the game features and environment to relaying known technical issues. They will have their own set of established procedures that detail which issues they can assist with and which ones are to be escalated to a GM. This is a great way to get a “behind the scenes” look at the industry, and we also do a lot of recruitment from our volunteer programs when we have an opening.

We would like to thank Funcom for taking the time to answer these questions. We are down to crunch time and we know they are very busy getting this highly anticipated MMORPG ready for launch.

 

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