Asherons Call: New Transition Diary

[big]Executive Producer's Transition Diary[/big]
posted on 23-Jun-2004
It is hard to believe that summer is already here and that six months have passed since we reacquired ACDM and AC2 from Microsoft. Time to bring y'all up to speed on where we're at with the final bits of the transition:

At this point, and in addition to the live teams, we're fully running customer service, technical support, QA testing and network operations. While we had a few hard bumps early on in each department, as we all expected, things have settled down and are running much better. A few statistics:

Customer Service: As of February 1, when we started training Envoys to take over the in-game support, the average time for a player to receive a response to an in-game help request was over 40 minutes. As of last week, that has been reduced to just a tad over 10 minutes. Once a call has been answered, the average time to resolve the issue is about 5 minutes. And that includes an upward spike in response times due to the addition of Verdantine, which has added over 1,000 calls per week to the queue. It would appear that applying more resources and building better tools and commands to resolve issues more quickly is working, :D.

NetOps: In general, all worlds are running at an uptime of over 99% with lower ping times since we moved to the new datacenters in Washington and Dublin. As always with the Internet, your mileage may vary on the ping time, depending on your location and Internet provider. Please remember that we are playing on the same servers you are, across three thousand miles between Boston and Seattle, and we see a noticeable improvement here. We also take samples from each world and log them every few minutes throughout the day, all the better to track this and optimize over time.

Our big concern, and a major priority for us right now, is to find out why AC2's Dawnsong sees some outrageous lag spikes for a few minutes at a time, seemingly at random throughout the day, and then settles back down again. The logs haven't been much help so far, so we're doing additional logging and applying more people from both our Core software and NetOps groups to the problem. And our apologies to the Dawnsong players that we haven't been able to produce better results so far; you are definitely at the top of our list of priorities.

QA Testing: We're fully in charge of all aspects of testing now and the department is fully staffed up. Most of the team are testing department veterans from other MMOGs, long-time players or both. We also recently added a long-time AC2 player and Vanguard member to the inhouse team, pleasing 1st_Tube, the AC2 lead tester, no end.

The QA leads have the regular week-by-week testing down to a stable routine now; the main challenge for QA lately has been the sheer amount of testing that the AC2 Crafting 2.0 system has demanded on top of all the other AC2 and AC1 content and getting Verdantine installed and launched. It has been no simple task. For example, they had to go through Verdantine event by event and make sure five years worth of content and live ops were in the proper state and matched the other worlds, all while testing the largest single game system rewrite AC2 has ever done (Crafting 2.0), plus all the various quests and dungeons added to both games for the monthly episode props.

Not bad for a group that didn't even exist 6 months ago.

Dude, Where's My Ad? This week, we will kick off Turbine's first ever online advertising campaign for the games, with a bit of an emphasis on AC2 in this first phase. We'll be rolling the ads out on various gaming sites over the next few months. Not to worry, ACDM players; both games are getting some lovin' and ACDM will get a major push later on. If you haven't seen it, we recently ran a contest asking players to help caption one of the banner ads (http://ac2.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=239) we'll be running for AC2. That ad will link to a new web page with screenshots and information about the games and info on how to get started playing.

We've also completed our search for a Director of Marketing; he joined us this month, taking lead of our new marketing department. He'll be responsible for keeping us in the public eye and helping to drive more players into the game. We're already bombarding him with requests and demands, :D.

Billing Migration to Turbine: This is still on track to happen in the late Summer or early Fall. We've been working on building out our back-end billing and account management software, doing the code necessary to tie into the Teleknowledge software we've licensed and to build out the infrastructure we need to receive and manage the account information from both MS and you when we flip the switch on this. As I've mentioned before: We're going to be very careful with this one and gauge any issues constantly as we make progress. We want this migration to go smoothly; if pushing it out to later in the Fall will create a better experience, that is exactly what we will do.

In the meantime, we're writing up the FAQs and instructions on the process. We'll post them soon for discussion, so you'll know what to expect when the migration happens. In the meantime, a reminder, nay, a constant harping on this theme:

Keep your Microsoft Passport ID active!

If you intend to migrate a player account to the Turbine billing system later this year, keep the Microsoft .NET Passport for it active until that migration happens. If you let the Passport become inactive for a time, it may be deleted by Microsoft. Once this happens, recovering access to your characters becomes very difficult and you will not be able to migrate to Turbine billing until this has been accomplished. Recovering access to your characters is not something that Turbine will be able to assist with in these situations.

That's it for now. I'll update you on the ad campaign and the progress of the billing migration in about a month.

Jessica Mulligan