Asherons Call: Q&A with Tim Holman

Zestryl asks: Tim Holman, can you comment on the complaints about +Admin actions?
Tim_Holman: Yes, I do check these boards, but as of recent my amount of posting has not been much, for that I apologize.

Well, your question isn't a tought one, but I have to put it in perspective. Here's my ideal situatuion - you're a player, you encounter a problem of any kind (macroing, abuse, stuck, or just a question), you request the help of an admin, within one minute you have some one appear who takes care of the situation whatever it may be.

With as many players as AC has, that would require a lot of people to get that kind of resolution time. Roughly one thousand admins not just policing the world but helping players who are stuck, being abused, or just simply have a question. That's a lot of people. They wouldn't be constantly answering calls, but they would be on hand to immediately resolve any issue.

I'm not going to guess how much admins make because I don't know, but let's say we pay them even just the lowest wage they can legally be paid, which is $5.75 an hour. In my opinion, that's not enough to do this job as it requires 24x7x365 coverage and you'd have to be pulling overnighters, but let's say it's $5.75. But it's not really $5.75 if you take into account benefits, insurance, etc., it's more like $8 an hour.

So, 1000 people x 40 hours a week is 40,000 man hours. 52 weeks in a year equals 2,080,000 man hours. Take that times 8 bucks. You end up with $16,640,000 a year just in admin salaries. Even if the staff were half that, that's 8 milliion a year.

AC costs a lot to operate. It's not just admins, it's machine maintenence, bandwidth, building costs, continued development costs, the list goes on and on. One time I saw some one post saying how we must have made some stupid decision while driving to work in our Ferraris. Trust me, the only Ferrari I've seen is of the matchbox variety.

Some would say, "Well, just increase the cost." I'm proud of the fact that while many games have jacked up their prices over the years, AC is still $9.95 a month. So we have to place realistic limits on all staff sizes.

What's my opinion on admins and CoC enforcement? Well, in my ideal world, we wouldn't need CoC enforcement because people would play by the rules. People will ALWAYS find a way around the rules - it's true in every MMO as it is in real life. Until we have a situation like Minority Report where we can predict bad behavior before it happense, people will abuse the system.

One thing you may have noticed recently is a lot of stuck characters. I will not speak on thier policy as I do not set it, but if I were an admin and I got two requests at the same time, one of "I'm stuck" and one of "I think Bob the Archer is combat macroing" I would investigate the stuck request first. Why? The stuck person can't play the game at all. The person seeing the combat macroing can still play the game and I can always find and investigate Bob the Archer later. The biggest drawback to that approach? The person reporting Bob doesn't see an admin appear immediately to address the problem, so now you've got the player perception that the admin isn't doing anything. Doesn't matter if Bob is later investigated, banned and the person who reported Bob never sees him again, all they remember is that an admin didn't show up immediately.

We've been having quite a few stuck characters recently and it is related to server performance - we've been looking into it constantly, found some things to clean up, but haven't fixed it 100%. The admins have been helpful in gathering info on this for us.

And on top of helping us the devs, the admins have been investigating unattended combat macroing and have taken action against many people. Have they caught everyone? No. But they have caught some. Only a few have been permanently banned from the game, many others have been given warnings.

We've talked about putting up more statistics on the hall of shame, such as '# of warnings' or '# of temporary bans' so you can see more progress. This was discussed Friday afternoon but nothing has been set yet.

Some folks have suggested using volunteers. There are too many legal issues surrounding the use of volunteers which I won't go into here, but that will not be happening any time soon.

Hehe, don't worry about being blunt, no offense taken at all As to my role in the game, I am employed by Turbine as the producer of the dev team and my responsibilities are managing the content dev team and the delivery of the monthly content, as well as coordination of any community related materials needed by Microsoft. I'm was a long time player of AC, played for two years before coming to Turbine. No, I do not oversee the admins, but they work with us and are very helpful.

Like I said in a post earlier, we're addressing the issue of unattended combat macroing as quickly as possible and some progress has been made. Everyone is absolutely correct in that the problem is far from being eliminated. And quite frankly it will never be eliminated just as crime will never be eliminated in the real world. Players will always find new methods of coding the macros and we have to find new methods of catching them. One of the problems in investigating ucm is that it takes the most time out of any help call and will never be reduced to my ideal one minute resolution time. No lie, we've got an uphill battle in front of us and I can't see the top yet, but it is there.

My opinions on the admins? They've got a tough job, I'm glad we have them. Have they caught everyone yet? No. Will they catch everyone? I sure hope so, but that's going to take some time.

Tim_Holman: More comments on the same thread: _Eyedea_: There's more than one admin, and they are players of the game As far as fixes with characters getting stuck, there have been many changes to increase server performance, and postings have been made as such. Cleanups and efficiencies that have affected the game world, such as loot changes, were announced in advance, and those that haven't affected game play have not been announced.

Diamond and NBK: 1: Of course my number is absurd, but that's about what you'd need to ensure a one minute response times on everything, my ideal, and fantasy, world And even with that many, that's still only avg 333 overseering 8 servers of 1200 at any given time.
2. Yes, we're aware of the Solclaim complaints and are looking into it. I don't know how many stuck in world reports we got (can't get to that info right now) 3. Yes, my terminology should have been simply boot, not warning, and ban (I'd consider a three day boot a hefty warning ) 4. We've heard all those same reports too, and are paying particular attention to the reports of intentional crashing. And yes, we need to do better to show you how much time we are paying attention to this, as it is more than perceived. 5. If I could give Ferrari bonuses to the entire team (they all deserve it) the entire team would be dead in one night of back country road drag racing

Everyone, I'm truly sorry we can't eliminate this right away, we're doing our best and will do more to show that to you, our players. The 3-years-and-running loyalists that Mahret spoke of, that's who we owe that to.