How do you improve the customer support for an existing MMO?
[where do you start, and what do you target?]

Or, to put it another way, here’s three questions that I bet most games companies cannot answer without waffling:

1. What is “good” customer support?
2. Why do we care about customer support?
3. How good is our own customer support?

Time-out

Before I go any further with this, I want to point out that there are (at least) three main areas of Customer Support, of which I’ll only be covering one. The others are all covered reasonably well within the industry (hmm…maybe not so well, actually – but certainly better than this one).

Those other two areas are:

• Controlling what CSRs (Customer Service Reps) say and do to make sure they are “on-message” with what the Marketing and PR departments are trying to do
• Managing a community via forum-moderation, live events in-game, real-world events, etc

The other kind of Customer Support

…can be looked at in two different ways:

1. Handling routine questions, complaints, rants, and moans from customers. Helping them fix their PC enough to play your game. Helping them get their credit-card payment to go through successfully
2. Buying future revenue for unrelated products, one person at a time

This latter view emphasises the idea of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I’ve worked with plenty of people who felt we “ought” to be nice to customers, and make their experience with us a pleasant one. They generally disliked (or detested) the first view, but they themselves were only half-way between the two views; they didn’t really know why we cared (or should do) about customer support. I was like that myself for a long long time, until I sat down and thought about it properly.

We still don’t know what “it’s a service not a product” actually means

I’m sad to say this, but it’s true. On the whole, MMO and Online Game developers/publishers *still don’t get it*. They think they do, but they don’t.

Various people started chanting the mantra “MMOs are a Service, not a Product” back around the time of Everquest (the first one) and Ultima Online. In the game industry at large it peaked around the time of Gordon Walton’s “10 reasons you don’t want to make an MMOG” talk at GDC 2003. By now (5 years later) the industry has understood a couple of things about this subject, but on the whole it’s failed to think about it strategically, and has pretty thoroughly *missed the point*. Most people see the trees but not the wood – the mantra is so short and simple and easy to understand, people tend not to think it through, and so don’t realise the connotations.

What’s the most important high-level goal of a Product company?

“Shift more boxes”

What’s the most important high-level goal of a Service company?

“Purchase more customers”

…huh?

Yes. The primary goal with a service-oriented business is to BUY something, not to SELL it. Because a serviced-customer is a cash-cow that can be milked at any point in the future, every day for the rest of their life (in the case of corporate customers “the rest of their life” can be a very long time, maybe even measured in centuries). It’s worth buying them, even at great cost.

For people who are accustomed to the box-shifting view of business, this feels like it flies in the face of everything they know about business. Actually, it doesn’t, but it exposes an unstated assumption they’ve made throughout their lives: with EITHER business, you are NOT really selling (or buying) anything – you’re entering into contracts. A “sale” is, to give it its full title, a “contract to exchange a thing of value (a good or service) for a price”. In the case of box-shifters, the terms of the contract merely state that they are receiving “an amount of cash”. In the case of service-managers the terms of the contract state they are receiving “a batphone connected directly to the mind + wallet of the consumer”.

Or, to simplify: box-shifters “sell” for cash right now, and service-managers “buy” a relationship that they can later rent for cash in the future.

And there we have the root of all that follows: any company that chooses to sell a service instead of a product has – implicitly – chosen to FORGO cash IN LIEU OF taking possession of a RELATIONSHIP. i.e. they’ve actually *paid money* to get this “relationship-thingy”, so they’d better make sure they know what they’ve bought, that they didn’t “over-value” it, and that they know how to extract the “rental money” in the future.

Yes, you can still charge cash AS WELL as buying the relationship – but most people are doing that well enough already, and don’t need help from me to do it better.

Time for me to answer some questions…

Why do we care about Customer Support?

(NB: CS == every time a customer needs or wants something and get its from something you’ve done or said, whether they contact you directly, visit your website, or merely go back and read past emails you’ve sent them)

ANSWER: Second only to the in-game experience itself, CS is the richest, most direct part of the Relationship that you’ve purchased. For a service, it is more important than all the rest of your Marketing and Sales.

Marketers fight constantly to get their voice heard loud and clear – and without distraction – by consumers. In practice, thanks to free speech, anywhere that YOU can talk to the consumer, so can all your competitors. And so you find yourself desperately trying to “stand out from the crowd”, and get your message across. Even then, you cannot personally visit each customer, you have to rely on communications channels, different media (print, TV, news reporting, etc) – and each one of those channels introduces Chinese Whispers, corrupting (or deliberately censoring e.g. your mighty claims) your message.

A direct, unfiltered, uncensored, uncontested channel to every consumer’s mind is the best thing a marketer can hope for.

And you have one. It’s

• …sitting down in your CS department swigging a bottle of meths and wondering why no-one cares about it.
• …lieing in a filty heap of smelly clothes out the back of your website, wearing a tattered hat marked “Account Management”.
• …parading itself in a smokey bar full of leering shadows, doing lap-dances in a bra covered in sequins that spell “Abuse” and a thong that says “…My Email Address”.
• …erected a toll-booth at every corridor in your User-Experience Building, with three forms you have to fill out in triplicate for everything from getting a glass of water through to going to the bathroom. The three forms are titled: “Username”, “Password”, and “Best friend’s neighbour’s mother’s maiden name” – and each corridoor has a different layout of forms, and a different set of valid answers. Some of them swap about randomly every morning “…to confuse the Enemy!”.

Fine. Enough poking games-companies in the eye with a blunt implement. Where do we go from here?

What is good Customer Support?

That makes it quite easy to answer this question now. It has to:

1. Monetize the relationship we paid so much money for
2. Prop-up the relationship when it starts to falter
3. Cement the relationship and make it stronger
4. Remind the customer how much nicer you are than their last Girlfriend/Boyfriend, and that if they leave you they’ll never find true love again
5. KEEP THAT RELATIONSHIP AT ALL COSTS! (up to the difference in how much it’s worth and how much it cost to buy in the first place)

I’m sorry to all the people who diligently work in CS with no thought of monetization and think they’re just genuinely helping people. Yes, you are helping people. But you’re paid to do it because someone else in your company (your boss? your boss’s boss?) is using that as part of how they monetize it, or as part of something that helps to make sure the customer is still around in the future solely in order to BECOME monetized.

I put that last item in caps for a reason other than dramatic effect. Since the first item is “to make money” the last item is “…(profitably)”. If you calculate the total FUTURE revenue from this customer, and then spend up to that amount in order to keep them, you are guaranteed to always be profitable. Since you cannot guarantee they will remain a customer, you have to put a percentage discount on the expected future revenue that is proportional to how many of them you think you will lose unavoidably. Obvious stuff, and obvious difficulties abound there … all makes for a busy time for CFO’s and CMO’s to extract the most profit possible.

How good is our own Customer Support?

Most companies cannot answer this. In desperation, they collate graphs such as “number of support queries per month” and “percentage of support queries marked as Resolved by the customer, and with a customer-rating of 4 stars or above”. So what? That tells you some stuff about how good your CSRs are at being nice to people (not a lot, but some); it’s largely irrelevant from a wider CS point of view.

What you need to evaluate (again, self-evident from all the above) is more like this:

1. How much money are we spending on each customer? (min, max, average, median)
   • this is a simple headline figure, it solves no problems, but it can hilight that there IS a problem … somewhere

   • should be “total cost of the Relationship” not “how much do we pay our CSRs”
2. Segmenting customers by type, what’s the profitability for each Relationship?
   • Choosing those types is what you pay your Marketing Director for, it’s not trivial (inventing them is tricky, but working out how to actually MEASURE each type can be really difficult)

   • examples include:
     1. “people who bought our product at retail”

     2. “people who bought the digital distribution version via steam”
     3. “Spike TV viewers who saw our review in January 2005″
     4. “Parents who liked our game so much that they bought a copy of our game for their children”
     5. “Parents whose children liked our game so much that they bought a copy for themselves”
     6. “People who created an account on our website”
3. Ditto what’s the loss-of-relationship rate?
   • i.e. ONE of the inputs for calculating that “discount percentage chance-of-losing-a-given-customer-over-time” figure mentioned earlier
4. How much money are we making from each customer?
   • YES, it’s “what are they paying in monthly subscription / virtual goods purchase volume”, but NO that isn’t all it is

   • How much cash have we made by selling them some unrelated product or service (careful: that one will need to be monetized too)?
   • How many unique products have we sold them?
5. What are the trends in all the above for our userbase, zero-aligned?
   • i.e. if you measure all those figures and graph them over time for a user, you get one graph for each that shows e.g. “after 12 months, they bought their first secondary-product”

   • …if you average that for “all users in a given segment” (see above) then you get a graph that is both observational (based on fact) and also predictive for any future consumers of the same or similar type
   • You can then use this to spot trends in your relationship-management and relationship-capitalization
6. Then get fancy: instead of graphing the above by “time” on the x-axis, graph it by “milestone”. This way you can see if e.g. “having to visit the website to file a bug” is damaging your Relationships (people buy less other stuff once they’ve done that), or is failing to capitalize as much as intended (people don’t buy ANY MORE THAN BEFORE after they’ve visited your website to file a bug)
   • Read that example carefully. Think about it. Most MMO/online games companies don’t think about it.

   • HINT: Remember what I said earlier, about how the Relationship is a direct channel to the customer. Think about what that SHOULD have been going down that channel while the user was filing the bug
7. …and so on…

All the above list is, to a marketing person, teaching a granny to suck eggs. Good ones should know this stuff inside out. On a daily basis they ought to be working with more detailed, cleverer, more difficult-to-measure-but-we-measure-it-anyway-because-we’re-hard-workers demographics and actions. I’m presenting it more to illustrate the point than as an actual guide (I wouldn’t advise any real company to blindly do the above verbatim).

Conclusion

The Relationship is *everything*, and it must be:

• Guarded
• Monitored
• Strengthened
• Monetized profitably

at all times. It may seem that the last of those conflicts with the first three. In fact, all four of them are mutually conflicting, and you have to continually comprise, and re-compromise, finding the dynamic balance that best fits your company’s overall strategic aims.

The mistake many game companies make is to obssess about just one of the above (usually the “guarded” part if you “care about the company’s reputation”, or the “strengthened” part from a partially-enlightened marketing person). Many just ignore all four of them, and instead only look at the “spending” half of the word “profitably”, and ask continuously “how can we reduce CS costs?”.

Many game companies consider that the roles of the Sales and Marketing departments are to do this kind of analysis and activity on “future customers”, and fail to recognize the inherent waste of potential profitabilty that comes from ignoring the most valuable asset the company has: the hundreds of thousands of Relationships that it has bought, and paid for, but is only partially monetizing.

UPDATE: I just spotted this short post by Furqan over at Altgate that’s pretty relevant to this topic – about measuring the “value” of a free (i.e. non-paying) customer.

1. Because … Apple engineers have never heard of the concept of a “patch”, and require you to re-download the *entire IDE*, with all libraries, all documentation, all binary code – everything – when they release an update? So the current “SDK” for iPhone (hint for Apple: when most people say “SDK” they don’t mean “plus a copy of a bloody operating system”, they just mean “the few custom bits that are specific to that app”) is a whopping 1.6Gb?

[NB: actually in general I think that's a good thing - avoids a lot of mis-configuration / version mismatch problems - but as an MMO developer the idea of *not* patching gigabyte-sized packages horrifies me, and avoiding those problems actually isn't THAT hard (it's been solved many times by now!) these days. Writing (or buying) a good patcher is one of the first steps you do in MMO dev projects...]

2. Because … Apple didn’t think to split The Behemoth into multiple files, perhaps make them something reasonable, like a few hundred meg each?

3. Because … Apple decided to put this monster behind an authentication check on their website, presumably for legal reasons, and there is no other “official” mirror (all the ones you find on google are technically-illegal torrents or else, ultimately, redirect you back to the apple.com link), and their authenticated sessions TIMEOUT after 1 hour of “not fetching any new pages from the site” (completely ignoring whether you have any transfers in progress!), and refuse to send you data once your authenticated session runs out?

4. All the above?

NB: I wasn’t brave enough to try resuming the downoad without first re-authenticating and loading at least one web page from the apple developer site to prove I was logged in. I suspect (*suspect*) that the web browser would receive an HTTP 300 redirect to the login page, at which point most browsers are going to delete the partial download. Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAARRRRRRGHHH!.

Expect to see some comments/tutorials/advice on iPhone game development here at some point in the near future. If I can ever get the download to complete…

http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117

Dinowaurs Beta Testers Wanted

We’re now inviting Kongregate members to sign up to test the Dinowaurs Beta. If you don’t know what Dinowaurs is, go here for more info: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/3350.
Simply pop in to this thread and say that you want in and I’ll put you on the list for the test. Please, no conversations, as it makes it more difficult to pull all the names out.
We’d like to thank everyone who helped us test the alpha! Anyone who signed up for the alpha in the previous thread will be first in line, so no need to sign up again if you already did in the alpha thread.
Thanks, everyone!

(posted may 1st 2008)

2. When you start an open beta, don’t tell players they’re accepted until 2 days before the beta happens

Hello!

Thank you for volunteering to test Dinowaurs, an upcoming game on Kongregate. As of this email, everyone who volunteered to help test Dinowaurs will now get a chance to do so. We’re very grateful for all your help!

For those of you who have tested before, this is a different request than usual, and for all you new faces, welcome! What we need to do is load test the server – that is get as many feet stomping on it as possible and see if it crashes! Because of that, we’re going to try to stuff as many testers into the game at one time as possible. For this test, Dinowaurs will only be open on Monday, November 17 from 12 noon-2pm Pacific Time (All you non West-Coasters, take notice of the time!)

So we hope to see all 4000 of you Dinowaurs beta testers in here and playing the game on Monday! Don’t be late – our doors will close tight at 2pm.

Thanks again!

Kongregate and Intuition

3. Make it last 2 hours only

(Fair enough, normal practice for stress tests, although it’s usually a good idea to let people in a few days in advance to ensure that they have working clients etc (less of an issue for a web game like this, but still probably worth doing).)

4. Don’t tell anyone the secret link to the beta

Read that email again. Do you see the magic URL? No? That’s because THEY FORGOT TO INCLUDE IT.

Some googling turns up various people asking for it, and some friendly Kong players answering with the URL here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/flamingbait/dinowaurs

EDIT: they just sent another email which remembered to include the link.

Hello!

Today’s the day! At 12 noon Pacific Time (3pm Eastern), the doors to the Dinowaurs Beta on Kongregate will be flung open!

At that time you should make sure you’re signed in to Kongregate and go here to test: http://www.kongregate.com/games/intuition/dinowaurs-beta_preview

Make sure you’re on time! We will be closing doors promptly at 2pm (PST). If during gameplay you encounter any bugs, please click on the little bug icon at the top right of chat and fill out a bug report. The more actual bugs you find, the better the game will be!

We really want to thank all you beta testers. We really appreciate all your help!

Kongregate and Intuition

Could be they intended this all along. Given that the beta starts less than an hour after that email was sent out, I doubt it :).

1) Make it look fun and interesting and seemingly inclusive:

“MiniBar is a social evening in East London which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, Creative Commons, web applications, social networking and general Web 2.0 (3.0) mayhem & fandango.”

2) …but require that signup has to be done in two separate places for two “halves” of the event:

“You can come at 5pm … You need to register separately here for this part.”

3) …and make the location a Secret, known only to the special few:

“Location
This location is shown only to members”

4) If someone attempts to signup for the (free) event, deny them, and demand 250 letters explanation (no more! don’t you dare go over 250 chars!) for why they are important enough / l33t enough to be allowed to come:

(the way meetup.com works, I can’t access this page from cache to copy/paste the text, sorry – you’ll just have to take it from me that it’s pretty abrupt, demanding you justify yourself without offering anything in return, or any kind of explanation of WHAT you are supposed to write, or WHY)

5) Finish your event description with not one but TWO content-less/broken links, and describe them as “more info”. For bonus marks: forget to hyperlink one of them:

“More Info at: OpenBusiness.cc and barcamp.org/minibar”

(the first domain there is hotlinked to: http://www.openbusiness.cc/minibar/)

NB: http://www.openbusiness.cc/minibar/ == a empty webserver directory on a webserver allegedly running Apache version 1.3.39 (!) – not impressive for a web/internet event.

NB2: http://barcamp.org/minibar == a webpage with adverts for 50 odd totally unrelated items, e.g.

“angled bob hair style
black braided hair styles
jc penny free shipping
trendy hair style
victoria secret free shipping”

(yes, really – Victoria Secret and JC penny. For a supposed BarCamp about startups and internet companies. Um … OK.)

I guess that’s another Web 0.1 example, then…

Note to web companies: the days when normal people only had one online identity died ten years ago. We all have multiple identities today. Leave us alone, let us get on with our lives, and stop interfering with who we are and who we express ourselves as being.

(this was one of the more interesting challenges I hit upon at NCsoft when analysing how Social Networks / Web 2.0 / social gaming were going to affect our games: so few people in the company realised the multiple-identity thing was going on (even though most of them had 2 or 3 discrete identities!), and so many of the systems we were building/had built had no support for multiple identities per real-life person. When phrased properly, it became easy to see how disparate major problems we had with a variety of systems were actually the same root problem of enforced identity)

People will work around this kind of stupidity from internet companies, they always do: I already have to use 2 web browsers to get around this kind of problem occasionally (needing to be logged in as two accounts simultaneously, e.g. one to gmail and a different one to adsense) – if it gets much worse, I might have to start using Chrome too so that I can have a third.

But it feels such a shame that we still see this kind of shortsightedness…

Which brings be to a recurring problem I’ve seen for a long time with the online games and MMO industry, which I suspect is going to cause a lot of damage to a lot of social games and virtual worlds companies in the coming years: online service providers are – in general – shockingly bad (lazy or plain stupid, usually) at handling their customers’ money.

And the result? Ultimately, it could drive increasing numbers of consumers back to preferring to purchase their games and other online content via retail, where the companies and transactions are more trustworthy. OH, THE IRONY!

The knock on effects include:

• Good companies get tarred with the same brush (c.f. Daniel James frequent comments about the pain that Three Rings has been through with payment-processing, especially ridiculous attitudes to chargebacks, where the company regularly got shafted)
• Good customers stop paying for your service, and probably quit the service completely
• “could-have-been” customers stop paying for ANY online services before they even start using your service, and will never pay for yours
• Pre-pay cards are going to get even bigger, much bigger than most mainstream games companies and MMO companies have realised

What’s the problem?

Well, firstly, the problem is that most online companies have terrible security. For instance, I just tried buying something on iTunes. Apple’s security people should be ashamed of themselves, IMHO. I was horrified to discover that this is how iTunes still works:

1. You are forced to tie an iTunes account to an Apple ID, and that requires an exclusive email address. If you already have a completely unrelated Apple ID (e.g. I had an Apple iPhone Developer ID), you are forced to convert it into an iTunes account; there’s no option to keep them separate (unless you have other email addresses you’re happy to use)
2. To buy something in the UK iTunes store, you have to provide Credit Card details
3. These details are immediately saved and are used automatically every time you try to purchase something, without you needing to fill them in again
4. Apple forceably prevents you from removing the Credit Card (there is no “delete CC details” option, and if you try to manually wipe the number, the “intelligent” web-backend decides to ignore your input and leaves the details in place)
5. …
6. Any time you login to the account from now on, you can spend as much money on the CC as you like, without needing to know the CC number.

(in those 5 points there are several red-flag issues that leap out to anyone with a background in security, I’m not going to go through them all – suffice it to say, Apple has clearly made a decision that the amount of (I suspect: “substantial”) money they lose in fraud claims is made up for by the amount they gain in getting more consumers to make more purchases more often) – and I’m going to look at the most obvious attack only)

As an online game developer, I can immediately tell you that stealing accounts by guessing passwords is not merely “possible” but is “common”. Companies I’ve worked at have experienced upwards of thousands of accounts being stolen this way while I was there. This is a *common attack* and has been for many many years!

What happens if someone guesses your apple itunes password and logs in? Yep – free music. They can drain your credit card dry.

Surely, there is some secret piece of security going on here to prevent this invisibly, OR this must have happened by now, I thought. Some quick googling suggests that yes, it’s happened recently.

In fact, googling suggests that Apple has had at least one flaw in the password recovery that until recently made it even easier than normal to steal accounts by grabbing passwords.

(NB: as soon as I realised that the CC was so weakly protected, and that Apple refused to let me remove it, I converted my already “hard to guess” password to a random string of letters and numbers. And I sent Apple an email requesting that they manually remove the number or else take full responsibility for all future purchases, without contesting any claims of fraud that I make. They’ll probably ignore it :()

In passing, while googling, I found a bunch of CD-sized torrents titled “hacked itunes accounts”. I’m sure that’s a side-effect of some warez marketing rather than actual username/password details for iTunes accounts – the filesizes are way too large – but it was quite interesting to see.

What does all this imply?

1. Apple can’t, actually, be trusted with your CC details (in particular, read the “$450 stolen from paypal account via Apple’s weak security” link to see their alleged response when they were apparently at fault)
2. Apple is one of the most trusted consumer brands right now; when even Apple treats customers this unfairly, the backlash from that individual (and anyone who knows them) is likely to be quite substantial
3. Many consumers have no idea what to do when they are the victims of fraud; in the PayPal/Apple example, *if* you know how liability for this stuff works, you would ignore PP and go after Apple – but this is not something consumers understand or care about

“Credit Card Required for Free Game”

Another example: NCsoft’s billing system

Working for NCsoft, with some knowledge of the billing, payment, and account-management system they use for US and EU, and being a suspicious person who’s been the victim of CC fraud before, I made the decision to never put my credit card number in the system (I don’t put my CC into any system unless I have good reason to – all NCsoft staff get all games and all subscriptions for free after they’ve worked there long enough, so this shouldn’t have been needed).

Due to that decision – even as a relatively senior employee – I was never allowed to use my free, company-provided, Tabula Rasa account. Because the same system, plus some quirks of how TR was configured, would not allow NCsoft’s own account-management staff to make my TR account free until I used my Credit Card number to first pre-authorize the account (the other games were all fine, it was only TR that was a problem, due to quirks in the system).

Oh, how we laughed.

And I kept thinking: if this is how screwed-over I am, as an internal employee, one who actually works in development (and who can understand all the technical details of the system) … what’s the experience that our customers go through?

As an internal employee, I was able (although not encouraged) to complain. It got me nowhere (even internally). Later on, I had other problems with the same system, which got bigger and bigger. Ultimately I stirred up some trouble, and ended up (accidentally) greatly offending the team that was responsible for the payment systems internally. I went to visit them and apologise in person the next time I was in their office (it was a 10,000 mile roundtrip, so I had to wait until I was flying out there anyway), and spent some time understanding their setup. Basically, in a word: “under-resourced”. Or, in several words: “chronically under-resourced and massively over-loaded”. IMHO they had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever fixing that system or doing much more than keep it limping along and praying every day that nothing “too bad” would go wrong with it. Good guys, but hung out to dry by a trickle of a budget.

And NCsoft is one of the better, more accomplished, online game companies, with (in most areas) hundreds of support staff.

The Customer

Rather than break out into any more lengthy examples, I’ll leave those two personal experiences hanging, and suggest that further interesting reading can be found by looking at PayPalSucks, or googling for “hacked account” and just about any major game, and seeing what you find in forums.

Of course, this is online games, so … I have to assume that a percentage of the raving about fraud etc from “Irate Customers” is in fact idiots who think they can lie their way to free money (another standard piece of knowledge in the MMO industry: most complaints to customer service that mention lost money or items are themselves a very low-brow form of fraud, or “trying it on”).

The key point here is that Credit Card fraud is something most consumers have little or no experience of, and when they become a victim it’s a confusing and often difficult experience for them. And that even the “good” online services companies really struggle to make it bearable for the innocent consumer.

Meanwhile, Credit Card companies can (and do) make life excessively hard for companies, punishing them inappropriately severely for fraud, and siding with the consumer wherever they can. The same consumer that we often know to be a lieing cheater (and that’s just the normal consumers “trying it on”; the professional fraudsters are far far worse…). Everyone loses! (except the Credit Card companies; which makes the developer in me bitter – but it also makes sense, since the CC companies are the lynchpin of most of the online payment in the world, and logically if any actor in the system is to be more protected than the others then it should be them: if they falter, the whole system might collapse. Even if it feels grossly unfair at times how weighted in their favour everything is).

So, as more and more companies move to add more game-like elements to their systems, especially Virtual Goods and Item-Trading, payment is going to be a nasty shock for a lot of them (not just CCs, but plenty of the payment systems too, depending upon how the operator integrates payment). (of course, first of all they’re going to get a nasty shock when they find out how many payment systems there are in the world, and that Sulake’s claim of using well over 100 different payment systems for Habbo Hotel is, if anything, probably on the small side).

And to give a hint of the joys to come for people fleeing Credit Cards, I saw another source of probable nasty shocks at the conference – there was a mobile payment provider who integrated many different mobile phone networks, allowing the game operator to just deal with them without needing to know about all the networks. This can be exceptionally dangerous, and I’m sure some of their customers (game operators) will make the obvious mistake of assuming it actually works that way. No – each cellphone network charges a different commission on each amount billed, so the “integration” is really just skin-deep (I asked the payment provider’s staff, they confirmed this). Since operators will want to know how much money they’re getting when they sell something (they want to set a price!), some will use the option this payment provider offers of setting the “price the operator receives”.

That fixed price causes each consumer to be billed a different price to the others. That’s going to be fun to deal with when consumers start talking to each other about how much they’ve paid… Ugh.

Parting thoughts

Just one, really: Pre-Pay Cards FTW!

Hey, wait – does this mean that the “Retail is Dead” folks might have struck a bit too early?

Uh, yeah, I guess so ;)…

ANYWAY … here’s the news bit – changes to the parental controls:

By popular demand, in July we added the Official Moshi Monsters Forum where Monster Owners meet, learn, create and and chat via pre-moderated message boards. The Forum is like a larger version of our Moshi pinboards. We’ve designed a new approval system for our trusted members like you to post without having to wait for approval. No need to worry though; every forum post may be reported at the press of a button and brought to the attention of our Moderators in an instant. The only change is with the new system, active and trusted forum members won’t have to wait several hours for their posts to appear. And we continue to monitor the forums all day and night, as we do the entire website.

For PARENTS: If you wish for more details, we’ll be happy to phone you with the auto-approve posting criteria. You may email us at parents@mindcandy.com if you’d like to set up a phone call.

If you you do not wish for your child to participate in the Moshi forums, please contact us at parents@mindcandy.com and we will deactivate their moshimonsters.com account and delete the account within 30 days. Please include the child’s Monster Owner name and the email address used to register the account.

By reading this email, you agree that you understand the changes to the MoshiMonsters.com site since you registered your child and that you agree to let your child remain a member of moshimonsters.com (the friendliest site online!). If you’d like to reply to us with consent, feel free to reply and send the word YES in the reply.

I’m a bit confused – it seemes to be saying that:

• BOTH: the manual post-by-post moderation system has been replaced by “assumed OK” posting, and by reading this email you consent to that
• AND: you need to consent to that by replying to the email with the word YES in the reply

I’m sure it just means the latter (the former wouldn’t make much sense). Given that the newsletter wasn’t proofread (”If you you do not wish”), I wonder if perhaps that sentence was left in by accident from an early draft. Perhaps the final decision on “assumed consent” versus “active consent required” was taken quite late in the process, and there were two alternate versions of the text up to the last minute.

Anyway, flippant commentary and minor pedantry aside, it’s great to see that Moshimonsters is continuing to open up communication, and gradually evolve into something akin to a social space, or online game, from the almost exclusively single-player experience it’s been so far.

(I’ll probably do a proper post about Moshlings later … once I’ve had the spare time to grind for one; in a good way, I’m rather busy at the moment with other stuff)