Posters Name: Kagato
Posters Email: kagato@mwgl.org
Subject: Dark Age of Camelot : Interview with CEO Mark Jacobs
News:
The LA Times has interviewed Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs about their recently-gone-live Dark Age of Camelot. One of the questions I liked was:
Q: How do you plan to avoid the technical problems that have plagued other massively multi-player games?WOW! 46 people working in customer service, sure beats the service Verant/EverQuest has, you can never talk to anybody there.
A: A lot of the problems boil down to either inadequate bandwidth, not enough servers, buggy software or poor customer service. We've addressed all four. First, we have a deal with our Internet service provider that gets us as much bandwidth as we need at the drop of a hat. Without the bandwidth, you have nothing else. Second is server capacity. We have been running this game in beta for months with 10,000 active users. We have a darn fine idea of what our players will eat up in terms of server capacity. We'll have over 65 servers at launch, with each server capable of handling 1,000 players. The third area is customer service. I've got 46 people working right now in my customer service department. We're set up for full phone, e-mail and in-game support. It's 24/7 for in-game support, and phone support is 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. All these guys are paid, not volunteers. That sets us apart. Finally, our code base is established. We've used it in other games. It's been tested. Having said that, there's always going to be bugs in a multi-player game.