Really depends on how many clueless people who use your program . One fulltime customer support person will probably be enough for say around 500-1000 customers on average. I can''t quit remember how many there are for Ultima Online or Everquest.... are you allowing phone support or just net based support? If just netbased support it might be a tad easier for the customer support person as you can do multiple things, like posting on a messageboard/forum/newsgroup reaches many people whilst a phonecall reaches only one. Hope ive helped.
-Jason Starr-


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Freeze Software
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Well I''m not exactly qualified to give a really good estimate, its just from my experience with what I have heard and read about the MMORPG''s. Most of the time you will only need support when your program isn''t doing what it is supposed to do, like crashing for instance . If your game is relatively stable the only troubles you will probably be getting is the odd computer user who the game doesnt run too good on, or at all.
That number would probably apply to phone and net support. Having phone support is going to be expensive as you will definately need another person to do it(unless you want to spend all day by the phone), and if they aren''t fulltime then what is the use if you miss phone calls? That is people who will feel annoyed by it and your customer support may drop. Definately unless you are a big company looking to get into the MMORPG area I wouldn''t be worrying about phone support, just concentrate on the net stuff, keep a FAQ about your game, read newsgroups related to your game, respond to emails, etc. Doing all that stuff though will need plenty of time so your still not getting off too cheaply .
I would ask DavidRM as he has had a hand in making an online paintball game and would have more qualification to base anything on. Goodluck with whatever you do .


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Something else you can do is set up a strong sense of "community" for your game - particularly relevent and easy if its something like UO or EQ which have a game built round community.

Setup online forums where people will solve problems amongst themselves, appoint the most active and helpful people as moderators - build up some sort of reward system where the people who are the most helpful get free gifts (T-shirts, other games etc) - if its carefully designed and nurtured it could work very well. Get them to organise local meets in their own geographic area etc

That should drastically reduce the number of people who need speak to a human one-to-one to resolve problems... thinking from a pure business perspective you could make the customer pay the cost of calls (1-900 in US, 090x in UK etc) to get information they can find on your website (if they''re too lazy to look, then they shouldn''t moan if they get charged), maybe you could be nice and reimberse some of the call cost if it was a problem at your end rather than theirs.

When I worked at a local ISP many years ago, they had about 16 call operatives during work/evening hours and about 5 for the night. The number of customers was somewhere between 20000 and 200000. What worked well for them was assigning different call operators to different areas (ie. 8 for dial up accounts, 4 for ISDN and leased line accounts, 4 for corporate web hosting).

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Simon O''''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

Also think about creating loads of documentation and FAQ''s for your game, and be sure to put your email in small print at the bottom of the FAQ where people will only find it after they''ve read through it all

I have experience with a website I maintain for an old game Supaplex (http://www.elmerproductions/sp) and I remember seeing an increase in questions over time when people started using windows instead of DOS, and then by adding some good info to the FAQ I reduced the number of support questions a lot.

After restructuring the website to make my email less visible it also helped a little. I get about 130 hits on the main page of the game, and probably roughly 1 or 2 support questions per day (often simply referring them to the FAQ is enough).

Kind regards,
Maarten Egmond.