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Please read the current update for instructions on downloading the latest update. Players with Mac versions of the game will not be affected, but you will have a slightly longer wait for your version of the new maps. Please make a copy of your character folder before running the new update, just to make sure you don't lose any of your custom work.
It looks like we can give everyone a list of minimum specs for running City of Titans. Please keep in mind that this is 'for now' until we are able to add more graphics and other system refinements. Currently you will need :
Windows 10 or later required; no Intel integrated graphics like UHD, must have AMD or NVIDIA card or discrete chipset with 4Gb or more of VRAM
At least 16GB of main DRAM.
These stats may change as we continue to test.
To purchase your copy of the City of Titans Launcher, visit our store at https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/ A purchase of $50 or more will give you a link to download the Launcher for Windows or Mac based machines.
I know this is probably way to early to answer, but I am wondering what the support structure for this game will be? Tech is one issue, but dealing with the human factor is another. Name reports, hacked accounts, currency sellers, purchase refunds... these add up. Will MWM be handling these directly or partnering with someone to be the go between the tech and calls?
Would like to know this too. Using the most current case study of ESO what not to do, they outsourced their CSR and from what I've seen, it is abysmal at best with people saying their tickets has not been resolved for couple of days and when they do receive an answer, they will get a very patronizing e-mail where the CSR tries to RP with the end user, but dose not resolve the problem.
Who's gonna pay for that? :/
If done right, with the right amount of people to handle ALL of those requests, wont the Support Structure be half a million dollars annually or more?
Why cant we have MWM establish a Perks system for CoT GM Volunteers to handle all that. ;D
Maybe certain Day job badges or other things can be ALSO (not ONLY) gotten through helping n00bs.
Of course, the new players will be made aware if they want their Ticket answered faster, they can choose to use a 3rd party Volunteer Game Master, but are not part of MWM (but are outsourced to volunteers and must take a chance).
They can choose a Volunteer Game Master (VGM) via a Star Rating, 1 to 5, maybe from a listing, or Randomly selected. If they want a quality VGM that has a 4 or higher community feedback rating, they might have to wait a tad longer, too. ;)
And when you get Stuck in a wall or can't find the last minion in a Mish for a TF, you can create a Ticket and Choose either a OGM (Official GM) or a VGM (Volunteer Game Master). If a VGM is logged into CoT, one of them is randomly Pinged, maybe in the ChatLog or also a tiny window, asking if they want to take the support ticket, and what perk they would get (maybe a list of different things so as to collect them all) for that Mission! ;D
Of course, that would mean the user with the Issue would have to type out the issue beforehand so the VGM's can see if they are familiar enough with the problem, before they take it and fumble it and get 1 Star as a feedback rating. A timeout of 10 or so seconds will also apply... and the next randomly chosen VGM will be asked the same thing. :) If no VGM's pick up the ticket request, it would go to an OGM (Official GM). etc...
Over hundred people volunteered to help build Cot I'm sure many would be more than willing to be Support Volunteer GM. Myself included I be more than happy to be a Game Master for the CoT. Could have one of the perks be a Uniform just for the GM agents. Something like a Man in Black look ridding the game of the sum of the internet! Hmm maybe instead of a MIB look it be an exterminator aka a BUG exterminator.
Sorry having fun with ideas. Yeah I be more than happy to spend some of my free time serving as a GM even for free. I normally solo, but had a blast helping newbies learn the ropes and answering questions on the help chat.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
While I would love to employ such a structure, we've got to point out there are legal issues.
https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/ea-ultima-online-sued-by-their-own-guides.49237/
Everquest and Ultima Online tried volunteer GM positions. It wound up being ruled something that should be compensated, and there were some fairly hefty judgements. I'd rather pay the cash up front, you know?
As a result, it's not something we can take a position on at this moment until we're sure we're doing it fairly and legally. That being said, yes, clearly, badges for helping people is a good idea, because helping people is good, and we want to encourage people to be better people.
As far as insourcing customer support versus outsourcing, it's entirely up to how much we can afford either. Clearly, insourcing creates better results, and we want the best.
On the other hand, if I'm the one on the other end of the line, I'm not developing the game further.
We've got a spread of options, and we're not at a position where we can decide that yet.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
Ohh, that sounds unfortunate. :/
I haven't done any searches yet, but it sounds to me like they tried to treat their in game volunteer GM's as Forum Volunteer Moderators. A Big No No.
It just takes One Volunteer that had a awful day to cause a chain reaction. That one volunteer just has to say one discouraging thing like, "Man, we Volunteer GM's get No Compensation for all the Hard Frik'ing Work we do! We should be getting SOMETHING ya Know!" and it all goes to Crap'ola after that.
I don't want that. I want the Volunteers to Feel like they are Playing a Part in the Game, as a Volunteer GM... with badges, merits, or other perks they can receive. Its just that they have to be smarter when dealing with a real PC. :)
So if that same scenario above with the Volunteer, saying the same bit to everyone, I doubt other volunteers will feel the same, and just say "he probably just had a bad day" and wont feel at all the same way. Since, if a Volunteer is on a Trial/Mish/etc.. of sorts, and they get the ticket request, they will be offered the Reward for that trial/mish as if they Successfully completed it as compensation anyways, after they Complete the ticket request.
Well, its a shame no game has successfully used volunteers to this day. Would have liked to see one succeed. And if its not MWM that does it, i'll understand. :)
Hmm what compensation would work. Free Sub account plus some perks?
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Providing the player with the means to fix urgent problems (and /bug them for a fix) cuts down on the costs associated with customer help requests. Some games are very restrictive and don't give players the tools to get out of odd situations...simply having the options to teleport to a safe point, reset an instance, or autocomplete a mission helped a lot in CoH. Mission design that is forgiving of map errors ("defeat most" instead of "defeat all", "find 5" with 8 glowies on the map) reduce the chance that a server hiccup or AI flaw will make an objective impossible. There are other design tools such as objective trails and map reveals that give players hints on how to proceed when needed, but stay hidden otherwise. A thoughtful design is the first step toward a robust game with fewer play-stopping bugs or mentally "stuck' moments, and thus fewer urgent customer service calls.
Quite so. The number of times I've tried to use a /stuck sort of command and had it help not even a little, to be left with only the option of /killme, is... well, actually, I believe it is 100% of the times I've had the issue in a game. But even that is better than what we ran into in a couple of missions when alternate drop methods (need-or-greed, round-robin, etc) were introduced on one game, without actually accounting for quest drops that were bind-on-pickup, that you couldn't see ahead of time, and that went through the normal roll process... worse, when the GM did finally show up, about 45m later, they couldn't even help because the person who had gotten the drops had logged off, and they hadn't been given the power to bop folks with the "complete mission" wand, only to shift things like items around.
Frankly, while as a player I know how annoying it is to wait, having done my time in the support trenches and as a team lead lo these many years ago: even if you are well-staffed with fully paid employees, there will regularly be times when the semi-random distribution of problems dumps a dozen on you at once... when you only have half a dozen people.
Realistically, given the pace of most MMOs and when folks tend to play them, support more or less *has* to be assumed to be on the sort of time frame that one expects from something like email support, rather than phone or live-chat support, unless folks are paying a fairly serious premium for the support itself. That means a time frame on the order of 15 minutes to 2 hours. That's generally sufficient for "urgent but not immediate" issues, or things such as abuse complaints (which require time to investigate anyway), but it is almost completely unhelpful for any sort of 'live' or 'real-time' problem.
Designing in forgiveness on missions, making certain that their are "fallbacks of last resort" that do not penalize the players who are already frustrated over a problem that generally isn't their fault in the first place (so the punitive "/killme" isn't really a valid answer, but there are several alternatives), ways to work around issues temporarily that let you move forward while you await a GM response (or just move forward and file it as a bug), and so on aren't just niceties, to have a functional game, they're more or less requirements to have it work smoothly.
And then there's the mission I have had for four(?) years or so, on a certain game, that will not let me into the mission to finish it, but if I drop it I can't get a fresh copy from the contact (although if I team up with someone who has it, I can get it again... but it still doesn't let me in). I gave up on pestering folks about it monthly or so, about two years back. Now I just keep it as a curiosity; it seems likely that I may be the only player in the entire game in that situation, since it appears likely to have been a bug with one of the very earliest incarnations of the mission, which was rushed out to the main release to be a bridge over a "shallow XP" area.
So far as I can tell, not only do the GMs not have the ability to do the scoop up the player mice and bop them on the completion, the devs aren't even sure what sort of state things managed to get into to cause that. This is where the day job wisdom comes in handy: a core part of the system needs to be the ability to copy out a snapshot of *everything* about a player's state as it stands in the live servers, and replicate it to a testing system where it can be inspected in detail without harming the original. Because, speaking now as a dev, if I can't get access to something I can trust to be an identical copy of the necessary data, it is almost impossible to hunt down the gnarlier problems, because I'm left playing "take random guesses" rather than being able to simply fire up a debugger and *watch* what happens when trying to replicate the bug.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I believe there is only one thing left to say.
[img=400x600]http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/295/0/4/let__s_bro_fist_through_the_internet_by_rumbles-d5il8h1.jpg[/img]
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Out in most of the open world, you don't have that issue in NW, you simply change instance, and teleport back to a safe place in a different instance.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
bro fist through the Ether-Net. ;)
Side Note:
Maybe players can Enable a debugging sort of Demo Recorder (5-10 mins of content, while re-playing content they had issues with previously), and submit That for the DEVs to review. :P
Works in CO as well. At least as long as you aren't in Lemuria or Monster Island or Vibora Bay or, well, anywhere but MC when it's *right* after a reboot and they haven't hit a high enough population load to spin up extra instances yet... but yes, it does work.
Fun tidbit: waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when (as in, the first couple of weeks or so, at most, I think) they had it set up so that you always spawned at the zone entrance when you switched, to discourage folks from hopping around the zones hunting for stuff like crafting nodes.
Then someone figured out that it made switching zones the fastest way to get to the zone spawn, which was otherwise a giveaway power toy (in the form of 'go to power house', but they were almost invariably right beside each other anyway). Took only a couple of days of that spreading before they switched it back to 'nearest respawn', amazingly enough...
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
In theory it is definitely possible. In practice it may depend on how much information that actually involves; frequently that can be so much to sort through that it is literally impossible to get a handle on.
That said, if built properly (not necessarily a simple proposition) there are ways to make it possible to turn on recording of *just* the relevant information for troubleshooting some particular issue, which would at least make it possible for someone working a ticket to come back with "when you have a couple of moments, can I pull you over here and have you do a '/debug_log foo,bar,baz' and run around in front of Lord Reckless taunting him without attacking for about thirty seconds or so, then '/debug_log stop,save,report' and tell it to submit against ticket 12345?" (or, y'know, whatever seems likely to help reproduce the issue)
While by no means universal, being able to grab debug logging of just the stuff that might plausibly be related to whatever happened (powers firing, aggro logic, etc.) from both client and server in tandem can go a *long* ways towards helping narrow stuff down. And even further when you can look at data snapshots.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
So, it seems that smart Devs that want to help players kill bugs would build such useful tools into the game.
I remember, in AoC, I fell through the world and died, so I submitted a bug report. Five minutes later, I get a tell from CS and the fellow asks if I can Show Him right where it happened. So, apparently, he has godlike 'invisible camera' powers, rather than a PC-type avatar and we chat a bit while I walk my character to the spot, kill some interloping mobs, and then proceed to walk right through the same spot, but this time I only fall halfway and get stuck in the geometry.
I asked, 'Hey! Did you see that?' and he says, 'Wow, don't move, let me get some pictures of this!' I was completely intrigued, my own investigative problem-solving senses were tingling and I was completely Alright, with having my next 30 minutes taken up, not in Playing, but in being a lab-rat. I repeatedly poked at this flaw, while the CS guy watched and took pictures, and rezzed me when I miss the floor below and fall through the world... again!
It was a complex interaction of a stairwell, a small section of floor, and a bigass statue, where the surfaces Looked contiguous and solid, but the underlying structure had a twist that made a Hole. If you were lucky, you'd fall though, bounce off the partial wall below, and land on the next floor down in the dungeon. If you were Unlucky, you dropped between the stairs and the wall and you fell through the world.
What was most memorable about this, to me, is not just that Customer Service responded to my bug-report Quickly, but that they asked me to participate, and that they had tools for investigating and recording the 'issue'. The fact that the CS guy was very pleasant and actively interested in the problem was also a plus.
I'd love to see that sort of things in CoT.
Be Well!
Fireheart