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Recent Headlines for Pirates of the Burning Sea

Customer Service Devlog

By Keith Cross on Jun 26, 2008

The latest devlog on the Pirates of the Burning Sea official site takes a look at the ins and out of customer service.

I spend most of my day dealing with support incidents along those lines. Everyone has a good reason why their particular claim is worthy. On the one hand, we should reimburse anything anyone wants. It’s a matter of customer goodwill. If you’re frustrated and angry and feel cheated, then we have a very undesirable situation on our hands. Our goal is NEVER to make you feel cheated. Certainly you should expect some loss – it’s a game: you win some, you lose some. But loss and cheated are different and cheated isn’t an experience you should have in the game.

On the other hand, there are a number of reasons we can’t reimburse everyone everything regardless of the circumstances. For example, if you’re in a battle with another player and they pull their network cable, they shouldn’t immediately disappear and avoid being sunk. So they don’t – their ship remains in the zone until they’re out of combat or for 2 minutes. If they then claim they had a network disconnect and the ship that you sunk as it remained in the zone should be reimbursed, that’s an exploit. You now have a ship (if you’re a pirate) or at least the rewards for winning the fight AND he has the ship also. Suddenly, you can farm CSRs for first rates. That would be an untenable situation for the game for many reasons including economic and gameplay balance issues. Plus we just wouldn’t be able to staff the necessary CSRs to manage all those reimbursements.