Providing in-game support

[Mac_Fife]

Thisthread waqs prompted by some discussion in the "Where to Begin (the Game)" thread, e.g.:

Well I'm not bothering to factor the GoG in, there isn't much point when not all shards will have the GoG on them.

Oh darn… I had not thought about that.

I wonder if a global chat channel could be created to allow help messages to rely through the shards? If so, that could greatly extend the reach of the GoG. Rather than having to man every shard, one member to could answer questions across several shards.

If so, live help could be made more easily available and reduce the number of people needed to do it.

If, as seems likely, we end up spread acros several shards, how do we go about providing service equivalent to the Guild of Greeters and MO:UL's ResEngs? The GoG, of course, still exists, but I guess they could end up spread pretty thin, and as Tweek notes, not necessarily present on all shards. With no Cyan sponsored ResEngs, that function probably becomes the responsibility of the shard owner to organise.

Would a Relay, such as Nalates suggests be workable, at least for some things, or is too "hands-on" for that? What other options do we have? Remember that newbie support needs to be readily accessible to the non-techy player.

[JWPlatt]

Open source chat comes to mind. There is standard software which could be installed for game-to-world chat, thought I forget the name at the moment. Uru could set up a channel, or channels, to use for various purposes, including GoG-type stuff. GoG reps could be in game, on another shard, or in front of their TV and respond to requests for help and new visitors.

[Dachannien]

Let individual shard owners worry about their own support. If they can get the GoG to work with them, that's great. If support becomes too big of a problem for them to manage alone, they can merge with other shards and re-unify the community a little more.

[Robin]

The GoG used to have a Teamspeak setup with several channels. We often used it for music during parties as well. Team Speak, IRC or whatever chat system is settled on could be a standard setup option with a specific channel or channels being monitored by the Greeter or Greeters on duty, or anyone else who wants to help.

Since these chat services are independent of the shards, help of some kind would be available no matter which shard the explorers are in, or even if they haven't actually managed to get into one yet. We just need to settle on one, have someone support or host it, and make it as easy as possible to set up and then use by even the newest or least technically capable explorers.

[ametist]

IMO GoG would be a great help for unifying the community throughout different shards.
That's what most of us want, if I read the forums 'right'

[Erandel]

The latest policy at GoG is to only to be present in shards that request our presence - at least thats what we did in Until Uru. If people don't want us we're not there

[Mac_Fife]

The latest policy at GoG is to only to be present in shards that request our presence - at least thats what we did in Until Uru. If people don't want us we're not there

How well did that work in UU? In MO:UL, I think the GoG had some kind of rota to try to ensure that there were greeters on hand pretty much round the clock - I expect it'd be near impossible to get that kind of cover across even two or three shards?

The assumption I'm making here is that individual shards will generally attract players from multiple time zones, so there's no real "peak period" that you can target for cover. On the other hand if you had, say, "The German Speaking Shard" you can probably expect to get away with only covering CET evenings