Transition Diary (Jessica Mulligan)

[Ziv]

http://ac.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=167

Players have been asking how the transition of the Asheron’s Call® games from Microsoft to Turbine is going. We’re making good progress, enough to give you dates on a few of the pieces:

Customer Service: Our Director of Customer Service flew out to Redmond to meet with the current Admins for several days and spend time with them on the job, to see the current process in action. The Online Services Group has also done an outstanding job of interviewing and hiring support representatives and supervisors in a short period of time. All of them have customer service experience and play MMORPGs, almost all of them play either AC1 or 2 (for example, the AC Customer Service Manager has over a decade of customer service management experience and over four years as a player of AC1) and a few of them have experience with in-game support at other companies.

Our first class of Envoys (i.e. Admins, or in-game support representatives) is in training right now, with another class set to start on February 17th. Right now, we’re planning on transitioning the in-game support to Turbine’s control on Monday, March 1st, although you’ll probably see more of an in-game support presence before then, as new Envoys start taking some calls on the retail worlds.

Buying AC1 or AC2: People have been asking when the games will be available for purchase again. We apologize for not getting to this quicker. We were surprised by the huge demand for new accounts and weren’t adequately prepared. But, now the problem is in hand. By the end of this month, you should be able to purchase AC1 and AC2 (both CD Keys as well as the clients for both games) online through Turbine’s promotional partner. Then, by the start of April, you will be able to purchase them directly from Turbine.

The purchase options will be:
[list][*]Purchase a CD Key for Asheron’s Call® (for those who already have the client and just want an additional account) for $12.95 USD. This will include the standard one free month of access to the game;
[*]Purchase and download the latest Asheron’s Call® client software, along with a CD Key, for $15.95 USD. This will include the Dark Majesty expansion pack all the monthly updates since launch in 1999 and one free month of game access;
[*]Purchase a CD Key for Asheron’s Call 2® for $12.95 USD. This will include the standard one free month of access to the game;
[*]Purchase the retail unit of Asheron’s Call 2® for $15.95, including a free month of game access. We’ll the ship the unit from here and toss in a CD with the all monthly updates since the launch in 2002, so those installing the game from scratch won’t have to sit through a several hour update process.
[*]Purchase Asheron’s Call 2® and download the software and a CD Key.
I’ll keep you updated on our progress here; we want to get this up and running as soon as we can.[/lis]

Web Site: We’ve already moved the official support for AC1 to our own Web site at http://ac.turbinegames.com. Ramen on the AC2 team is building out the AC2 site right now and plans to open it in a Beta state on Monday, February 16. The date for the official transition of all AC Web support is March 1. After the transition, we will no longer support the old site at http://www.accmty.com/idealbb/default.asp. We will, however, continue to support the fan sites which we already support.


Quality Assurance Testing (QA): About 2/3s of the AC testing group has been hired and is training furiously on both games, including organizing their own play days and checklists, and working with the MS Test team to go over each milestone as it is delivered by the development team. The rest of the team should be on-board in the next two to three weeks. We’re planning on transitioning QA to our control around March 31st.

Network Operations (NetOps): The team has been hired and has been working with the MS NetOps to go over the various policies and emergency escalation procedures now in place. Several members of the team traveled to Redmond a couple weeks ago to look over the new datacenter and meet with their counterparts. The tentative plan is to transition NetOps to our control on March 31st.

Billing and Account Management: This piece is going to remain in Microsoft’s hands for a few more months, while we build, test and deploy our own billing solution and hire and train billing account representatives. We have set no official date to transition this piece, but our internal working timeline has us assuming this duty in early summer.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back with another transition diary in two weeks to a month.

Jessica Mulligan