Customer Service ~ Notes from Legends On Tour 2019

I know you are dying to know more about what we discussed during our Legends on Tour 2019 Summit. That moment has finally come, so brace yourselves… the Notes are coming!

Customer Service is the first topic we cover but in the following days, we will also report about Community Management and Game Design.

Since it’s going to be a VERY long post, you will be able to download the PDF version.

Let’s go!

Multi-hunting Team & Customer Service Quality

Pain points

The major part of the community’s complaints regarding Customer Service is linked to multi-hunters and the quality of our multi-hunting system.

The team is not efficiently catching cheaters and enforcing the rules across all domains.

There is also a big issue with the amount of time the Customer Service Team takes to reply to tickets. Sometimes they wait until the last hour of the 24 hours set to handle tickets of the punished player.

It’s difficult for players to have a conversation with the multi-hunter regarding the reasons behind a ban and a punishment, or even get a clear reply when reporting a player in the game.

Next Steps

In the upcoming months, we will change the multi-hunter system.

We will set up a specialized Rule Enforcement team to cover all domains, no matter the language. This team will proactively oversee the search for players who don’t follow the rules and will directly penalize the player when they notice the infraction.

They will also check reported players on their assigned game worlds.

Inappropriate language violations will still be handled by the Customer Service Representative (CSR) of that language.

To accelerate the current system, a punishment will be offered to players who broke the rules directly in-game.

Players will be able to accept the punishment to get automatically unbanned and return to the game.

If they are unhappy with the punishment offer or the multihunter’s decision, they will still be able to send an inquiry to Customer Service. This request will be handled by the CSR of this domain.

If needed, the CSR can reach out to the Rule Enforcement team for explanation or a second review of the case.

We acknowledge that there may be human mistakes when handling rule violations on our side. We want to be more transparent and will take responsibility when an error is made. Players who were punished by mistake will receive adequate compensation.

Furthermore, we will work on implementing a “Report Player Button” in-game to facilitate the communication within the community of players and the Rule Enforcement team.

This should overall greatly improve the system and enable the players to return to the game faster.

We will look forward to your feedback after these new systems are fully set up, so we can continue to improve and offer you the best experience in-game.

Penalties and Punishment Guidelines

Community feedback

The participants of the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit mentioned that penalties are either too low or too strong depending on the domain, type of game world (Tournament vs. Standard) and rule infraction.

There are also several discrepancies between the penalties applied by the multi-hunters on different domains, which makes the system very unfair to players.

It was discussed that giving warnings for first offense multi-account is too mild for the advantage given by the infraction.

We also discussed the removal of troops in the Tournament, which is currently perceived as “game over” for the player who cheated.

Discussion outcome

As part of setting up a new Rule Enforcement team, we will review all the punishments currently used.

One important objective of this new Rule Enforcement Team is to apply the same punishments for the same rule infractions across all the domains. We want to make sure that a Russian player gets the same punishment as a French player for the same infraction.

The rules will also be clearly defined and explained to the team through detailed training.

To follow the same punishment guidelines everywhere, we will merge the Tournament and the Standard gameworlds’ punishment guidelines.

This means that the Tournament guidelines get slightly lower punishments (especially regarding the 100% troop deletion penalty) and the standard gameworlds will get higher penalties (no warnings).

There will be only one set of guidelines across domains and game worlds.

We agreed with the participants of the Summit that the first offense warning will no longer be used for the multi-account infraction.

Generally, Rule Enforcement only acts for proven rule violation cases.

In case something is unclear or could be regular gameplay, we give the benefit of the doubt to the player and continue monitoring until proof is present or enough time has passed to stop monitoring.

We will review and adapt the punishment for them to be smarter and match the benefit gained by the account which didn’t respect the game rules.

Community feedback

The participants of the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit asked the punishment guidelines to be published on the Forum so that any player can check and understand the decisions taken by the multihunters.

Discussion outcome

Unfortunately, revealing our punishment guidelines would go against our goals to avoid cheaters in the game.

Publishing the punishment we would apply when breaking the rules would enable players to cheat until they are sure that the punishment we will apply is lower than the benefit they received from cheating.

Rule 1.1

Community feedback

The communities complained about the lack of precision of Rule 1.1: “An account must always be played for its own benefit.”.

This rule was disabled for Path to Pandora gameworlds since they include a conquering system which made friendly conquering fine. However, removing this rule on Path to Pandora triggered many multi-accounts.

The usage of VPN, proxy, or TOR network to create multi-accounts was also a hot topic for the participants of the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit.

As part of our preparation for Legends on Tour 2019 Summit, the community management, customer service, and game design team met and discussed certain game situations punished by this rule.

It became clear to us that this rule was not adapted to a team game like Travian: Legends.

We would like to remove the second part of rule 1.1 and only keep the first sentence: “Each player may only own and play one account per game world.”

Discussion outcome

During the discussion with the participants of the Summit, a lot of controversies arose.

For some, removing the second part of rule 1.1 would mean encouraging more multi-account behavior across the domains.

To prevent this, we will implement several changes via game design which makes it less profitable to create multi-accounts in comparison to legit gameplay.

You will be able to read more about the changes to the pushing protection on the Game Design notes.

Regarding the use of VPN, proxy or TOR to organize a multi-account system to support the main account, the new Rule Enforcement team will monitor these suspicious cases closer.

However, as the Travian: Legends developers have mentioned, we are unable to completely block the use of those tools as it would have a high impact on players in certain countries or mobile players who do not cheat.

Improve Travian Answers

Community feedback

The participants of the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit listed “improve Travian Answers” as one of the most important topics to talk about. The Answers pages currently have a lot of outdated or redundant content. In addition, they are not properly organized across domains/languages.

Discussion outcome

We are currently working on changing our Ticket System.

The new Help Center will have an integrated knowledgebase which Travian: Legends will use to build a fresh and improved help database. This tool will allow us to keep better tracking of updates and changes needed.

Before transitioning to this system, we will select the information that should remain on the Customer Service Help Center. Precious player guides will be transferred to the forums.

While we wait for this new ticket system, the Customer Service team has already started working on updating the Answers Page with correct information.

However, the task has proven to be very challenging as every language has a different structure and different information. We are bringing updates slowly and keep a list of changes that must be done and information that must be added to the current pages.

DOWNLOAD THE PDF VERSION HERE: Multi-hunting Team & Customer Service Quality, Penalties and Punishment Guidelines, Rule 1.1, Improve Travian Answers.

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