popplers

An ENORMOUS amount of money gets burned for customer support. If a player calls once a month, they have easily spent their monthly fee (and maybe more). So, there's a big focus on keeping support calls very low. (Which is why the telephone number is usually very well hidden.)

Online help is much cheaper, but not inexpensive. Too many petitions and say goodbye to profit.

So, we do as much as we can to not get any petitions and streamline the ones we get. Cities doesn't do everything it could for this, but even basic design decisions are informed by this need.

Example: To play Cities cooperatively, you need to be able to affect other players. But some effects are potentially bad (even seemingly benign ones like giving items to others and rezzing). We decided, then, that the act of teaming would give tacit permission for TP, rez, gifts, etc. The idea was that if someone was a griefer, you kick them or quit the team yourself and poof! no more problems.

Even so, due to player complaint, we decided later on to add a prompt for these things (which you can turn off).

I considered exposing a "trust network" to help find teammates and avoid griefers. We didn't get this into Cities due to lack of time. It also didn't need it much; it's a friendly game and the design is pretty grief-safe (compared to most other MMOs, at least). (I'd be surprised if some form of trust network wasn't in future games by us, which is why I'm being a little vague about this here.)

One thing that I've wished for more than a few times is eBay-style feedback. Someone kill steals? Give them a thumbs-down. Team with someone and like how they play? Thumbs-up. Ideally, this rating would be one more tab that you could see when you did /info on a person. Feedback should probably be associated with a given login, not a given character.

And couple that with a FOAF network so that my ratings (since I'm a "friend") about others are weighted higher, etc.