Don't blame Ryyst for everything

Galactic Emperor · January 2016

Since the mods wouldn't delete the old one, made a new one.

I've noticed a lot of you complaining about GLU, and being the head admin of the forums, it all gets channeled to @[RR] Ryyst. Imagine you were in charge of a computer, and all of a sudden a weird error pops up, and you don't know how to fix it. How would you feel if thousands of people came up to you and started harassing you for some thing that you need time to fix? Always clones, free boost, glitches blah blah. They are working on it. Don't forget they have to juggle Car Town Streets too, they can't all be working on Rivals all the time. They just need time and peace to fix it. Stop harassing Ryyst and GLU will get to fixing all the problems.

[RR] Ryyst · January 2016

Thanks for the support.

It's a sad thing to say, but, I am used to it. I've been involved in community/customer service for video games for a little over a decade now. No matter how big or small the company, there will always be people who like to... take out their frustrations... on someone. Usually that someone is a person like me. I worked for a company that employed hundreds of reps with teams working on tools to give them everything they needed to assist players, and nothing was fast enough, we still were called out to fix things that were simply, not their to fix. I'd like to think that this level of... regard.... towards front/customer facing employees of our chosen profession stems from the... passion... that our players have for the games we supported/support.

IF there was something I'd like the general gaming public to understand is that most of the time CS/Community has their hands tied when it comes to customer assistance. They can only do so much, usually that is dependent on the tools they have to do their jobs. Tool programming is a rare resource. For the huge company I worked for, we were lucky enough to have a dedicated tool department. Not many smaller studios have that luxury. Even then, there are policies in place to limit what we can do, usually this is for the benefit of the game as a whole.

The studio behind Racing Rivals is lucky in that the heads of Customer Support and Community came from a bigger studio that took the time and care to nurture an online community and an actually helpful Customer Support department. We took a lot of what we learned and applied it as much as we could here. Most of the stuff we can do here at this studio is because we requested it, and made sure that we are able to provide as much support as we can. Most smaller studios do not. That isn't to say we have the tools to do everything, because unfortunately tool development takes time and we don't have a dedicated tool team, so we get what we can.

Why are we unable to assist with every single issue that comes our way. Simple, we don't have the resources. We don't have all the tools we need. We are limited by real world problems that every studio faces.

I know its easy to believe that all we do here is swim in a vault of gold coins. We don't. Each and every one of us works very hard at what we do. Some of us stay late every night, some of us work weekends, It's not uncommon for me to walk into this studio early in the morning to see someone sleeping on a couch because they pulled an all nighter, and still worked a full day after.

Alos, all the comments that are like, "Spend less time doing X and more time fixing Y"...

Like most businesses, our studio is separated into many different departments, each with their own tasks. Our dev teams are split between fixing bugs, developing new features, and working on back end things trying to keep up with ever evolving technologies. They also then have to deal with cheaters and exploiters, which in turn takes away from their work on other things.

Our content and art teams constantly work to provide new cars. Yes.. this is separate from fixing bugs. Trust me you don't want the artists working on programming. They do what they do, devs do what they do, Customer support does what they do and Community does what they do.

I'm not asking for pity or whatnot, we are all very lucky to be in an industry that we love, doing what we love. That's a rare occurrence. What I would like is understanding of what it is we do and a little bit of how this industry works.