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Comment by slyn | Hacker News Reader

Even more surprising to me was this:

"Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers."

Programming, art and design, and cinematics adds up to maybe ~250 people. Supporting and monetizing what they make requires about 10x the manpower. Is that normal among all mega-corporations/projects, or is that something unique to MMO staffings?

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The creation is scalable, but the support isn't. What if WoW had one billion players? They could still crank out the same content with the same 250 developers and designers and deploy it to all their players, but they'd need proportionally more GMs and customer liasons.

There are about 75-125 WoW servers (parallel instances of the game all hosted by Blizzard), each having several thousand to the low tens of thousands of users. 2056 GMs for that puts it at about 20-30 GMs a server. 20-30 people to police ~15,000 players seems reasonable.

If a small percentage of people are having billing issues, that's tens of thousands of people with issues, and billing requires detailed, one-on-one interaction from a Blizzard employee, so 340 to handle all that seems reasonable to me.

Based on the size of the player base the numbers seem right. The support staff will have to grow with the userbase.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/

That's 242 realms, US only. Probably similar number of realms in the EU and China regions.

I think this is just the nature of supporting a very large (in terms of population) interactive system. There are over 10 million active accounts. In the US, there are ~240 realms, let's say each realm has 500 to 1000 concurrent users. That means at in the US alone there are around a couple of hundred thousand paying customers online at any given moment - any one of whom might need and expect real-time or prompt offline support.

Well, WoW is a service. A service with 10 (11?) million active subscribers. So 2056 GMs sounds pretty reasonable. (I've never had to interact with a billing manager and don't really know what they do.)

Based on what I read, it's probably people devoted to account and billing issues, as well as fraud. There are an amazing amount of gold farmers from around the world who create fraudulent accounts with false credit card information, as well as average people who are trying to get a free ride out of Blizzard. Someone needs to take care of banning these people as well as dealing with any billing problems with legitimate customers, something which can require knowledge that's a world apart (literally) from Game Mastering.

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