Community Detective Issue #11: Global Agenda

It's time to bring the pain, Community Detective style. What style is that exactly? Well, I don't rightly know, as the column just recently passed the ten issue mark and said style is still developing. Rookie jitters notwithstanding, this week's issue is all about pain -- my pain to be exact. The kind of pain that happens when I subject myself to things that I'm not really a fan of. In this case, F2P and PvP (at the same time, oh noes!!).

Anyhow, strap on your jetpacks and blast past the cut where I'll give you the low-down on the community and customer service in Hi-Rez Studios' massively multiplayer third-person shooter known as Global Agenda. Surprisingly, my fortnight of probing the game's community brought about the completely unexpected realization that I actually enjoy the game, so there might be a few bits of commentary related to that as well. You just never can tell.

There's something pleasingly irreverent about Global Agenda, whether it's the tongue-in-cheek "No Elves" pre-launch advertising, the politically-incorrect Friends with Benefits promotion, or the no-nonsense/pretense style with which the Hi-Rez higher-ups market their game to the public.

Speaking of agendas, let's pay a little lip service to this week's methodology. Global Agenda features one server per region (North America, Europe, etc) and I chose to focus on the North American community for my initial look at the game world. Community interaction and chat mechanics are similar to standard genre conventions, with a couple of noteworthy quirks. One is that the game's version of global chat (city) is truly a global chat -- everyone on the server can hear you when you speak in it. The other is that city chat is not available unless you're in the game's Dome City hub location (i.e. if you're out on a mission, you'll have your team, local, and agency (guild) chats, but no global.

As such, I opted to get a sense of the game's community both by running PUG PvE and mercenary PvP missions as well as using the city chat to get a feel for how folks would respond to newb questions. Ordinarily I create multiple characters and use multiple accounts to get a broader feel of a game community, but with Global Agenda, I opted for a single character. For one, I was having a great time playing the game itself and wanted to focus on my character (which doesn't always happen in this column, to be frank). Also, with the way the world is highly instanced, and the fact that you're never far from having access to the whole of the population via city chat, there was really no need for multiple toons like there is in some racially- or factionally-segmented titles.

In addition to my community questions, I also submitted a customer service ticket. During last episode's Final Fantasy XIV examination, I opted to try and mix things up a bit by refraining from my usual deleted item trick. Due to several reader requests, I've reinstated the deleted item test this week in the interest of giving Hi-Rez's customer service apparatus something meatier to chew on than a stuck character petition.

For my first community question, I stuck to the basics:

Turns out that you have to manually uncheck a lot of boxes in order to get a clutter-free screenshot, and I went through pages of forum threads as well as quite a few queries in global chat to finally arrive at this conclusion. As per Community Detective tradition, I asked this question at various times during the day and week, concentrating on weekday afternoons, evenings, and a weekend period.

For my second question, I got a bit more in-depth:

I was initially scratching my head as to how to join up with teammates, so I again posed the question in city chat at various times of the day and week. Turns out that grouping with a friend for instanced PvE missions requires one of you making the other the team leader, and then zoning in and out.

Global Agenda's community is, how shall I put this... colorful, and I'm not just talking about the larger-than-life armor stylings. While all of my questions were answered, there was a bit of "STFU newb" to be found, particularly in the city chat. Local chat is usually dead silent, at least when you're powering through the easily soloable PvE missions that make up the game's early levels. I ran across the occasional chatty player, but these were few and far between. I suspect that most of the worthwhile community action happens in the game's agencies (player guilds), which I will be testing out in a future edition of this column that will focus on high-level Global Agenda gameplay.

The game's integrated voice chat also deserves a mention, though in my experience it wasn't used too often. It automatically becomes available when you enter instanced missions (primarily Sonoran Desert PvE team-ups and mercenary PvP matches in my case). Since the system throws random people together much like dungeon finders in other games, there isn't a lot of chit-chat like you'd find on a friendly Ventrilo server. Mostly it's "move to the next objective, stop being such a newb, etc." It's a bit off-putting the first time you get yelled at for messing up, but such is life in online shooters. You'll get used to it.

For those new to the game or thinking of trying it out, the community is about what you would expect from an online shooter. It seems to skew predominantly young and male (or the mental equivalent), as the global chat is filled with a constant stream of unprintable attempts at amateur comedy night. I toyed briefly with the idea of including a screencap of my chatbox as one of the images accompanying this article, but I realized that by the time I finished blanking out the racial and homophobic slurs -- not to mention the harsh language -- there wouldn't be much left to look at.

Hi-Rez's customer service apparatus is nothing remarkable, but it's also nothing that makes you tear your hair out in frustration either. For this week's test, I deleted a piece of quest armor and concocted a bit of a sob story to see if their CSR's would take pity on a poor newb.

There's a curious lack of any kind of help button in-game, though typing /support does take you to the game's Steam help FAQ. I opted to search out the support functionality on Global Agenda's official website, and found a fairly standard help ticket submission system. Filling it out was painless, and I received a confirmation email almost immediately, as well as a message letting me know to expect a response within one business day.

Unfortunately, one business day stretched into a little over two, and though I filed the support ticket on a Monday, I didn't receive a human response until I poked them with a polite "hey I submitted a ticket" update two days later. Hi-Rez also declined to restore my item, offering no reason for the denial.

HiRezDuke was polite and gave me a short spiel about how better items would be forthcoming via quest progression anyhow, so the situation ultimately didn't dampen my enthusiasm for the game even though it wasn't handled particularly well in terms of timeliness or resolution. Whether or not the time factor was an isolated incident or par for the course is hard to judge in a short time window. I'll revisit this when I return to the game at a later date.

And there you have it: this week's look at Hi-Rez Studios' Global Agenda. The game is surprisingly enjoyable in and of itself, which mitigates the rough-around-the-edges player community. To be fair, you can't exactly expect Landroval or Starsider levels of community involvement and helpfulness from a F2P game that focuses almost exclusively on shooter combat. That said, finding someone to help you out (whether it be in the minefield that is city chat, the team combat missions, or the shared PvE instances) isn't too much of an issue.

Customer service was fairly poor when compared to previous editions of this column. The response time and ultimate resolution of my particular test were both sub-par, but as always, this is a snapshot of a particular incident and not an overall indictment. It's also worth mentioning that you can't play the game without installing Valve's Steam DRM... er, online gaming service. This doesn't bother most people, granted, but I mention it here as it is unavoidable even if you buy the complete Global Agenda retail box. [Update]: You can actually get a stand-alone launcher via the game's official website.

At the end of the day, Global Agenda has a lot going for it, and I'm very much looking forward to becoming a regular community member, as well as spending another Community Detective episode in Dome City and the surrounding environs. That's all the time I've got for today's issue. Let me know about your Global Agenda experiences in the comments, and also feel free to comment or email me with suggestions for new customer service tests.

Join Jef Reahard every other week as he goes behind the scenes to file first-hand community and customer service reports from the front lines of your favorite genre titles. From Aion to Zentia, the Community Detective case files are an essential part of any game-hopper's research library. Suggestions welcome, care of jef@massively.com.