Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 1292206" data-attributes="member: 2629">Compensation is very much a factor of location. An attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles or New York will make a drastically different amount than an attorney in a very similar position in a place where the cost of living is much lower. Most paralegals certainly make more than most CSRs, but that is not the issue here. There are good candidates out there that can do the work. (See below)Let me see ... how many people want to spend their time giving advice about D&D. How many people can I find that will spend hours researching some small, trivial aspect of the rules. Hmmmm ... Well, gee. I think I found a few thousand of them that do it for free on message boards right now. An innovative plan by WotC could take advantage of these board gurus, give them some authoity, give them some tools, give them some access to designers, etc ... and you'd have a work force that would do an excellent job - probably for nothing more than a few free products.That plan is probably a bit too difficult to implement, so let's look for paid employees instead. We want:1.) People with adequate command of English (and possibly a few other languages as well - Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, L337, etc ...), 2.) People that will work cheap, 3.) People that have years of experience in role playing games, collectible card games, etc ... , and4.) People that will be around for a few years.I knew a few dozen people that fit that description when I was in college. If you culled the ranks of the college folks in the Seattle area, you'd be able to come up with a few hundred candidates. Only a small portion of them would be interested, but I'm pretty sure you could get enough if you looked around. After all, there are many college aged people that do it for free right now on the internet ... if you add in some money incentives, you'll get a good crowd from a small area.An $8.00 an hour part time college job answering emails (and perhaps phones) to earn pizza money while in college? And instead of secretly sneaking off to post on D&D boards about D&D rules, you get to do it as your job? And, once again, there are massive revisions that could be made to customer service that would *reduce cost* while *increasing efficiency*. Automated responses could handle a portion of the questions. Contrary to popular opinion, a simple program that searches for combinations of key words or phrases in an email and then sends an automated response with a link on it that gives the reader a chance to remove his question from the queue of questions to be answered if the automated repsonse handles his query is not an earth shatteringly difficult thing to get your hands on. Reusing prior stored answers to questions could increase clarity and consistency while reducing the time it takes to answer a question. A huge database that covered every aspect of the rules may be too difficult to manage, but one that handles the big unanswered questions that come up over and over and over is not too much to ask. In truth, it wouldn't need to be anything more than a private message board where the custserv people (and key designers and gurus) post up important questions that do not have clear answers before the answer is sent out. There are a lot of people out there that do this for free every day - how many times have you seen an answer on an email begin with "Andy Collins had this to say on the subject:</blockquote>

Verification