The Pirates of the Burning Sea official site has been updated with a devlog which answers the question, "What's going on in Customer Service?"

Aether’s been hounding me to do a devlog on what’s going on in Customer Service. I keep telling him we’re too busy trying to respond to incidents; we don’t have time for his nonsense. But he’s a persistent fellow so here goes.

Overall, things have improved a great deal, I think. We’re still not where we want to be! Trust me when I say we’re still not satisfied with a number of aspects of our overall support. For example, we still have a backlog of incidents submitted months ago. That’s totally unacceptable. The backlog has shrunk considerably since my last devlog, but it still exists and I’m still losing sleep over it. Also, it still happens periodically that a CSR will give a suboptimal response. Whether it be something that would seem to imply they didn’t read your question or request or whether it be just flat out the wrong info, it still happens. That’s also unacceptable. Most CSRs have improved a great deal over time with experience and training. A couple CSRs no longer respond to customer reports but instead help out in other ways.

And that’s actually one of the improvements we’ve made. For every shift, there’s typically a CSR or multiple CSRs on the front line, focusing on responding to tickets in a timely fashion. They spend their time teleporting people out of locked rooms and banning gold spammers and answering tickets. Then there are 2nd-tier CSRs focusing on doing research. Can we repro the bug this player reported? How best to help this customer who has somehow gotten his missions out of order? Did we just uncover a gold-farming ring? That sort of research takes time and the CSRs doing it can’t really pay attention to the queue. But they can be called in to help with the queue if it starts getting out of hand. Similar to how a grocery store will open another lane, pulling in someone who had been stocking shelves a few minutes ago, when the lines get long. When we first launched, cashiers didn’t know how to stock the shelves so, if there was no line, they tended to stand around bored. Now the front-line folks are better trained and can help the 2nd-tier folks with the research and vise versa.

Read more here.