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Technical Support | Cure Tech Support Boredom | Common Problems |
Clan Lord Addiction | Cost FAQ | Clan Lord Principles | Future Directions
Thanks

First: We will never answer questions like “How do I kill the dragon?” or “How do I get out of the maze?” Our Tech Support is not a hint line.

We think the single most important thing a software company provides (other than software) is Technical Support. We pride ourselves on being able to solve virtually any problem one might have with Clan Lord, and lots of other problems as well.

If you email help@deltatao.com, you’ll get a relatively prompt response. Or, if you must, call us directly at (408) 730-9336 at reasonable California business hours and ask for tech support. It’s also possible that you can get us at unreasonable hours, since we work hard and late, but we can’t guarantee it. If you want alert, friendly service, don’t call early in the morning.

Keep in mind that we’re understaffed, overworked, and appreciate brevity. If you can answer questions like “What version of the System and Finder are you running?” without checking, we’ll be ecstatic. If you call with questions like “What’s a Macintosh?” we’ll be peeved. Okay?

We love getting questions and comments via e-mail.

• Billing questions: billing@deltatao.com
• Suggestions: suggestions@deltatao.com
• Sales questions: sales@deltatao.com.
• Or you can send directly to Joe (the president) at joe@deltatao.com.

Good companies have technical support lines, where intelligent people (or, in our case, the company president and engineers) eagerly await the opportunity to solve problems from honest people trying to make the most of their software. While many support guys try to give the impression that they are overworked and underpaid, in fact they are often bored by their job.

In our years of answering these calls, we’ve learned a few important tricks which you can use to make life fun and interesting for those on the other end of the phone. We’re now going to pass these on to you.

These techniques are guaranteed to fulfill and entertain whoever has the decency to answer the phone and do free technical support. (If it’s 900 number technical support, you may see the support people using many of these methods, instead of the other way around. Beware.)

1. Refuse to describe your difficulty.

When asked, merely mention a general uneasiness with your computer, or repeat over and over, “It just doesn’t work.” (Important tip: don’t say what “it” is.)

2. Don’t have your computer handy.

If you do, the Technical Support guy (who, for the purposes of this article, will henceforth be referred to as “John”) will probably just start making you use it. Explain that “It’s at home,” or in the other room, or in Australia. Ask John to hold while you drive to Kansas (where your computer is) to try his suggestions.

3. Don’t try to solve your problem yourself.

Actually, this should probably be number one, since if you inadvertently solve your difficulty, you really don’t have much of an excuse to call John. More importantly, it’s neat to make as many trips as possible away from your phone to your computer in the closet (see 2 above) to try obvious suggestions, like “Try turning off all your INITs.”

3a. Don’t read the manual.

Altogether too often, there’s a section on troubleshooting, and your problem is covered. Again, this would leave you with no excuse to call John. Remember, it’s important to have him say “R.T.F.M.” (“Read The Manual”) into the phone a couple of times a day.

4. Talk slowly, and repeat yourself a lot.

This serves the dual purpose of taking up a lot of his time, and letting John know you think he has an IQ of 23. If you’re really good, you can put off answering his questions until he’s asked new ones.

4a. Speak a language other than English.

John speaks English, so if you speak a different language, you’ll get to repeat yourself a lot. When you do, go louder and slower.

Of course, if you’re actually trying to glean useful information, you can just do the opposite of these suggestions, and you’ll probably be dealt with promptly and efficiently. If that’s your kind of thing.

Sample Dialogue:

John: “Delta Tao Software, this is John.”

You: “I’m having... trouble.”

John: “What program are you using?”

You: “It... just isn’t working right.”

John: “What exactly is the problem?”

You: “I try, you know, to run it, and it just won’t...” (Long pause)

John: “It won’t...?”

You: (relieved) “Exactly.”

John: (takes deep breath, closes eyes, rubs temples, counts silently backwards from ten. Sighs.) “What software are you using?”

You: “Macintosh software.”

John: “No, I mean—”

You: “Oh, let me check.” (loud tramping noises, door opening, going up stairs, grunting, distinctive distant “bong” of Macintosh being turned on. Long pause. More stair sounds, door opening, loud tramping) “Uh... how do I find out?”

John: (quits and goes home)

We don’t get very many calls about Clan Lord — it’s easy and nearly flawless. But in case you do have questions, look here before you give us a call. You might save your nickel.

I crash all the time.

Don’t look at us — our software never crashes. It must be somebody else’s fault. Seriously, if you turn off all your weird system extensions, you’ll probably find that Clan Lord is bullet-proof. (You might also try throwing away your “Clan Lord Prefs” file.) On the other hand, if you do find a reproducible crasher, email us and tell us about it so we can fix it in later versions.

I can’t get into the world.

If you normally get in fine, but today the server doesn’t seem to be answering, it’s possible that the Clan Lord server is down. Try again in an hour or two, or check our web page for information.

My music sounds bad.

If your machine is bogged down, sometimes the music will sound rough and scratchy. Try turning Virtual Memory off in the Memory control panel. Or upgrade to a newer version of QuickTime — older versions sound cheesier.

My graphics got all wacky today.

Hmmmm. What’s special about today? Could it be a holiday?

What are the secrets?

If we told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? So don’t ask us. Figure them out for yourself, if you must.

Please?

No! They’re secret!

Pretty please?

OK, maybe a couple. Play with Clan Lord on holidays. Send us a hundred bucks.

My boss is coming — Help!

If you hold down the option key and click on the computer desktop, Clan Lord will be instantly “hidden.” You can get it back by choosing it from the application menu in the upper left hand corner of your screen. Or just hit Command-Q — Clan Lord quits fast.

Clan Lord is a great game, but try not to let it take over your life. Spend a few hours outdoors from time to time. Meet some people in the flesh. Read a book.

• A car cuts you off in traffic and you want to “curse BMW.”
• You expect your refrigerator to open when you bump into it.
• You cut yourself and yell “Healer!”
• You go up to strangers on the street and say, “Nice pants.”
• If you don’t get enough sleep, you complain about lag.
• In a crowded restaurant, you regroup in the safe area.
• When you wait for a long time, you’re tempted to depart.

Clan Lord has a monthly fee in addition to the cost of purchasing the CD. You’ve already purchased the CD, so you get two months of play free. After that, it costs $10 per month.

How do I pay?

The serial number that came with this game will let you create an account and give you the two free months. During that time, you’ll probably want to give us your credit card number, so you don’t get booted from the game when your free time runs out.

It’s also possible to mail us a check, to pay in advance. Details about other payment options can be found on our web pages.

How many characters do I get?

One. To get more than one character, you’ll have to pay a small additional fee. Details are on the Clan Lord web server.

If you have multiple characters on the same account, only one can be in the world at a time.

If I want to have two characters in the world at the same time, do I have to buy two CDs?

Yes. It’s possible that you might be able to buy a serial number without the CD and manual (for your second copy) at a discount. Check the Clan Lord web pages for details.

Why are you charging a monthly fee, instead of a one-time cost?

There are hourly costs associated with running a network — about twenty cents per hour per person. In addition, we’re going to continue to spend lots of money upgrading the game and world for years.

If we only charged a one-time fee, it would be in our best interests to make a flashy game with little depth, hype it for months before releasing it, then sell as many as we could as fast as we could. Then when people reached the limits of the game, they’d quit and stop costing us network money. We could save even more money by having overloaded servers, so the game lagged and ran slowly.

We want to grow the game slowly and build a rich and varied world that’s fun to play in for years.

You’re crazy! Bungie.net and battle.net are free!

StarCraft and Myth are excellent games, but they aren’t quite the same as Clan Lord.

For one thing, the individual games on battle.net and bungie.net aren’t run on Blizzard’s or Bungie’s servers — they pass the games off to the game host. This is smart — it reduces their server load to almost nothing. Unfortunately, it’s important that Clan Lord be one big world, not a lot of little ones, so we can’t pass off server responsibilities like that.

In addition, over 95% of Myth’s play is single-player, and doesn’t cause any network costs at all. Clan Lord can’t be played single-player.

Third, players are unlikely to play those games heavily for more than two or three months. We want people to play Clan Lord for years.

But I can’t afford ten bucks a month!

We understand that some people won’t be able to afford to play Clan Lord. We are considering price structures to help them, like giving a discount if they recruit new members, or hourly rates instead of monthly, or a discount for players who are restricted to non-peak hours.

Check our Clan Lord web pages for discounts currently available.

Why is Clan Lord on CD?

We don’t want everybody to have to download hundreds of megs of graphics and sounds to play.

Now that Clan Lord is on CD, is it done?

No. We plan to continue growing the world of Clan Lord for years. We have enough major changes scheduled to keep us busy for at least eighteen months after we ship the first CD.

Can I run my own server?

No, even if you have your own fast unix box with a T3 (the minimum requirements for running Clan Lord). We want to continue growing and developing the world for years, and we want everybody to participate in the one great world, not in a bunch of tiny ones.

Is there a free trial?

The main world will be open only to paying customers, to keep them from being hounded by obnoxious newbies, but we may run a free downloadable world that only lets people keep a character for a day or so. That way people can get a feel for the game, anyway.

Will you give refunds if there are bugs in the game?

If? Heck, we can guarantee that there will be bugs in Clan Lord. There are bugs in every product. And no, we won’t give refunds. We will do our best to fix bugs quickly, and to keep the game up, and running, and fun. If something really bad happened, like we had to shut down for a week, we would probably extend everybody’s membership for the lost time — that’s only fair.

Will the game run all the time?

In theory, Clan Lord is 24/7. In practice, however, there are bound to be times when the game goes down because of a crash or other mishap, or network problems may drag the game to a halt from time to time. In addition, we’ll bring the game down for several hours at a time to implement new features and improve the world, probably around twice a month. We’ll try to do these updates during early morning hours, though.

Will the price always stay the same?

Unlikely. We hope to lower the price in time as we build a larger membership. We’d be very sad if we ever had to raise the price. We do our best to treat our customers right.

We have a set of principles we follow when deciding if and how to add new features to Clan Lord. We work hard to fulfill as many of these as we can, though it’s a big job, and we’re destined to not always succeed.

1. Clan Lord is fun, not frustrating.

• Fun activities should be profitable; boring ones should not.
• Actions that are fun for other characters should be rewarded.
• A player should not be forced to do things he or she thinks aren’t fun.
• Characters never go dramatically backward.
• Nothing bad happens to characters when they’re off-line.
• Rewards are large; penalties are small.
• Rewards are common; penalties are rare.
• “Too easy” is just as big a problem as “Too hard.”

2. The world of Clan Lord is full of surprises.

• The world is large and diverse enough that one can always explore.
• Each day is potentially different.
• There is always the possibility of an unusual event.

3. Each character should feel special.

• Characters can grow more diverse over time.
• Characters should always feel they can be useful.
• Active characters gain in rank and stature compared to the general population over time.
• Characters can do things alone if desired.
• Characters can have both short-term and long-term effects on the world.
• Characters get to decide, as opposed to having decisions made for them.

4. Clan Lord is about interactions between characters.

• Groups are more effective than individuals.
• There is no upper limit on the total population.
• Characters can communicate with each other in a variety of ways.
• Characters can form and join a wide variety of organizations.
• Politics is a major factor.
• Good characters vastly outnumber evil ones.

5. Clan Lord is approachable and easy to learn.

• Initial play is simple, with more twists added as the character grows.
• Characters are not forced to make permanent decisions before they know the consequences.

6. Clan Lord is fun.

• This is the first and last principle.

Clan Lord will undergo massive changes over the next couple of years, but it will strive to continue to be simple and fun. We welcome suggestions — many things suggested by early users are now in the game. We’re more likely to do suggestions that make things simpler and more fun.

The best way to give us suggestions is in writing. When you talk to us on the phone, your comment has to get translated too many times before it gets to the programmer for him to know what the suggester had in mind.

Tons of people contributed to Clan Lord. They hammered it through over five years of development. They pointed out every little flaw, and selflessly crashed their machines dozens of times helping us make a cooler, better game.

These aren’t all the people that helped. No doubt a few were inadvertently forgotten, or we couldn’t figure out how to spell their names, plus there are a couple that we just plain intentionally snubbed.

Developers

A sampling of those who worked on the world of Clan Lord, in no particular order.

• Josh de Cesare: Massive client improvements, monster AIs, and more.
• Ian Hendry: Monster AIs, area design, and more.
• Ted Oliverio: Monster AIs, area design, and more.
• Divo Palinkas: Area design, monster design, and more.

Contributors

A smattering of people who contributed goodies that made the world a better place to explore, in no particular order.

• Brent Brighton: Graphics and more.
• Bryce Wolfson: Networking improvements and more.
• Ben Watson: Sound effects and music.
• William Wallace: Fonts, graphics, sounds, the Guide, and more.
• Mike Apolis: Graphics, sounds, and more.
• T. Kephart: Graphics and more.
• Tony Ritchie: Graphics.
• Tanja Rau: Graphics.
• Kenzie Ferguson: Graphics.

A partial list of the thousands who helped out during our lengthy development period, in alphabetical order.