Tech Support?

Ever wonder why tech support is so bad for Home? Well, another insider has given us some information. This person worked in the tech support area for Sony, and has since stopped. From the sounds of it, they didn't part on good terms. With that in mind, here's some great info via email:

Well, for starters, are you aware that very little of SCEA's tech support / customer service is actually done in Foster City? There are 3 levels of Tech Support, they are referred to as Tier 1 (front line agents), Tier 2 (supervisor level agents), and Tier 3 (special teams). Foster City is where you find the Tier 3 and the "in-house" Tier 2 agents who have the most authority. But most of the actual Tech Support is contracted to a 3rd-party company called Sitel, [Home-Watch note: I looked up this company, and they do exactly what this person says they do. Check their website here] and the call center is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. One of the reasons the Tech Support and Customer Service for PlayStation Home is as bad as it is, is due to the clowns who run this call center, and the misfits they hire to staff it. The so-called "elites" that you refer to on the PS forums generally speaking have more knowledge of PS Home and the PS3 than the Tier 1 (and Tier 2) agents who staff this call center. I'm sure that doesn't surprise you. For the most part they are poorly trained, are not given adequate support to do their jobs (in terms of material resources or knowledge), and the turnover rate is high, so there are few agents with much experience. Another factor has to do with actual Sony policies, which are not very consumer friendly. Example: Consumer buys Midway tickets for PS Home, but never receives tickets. The vast majority of Tier 1 agents don't even understand this issue and will probably try to brush off the consumer. Those few who do understand the issue aren't given adequate information as to what might be causing it, or how to resolve it. All they can do is kick it up to the Tier 3 level, but if a solution is found, it likely won't be communicated back down to the Tier 1 level. Same applies to consumers who buy Home items like clothing or furniture but don't receive them. Or those who have missing items from their inventory, both free and purchased items, which one day just aren't there.

More insider information - HARD NUMBERS ARE HERE!

Well, it's now known what the virtual item sales are for Home. With all the Kotakus, IGNs, 1ups, and other gaming new sites out there, a tiny blog got them first. And they are SAD. A forewarning, these numbers don't include the income from advertising. This is only the sales from micro-transactions, and only for the USA.

Home rakes in on average $125k a week. That's right Home fanatics, it's not even breaking a million per month. Hence the reason it's quite possibly being canceled in the near future.

So who's to blame for all of this? Well first off there's Katherine De Leon, who is responsible for the virtual spaces in Home. So when the [all] spaces bugged out, she would be the one to blame. We reported prior to this that they had hired someone to "revamp" Home, and it turns out it was Katherine who did the hiring. She hired a woman by the name of Celia Pearce, who claims:

Celia Pearce is a game designer, author, researcher, teacher, curator and artist, specializing in multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds, independent, art, and alternative game genres, as well as games and gender. She began designing interactive attractions and exhibitions in 1983, and has held academic appointments since 1998. Her game designs include the award-winning virtual reality attraction Virtual Adventures (for Iwerks and Evans & Sutherland) and the Purple Moon Friendship Adventure Cards for Girls. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from SMARTLab Centre, then at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.

Her website can be found here. Be warned, her website is an eyesore that challenges even the worst Geocities pages of the late 1990s. Higher than Katherine though is Jack Buser. Jack Buser (seen here doing his best impression of Animal from the Muppets) has failed to keep Home's development moving forward. While most successful companies and software projects excel due to the teamwork and combined efforts of everyone involved, Jack Buser had made every attempt possible to do the polar opposite. Every member of the team, if it be Katherine De Leon, Glasswalls, CydoniaX, Locust_Star, Buggie, or [insert name here] has had issues with Buser. According to sources he's a bit bipolar and has an extreme fear of failure. So chances are he's scared shitless at the moment because Home is doing really poorly.

It seems to us Buser's biggest mistake is placing his responsibility as the director for Home on the shoulders of the dingbat Celia Pearce and her idea of what Home could be. She spent months hanging out at malls and theme parks, taking pictures, and put all this together into some sort of grandmaster "redesign for Home." So there you have it...the future of Home is a giant mall/amusement park designed by a clueless, socially inept middle-aged lady who billed so much money to Sony for this "work" she bought a house with it. She then passed off this piece of shit to Katherine who passed it off to Jack, who decided to bank Home's entire strategy for the year on it. Now, normally strategic direction of a platform should come from the DIRECTOR, don't you think? But since Jack is so incompetent he dove on this thing like a fat kid on cake.

Most of the costs for Home development are in London, but there's also a ton of money paid out to 3rd parties who also build a lot of their virtual spaces and items. In fact, this is how most stuff is being created for Home this year, since Katherine De Leon has managed to hog most of the budget for her internal team of about 25 people to only work on the piece of shit Home redesign.
Some other interesting information, we have discovered Home does have its own QA team and they also use Sony's internal QA. Each region also has their own. Katherine, Jack, and the Home business manager talk to game developers to try to convince them to make stuff for Home. Jack answers to the Senior Director of PSN Marketing, Susan Panico.

So we have to ask: Susan Panico, what the fuck is going on? Why are you letting this crap go on? Isn't it time to cut and run?

More insider information

Via Email:

Home is NOT profitable despite Abuser's latest PR bullshit propaganda. The biz model may be a profitable one...anyone in the gaming/virtual world industry knows that microtransactions are EASY money. Keep pumping out those virtual shoes and idiots will buy them! HOWEVER...that doesn't make a dent of different to Home's PNL..bottom line, etc. (PNL = Profit & Loss) It costs millions to run Home. Any money they make is dependent upon virtual item and personal space sales, as well as all those tacky promotions they do, like the stupid Criss Angel thing for A&E. My sources told me Promotions at Sony have already pulled out most of the promised money for Home because it's not getting enough traffic. So unless the virtual swag sales are enough to cover the costs of a whole dev team in London, the inflated salaries of Jack, kdel, and the other aholes running SCEA, and production costs...ain't NO WAY Home will be profitable by Q4 of this year, if ever. And if it's not....here come the axe.

Hmmm, looks like Home could be on it's way out. WTF will I do then? Perhaps I'll start a blog devoted to raising indoor tropical plants. Or perhaps a fishing lure blog. Choices, choices.

More insider information

Via Email:

More dirt about Jack: last year he either dumped his wife (or vice versa) for being a coke-fueled party girl and gained sole custody of their daughter. Any appearances of the 2 of them before any of this happened made it clear that she thought he was a huge dork and sick of him. So none of this came as a big surprise. But around the time of his divorce is when he started acting extra-crazy on the job. He tried really hard to block GlassWalls, largely considered to be the best CM Home has, from being hired to Cyd's team probably because he is as prejudiced against gay people as women. It was also his idea to hire BuggieTechnica, the worst Home employee ever, who was ultimately fired for being a whiny bitch and hanging out on game forums all day, among numerous other offenses.

Katherine de Leon was an INTERN and former community manager (ha!) at Linden Lab only 3 years ago. How she managed to get the keys to the Home kingdom and fly around all over the country spinning her bullshit propaganda about Home is anyone's guess. She is nepotistic and hires all her best friends since they are the only people who can tolerate her....even some of them are looking to leave since she is such a horrible boss. Her latest hire was a woman whose virtual world development company failed and went bankrupt. Awesome choice. The 2 of them have a barely-concealed lesbo relationship and are plotting ways to be able to sleep with each other without getting in trouble with HR. Too bad "kdel" recently married a beard.

Not sure if this type of personal gossip is what you're looking for, but it sure is fucking entertaining, isn't it? Obvs I'm not going to get the true insider info about when exactly Home will self-destruct, but I'm sure it's not long now.

Home Moderation Terrified of Home-Watch!

We've gotten swamped with multiple emails from folks who have been censored. Rather then anything we'd love to do a little jig and get on with the mockery, but I'll post emails instead.

Email #1:

the removed my fucking signature and deleted a thread i made. bastards

Email #2:

i came across a link to your site in the home general forums, can't help but appreciate the bulk of everything you are posting there, keep up the good work and perhaps some competent people will be hired to run home and moderate. and oddly enough when i navigated back to the forums the post with your link had been deleted.

Email #3:

they deleted the last one i made 'cause it had the home-watch url in it. here's the message i got:

Warning
From: Admin Assistant Avara
Date: 01-16-2010 10:25 PM

Please refrain from advertising and posting links to inappropriate content (inappropriate language) on the forums. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Email #4: (And my favorite, from a Sony Employee)

dude, lol. you are pissing a lot of people off.your blog is hush hush.but everyone is talking about it quietly.a bunch of us are laughing our asses off aroud here. please keep up , most of us hate home with a passion.

Other then you guys at Sony not being able to put together an email that can be read, you guys are awesome for shooting this to me, and thanks again for letting me paste it.

Censorship is abound! Seems we must have ruffled some feathers, because we're even being chatted about at Sony. Wow. Awesome job everyone. To celebrate, I've made a new sig image without our url, so we can avoid those hyper-sensitive feelings of the Home staff.

Inside Information

Recently we have been in contact with a handful of Home insiders.We WILL NOT be sharing their names, positions, or any other info about them.

But we would like to share the fact that we are now inside home, and getting a look at the inner workings. We have info about the development process, the process used for testing, we even have some REALLY interesting things we've learned about the HCM, with a lot of it focused on CydoniaX. It would be kind of pointless to just start listing everything we've learned over the last week. However over time we'll share it bit by bit as it applies to specific situations.

Expect it to be juicy, and expect it to come out in future posts!