In the magical land of Dereth, a bloody war recently came to an end. For 14 months, darkness had prevailed in the 3-D fantasy world of Microsoft Network's online role-playing game Asheron's Call (AC). The shadow Bael'Zharon had broken out of his crystal jail, unleashing a reign of terror.
But ultimately, the evil Bael'Zharon proved no match for the united peoples of Dereth. With the guidance of the benevolent but reclusive mage Lord Asheron, AC players banded together to banish Bael'Zharon to the outer void.
It was starting to look like a mild, peaceful winter in Dereth without Bael'Zharon around. Players rejoiced over their victory as they anxiously prepared for the next nightmare AC's writers had in store for them.
But they didn't expect a real-world nightmare that has brought their tightly knit fantasy world close to ruin.
Asheron's Call is Microsoft's contender in the latest generation of online games known as MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games), a growing genre that includes Verant's Everquest and Origin Systems' Ultima Online.
In MMORPGs, players inhabit a "persistent universe," interacting with other remote players in a game that never ends. Asheron's Call differs from the genre with its constantly evolving storyline, with new story updates every month.
Although Microsoft didn't plan to launch the new AC storyline until Wednesday, a potent rumor about an upheaval in the game's management team spawned another plot twist that the company wasn't prepared for -- this one with very real, offline implications for the Asheron's Call community.
On Monday, the online gaming site Gamespy published a rumor that Microsoft was planning to replace its entire corps of volunteer helpers, systems operators and game-conduct enforcers for Asheron's Call with paid, full-time contractors.
Word of the imminent dismissal spread rapidly through the AC community, which includes some 500 volunteers. Since Asheron's Call went live in November 1999, volunteers have played a critical role as peacekeepers. They patrol the game's eight parallel worlds -- a universe roughly the size of Delaware -- and outlying chat rooms to enforce the MSN Gaming Zone's code of conduct, which prohibits the use of foul or racist language and sexual harassment, among other things.
Depending on their rank and responsibilities, AC volunteers were classified as Advocates, Sentinels, Chancellors and World Overseers, and had special in-game avatars and chat-room IDs to mark their status. Some enjoyed special powers such as the ability to teleport within the game, move other players around or make themselves invisible. As the chief rule enforcers, Sentinels had the power to gag offending players for five minutes or boot them off the game for a full day.
On Tuesday, Microsoft posted a notice on its MSN Gaming Zone confirming Gamespy's rumor, sparking a firestorm of flames and four-letter words in AC's chat rooms. No Sentinels were on duty to keep the peace.
"Our growth has precipitated the need to evolve the way we provide community support to our players," Ken Karl, program manager for Asheron's Call, wrote in the announcement. "Beginning Feb. 15, we will be making some changes to our community support infrastructure that will enable us to guarantee players that trained, full-time professionals will be available to answer community concerns.
"This means that the Sentinel and Chancellor programs are now discontinued; and on Thursday, Feb. 15, the Advocate program will be discontinued as well. Microsoft would like to thank all these volunteers for their dedication to the players of Asheron's Call."
As the reality of the new AC world order set in, many of the volunteers' shock turned to outrage over what they saw as an arbitrary and callous move by Microsoft.
"You know, it's not that they are doing it, but that they can't bother to get off their high horse to tell us! What the hell did my near 1,000 hours mean to them anyway?" said one volunteer, who had served as an AC Advocate, Sentinel and World Overseer.
Microsoft said building a full-time staff of in-house game support specialists was just "the next logical step for the (MMORPG) genre."
"Having a dedicated full-time support staff will allow us to provide a consistent level of support to the AC community," Karl said. "When you're not paying your support staff and they're lending their time as volunteers, you can't enforce accountability."
But some members of the AC community think the company's decision to dismiss the volunteers was a defensive measure to avoid future litigation. Indeed, Microsoft need look no further than one of its closest competitors in the gaming world, Origin Systems. Last September, former Ultima Online volunteers slapped the game company with a class-action lawsuit, demanding compensation for their time.
And in 1999, a class-action lawsuit was filed against America Online on behalf of thousands of former and current volunteers, who are now demanding back pay for their work as chat-room moderators, rules enforcers and customer-support troubleshooters. With the lawsuit scheduled to go to trial next month, the court will decide whether for-profit companies can hire unpaid volunteers -- a case that threatens to be the biggest legal upset in the technology industry.
For its part, Microsoft has more than its share of (non-antitrust) lawsuits to reckon with. Last year, a court ordered Microsoft to pay more than $97 million in back pay to approximately 12,000 of its laid-off temp workers.
"It's pretty clear that Microsoft looked at the lawsuit against AOL and said, 'We can't let that happen to us,'" said Bryan Reynolds, president of Obsidian, which runs a fan site called Asheron's Lore.
For now at least, Asheron's Call volunteers aren't after Microsoft's money. What they really want, it seems, is empathy. After hearing about the dismissal, Rebecca Morn, a former Asheron's Call Sentinel, created a private website to serve as an organizing ground for fellow AC volunteers. At last count, the site had 235 members.
"There's not as much venom-spewing as you'd think," Morn said. "There's just a lot of hand-holding and commiseration among the volunteers. This whole ordeal is turning into a full-blown grieving process for a lot of us."
