Mythic is looking to bottom-feeding their team:

If you want to be a game artist, you need to have studied art. Ditto programming. But if you want to be a world builder and work your way up to designer, the best way in is to start in customer service and impress everyone with how smart, creative, and hardworking you are. We’re about to have another round of promotions from the CS pool, but we can’t promote those deserving men and women until their replacements are trained. That replacement could be you… and it could be you moving to building and design in 2007. So apply, already.

So, if you want to be an artist you need to study art, if you want to be a programmer you have to study programming. …And if you want to be a designer you need to bend over and do customer support for Mythic. Duh?

No, really. I cannot stress enough how this isn’t just an awful practice (back to what Anyuzer wrote long ago, I don’t believe that QA and CS are good places where to cultivate good game designers) but it’s also a very bad example to give.

It isn’t written anywhere that if you are good at customer support then you can be a good game designer. Nor that you can be good at customer support if you are good at game design. It goes beyond every logic, in fact. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that the announce denigrates the important work that people do in customer support and QA. That’s not the ghetto of gaming, it shouldn’t be publicized as something devalorized that is only done by people without any other talent, rejected from other “prestigious” roles, or exploited while they hold tightly onto the remote hope of climbing the social treadmill.

You are really going to risk to fill CS with wannabe designers who have had very bad luck with other opportunities and are now RABID to trample on each other and take advantage of every possible chance. People that couldn’t care less about CS and will NEVER do a good work for that simple reason. The very best feeling that they can get out of that work is just a whole lot of frustration. Because their goals don’t coincide with their position. They aren’t there to do a good work, but to endure it and hope they can make some friends at the higher levels so that they can be promoted among the envy of the other 99% of co-workers.

This type of competition cannot lead to anything good. It’s inacceptable to propose jobs with false, remote promises as if the job was a lottery that rewards only one over hundreds. People are gullible, but taking advantage of that is shameful.

So. Good luck with your new position. I can already see an appeal queue. DAoC players are dying to see how smart, creative, and hardworking you are with your replies.

Jessica Mulligan: It isn’t enough to just get a job in customer service at game company and then work your way up the ladder while experimenting with different types of games. Those days are gone.