For companies running an online game, one of the strangest concepts to learn is that Not All Customers Are Created Equal. In an MMO. one customer’s ten bucks is not equivalent to another’s 10 bucks, if the first is actually driving people away. This seems like common sense to anyone who has played an MMO for more than a week.

But it runs contrary to all business logic. Your first instincts is to think that The Customer is Always Right. Learning otherwise is almost impossible to do until an organization has a game running – until you experience the problems for a while, your first instinct is to Try To Save Them All. Some aren’t worth saving. 3DO went through that learning process. When I moved to Origin, the UO management team was in the middle of learning it as well. Then I came here, I found that both Wolfpack and Ubi were still getting a handle on the concept – despite having many other games come before them.

It’s just a lesson an organization has to learn the hard way.

The interesting thing is that the concept that maybe, just maybe, the customers AREN’T always right is starting to bleed into other businesses. For example, here’s a link to a story about Best Buy learning that they don’t want 20% of their customers.

The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on “loss leaders,” severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. “They can wreak enormous economic havoc,” says Mr. Anderson.

The trick, in both places, is to find out which customers cost you more money than they bring in. Obviously, in MMOs, the obvious targets are exploiters. If an exploiter or extremely vulgar soul is at risk of driving 10 people away, obviously you show them the door, just as a restaurant may show the door to someone who was being obnoxious in their dining hall. What Best Buy points out is that the more interesting cases are the less flagrant, less expensive cases.

Let’s say that you pay your CSRs twelve bucks an hour. Let’s say that the average time to deal with a call is 10 minutes (both numbers are highly hypothetical, and obviously vary based on game and/or company). Placing a call to a CSR costs the company two bucks – before you get into the overhead that guy carries (office space, equipment, training, management, etc).

Which is to say, mathematically, it makes perfect sense to get rid of the whiners. Anyone who fills your queue with useless calls that have no possible resolution and requires a lot of handholding. People who complain about every name they see because it once appeared in a Dave Duncan book 15 years ago. People who are offended by harmless flirting. People who are keeping your CSRs from dealing with real problems. Raph once told me (purely hypothetically!) that if a game were to simply ban every player that made 2 or more service calls, it’s profitability would skyrocket. Assuming, of course, it could survive the disastrous PR hit.

True story: 3DO once banned a woman from Meridian 59 because she’d call the support line too often. Why? She thought the GM’s voice was sexy. She would, on a daily basis, take a whole bunch of qualudes and call just to hear him be helpful. But Meridian 59 was a low margin business, and her faked little dramas were keeping customers with real problems from getting the service they needed.

Will a company ever go that far as to systematically purge the whiners? Hard to say. It seems so unfair, so counter to standard business logic. But then again, thanks to exploiters, we’ve already gotten rid of All Customers are Created Equal.