[...] Community relations, management, design, and governance September 29th, 2006 (Visited 5105 times) Tags: community management, disney, vw design [...]

[...]   SWGStraticsVoice – 7:16 AM PDT | Posted By: RainStar   We’ll start off with quotes from the Austin Game Conference that were found on Gamasutra.comGordon Walton of Bioware Austin::… You’re all a bunch of whiny little b—-es. We’re all victims of the guys with the money! No. Guess who signs up to make the game. Guess who along the way decides to change things. … Guess who won’t stand up and lose their job rather than ship s–t. I put myself in there. I’ve done that. I’ve made bad decisions … many more times than most people here in this room … I think the challenge here is, are we agents of our lives, or are we victims? We’re talking about, oh, it’s going to come from the top down. Well guess what, if nobody will work for those schmucks, it’ll come from the bottom up. … What are they going to do? They don’t know how to put it on a disc. …The other thing is, we’re not holding up our end. Somewhere along the way we caved and promised something we couldn’t deliver. So you can’t say it’s the other guy, it’s some other motherf—er. No, it’s not. Everybody in this thing is responsible for what happens. Every single person on the team had a opportunity to do better. And I’d like to see more people think about how they’re going to make it happen rather than sit up and rant and b—- about it.Rich Vogel of Bioware Austin:Looking out at E3 this year, there is nothing innovative coming out in the next three years, and that’s pretty sad.Scott Jennings, senior designer at NCSoft:Players are like “ravenous locusts,” and while Blizzard releases patches with updates to the game regularly, they’re not as accessible as they ought to be. The system “is best described as, ‘Let’s make something so frustrating, people will just post the damned patches for me,’adding that he had a FilePlanet account just to download new WoW patches.Part of our primary service of an MMO provider is providing the damned MMO. The second part is just being there – letting customers play when they want, as expected, instead of waiting in line – something else WoW doesn’t always provide. Further, MMO services should provide respect in the form of competent relations with its players, treating them as people rather than piggy banks. Raph Koster, formerly of SOE/SWG:Content isn’t worth a damn. What is of value is the relationship between the consumer and the producer. Being good is no longer an exclusive. In a hit-driven business, the epitome of success is to be the Beatles or Elton John, which means having a consistent record of making blockbusters, or almost never screwing up, of always earning out reliably and of doing this over the course of decades. Those people are so rare they are the dodo, and their share of the audience as a percentage of the population is shrinking.The goal instead should be to be the Grateful Dead. You don’t want to be the number one hit, you want a relationship so that you can ding them over and over and over again. The band’s t-shirts may make more than their recordings.SOE’s John Blakely and Todd Fiala: Don’t make our mistakes.John Blakely: …..But what I would have done differently was be more sensitive to the target audience. The audience you launch with is the one you’ve got.Chris Kramer, Director of Corporate Communications at SOEIn late winter through early spring, SWG was one of SOE’s biggest gainers in terms of new players to a live game, coming through both the trials and through new software purchases.Jason Ryan, the Events Manager for SWG:We’ve had great responses from the players. The last two patches were player initiated bug fixes and lingering issues. The Expertise system is going in and has been well received.Alan Crosby, Director of Community Relations at SOE:Players have been very upbeat on the forums and the questions are mostly about the future and what the game is about moving forward. Now we go to the SOE/SWG site where Chris Cao made the boards light up….. The Game vs. the Boards by Dev Chris CaoRoughly 80% of the people who play SWG never read these boards. We know this from our own internal metrics and it poses an interesting question. Are we talking to people who play the game or posters who play the boards? I don’t mean to imply that the people who post here don’t play the game. Far from it. There are thousands of well-constructed, thoughtful, and insightful posts from people who obviously know the game very well. Just read a few lines of these gems and you’ll realize that, first and foremost, these people care about the game. Their focus is the game. I think the lion’s share of the profession feedback in the last couple publishes is a fantastic example of these players who post.But, at the same time, these boards are constantly cluttered by the reverse. Posters who play. They use these forums to lash out at others, criticize wantonly, and generally feed their own egos. They regularly attack devs and moderators, clinging to past wrongs and imagined slights. They focus on themselves instead of the game. To them, the boards are the real game. As devs, we aren’t here to play the board game. We’re here to play, and to make, SWG.The upcoming chapters will see the remainder of the profession expertise systems implemented. We have a lot of work to do and the feedback from players who post is going to be invaluable. You aren’t going to like every decision we make and we understand that. We have a limited resources and time to accomplish all that needs to be done. But, as I’ve said before, we will be here (on the boards) and we will be listening. If you’re up for a focused discussion of ideas, we welcome you and you can bet you’ll have our attention.If, however, you feel the need to throw another stone, indulge a rant, whine, pick apart another poster, argue a dead point, rules lawyer, quote ancient history, or engage in any of the other classic board game moves, don’t expect us to pay attention. We have better things to do.We have some SWG to make. Chris Cao Editor’s Note: To say The game vs the boards thread got a lot of responses from the community would be an understatement.Raph Koster’s post on his his personal website, part of which says this:Tide’s Horizon and Lum are both talking about this, but I am frankly a little loath to. I don’t want to come across as criticizing, since that’s not really my intent. But lately there’s been a spate of discussion about what community relations is, whether forums should be run, etc. As you may know, I have fairly firm opinions on this. But that’s not what I want to talk about just now… and really, what I am saying has little connection to the actual original thread that kickstarted the topic yet again. Edit: since the preceding sentence was apparently not clear enough: this post isn’t about SWG or Chris Cao’s statements. It could just as equally apply to Linden Labs switching to a blog mechanism for communicating to their users, or really any company that sees forums as an adjunct to to the world. Please don’t hijack the discussion to debate a given game’s management.Here is the rest of what Raph had to say on that matter.That’s it for this edition of interesting quotes and posts. [...]

[...] Roughly 80% of the people who play (SOE Game) never read these boards. We know this from our own internal metrics and it poses an interesting question. Are we talking to people who play the game or posters who play the boards? I don’t mean to imply that the people who post here don’t play the game. Far from it. There are thousands of well-constructed, thoughtful, and insightful posts from people who obviously know the game very well. Just read a few lines of these gems and you’ll realize that, first and foremost, these people care about the game. Their focus is the game. I think the lion’s share of the profession feedback in the last couple publishes is a fantastic example of these players who post. But, at the same time, these boards are constantly cluttered by the reverse. Posters who play. They use these forums to lash out at others, criticize wantonly, and generally feed their own egos. They regularly attack devs and moderators, clinging to past wrongs and imagined slights. They focus on themselves instead of the game. To them, the boards are the real game. As devs, we aren’t here to play the board game. An interesting claim to lay to a consumer base. So how do you make a forum comprised of "Players who Post"? I mean 3rd part and community run sites lack many of the tools developers have in which to enlicited the type of behavior modled by "Players who Post", and already we’ve seen and I’ve very quickly said goodbye to a few of the "Posters who Play". For those of you whom are into this sort of thing, here’s a few links of the MMO Dev Blogsphere. Ralph Koster Scott Jennings Rob Meiners Ralph Again I think I’ll add to the rules, "If you feel the need to throw another stone, indulge a rant, whine, pick apart another poster, argue a dead point, rules lawyer, quote ancient history, or engage in any of the other classic board game moves, you can expect to get frowned upon here at WHA." __________________ Garthilk Site Manager Warhammer Alliance "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." [...]

[...] There’s been quite a bit of this lately. Actual commentary to follow, no doubt:Ron Meiners on Community Managers, on Terra NovaRaph Koster follows upScott Jennings talks about forumsRaph Koster, on the same subject [...]

[...] Tide’s Horizon and Lum are both talking about this, but I am frankly a little loath to. I don’t want to come across as criticizing, since that’s not really my intent. But lately there’s been a spate of discussion about what community relations is, whether forums should be run, etc. [...]

[...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RaphsWebsite/~3/29585342/http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/29/community-relations-management-design-and-governance/These four words mean different things, and frequently call for different talents and skillsets used by different people. And yet, they seem to get used interchangeably, and lumped into one person’s job. We should stop that. [...]

The principle is to make them feel special. Their perception is essentially what you’re dealing with.

This is exactly what I have been saying. Or trying to say anyway. You can’t really make everyone special so you have to try, instead, to fake it well. And this is what I think that Disney and Casino customer service are doing, creating a dialogue with the customer and playing up the relationship between customer and company even though customers.

Got ya, I understood you meant that actually, and I completely agree. My observation is there is a differance between (Im sure Raphs laid this out re: community if I recall):
Involvment
Community
Communication
Impact of Playerbase opinion on (I’ll use catchall: for Design/development/features etc.) the Organization.

Involvment to me is where you have game related attendant websites/portals for players of the game.

Community is the playerbase as a whole, are they reactive/proactive, are the relations positive/negative with the game devs.

Communication is a channel to the playerbase, this is the governance/gardening, management, relations etc comes in, the community managers promote involvment, encourage community, and tell the playerbase why/why not the following is possible:

Impact of playerbase opinion/ideas on the organization. Sometimes there are excellent ideas propogated by the playerbase, sometimes thier total crapola. They should have a channel and a filter to the organization or method of getting these good ideas to the organizations they support.

These have been my observations of what community management/community building is all about over the years as it relates to the game space, (significantly different in PR and Politics btw) from a gamer perspective.
And Im not trying to write a thesis here all Im saying is this:

Players going forward are going to be demanding more, not less of this, because much of the demographic has been connected, communicative and places a high value on socialization (the similarities to a previous generation from the 60′s are relavent no?).

You can’t make them feel special, and you cant listen to every player complaint, and moreover you cant buy them off either. What can be done is promotion of involvement, community, and good communication.

Players just want to know there is a channel in place, this begets loyalty to your game (“brand”) it should be personable, well thought out, informative, authoritative, and most important of all a community manager has to have credibility with the playerbase.

A community manager with no playerbase credibility is useless to a game company, really seriously just a waste of resources.

Credibility is lost when the company uses the CM as a fall guy/girl, flak, constant bearer of bad news, and mistakes are never copped to. Which really means a company has to be commited to keeping a CM credibile enough to ensure the channel to the playerbase is kept intact.

Community Management of a playerbase has got to be a seriously hard position, I wish these people got more respect from players and the companies they work for, I would hope they would get a little more commitment from the companies they work for, in the future than they have in the past…

it is simply not economical to make players truly special.

That’s true.

they make a lot of people feel special even if they aren’t.

That’s also true.

The principle is to make them feel special. Their perception is essentially what you’re dealing with. Actualities are irrelevant, and in fact, the “I’m unique, just like everyone else” concept applies: why the heck should they BE special? If they feel special, they’ll reciprocate the feel-good mojo, which translates eventually into dollars. You don’t need more than that.