Forums, part 763(a)

I was talking about my forum-scaling theory (see here) today, and someone asked me "So what would you do if you had a forum with 5 million active posters?" and my immediate answer was "Shut it down." Now, this was in the context of an online game - certainly if my primary business goal was building a forum, I'd consider five million active posters a raging success. But for a game? I'm not sure that would be successful.

For that to make sense, I need to address what I see as the value of an official forum. Ryan Shwayder's post on that subject is here, and it's a good starting point.

Communication: Ryan's a little vague about exactly what communication he's talking about here, so I'll clarify what I mean by communication on official forums.
- Player to Developer: This is one players tend to think is the point of official forums - that it's a venue by which they can tell the devs what they're thinking. And it's true to a point. However, the bigger the forums, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and the harder it is for the developer to extract useful information out of a forum. Note that I say "information" and not "data", because you're not going to get anything remotely resembling objective numbers. CMs generally interpret forum feedback by a sort of intuition-slash-voodoo, and while I'll be the first to tell you amusing anecdotes about how useful it can be (ask me about the L2 server crash bug, sometime,) it's still a resource- and skill-intensive method of finding out what your players are thinking. This is where my earlier post about forums not scaling well really applies.

- Developer to Player: If you're communicating with your players solely - or even primarily - through forums, you're Doing It Wrong. Forums, by their nature, have a barrier to entry. They're not the landing page of your website, they may require login, and they will definitely require some sort of searching to come up with dev posts - whether that searching be on the part of the user or via some sort of Dev Tracker tool. This means that the vast majority of players will either never see what you're telling them, or they'll find some site willing to do the grunt work and go there instead. In World of Warcraft, for example, I almost never visit the official site - I use WoW Insider instead, because they'll aggregate everything I might possibly need to know.

Now, this doesn't mean that using the forums to communicate is a bad idea - doing so can foster a sense of community and give your most invested players a reward for time spent hanging out on your site - but it's not a news feed. This isn't really an issue of scale - the percentage of your players that actively read the forums may vary from product to product, but in my experience it doesn't correlate with size, or in fact with anything I've been able to pin down.

- Player-to-player: This is the subject where I get in to arguments with my colleagues who are very much in favor of forums. Forums build communities, and players who are invested in the community will stick much longer than players who aren't. Being able to shape, moderate, and direct the formation of your official forum community is a power any company should think long and hard about giving up. But again, there's a limit. That limit is related to Dunbar's number. Now that's not a fixed number, but the basic idea is that there is a limit to how many people a person can handle as being part of their community. From my observations, what generally happens on forums is that when the number of active posters gets bigger than that (150 sounds a little high, actually, although I'm not at all sure how lurkers factor in) the forum fragments. Sub-forums attract their own communities, and while people may read the "general" or "news" forums, they'll really only participate in their chosen subgroup.

Now, say that 1% of your player base actively participates on the forums. It's a nice round number, although probably a bit low. That means that you can get a solid (if pre-WoW) number of players - a hundred thousand or so - before the base starts to fragment. That's a community. Double it, and you have two weakly linked groups, or maybe a few smaller ones (depending on how your forums are set up.) Ten times - a million players - and you're looking at a minimum ten sub-communities, all with their own drama and personalities. Now, is that adding value to your product?

It's true that if you have a million subs, those communities will form whether you like it or not. They'll form on fansites, in guilds and alliances, on Facebook, wherever. The question is, does it make financial sense to try to make them form under your own aegis? Do you want to spend the money on the headcount it will take to moderate those ten or twenty subgroups, the hardware and software to keep the forums itself up, the technical staff to deal with the hiccups? Personally, I'd have to be really out of inspiration for other ways to manage that community before I'd say yes.


Ownership: This was Ryan's second item, and Moorgard's comment that "stability" is a better word is one I agree with. Any site you don't have control over, you can't depend on. Fansites can be very fly-by-night operations, and if your primary contact has a kid or develops a wicked cough syrup addiction or gets thrown in jail for flashing old ladies, the site may well disappear or simply decay. And the only thing I have to say to that is... so what?

Communities will form anyway. You'll get sub-groups that form off of any game - even Auto Assault, which was by no one's estimation a raging success, had at least one lively and successful fansite. If one falls, another will take its place. The only question is whether an official forum is going to be in the mix or not. We've even seen official forums disappear (UO had one, for a little while, and then it was taken down, and I dare you to go to Stratics' UHall and tell them that they don't count because they're not on an official forum.) This just isn't one of my primary considerations when thinking about whether or not to make a forum. If ten years playing MMOs has taught me anything, it's that people will find a place on the internet to bitch.

Integration: The third item on Ryan's list, and by far the most interesting to me. Most modern MMOs have really limited websites, with the forum usually being the most interactive aspect by far. (LOTRO being the exception - although I haven't looked at it too extensively, it's a really exciting concept.) Things like the WoW Armory are interesting, but don't have much to do with building communities as such - they're really enhancements to gameplay.

This is where I think that the weaknesses of forums (poor scaling, less-than-ideal one-to-many and one-to-one communication, lack of dynamic handling of sub-communities) can be mitigated. If my WoW guild could have its own subforum where we could assign visibility preferences to subforums and set permissions and whatnot, and if I could get a running feed of threads my guildies have posted in, and twitter-style updates whenever a dev posted, plus attach my character profiles and give me a blog and my own WoWTwitter account and a server status widget and an official news feed... well, I'd feel like part of the greater WoW community, and maybe I'd actually visit the forums every once in a while.

Yes, that's a wishlist, and yes, it'd be hard and expensive. But don't try to tell me hiring moderation staff for five million gamers all on one message board is easier or cheaper.