This is an excellent roundup of why game forums are dangerous and awful. The "Value of Forums" section is rather token, and pretty much coincides with my rant here.
My question is, if we all know this stuff, why do we keep using forums? Why play with a tiger if you don't absolutely have to?
Showing posts with label Community Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Community Management. Show all posts
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Proving My Point
I'm still kicking around the idea of how to teach (or at least define) good writing for community management. To that end, I was idly googling the friend who spurred this train of thought, and came across a completely unrelated paper. That paper contained this lovely bit:
I sent that around for various of my colleagues to admire, and Sanya used it as the nucleus of her weekly column. It's a good column - go read it.
What really interest me are the comments. The MMO players who are invested to the point where they read and comment on industry-insider process columns like Sanya's are the ones most likely to give feedback to the companies in the first place, so what they have to say is worth listening to.
This, I think, rather proves the point of the quote above. The feedback to CS is just as important, if not more so - it could be on any topic, and the CS folks are well-situated to spot trends and report them (although some teams are better than others in having a channel for the CS team to pass those issues along.) A focus group is usually, well, focused, and feedback that doesn't touch on the specific area in question is tossed out - but usually the focus groups have much more visibility into the process and the decisions as they're made, so their feedback feels much more influential.
That definitely matches my experience. People like to feel heard, and you can't look interested and nod meaningfully over the internet. What you can do is respond. The problem is, not every idea or thought or post is one we can respond to without causing even more trouble. The standard "Thanks for your feedback!" note rapidly becomes worthless, because it's a form response. That's why customers like it best when they have a forum they can post on, particularly one where the devs respond. They can tell they're being listened to by their peers as well as by their desired target audience. The problem with that of course being that it doesn't scale.
The weekly Q&A/Grab Bag style of response that Sanya herself pioneered is one way to handle the situation, but I can say from experience (about two years of those linked archives were my posts) that it can be a very tricky thing to pick what gets attention and what doesn't. And it's even trickier when you have weeks where there are literally no new customer issues that you can address, because there's no decision or reaction that can be made public.
So this is what I'm kicking around. There's gotta be a better way to do this that a) encourages quality customer feedback and b) scales with the size of the community without requiring ridiculous amounts of headcount. I have my own plots and schemes, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.
"If you ask people for information (or compel them to provide it), you should give it back to them in some familiar form that lets them see how it is useful or interesting. They will then be less inclined to resent your asking in the first place, more inclined to be curious about the relationship of their work to others’, and more open to considering its implications"
I sent that around for various of my colleagues to admire, and Sanya used it as the nucleus of her weekly column. It's a good column - go read it.
What really interest me are the comments. The MMO players who are invested to the point where they read and comment on industry-insider process columns like Sanya's are the ones most likely to give feedback to the companies in the first place, so what they have to say is worth listening to.
"Sending your feedback to Customer Support will most likely get you a "Thanks for your feedback!" standard response while your suggestions will end up in the CRM's digital bin as a single person's opinion will most probably be regarded as rather unimportant.
You will be better off with becoming part of a focus group (if such thing is in place), or with providing feedback on the game forums where other players and maybe community representatives may discuss it." - Phall
This, I think, rather proves the point of the quote above. The feedback to CS is just as important, if not more so - it could be on any topic, and the CS folks are well-situated to spot trends and report them (although some teams are better than others in having a channel for the CS team to pass those issues along.) A focus group is usually, well, focused, and feedback that doesn't touch on the specific area in question is tossed out - but usually the focus groups have much more visibility into the process and the decisions as they're made, so their feedback feels much more influential.
"The suggestion and class-specific forums almost NEVER draw an official dev response... the ACTUAL feedback forums are viewed as the places where ideas go to die, so fewer and fewer people bother." - ArKane
That definitely matches my experience. People like to feel heard, and you can't look interested and nod meaningfully over the internet. What you can do is respond. The problem is, not every idea or thought or post is one we can respond to without causing even more trouble. The standard "Thanks for your feedback!" note rapidly becomes worthless, because it's a form response. That's why customers like it best when they have a forum they can post on, particularly one where the devs respond. They can tell they're being listened to by their peers as well as by their desired target audience. The problem with that of course being that it doesn't scale.
The weekly Q&A/Grab Bag style of response that Sanya herself pioneered is one way to handle the situation, but I can say from experience (about two years of those linked archives were my posts) that it can be a very tricky thing to pick what gets attention and what doesn't. And it's even trickier when you have weeks where there are literally no new customer issues that you can address, because there's no decision or reaction that can be made public.
So this is what I'm kicking around. There's gotta be a better way to do this that a) encourages quality customer feedback and b) scales with the size of the community without requiring ridiculous amounts of headcount. I have my own plots and schemes, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Community Management 101, Writing Component
I had a conversation this weekend with a friend who's involved in developing writing curricula for various different disciplines, and it got me to wondering about how I'd teach the particular style of writing needed in my own job.
There are really only two key elements:
- Control of tone: Emotional content is a very big part of everything we write, because much if not most of it is targeted at individuals, rather than a general audience.
- Clarity of content: The most minor of misunderstandings can spark week-long drama fests and infinitely repeated misinformation. (Ask me sometime about the function of hunger in UO.)
The content that requires factual clarity would probably be pretty much covered by a standard technical writing curriculum. I've learned it more or less by trial and error, but I think that's the easier part to teach. (Learning to translate patch notes from programmerese is a separate art...) The question of tone is the more interesting one.
We talk a lot about "good instincts" when discussing what to look for in a new hire, and while half of this is not necessarily writing-specific - when not to respond to a situation, when to ask for backup, that sort of thing - half of it is about choosing the most effective emotional content for a particular piece of writing and being able to accurately convey it. Both parts of that are very hard.
Picking the right emotional content is hard. It's slightly easier in one-on-one communications, because you only have to predict one person's reaction - but I very seldom get the luxury of dealing with my customers one-on-one. I usually need to talk to large numbers of them at once, and walk a very narrow path that will give me the best reaction from the largest number of people. Different communities have different temperaments - a friendly, cheerful tone may give you a warm and positive reaction from one group, whereas in another it's taken as a sign of weakness. Being able to read the room is one of those things that we call "instinct" and can only be taught by experience.
I would kill, however, for a class that taught how to convey that tone - avoiding common pitfalls, learning and working around loaded words and phrases ("working as designed," "soon," etc, in the MMO industry.) It is NOT a good area in which to have to learn by doing, but that's the only way I know how to teach it.
There are really only two key elements:
- Control of tone: Emotional content is a very big part of everything we write, because much if not most of it is targeted at individuals, rather than a general audience.
- Clarity of content: The most minor of misunderstandings can spark week-long drama fests and infinitely repeated misinformation. (Ask me sometime about the function of hunger in UO.)
The content that requires factual clarity would probably be pretty much covered by a standard technical writing curriculum. I've learned it more or less by trial and error, but I think that's the easier part to teach. (Learning to translate patch notes from programmerese is a separate art...) The question of tone is the more interesting one.
We talk a lot about "good instincts" when discussing what to look for in a new hire, and while half of this is not necessarily writing-specific - when not to respond to a situation, when to ask for backup, that sort of thing - half of it is about choosing the most effective emotional content for a particular piece of writing and being able to accurately convey it. Both parts of that are very hard.
Picking the right emotional content is hard. It's slightly easier in one-on-one communications, because you only have to predict one person's reaction - but I very seldom get the luxury of dealing with my customers one-on-one. I usually need to talk to large numbers of them at once, and walk a very narrow path that will give me the best reaction from the largest number of people. Different communities have different temperaments - a friendly, cheerful tone may give you a warm and positive reaction from one group, whereas in another it's taken as a sign of weakness. Being able to read the room is one of those things that we call "instinct" and can only be taught by experience.
I would kill, however, for a class that taught how to convey that tone - avoiding common pitfalls, learning and working around loaded words and phrases ("working as designed," "soon," etc, in the MMO industry.) It is NOT a good area in which to have to learn by doing, but that's the only way I know how to teach it.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Creators and the Internet
George R.R. Martin posted a wee rant about some of his fans' behavior here, and John Scalzi expanded on the topic here. I was going to comment directly in Scalzi's blog, but it ran long.
It seems like there are two issues here - there's being discontented with the pace of production of a product you're interested in, and then there's how customers express that discontent.
The first is entirely the consumer's right. I'd be terribly curious to see the actual sales impact of longer delays vs shorter delays on publishing books in a genre series - I doubt that info is public anywhere, but I have to wonder if there's a sweet spot of building audience anticipation vs. losing the audience's interest. I suspect there is, and I suspect that publishers know about it. If the wait's too long, people probably will get frustrated and get distracted and wander off.
Now, if you're frustrated about something, isn't it your inviolate right to go bitch about it on the internet? Isn't that what the internet is for? And people often don't moderate their tone or take others' feelings into account on the internet. (This should not be news to anyone.) And I have met few if any authors, artists, game designers - anyone who produces a creative product for public consumption - who handled public, vitriolic criticism well at all. So this kerfuffle is absolutely unsurprising to me.
It seems like writing, because it's entirely a one-man job, is a little more intensely affected by this phenomenon, because there's no one else for the audience to blame. There's no production team running behind, no art contracts that fell through, no unexpected hardware failures or bugs in the code. The process takes place entirely in the black box of an author's head. This probably makes criticism a lot more personal, and it makes long delays (and make no mistake, Mr. Martin's latest book is long delayed indeed) even more frustrating, because the consumer literally can't understand what's holding up the process, and so they seize on anything handy - Livejournal posting, convention appearances, whatever.
In this particular case, though, the problem is one that's all too common, and all too avoidable - failure to correctly set expectations. I love transparency on the part of my favorite authors, and I read several of their blogs regularly. But this book was previously, publicly estimated to be released in 2006, 2007, and 2008. It has not yet been published - it is not, by the author's own admission, even completed. Now, this isn't a moral failing - no one deliberately lied. But there's a damn good reason the MMO industry customarily overuses the word "soon" when talking about... anything, really. Things change, deadlines get missed, plans get updated, and explaining all that to a bunch of furious customers is not anyone's idea of a good time.
I'm not blaming anyone here, and I will wait patiently until all of my favorite authors produce more masterpieces out of their black boxes. But guys, please don't tease me? I'd rather get a lovely surprise than another disappointment as an estimated date slips by.
It seems like there are two issues here - there's being discontented with the pace of production of a product you're interested in, and then there's how customers express that discontent.
The first is entirely the consumer's right. I'd be terribly curious to see the actual sales impact of longer delays vs shorter delays on publishing books in a genre series - I doubt that info is public anywhere, but I have to wonder if there's a sweet spot of building audience anticipation vs. losing the audience's interest. I suspect there is, and I suspect that publishers know about it. If the wait's too long, people probably will get frustrated and get distracted and wander off.
Now, if you're frustrated about something, isn't it your inviolate right to go bitch about it on the internet? Isn't that what the internet is for? And people often don't moderate their tone or take others' feelings into account on the internet. (This should not be news to anyone.) And I have met few if any authors, artists, game designers - anyone who produces a creative product for public consumption - who handled public, vitriolic criticism well at all. So this kerfuffle is absolutely unsurprising to me.
It seems like writing, because it's entirely a one-man job, is a little more intensely affected by this phenomenon, because there's no one else for the audience to blame. There's no production team running behind, no art contracts that fell through, no unexpected hardware failures or bugs in the code. The process takes place entirely in the black box of an author's head. This probably makes criticism a lot more personal, and it makes long delays (and make no mistake, Mr. Martin's latest book is long delayed indeed) even more frustrating, because the consumer literally can't understand what's holding up the process, and so they seize on anything handy - Livejournal posting, convention appearances, whatever.
In this particular case, though, the problem is one that's all too common, and all too avoidable - failure to correctly set expectations. I love transparency on the part of my favorite authors, and I read several of their blogs regularly. But this book was previously, publicly estimated to be released in 2006, 2007, and 2008. It has not yet been published - it is not, by the author's own admission, even completed. Now, this isn't a moral failing - no one deliberately lied. But there's a damn good reason the MMO industry customarily overuses the word "soon" when talking about... anything, really. Things change, deadlines get missed, plans get updated, and explaining all that to a bunch of furious customers is not anyone's idea of a good time.
I'm not blaming anyone here, and I will wait patiently until all of my favorite authors produce more masterpieces out of their black boxes. But guys, please don't tease me? I'd rather get a lovely surprise than another disappointment as an estimated date slips by.
Monday, February 16, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Drinking the Kool-Aid
Part 2 of the Massive Gamer interview with me is up. I wanted to expand a little bit on one of the bits in it. actually.
I talk about "drinking the kool-aid" a lot in community - internally, that is. What I mean by this is when you've bought in to a project, a feature, or the overall company line to the extent that you no longer have any perspective on it. A large part of a CM's value to their team is their ability to provide an outside perspective - not just a customer's perspective but a synthesis of all possible customer perspectives. How will the players react to this change? What should our highest bug fix priority be? Is this ad campaign going to have an effect on our existing playerbase? These are all questions a CM should be able to offer an answer to.
A problem arises when you, as a CM, have adopted the official line to the point where you begin to believe it. This patch will be great - look at all those bullet points! These bug fixes will be perfect because we say so, despite having our most junior programmer tackle the five easiest fixes regardless of severity! This ad campaign will bring in people by the thousands, and no matter that it promises things we've been promising since beta and can't deliver on!
The marketing team can say these things, because it's their job to be perky. CMs - good ones - are not perky. As a matter of fact, they tend to be the most cynical and jaded - and usually drunk - folk I've ever encountered. It's our job to see the downside as well as the upside. It's our job to anticipate criticism and plan how to react to it. Yes, we have to be upbeat and optimistic in public - hence the drinking. But to our teams, we should always be trying to make sure people see both sides and plan for them.
And in order to see both sides, we have to seek out both sides. We have to look for criticism, find the pockets of negativity, and welcome the flames. We have to get our hands on them in order to weigh them, judge them, then translate them into fluffy bunny terms for the delicate artistic temperaments on the dev team, so that next time the public has to find something different to bitch about. If your game just biffed a publish, you better know how, and why, and how many people noticed. Likewise, if your company has an image problem overall, you better have a report on who is bitching, what obscene nicknames it's been given, and how exactly the corporate logo has been photoshopped.
This is totally why we all drink so much, and why we burn out so fast. But it's still the job. And it does make it easier to live with when the company fucks up in exactly the way you predicted it would, and pisses off precisely the set of people you forecasted, and lays you off. Satisfaction in a job well done is almost as good as health insurance.
Massive Gamer: What do you think is most important when it comes to doing good community?
Preacher: Honesty - not just in the sense of conveying true information to and from the players and the devs, although that is very important, but also not getting so caught up in the emotions of the moment - whether it's the players upset about a change or the devs excited about a patch - that you lose sight of the facts and misrepresent the situation
I talk about "drinking the kool-aid" a lot in community - internally, that is. What I mean by this is when you've bought in to a project, a feature, or the overall company line to the extent that you no longer have any perspective on it. A large part of a CM's value to their team is their ability to provide an outside perspective - not just a customer's perspective but a synthesis of all possible customer perspectives. How will the players react to this change? What should our highest bug fix priority be? Is this ad campaign going to have an effect on our existing playerbase? These are all questions a CM should be able to offer an answer to.
A problem arises when you, as a CM, have adopted the official line to the point where you begin to believe it. This patch will be great - look at all those bullet points! These bug fixes will be perfect because we say so, despite having our most junior programmer tackle the five easiest fixes regardless of severity! This ad campaign will bring in people by the thousands, and no matter that it promises things we've been promising since beta and can't deliver on!
The marketing team can say these things, because it's their job to be perky. CMs - good ones - are not perky. As a matter of fact, they tend to be the most cynical and jaded - and usually drunk - folk I've ever encountered. It's our job to see the downside as well as the upside. It's our job to anticipate criticism and plan how to react to it. Yes, we have to be upbeat and optimistic in public - hence the drinking. But to our teams, we should always be trying to make sure people see both sides and plan for them.
And in order to see both sides, we have to seek out both sides. We have to look for criticism, find the pockets of negativity, and welcome the flames. We have to get our hands on them in order to weigh them, judge them, then translate them into fluffy bunny terms for the delicate artistic temperaments on the dev team, so that next time the public has to find something different to bitch about. If your game just biffed a publish, you better know how, and why, and how many people noticed. Likewise, if your company has an image problem overall, you better have a report on who is bitching, what obscene nicknames it's been given, and how exactly the corporate logo has been photoshopped.
This is totally why we all drink so much, and why we burn out so fast. But it's still the job. And it does make it easier to live with when the company fucks up in exactly the way you predicted it would, and pisses off precisely the set of people you forecasted, and lays you off. Satisfaction in a job well done is almost as good as health insurance.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Community Management and the Closet
I am not in the closet, and haven't been for many years. I'm queer as a three dollar bill (and female, if my readers haven't actually met me. The whole "Jeremy" thing is a long story.) But I was thinking last night about what I'd say if someone asked me if I'm out to my community.
The answer is... not really. I mean, I don't hide it - I'd be hard-pressed to do so convincingly anyway, and I have no desire to. But it's just a non-issue at work, and it's never come up. (Well, confession time. When I told my L2 forum suitor who played a male Light Elf "I prefer my women a little more butch," I meant it literally. Sorry.) The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt that it was *important* that it was a non-issue - that it *shouldn't* come up.
I think it comes down to this: players are not sex objects. At all, period, regardless of orientation. Some of the most cheerfully lecherous men I know are CMs, but when they're working, they're working. It's a different mode, and sex doesn't come into it at all - and so sexuality doesn't. (I'm not making claims about what happens in the privacy of people's heads - or even my head - just that the actual communication between a CM and his or her players is outside of all sexual considerations.)
And this is important, because we have a very specific relationship to our players. The somewhat tortured analogy I made in my head last night was that we are, in many ways, like priests. The players come to us, share their troubles, their concerns, and - you'd be surprised how often - their sins, and we intercede with the dev team on their behalf. It's a very particular sort of intimacy, and it's really very impersonal in many ways - they don't need to know anything about what kind of single malt I drink or whether I favor UT or Texas Tech, but they do need to believe in my relationship with my dev team and my willingness to act on their behalf. The minute a players starts to believe that a CM is interested in them for some out-of-game reason, that relationship breaks down. And when it does, word gets out - this is the internet, after all - and that relationship breaks down on a much larger scale.
So, am I out to my players? Well, they have Google, and I'm sure they can find this post or other evidence. But the real answer is, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't come up.
The answer is... not really. I mean, I don't hide it - I'd be hard-pressed to do so convincingly anyway, and I have no desire to. But it's just a non-issue at work, and it's never come up. (Well, confession time. When I told my L2 forum suitor who played a male Light Elf "I prefer my women a little more butch," I meant it literally. Sorry.) The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt that it was *important* that it was a non-issue - that it *shouldn't* come up.
I think it comes down to this: players are not sex objects. At all, period, regardless of orientation. Some of the most cheerfully lecherous men I know are CMs, but when they're working, they're working. It's a different mode, and sex doesn't come into it at all - and so sexuality doesn't. (I'm not making claims about what happens in the privacy of people's heads - or even my head - just that the actual communication between a CM and his or her players is outside of all sexual considerations.)
And this is important, because we have a very specific relationship to our players. The somewhat tortured analogy I made in my head last night was that we are, in many ways, like priests. The players come to us, share their troubles, their concerns, and - you'd be surprised how often - their sins, and we intercede with the dev team on their behalf. It's a very particular sort of intimacy, and it's really very impersonal in many ways - they don't need to know anything about what kind of single malt I drink or whether I favor UT or Texas Tech, but they do need to believe in my relationship with my dev team and my willingness to act on their behalf. The minute a players starts to believe that a CM is interested in them for some out-of-game reason, that relationship breaks down. And when it does, word gets out - this is the internet, after all - and that relationship breaks down on a much larger scale.
So, am I out to my players? Well, they have Google, and I'm sure they can find this post or other evidence. But the real answer is, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't come up.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Meritocracy on the Internet
Listening to an interview with Rachel Maddow, her comments about the value of blogs got me thinking. Maddow says,
"There is a bit of a meritocracy in terms of rising to the fore with opinion... in the blog world, you're going to get more attention, you're going to get more clicks, you're going to rise to prominence if what you are writing is provocative, interesting, or accurate, occasionally."
Now her job, and the job of any pundit, is to take information from various sources, synthesize it, analyze it, and present it in a digestible fashion to a specific audience. Sounds substantially similar to what community managers do when looking at player feedback, no? The difference is that pundits are looking to be interesting and provocative in order to retain their audience. CMs are looking to present accurate information on which to base critical decisions. So are "provocative, interesting, and accurate, occasionally" the criteria by which we want to sort player feedback? Is that really "merit" for our purposes?
Probably not. It is helpful to be able to see what the playerbase finds interesting or provocative - keeping tabs on that is a very important part of the job. You can earn a lot of goodwill by leveraging highly visible issues that cost little to address, and filtering the information you have by those criteria is a good way to get that pool of issues. But getting base issues - the sort of issues that make people quit, rather than rant in amusing fashion on the internet - really requires an approach that *doesn't* take into account whether or not they've been, shall we say, "politicized."
There's another point here to be made about how actual politics get done, but I'll save that one for later.
"There is a bit of a meritocracy in terms of rising to the fore with opinion... in the blog world, you're going to get more attention, you're going to get more clicks, you're going to rise to prominence if what you are writing is provocative, interesting, or accurate, occasionally."
Now her job, and the job of any pundit, is to take information from various sources, synthesize it, analyze it, and present it in a digestible fashion to a specific audience. Sounds substantially similar to what community managers do when looking at player feedback, no? The difference is that pundits are looking to be interesting and provocative in order to retain their audience. CMs are looking to present accurate information on which to base critical decisions. So are "provocative, interesting, and accurate, occasionally" the criteria by which we want to sort player feedback? Is that really "merit" for our purposes?
Probably not. It is helpful to be able to see what the playerbase finds interesting or provocative - keeping tabs on that is a very important part of the job. You can earn a lot of goodwill by leveraging highly visible issues that cost little to address, and filtering the information you have by those criteria is a good way to get that pool of issues. But getting base issues - the sort of issues that make people quit, rather than rant in amusing fashion on the internet - really requires an approach that *doesn't* take into account whether or not they've been, shall we say, "politicized."
There's another point here to be made about how actual politics get done, but I'll save that one for later.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Why Forums Don't Scale
It's a math problem.
The number of potential interactions between users goes up exponentially with the number of users. The interactions are what need moderation, of course. Therefore, the number of moderators needed to keep a constant level of oversight goes up exponentially too.
The income per user, of course, does NOT go up exponentially. (Although that would be a neat business model, if someone made it work.) There is definitely a level at which you can make forums work with a single mod per shift - or even one real mod and a bare minimum of oversight. A bit higher, you can do with 2-3 people during the bulk of your posting hours. That's still a pretty reasonable budget for a (pre-WoW) successful MMO. Beyond that level, though, it is either too expensive to do at all, or it just gets done badly - and badly moderated official forums are, in my experience, worse than none at all.
It's not that I don't think official forums are valuable, although, having tried both sides, there is a definite advantage for the community manager to being completely divorced from the moderation side of things (and, by extension, for the company - the players can't complain that we're censoring them when WE aren't even involved.) It's that I think that for games past a certain size, the expense of having official forums is not offset by the value. I can get many more valuable things done when I'm not moderating, and if someone offered to pay for a staff of moderators, I could honestly find other work for them that I think would benefit the game and the community much more.
The number of potential interactions between users goes up exponentially with the number of users. The interactions are what need moderation, of course. Therefore, the number of moderators needed to keep a constant level of oversight goes up exponentially too.
The income per user, of course, does NOT go up exponentially. (Although that would be a neat business model, if someone made it work.) There is definitely a level at which you can make forums work with a single mod per shift - or even one real mod and a bare minimum of oversight. A bit higher, you can do with 2-3 people during the bulk of your posting hours. That's still a pretty reasonable budget for a (pre-WoW) successful MMO. Beyond that level, though, it is either too expensive to do at all, or it just gets done badly - and badly moderated official forums are, in my experience, worse than none at all.
It's not that I don't think official forums are valuable, although, having tried both sides, there is a definite advantage for the community manager to being completely divorced from the moderation side of things (and, by extension, for the company - the players can't complain that we're censoring them when WE aren't even involved.) It's that I think that for games past a certain size, the expense of having official forums is not offset by the value. I can get many more valuable things done when I'm not moderating, and if someone offered to pay for a staff of moderators, I could honestly find other work for them that I think would benefit the game and the community much more.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Eating Bees
If you're interested in the sort of stuff we talk about but want to see it done better, check out http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org - Sanya Weathers, formerly known as the infamous Tweety, covers community management in her inimitable style.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Why I'm blogging
Since Tisirin introduced the blog, and Greypawn introduced himself, it's my turn to hog the spotlight. I'm not going to talk about myself - much - but I do want to talk about why I'm doing this, here, in public.
In many of the links we've posted in the last two weeks, there has been a common thread - they just don't get it. "They" meaning developers, producers, publishers - whoever appears to be stifling the glorious efforts of the wise and brilliant community team. My compatriots have gone so far as to suggest, darkly, that "they" will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I don't necessarily disagree with them, but I'm also not waiting for the revolution.
Designers have blogs, producers have blogs, programmers have blogs - they talk about the issues relevant to their positions, and in doing so, help make those issues more widely understood. They also become part of the larger community of publicly visible game professionals. Why should community be different?
What we do is not a secret - even less so than some other aspects of the industry. An hour alone with Google, and I can find out how all of my competitors handle their boards, their patch notes, their contests... it's all public. How we talk to our players is very seldom secret - I can search anyone's boards for the CM's post history in minutes. Why we do things the way we do... well, I think the industry as a whole would benefit from more discussion about this, rather than less. That's why I'm here.
I'm emphatically not here to talk trash, to air dirty laundry, or even to make a name for myself. I have a job in the industry - I'd like to keep it. And I don't really have the personality to be a "personality" - but I spend a lot of time thinking about why I do what I do, and I like to talk it out. It's a young profession, and we can't grow it if we're reinventing the wheel with every game, with every company, with every segment of the market. Let's talk about how to do it right - then we can really compete.
In many of the links we've posted in the last two weeks, there has been a common thread - they just don't get it. "They" meaning developers, producers, publishers - whoever appears to be stifling the glorious efforts of the wise and brilliant community team. My compatriots have gone so far as to suggest, darkly, that "they" will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I don't necessarily disagree with them, but I'm also not waiting for the revolution.
Designers have blogs, producers have blogs, programmers have blogs - they talk about the issues relevant to their positions, and in doing so, help make those issues more widely understood. They also become part of the larger community of publicly visible game professionals. Why should community be different?
What we do is not a secret - even less so than some other aspects of the industry. An hour alone with Google, and I can find out how all of my competitors handle their boards, their patch notes, their contests... it's all public. How we talk to our players is very seldom secret - I can search anyone's boards for the CM's post history in minutes. Why we do things the way we do... well, I think the industry as a whole would benefit from more discussion about this, rather than less. That's why I'm here.
I'm emphatically not here to talk trash, to air dirty laundry, or even to make a name for myself. I have a job in the industry - I'd like to keep it. And I don't really have the personality to be a "personality" - but I spend a lot of time thinking about why I do what I do, and I like to talk it out. It's a young profession, and we can't grow it if we're reinventing the wheel with every game, with every company, with every segment of the market. Let's talk about how to do it right - then we can really compete.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
We Get Pwned
Timothy Burke writes the post we should have written
This is an excellent description of what I do every day when reading the forums - I'm embarrassed that I haven't been able to articulate it this clearly.
This is an excellent description of what I do every day when reading the forums - I'm embarrassed that I haven't been able to articulate it this clearly.
Friday, October 6, 2006
Other Folks Talking about Community
There's been quite a bit of this lately. Actual commentary to follow, no doubt:
Ron Meiners on Community Managers, on Terra Nova
Raph Koster follows up
Scott Jennings talks about forums
Raph Koster, on the same subject
Ron Meiners on Community Managers, on Terra Nova
Raph Koster follows up
Scott Jennings talks about forums
Raph Koster, on the same subject
Friday, September 15, 2006
"The Vocal Minority"
This phrase is heard pretty often when talking about community management, particularly when discussing forums. It's not untrue - statistically, active posters on forums are generally a small subset of the playerbase. They also tend to represent the powergamers and the social butterflies - not necessarily your average player. So calling them a "vocal minority" is fairly accurate.
It's also toxic as hell.
The phrase is generally used by producers and execs who don't want to take seriously the feedback the CM is presenting. It's condescending, dismissive, and ultimately potentially disastrous. It's one thing to look realistically at forum feedback as compared to login polls, in-game metrics, and other forms of feedback, but it's quite another when forums are the only form of feedback you have - which is, sadly, often the case.
As m'lord Calandryll put it at a recent AGC panel, your "vocal minority" is your canary in the coal mine - if you ignore it when something goes wrong, instead of that one bird dropping dead, it will be everyone.
It's also toxic as hell.
The phrase is generally used by producers and execs who don't want to take seriously the feedback the CM is presenting. It's condescending, dismissive, and ultimately potentially disastrous. It's one thing to look realistically at forum feedback as compared to login polls, in-game metrics, and other forms of feedback, but it's quite another when forums are the only form of feedback you have - which is, sadly, often the case.
As m'lord Calandryll put it at a recent AGC panel, your "vocal minority" is your canary in the coal mine - if you ignore it when something goes wrong, instead of that one bird dropping dead, it will be everyone.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
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