Director's Cut: The Community Manager Discussion from My Interview with Scott

[Nonentity]

HI SIGNE OMG 

The only firsthand experience I have with CRMs was that I used to go have cigarettes with one of the WoW CMs (Eyonix). There was this guy who was a senior GM, who always seemed kind of stressed out, but he went on to do a Community Manager. I always liked the guy.

It was Tseric, heh.

[HaemishM]

This is where my standard obsessive point about the need for live management teams to see themselves as involved in governance of their worlds (or governace + godhood) comes in. "Community management" is a failed term from the outset because it doesn't capture how players look at development teams, how they form groups and constituencies, and it implies that all you're doing is managing (e.g., placating or schmoozing) your players. There's a whole raft of misfires embedded in the entire idea and it leads even the competent community managers into trouble now and again, when they fundamentally misunderstand what they're hearing or seeing. Once a game goes live, developers are sovereigns. You can be an autocratic sovereign, or even a cruel one, and probably still flourish in some ways. But live management has got to understand: they have responsibility for these worlds, and the players are citizens or a body politic of some kind. When you make "community management" into nothing more than a few people who reply noncommitally to forum complaints, even if your forum respondents are good at their jobs, you're still going to negatively affect your potential retention. Because players can't really relate to or engage with the future of the gameworld in that fashion. They sense a vacuum, an absence: they don't know what the stewards of the world intend, or what their core design principles really are.

So the community managers are in essence priests?

EDIT: That would certainly explain the boyfucking then.

[Draegan]

Any interviewer that asks a question with the words "frothy dipshit" is ok in my book.

[tazelbain]

Whether or no the should, most Community Managers are firefighters trying to keep the forest fire from burning the town down.  This adversarial relationship is doomed to fail because the fire pays taxes the town needs.  These strategies of not "don't add fuel to the fire" and creating firewall in an attempt to create a well-behaved fire laughable and counter productive.

I say let the community burn and put all your resources into Community Analysis.  The industry is rife with examples were massive resources are wasted on something the Community had no interest in or simple fixes that would have gone a long way to keep the Community growing are ignored until it is too late.  These are all failure of community analysis or ignoring community analysis.

[Rishathra]

Any interviewer that asks a question with the words "frothy dipshit" is ok in my book.

Any interviewer that gets the interviewee to say "frothy dipshit" not once but twice, is an excellent interviewer in my book.

[Modern Angel]

I like the last bit of the cut part. It was brought up a little while ago in a different thread about the various MMO communities getting worse and worse. Some folks said that it's always been that way but I disagree. They've always been completely shit but, as Lum implied, the past two years or so have seen them get even worse. They're stream of consciousness now. I literally cannot recall the last time I read an official thread started by a player, even one where the topic is perfectly rational and worth discussing, which hasn't turned into a weird exchange of insults for the sake of insults within a page. They're useless, completely useless whereas once upon a time they tended to be 2/3 useless.

Community Managers are... they're crazy. They have to be. There is no fucking way I could stare into the mouth of hell like that all day, everyday. Modern MMO boards are like Finnegan's Wake constantly being written and rewritten in real time by people with massive, seeping head wounds. It's just a sad state of affairs because there are always things in this game that NEED to be expanded upon and changed but there's no way to get decent feedback. Even with zero tolerance banning sprees, you can't keep up anymore.

[schild]

If you set the tone of the boards early enough with clearly defined rules, yea, you can in fact keep them manageable. Most people aren't willing to do that early on though, probably for fear of bad press. Maybe because someone told them not to, or sometimes they're under the thumb of marketing. Who knows why, point is, it's possible.

For most CRMs though, no, it's probably not worth the hassle.

[Modern Angel]

It's theoretically possible, yes, but with how big these games are now it's just not feasible. Posting on the boards has become a hobby within the hobby. When it was a game with 100k subs and 5k posters, sure, but now you're talking 500k+ with 50k posters as a conservative estimate. And even if half of that 50k wants to be constructive the other 50k wants to slam the shit out of anyone and everything with no rhyme or reason. It's just so vast.

I guess more than the sheer volume of noise it's just the style of it. It honest to god has no context or sense. The posts are just words.

[NowhereMan]

There's certainly a line to be trodden, start banning people for every thread that's critical of your game and there's no point to having an official community. I definitely think that CRMs at most official boards should be a bit more ban happy though, if all someone really contributes to a thread is calling everyone who has a grievance a crybaby or everyone else jacktards for not agreeing that their class is totally nerfed, I think they should get hit with the banstick. Do it often enough and ideally make it public which post(s) led to a banning and you can get a community under control. Like Schild said doing it early makes things easier, if the CRM has the leeway and the balls (as well as basic judgement capacity) to do it. Of course there's also the physical capacity for reading and moderating the sheer number of posts, getting a stable of decent volunteer mods helps a lot but that's extending the judgement capacities of the CRM to not only people's posts but to judging other people's character and capacity for good judgement. It's still possible and starting early when things are still small is the way to go but on something like the WoW forums... I don't think there's any real hope for getting constructive feedback out of that. I prefer reading our politics forum

Also sticking in a board that's free-fire for stupidity can help just because there's somewhere for people to vent and be able to post without thinking that it seems is required for people on the internet.

[schild]

Yea, you can't be a pussy about banning people. Important rule pretty much every CRM ignores. They may THINK they're banning enough people, yea, they're wrong. I don't care if you have 1 post or 10,000. You deserve a ban, you get one.

[Venkman]

This is the part I've often wondered about:

Why can't companies take a heavier hand at banning players from the forum without also banning them from the game? Seriously, especially with something like WoW, you could just flag that person's entire account from forum posting even if you let them continue playing. Way I figure it, if they get to the number of retarded posts needed to prompt a ban consideration, they're going to keep their account active and paying anyway even if they can't post.

I'd think this route is better than not having official boards at all and therefore letting any target message you want to get out there be drowned out by whatever noise exists in the fansite boards.

[Modern Angel]

They CAN just ban forum accounts, though. Honestly, I really like Mythic's beta handling of the situation where they seemed pretty merciless about banning people posting retarded things. These people who post aren't dumb. They know what they're doing. So they hit post knowing full well they're being assholes.

[naum]

Problem is, where the line between foul and obnoxious behavior and posts that just bear unfavorably upon the product. When bans start flying, they usually encompass as much of the latter, if not more, than the former… …then the "official" forums resemble an edition of Pravda…

[WindupAtheist]

Problem is, where the line between foul and obnoxious behavior and posts that just bear unfavorably upon the product.

QQ MOAR FAGGOT LOL EPIC POST

There's a lot of ground that could be covered before you even came within sight of the line.

[Daeven]

Like, ohmygod, I, like, totally once knew a guy who had totally worked on Web 2.0 stuff! 

You spelled "Web 2.0!" wrong.

Unfortunately, I did as well. There's no flash, or way to leave out vowels. Or 'Swoosh' logo there. So that's just about as non web2.0 as you can get.

Anyway. What was the question?

[schild]

I would like to replace the phrase "Web 2.0" with the word "webr."

[MahrinSkel]

I would like to replace it with GeoCities.

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing.  Just about everything else being called Web 2.0 strikes me as a repeat of Web 1.0 around 1996, this time with effectively unlimited bandwidth.

--Dave

[schild]

I would like to replace it with GeoCities.

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing.  Just about everything else being called Web 2.0 strikes me as a repeat of Web 1.0 around 1996, this time with effectively unlimited bandwidth.

--Dave

Don't forget rounded corners.

[Venkman]

Problem is, where the line between foul and obnoxious behavior and posts that just bear unfavorably upon the product. When bans start flying, they usually encompass as much of the latter, if not more, than the former… …then the "official" forums resemble an edition of Pravda…

A good point. But that's where you'd say only people with registered accounts can read and post. I really don't get why companies would continue to allow their forums to be public. The very VERY worst marketing tool any company has is their non-accountable player base. Shut that noise down asap.

Just some quick thoughts:

• No public reading of boards. Players want knowledge about what's wrong, go find a rant site. Otherwise, pay your $60 and take a chance like a good little wallet.
• Use player ratings system to build a "case" against someone who should be banned. Quite possible someone who's both a jerk and has really insightful posts will not be voted down as much as someone who's just a jerk.
• Ban players from the boards but not the game. Using a 3-strikes rule. First is a 2-week ban, second is a 4-week, third is a perma, but by then you don't care if that person stops paying for your game anyway as they're probably a CSR nuisance too.

[Modern Angel]

Web 2.0 is a term people over 50 cooked up to sucker people under 20 into thinking they and their "new frontier" of internets were relevant. It's a punchable term.

[UnSub]

Problem is, where the line between foul and obnoxious behavior and posts that just bear unfavorably upon the product. When bans start flying, they usually encompass as much of the latter, if not more, than the former… …then the "official" forums resemble an edition of Pravda…

A good point. But that's where you'd say only people with registered accounts can read and post. I really don't get why companies would continue to allow their forums to be public. The very VERY worst marketing tool any company has is their non-accountable player base. Shut that noise down asap.

Just some quick thoughts:

• No public reading of boards. Players want knowledge about what's wrong, go find a rant site. Otherwise, pay your $60 and take a chance like a good little wallet.
• Use player ratings system to build a "case" against someone who should be banned. Quite possible someone who's both a jerk and has really insightful posts will not be voted down as much as someone who's just a jerk.
• Ban players from the boards but not the game. Using a 3-strikes rule. First is a 2-week ban, second is a 4-week, third is a perma, but by then you don't care if that person stops paying for your game anyway as they're probably a CSR nuisance too.

I disagree on some of the above.

 - Let the public read the boards and be able to exert some level of control over what is said. On a separate rant site you don't have that control. Also, if you talk to the rant site once, you give the veneer of respectability, which turns around and bites you in the ass when they start saying how much your game sucks now.

 - You can try to rate players / rate posts, but groups of players learn how to game the system. In reality, it comes down to a mod going "That's not right" and warning the player / banning the player.

 - Also, a jerk with good opinions is still a jerk who deserves bannation. I can think of a few cases of well-known player members of some MMOs getting the idea that all the people agreeing with them gave them some sort of power so they then started to cross the line. Ban them if they do that, regardless of how good some of their thoughts were. Perhaps they can be given a touch of extra leeway, but in the end they are probably replaceable.

 - Agree on the third point. They might be a pain in the ass on the boards, but it should be a separate thing unless they, the player, wants to try to combine the two. Your forum community is not your game community.

I would say:

 - Make bannings public to a degree, or at least some indication of what they were banned for. Yeah, that gives the asshat a public spotlight, but it stops them becoming a martyr when they just 'disappear'. When you can actually point to the person acting like a jerk as the reason, it makes it easy to justify why they were banned.

[NiX]

the best way to show you can manage a community is to manage one.

Not such an easy thing to start doing though or is that the point? I'd think if you could start a new community and make it flourish, your talents are better off elsewhere anyway.

[Venkman]

Manage a community, not inspire the creation of a new one. There are many community managers that evolve from the management of existing communities.

[Ratman_tf]

Maybe it's not for me but I gave up on communities a long time ago. Back in the UO and EQ days, people had interesting things to say about these games. Now it's all *Rehashes of ancient arguments. *Ascii pron and links to Rick Astley. *Theorycraft that makes my eyes glaze over in boredom. *Retarded smack talk.

[Tmon]

I still think the best way to handle official boards is not to have them.  Why let people trash your game on your dime?  Have your community people monitor the fan site boards and make sure that you have a version of the Herald so you can publish useful information in a way that doesn't get submerged in the sturm and drang of the boards.

[Kirth]

I still think the best way to handle official boards is not to have them.  Why let people trash your game on your dime?  Have your community people monitor the fan site boards and make sure that you have a version of the Herald so you can publish useful information in a way that doesn't get submerged in the sturm and drang of the boards.

This, I'm a strong advocate of it. Official forums do not work, splitting the community over a number of "fan sites" that your CM's or whatever can monitor and post in occasionally is definitely a better way to go. I've said it before, boards like EJ, WHA, work because the people who run it don't want to alienate the employees of whatever game they represent and are still able to swing the ban hammer hard. While something like eq2flames is a good lesson on keeping the fan site owners at arms length (re: the hartsmen thing ) .

[WindupAtheist]

A decent moderation team handing out one-week bans left and right for the more obvious "LOL QQ FAGIT" nonsense could improve the tone of the WoW boards immensely.  Blizzard just doesn't give a shit.

[NiX]

Manage a community, not inspire the creation of a new one. There are many community managers that evolve from the management of existing communities.

Fair enough.

Schild, I am to manage this place!

[Vetarnias]

I still think the best way to handle official boards is not to have them.  Why let people trash your game on your dime?  Have your community people monitor the fan site boards and make sure that you have a version of the Herald so you can publish useful information in a way that doesn't get submerged in the sturm and drang of the boards.

On the other hand, not having official forums just allows some other board to fill the void, and it being beyond your control, you have to live with whatever moderation it decides to apply.  Furthermore, I'm wondering whether the decision of a MMO company not to maintain regular forums might give the impression that it is callous towards its customers and does not care to hear about player feedback.

It is true that, for the most part, forums are just as a previous poster wrote, namely "*Rehashes of ancient arguments. *Ascii pron and links to Rick Astley. *Theorycraft that makes my eyes glaze over in boredom. *Retarded smack talk".  And let us not forget those Bombay TV clips; I remember on the Pirates of the Burning Sea forums, there was an entire thread just dedicated to answering the previous post with such a clip.  No need of further argument. A few were funny; the others just made me roll my eyes.

I guess in the end it all has to do with how the forums are moderated.  Funcom, for instance, shot itself in the foot with its heavy-handed yet erratic forum moderation, locking perfectly reasonable threads discussing valid points while leaving flamefests wide open, then going as far as making verboten any discussion of forum moderation itself. 

I used to believe that forums would help create a community around a game.  But how much of a community can we expect when the same gamers come with pre-formed guilds, and leave whenever a new MMO comes along?  Unfortunately, they are for the most part the type of player whom I am expecting to see post on the forums; casuals usually don't bother, except to post a very specific question.  So it is a bit naive to expect to create a community out of generally very fickle players who will start stabbing you in the back soon enough.  I can't forget one of the members of a "hardcore" cross-game guild going around on the PotBS forums claiming the game was "dying" while spreading the gospel for Warhammer.  Well, I fear PotBS is dying, that's not my point, but only a few weeks before, his guild was proudly defending PotBS against the evils of "carebearization", and suddenly, just as it seemed the developers had changed course to steer away from "no crying in the red circle", poof, the game is dying.  It just had whiffs of that favourite hardcore excuse, "UO died after Trammel".  Not to mention that while said "hardcore" players might not care whether they develop their e-peen with broadswords, lasers or cannonballs, not everyone playing a game set in the Age of Sail is going to be interested in yet another fantasy MMO with dwarves.

In a way, official forums can capture the zeitgeist of a game (take a look at the PotBS forums and tell me about it), but the danger, for developers (if they read their forums at all) and players alike, is to believe that a vocal small minority speaks for the silent majority.  In most cases, the whiners are entirely self-interested, but if you want an example from the other end of the spectrum, look up the forums (please don't laugh) over at Puzzle Pirates: The majority of players posting there are not what you might call ordinary players.  They are the elite players and the political heavyweights of each ocean -- everyone knows them. They are regulars who will enter every contest and win them. Will their concerns reflect those of the majority?  I doubt it -- in fact, they have grown into a nice little cheerleading band that approves of everything the developers do, while remaining very conservative otherwise -- and I doubt that ordinary players read the forums at all. In fact, any dissent is immediately dismissed, ignored, or drowned in a flurry of spam posts.  (Apparently, this was also the case for the beta-period PotBS forums.)

So it would seem forums are condemned to move to one of two extremes: Whiners who can never be satisfied drowning out everyone else, or sycophantic elites who rose to the top under the current system and whose concerns give you no clue whatsoever as to what might be wrong with your game.  But I will defend the use of official forums, for in the end, I suspect we are using them to get a glimpse of company mentality.  PotBS, for instance, got some very high marks early on because of developer interaction with the community (Flying Lab Software's CEO regularly posted on the forums, and not just in those announcements locked to replies); it's one of those things, even though that interaction has dwindled to practically nothing in recent months, which got me to care about the fate of PotBS despite my not playing it anymore.  In comparison, I wouldn't care if Funcom sank to the bottom of the Atlantic with Age of Conan, precisely because of their treatment of their player base.

So when it comes to the question of having official forums, I would use an old cliché: The worse thing than having them is not having them.

[Bzalthek]

The "fan sites beyond their control" argument would imply they have any control over the forums they already do run.  I have seen little in the way of such evidence.

[Moorgard]

Official forums do not work, splitting the community over a number of "fan sites" that your CM's or whatever can monitor and post in occasionally is definitely a better way to go.

I disagree completely.

Official forums, for all the babysitting they require, are still the best place for controlled interaction with the players. The CRM needs a place where the tone can be managed, and no matter how close the relationship is with a fansite, it's still kind of like visiting foreign soil.

That said, I think official forums need to be minimal enough to still encourage the growth of external communities. There's a lot of value to be had in a close relationship with approved fansites, but core messaging should still come from official forums.

And yes, you need to ban troublemakers. I tried to evaluate someone's post history before I took that step, and I weighed previous contributions against the drama they caused. In a few cases it was a tough call, but most of the time it was easy. Idiots aren't hard to spot.

[schild]

I've found that these days, if my first thought is to ban somebody, I'm probably right. it would take one HELL of a contribution for me to even consider not banning them.

But yes, official forums > all. Unofficial forums are entirely unmanageable. Unless you have a better CRM there then you do at the official ones.

The whole camelot herald thing is just stupid to me. Ok, no official forums. But there's these unofficial ones that are de facto official forums. That's just silly.

[taolurker]

Official forums, for all the babysitting they require, are still the best place for controlled interaction with the players. The CRM needs a place where the tone can be managed, and no matter how close the relationship is with a fansite, it's still kind of like visiting foreign soil.

I also agree it's better to have official forums because then the devs can really be connected with their players, as well as get more direct feedback. The only difference with an official forum and one that is foreign from "the company" is the MMO operator's ability to moderate. The company has less contact with the posters on an outside forum, will still need forum people to visit the external sites, plus when posting end up being visitor celebs, instead of a piece of "the community" with their player base.

That said, I think official forums need to be minimal enough to still encourage the growth of external communities. There's a lot of value to be had in a close relationship with approved fansites, but core messaging should still come from official forums.

I've actually thought MMO companies should allow external communities to grow within an "official forum"... and MMOs should grant guilds their own forum and management system right on the MMO's website, directly connected to an official forum.

And yes, you need to ban troublemakers. I tried to evaluate someone's post history before I took that step, and I weighed previous contributions against the drama they caused. In a few cases it was a tough call, but most of the time it was easy. Idiots aren't hard to spot.

This goes without saying, and bans should always be handled with kid gloves, but most of the time they are necessary to enforce rules. It also is something that should be visible to the rest of the forum, and not hidden in the background, so that other posters know there is consequences to their actions.

I also think that forum bans and gaming bans should be linked, unlike others here (maybe a single forum ban before it affected the game account though). Also, official forums should only allow subscribed people to post, and the access to the forums should be restricted for non-account holders.

[schild]

I've actually thought MMO companies should allow external communities to grow within an "official forum"... and MMOs should grant guilds their own forum and management system right on the MMO's website, directly connected to an official forum.

This is something I'm surprised hasn't happened yet. I suppose though, it's only a matter of time.

[UnSub]

The "fan sites beyond their control" argument would imply they have any control over the forums they already do run.  I have seen little in the way of such evidence.

I do... but then I tend to hang around the CoH/V or Cryptic forum pages. While there are moments of friction, generally those communities are pretty well managed. In both cases the devs believe that commenting on things directly to players is the best way to go. Yeah, sometimes the devs get angry at what they read and comment on it... then the forum mods / CMs delete it as inappropriate.

The problem with having only fansite forums to read is instead of having one place of angry commentary you are meant to sift through, you've got 9, all of which may be saying the same thing. Also, you could make a strong argument that games like TR aren't very well served by not having one official forums as a contact point for all players.

Regardless, it is up to the CMs to set the standard they wish to see the forums adhere to. Looking at Cryptic, you've got ChampO that tries to be friendly and locks threads using a gimmick moderator (Foxbat) and STO where Razor is incredibly appropriately named in how he chooses to deal with controversial threads. Overall I have to say more conservative is better than not conservative enough.