Reducing Pesky Fan Noise?

Thanks to FiringSquad for their editorial about how gamers and developers interact in public forums, inspired by Alex 'Marweas' Rodberg's public outburst in the HomeWorld 2 forums, which in turn inspired a Penny Arcade strip about the trials and tribulations of being a 'community manager'. The FiringSquad article suggests that "...there's an increasing divide between the people who make the games and the people who play them. And guess whose fault it is? It's yours, not theirs", and goes on to venture that "Online interaction is so impersonal, so fraught with assurances of anonymity, and so littered with the maladjusted and juvenile, that there are no social repercussions for acting like a jackass." What's to be done?

Comments

Community managers

[FooAtWFU]

I am very glad that I do not have to manage a community... and I'm amazed, overall, at the kind of patience that many community leaders are able to show in the face of idiocy, trolling, and flaming.

Perhaps more communitites could implement a Slashdot-like system with karma, moderation points, et cetera. On the other hand, it might be hard to structure moderdation around miniature communities such as these. Still, for the midsize to large community, it might provide at least a partial solution.

Now, to find a good bulletin board service with Slashdotty moderation... =S
Hmm. Is the software running thse forums is available as open source? that would be great =D

Re:IRC

[FooAtWFU]

I hang out on #angband (WorldIRC network). While I can't say that there are 400+ users the channel has a simple solution. Nearly everyone is an operator.
Of those 41 users who are on as I write this, 33 are ops. There are also about 5 bots and 2 services. There are a large number of regulars- impossible to count exactly, of course, but over 100 who are at least quasi-regular.

If some random jerk comes in and immediately starts advertising (and I quote from earlier today: "just go here.. really fun free game! join up!! http:// its like fantasy sports! except an RPG!") or something else truly idiotic and annoying, they get kicked. Boof.

People pulling mass de-ops are not an issue, since channel services can let many people back on to kick+ban the idiot who did it.

True, we still have occasional issues, policy conflicts and an ongoing conflict with a certain person who shall not be named (yes, person occasionally suffixing name with Dharma, you!)... but that is to be expected in any community this size, and people mostly deal with him farily well. Morons are (mostly) disposed of swiftly.

I don't know that I could stand being on a channel with 400+ people anyway, even if they are all completely legitimate people. If even a fraction of these people were actively chatting, it would be as loud as all get-out...

Re:Social Repercussions

[MMaestro]

Your idea could use a few refinements, though. One most importantly is the creation of a database with all the players. Here on Slashdot, all you need is an e-mail address and you don't even need one from your ISP (I'm actually using a free one from Yahoo).

One of the best possible methods would be to have all the players be logged by their CD key. Without actually buying a copy, its very hard to get one without; stealing one or hacking in the company's computers and extract a CD which about 90% of all jackasses can't do. This way players can be secretly logged and tracked by their CD key: different aliases and accounts won't matter unless the person decides to buy multiple copies for multiple computers.

If a player's CD key "karma" gets wayyy too low, (say -500 with +500 being the starting point) then he could be subject to monitoring from the system to see if his actions "go too far". (Say he camps the newbie area PKing, with a bot no less, for 6 hours.) In which case the player could have his equipment lost, player stats erased or, admittedly an extreme, have the player's CD key completely and permenantly banned.

In a way, Blizzard's Warcraft 3 does the same method. If you cheat on Battle.net, map hack, then your CD key could get banned and the only way to fix that would be to buy another copy of the game. (CD key generators won't work online, in case any of you wondered about that)

It should be mostly lip service anyway

[Mike Hawk]

Sure there is a rep on the boards. But just for appearances one would hope.

In my entire history of gaming and the internet, I've never seen a random forum suggestion get put into a retail game AND the result being something better that it already was.

Very simply, if you put a PR guy in charge of your forums, make him a community yes man. "Uh-huh, we are also concerned about that". "Thats a good idea." "We are definitely exploring that."

If the fan(boy)base was that adept at creating something, they would be industry and not the fanbase.

You get what you deserve

[Korpo]

There are enough games and developers that deserve being flamed.

E.g. Strategy First (publisher) and Paradox (designer) for Hearts Of Iron. Being a WW2 simulation/strategy game, it offers a lot of advantages over other games of the same kind, but those advantages could not recompense one for the fact that after several patches the game basic principles were neither balanced nor did work well. There were tons of bugs, the AI was inept to the extreme, and even CTDs were rather common in the first revisions. There was the 1st patch available between gold and release.

How do I come to buy such a game? After Europa Universalis I+II Paradox had quite a reputation in strategy gaming. Game testers hyped the feature-loaded game. Beta test was conducted by community members.

So what went wrong? Strategy First as publisher pushed a release that was too early. Paradox released a game to their publisher of which they must have known it was buggy to the hilt. The game testers hyped a game which flaws they must have percepted when testing it. And the community failed to point out most bugs and flaws when beta testing.

Now if publisher, developers, reviewers, critics testers and community fail you, wouldn't you vent your frustration on the forums? I did. At least it recompensed me somewhat for spending money on that game, which I received not the promised value for (though I keep monitoring patch levels).

The gaming industry is in a sorry state, and doesn't even know how to spell quality. It deserves being flamed, especially big firms like Sierra, who surely could do a better job than they do.

Re:Dealing with noise

[Wayfarer]

The solution? Discussion with gamers is going to be at its most helpful for the company during the early parts of game development, when ideas and features can be requested and demand can be built up in advance of a marketing campaign. As the project approaches beta testing, employees should cease discussion with the outside world and instead talk only with the beta testers, and interaction with gamers should be done with fancy advertisements in magazines and giveaways until the product hits the shelves.

For what it's worth, Quicksilver, developer of Master of Orion III, ended up following that same pattern, with various staff members contributing (often cryptic) information about "The Elephant"--the design document for MOO3. The initial transparency and calls for fan participation drew many people (myself included) to their official message board. This formed the foundation for a community that was sometimes compared to that enjoyed by Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. Yet as development wore on, the flow of information dried up. Rumors started flying about cuts that might be happening in the feature list. Taken in conjunction with the removal of several highly visible staff members, what happened next was no surprise.

Deprived of the information flow that kept everyone on the same page, the community fragmented. "Fanboys" versus "trolls". "N00bs" versus veteran forum members. Certainly, this is par for the course in many forums; however, the sudden loss of a certain camaraderie struck me as significant. The problem was compounded as people turned back to past posts by various staff members, trying to divine the current condition of the project by piecing these posts together into a coherent account.

The end result was a lot of bad feelings all around. Although discussion was quite civilized when there was plenty of information to worwith, a paucity of information led to abandonment issues.

In a post-mortem interview with GameSpy, Rantz Hosely--art director for MOO3 and frequent presence on the boards--acknowledged that the information flow could have been better managed, specifically in terms of making sure that fans knew they weren't simply being ignored.

Personally, I doubt anyone will be (intentionally) trying the MOO3 experiment again any time soon. Why have the actual developer manage the information flow when you can have a marketer spit out full-color glossies on demand?