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

How to resolve pesky fan noise...

[XBL]

Buy some stuff from Quiet PC. Maybe some lower RPM ball-bearing fans and shit.

Re:How to resolve pesky fan noise...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have found that the best tool for quieting a PC is a sledge hammer. It also solved my spam problem.

Re:How to resolve pesky fan noise...

[moonbender]

Same thought here, I wondered why this was posted in the games section at first. Guess that producer feels about his customers just like I do about my CPU and case fans - you don't like them, but you need them; you want them to stop annoying you, but without them you're screwed. :)

Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first read this, and the Penny Arcade strip, I honestly thought of all the user complaints /. editors have. (ie moaning about trolls, complaining about poor mods, etc) I am shocked at the arrogance many developers/site owners/moderators have toward their users! (I'm not trying to single out /. here, they are just a good example) In many cases, the users are the ones who made the editors who they are. Look at /., aintitcool, or even fark. Without the users, these sites would have little value. If all your value is derived from user submitted content, maybe users should be respected/rewarded/thanked occasionally, instead of the moaning.

-Sean

Poppycock

[Syncdata]

there are no social repercussions for acting like a jackass
There certainly are. You are labeled and branded as a jackass.
I remember in the days when I'd hit up rec.games.wotc.magic and read the posts. WOTC went through reps like water, due to beligerent people making the reps job a pain.
But the thing of it is, it's the reps fault for not being able to suck it up and do his job. Members of the public can often be belligerent, whether anonymous or otherwise.
If you work for a company tailoring to the public, (as all companies do) deal with it. Affixing blame to the public for this cat's inability to represent his company is ludicrous, particularly given that he himself was demonstrating a certain degree of belligerence himself, let alone making himself look like a jack-ass.
I'm sure the nature of gravity makes a pilots job more difficult, but I doubt pilots get all huffy, and write angry letters to sci.Newton.gravity.

Re:Poppycock

[tc]

You're both right and wrong. Firstly, some disclosure: I am a game developer, and I post on public forums about my game.

You're right in that we can't blame 14 year old fanboys for being jackasses. That's what they do. You're also right that being belligerent towards the public (i.e. your customers) is not sound business sense. That's why my policy is that I just ignore the jackasses and stick to answering sane questions or responding to reasoned criticism without blowing up at anybody.

On the other hand, as the article pointed out, the forum fanboys represent merely a tiny loudmouthed fraction of your total customer base, and they tend to vastly overestimate their importance and influence. Which means that games developers can usually get by quite well without having to keep them happy. When a forum starts becoming too noisy or abusive, the developers tend to just leave quietly (again, as the article observed), only occasionally do they snap and blow up on their way out. The losers when that happens are the forum users, not the game developer.

So yes, game developers should act like calm professionals when dealing with public forums. Same as the representative of any business. On the other hand, forum fanboys should realise that posting on public forums is often something developers do because they want to, not because they have to, and that driving them away by being pointlessly abusive is not exactly smart behaviour either.

Re:Poppycock

[ivan256]

However, one of the things which inspires people to buy games is mods.

The percentage of the game buying population that knows what a mod is is practically insignificant in the pool of buyers. On top of that, mod users can be more of a hassle than their $50 is worth. Catering to the 12 guys who built their own PCs with "cool" features that they don't realize are the cause of instability (like the windows in the side with the wireless base station on top) who act like children (or are children) and fill the forum with threats of lawsuits instead of just returning the game to get their money back may not be a winning strategy.

Re:Poppycock

[Makoss]

Pfft. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Half-Life would have been soooo lame if not for my blowhole, water cooling, and UV lighting.

Mods are so cool they even started bundling half-life with them, any of you guys know what color Cold-Cathodes they were shipping?

Ohh. . . .wait. . . .you mean those OTHER sorts of mods. . . .

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:Community managers

[orkysoft]

Duh.

IRC

[Gr33nNight]

Try being an operator on IRC, you think there are jackasses and immature loots on message boards? Oh man, come to any IRC channel with 400+ users.

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...

The only thing wrong with MMOGs...

[wtom]

The only thing wrong with Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are the other players. I have played Ultima Online for years now. Most of the people you see in the forums are the hardcore fans, not casual gamers. Most of them are, indeed, maladjusted trollish wastes of breath, cat-assing their lives away, going into jittery, spit-flinging caniption(sp?) fits over the latest class nerf or PvP change.

I myself am a maladjusted, trollish waste of breath...but I don't spend my time going into paroxysms of infatile, futile outbursts on the boards about it....any more, anyway. I avoid gaming/dev boards like the plague that they are.

I generally side with the devs on issues like this. I read that guy's response, and based on some of the feces I have seen thrown at devs on the UO boards in the past, I can guarantee that my response would have been less coherent, less polite, and have had a great deal more expletives in it.

On the other hand, I would not have been stupid enough to take a job holding bees in my mouth in the first place. I have already lost any expectations of decent behavior from the vast majority of humankind, most especially those who huddle in darkened rooms in front of their multi-headed gaming systems, even as I myself do...

Social Repercussions

[shadowcabbit]

"...there are no social repercussions for acting like a jackass." What's to be done?

Simple. Create social repercussions for being a jackass. Slashdot, strange as it may seem, is the ideal prototype for a message board, with a few modifications. Moderation by the users, but meta-moderation by the developers; a tangible penalty for low karma (ie restricted posting or eventual IP banning) and tangible rewards for good karma (seeing "news stories" or artwork or something ahead of time); and moderators/metamoderators with a clear and unambiguous set of guidelines by which one should moderate.

That's being nice. Being evil: the lower your karma goes, the more often your email address is signed up for gay animal porn spam. Trolls are "randomly selected" as winners to receive an exclusive "beta test" of the game, which turns out to be a warez'd copy of Daikatana with a photocopied picture of the game's logo as a CD sleeve... and somehow an anti-piracy group "happens" to come by a day later with a search warrant. Anyone who posts the latest form troll du jour (just read the last few stories at -1 for an example of what I mean) is immediately given a vicious sack beating and denied food and water until Duke Nukem Forever is released.

I would prefer to see the "nice" version implemented, but eh. Do what you gotta do.

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)

Dealing with noise

[Sheetrock]

First, the Penny Arcade thing hit the nail on the head. Fragile personalities should not be on the front line of your PR effort, especially when it involves delivering a stream of fluff and BS to gamers ("The release has been pushed ahead to August, and will definitely hit the shelves at the end of the month.", "It will support Windows, Linux, and MacOS out of the box.", "The next patch will address the crash to desktop issue."). The sad fact is that most gamers are not socially adept enough to accept delays or bugs, and most manufacturers push the developers into a timetable that ruins a perfect release.

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. Afterwards, bug reports and patch requests should be handled privately, with the details of each report being filtered down to an exact set of problems for the patch team, relieving developers of the need to talk with disgruntled gamers. Obviously, neither camp can handle civilized discussion, so the only time they should talk is during the heady period before all the letdowns start occurring.

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?

Both sides are at fault here...

[GaimeGuy]

Look, I can understand how the users feel, and I understand how Rodberg and other developers feel, but there's a lot of people who are at fault...

#1: Rodberg. As a PR representative, he has no business blowing up at the fans like that. Yeah, they may be jackasses at some times, but he has to deal with that. Flaming your potential customers isn't going to help.

#2: Sierra, for putting Rodberg in a position he obviously couldn't handle, in the PR dept.

#3: The fans. Some fans just can't understand that making games and running a business are very difficult. They accuse companies and developers of ignoring the fans, and they think they could do a better job at making a game or running the company than the pros do. Frankly, these people don't realize that each fan desires different things from a game. A developer needs to take all fans into account when developing a game, and while it is impossible to please everyone, they try their best to make a game that will satisfy their users. When there are complaints that conflict, they try and find a solution that will please as many gamers as possible. It's not just "Add feature A to make B number of people buy your game." It's more like this:

"Take into account suggestions A, B, C, D, and E, and using all their ideas, try to come up with an idea, F, that satisfies as much of suggestions A through E as possible, while retaining interest from as many current fans who plan to buy this game as possible, also taking into account costs (G), available resources (H), time schedule (I), hardware limits (kind of falls under H), size of production team (J), and other factors (K and on) in the making of such decision."

It's much more complicated to make games and run businesses than it seems. There are so many factors that the public has no need to care for, and, as a result, overlooks, resulting in this ignorant idea that developers can just add features that are requested. Making such modifications to the game/adding those features may make the product lose more users than it gains, or eat up the budget of the game, resulting in a loss of other features (dumbed down graphics/sound, shorter game, no tutorial mode, etc.), among other things. Frankly, these gamers who so aggressively bash companies need to grow up and learn the difficulties of these jobs (basically not possible), or, more realistically, need to just be ignored by the PR of the companies, because they just aren't worth their time.

By the way, I feel like a complete newbie asking this, but how do I indent on these forums? (face turns red in embarrassment) :/

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.

a la jay and silent bob

[WiKKeSH]

Banky: Stop the movie? What are you, crazy?
Jay: All these assholes on the internet are calling us names because of this stupid fucking movie.
Banky: That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously. Stopping the flick isn't gonna stop that.

Cowardly flaming.

[Chuck Chunder]

I hate it when I see someone flaming or trolling a company employee in a forum. I see it as an incredibly weak and cowardly act as they are essentially picking a fight and taunting someone they know is restricted from responding in kind.

BioWare forums

[QEDog]

Bioware does a surprisingly good job in their forums. Yes, way too many people post there. Yes, people don't use the appropiate threads to handle the proper issues. Yes, a lot of fanboys saying things that are not relevant at all for the developer or the gaming comunity. But, somehow, the moderators are able to post frequently, talking about the issues. In fact, when NWN came out the toolset had a lot of bugs, and the forum became a very powerful tool to help handle those. Were the moderators bitching about people complaining about bugs? No, they just started threads to acknoledge those things AND updated with comments frequently.

Forums in general ARE harsh. That is why the moderator is there, to try to focus the forum into something positive for the community.

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.

Alex and Sierra

[Tnylr]

I used to work with Alex. First off, he's more of a Brand Manager/MARketing WEASel than PR.

Second, he's been marketting games and interacting with communities for a long time. (IMO) A lot of why he does community relations is that he likes being part of the community since he's a big gamer himself. I'm unsure if it's even (a big) part of his job description- though that doesn't excuse anything.

I found it quite odd to see his comment. It's not something I'd expect him to write. Though I'm betting Sierra marketting is under a lot of pressure right now with not a lot of resources.

- VU/VUgames has been 'for sale' for almost a year now, and VU hasn't been doing to well.
- Sierra has quite a few PC games to market this season (Half-Life 2, Homeworld 2, Lords of the Realm 3, Ground Control 2, War of the Ring) plus their console stuff). I seriously doubt they have either the manpower or the budget to adequately cover all of them. Which isn't something that any dedicated marketting person would be pleased with at all.

Having been on both sides

[DaveCBio]

I see fans as a double edged sword. There are some incredible people out there playing and appreciating games. Then there are some that make you wonder if the long hours and draining work is worth it. In the end, if it's possible, the best course of action is to usually ignore the trolls and listen to the people that have real feedback both positive and negative.