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: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.

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.

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.