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How To Manage A Large-Scale Online Community

Posted by Zonk on from the cracking-heads-taking-names dept.

Gamasutra has a piece covering a talk Rich Vogel gave at the Montreal International Game Summit discussing managing a large-scale online game community. From the article: "In an online game, the developers get instant, automatic feedback from the playing community, though, 'you need to be pretty proactive on the boards,' he says. Vogel recommends that MMOG developers define their mission or goal, which needs to be somehting that inspires passion. Early adopters of the game will be equally passionate, and the developers need to be in tune with them. The goal can be contained in a simple, short slogan."

4 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Easy! Watch what Blizzard do... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Or you can go the Square-Enix route, and pretend they don't even exist.

    No community site, no community forums, no community building at all...

  2. Get rid of message boards by giverson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Official message boards in MMOGs have basically one thing on them: gamers shouting at the devs. Those of us that actually want to talk about playing the game with other players have to look around elsewhere. The idiots that sit there and try to make sure the devs reply to their post are poison to the community.

    The solution? Get rid of the official message boards. Let the community develop on other sites. Monitor those sites and the discussions for feedback, but only post rarely, and only if you have something to say.

    Gamer to gamer discussions are going to be far more helpful than a board that is just gamer shouting over gamer.

    In the early days I loved the Ultima Online community on the newsgroups and on UOVault. But the communities in Galaxies and WoW are miserable unless you go to one of the forums that the devs stay off of such as the server forums and class forums. Stay out of general!

    Few things are more annoying than a message subject that starts out with DEVS READ THIS NOW!

    No, I didn't read the article. I've just wanted to get this off my chest for months now. This seemed like a good excuse.

    --

    Capitalism does not lead to corruption, lack of character does.
    1. Re:Get rid of message boards by Phwoar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The game I play religeously is more of a MUD than what is construed as an MMOG/MMORPG, but there's an active, and fairly vocal, playerbase. The GMs/Devs moderate the forums and take in what is said on them, but do not contribute to conversation there. This stops a lot of the "LISTEN TO MEEEEEEEEE!!" posts, and the same could be achieved by having one or two non-staff voulenteer moderators likely picked from the early adopters if you're on a fairly small-scale community game, or part-time customer service reps if it's a Sony game. Said people would forward anything important on to the Devs.

    2. Re:Get rid of message boards by Fool_Errant · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is the route that NCSoft took with Guild Wars. The closest things Guild Wars has to official open fan forums are "elite" fansites with forums, which are routinely watched by devs, and have been around for a long time. There is fairly little dev input on many of these sites, so when devs show up, it tends to be primarily to announce happenings and to act as soundboards between the devs and the players on those things that have created mass havoc through the entire community, such as cheating/exploits/smurfing and one or two patches and balances that really upset large portions of the community. There is whining, yes, but surprisingly much of the whining is centered in the threads on the latest patches, PvP threads, and those threads asking for the last few announced items that have yet to be implemented that are to show up for "Chapter 1." The rest tends to be a nice mix of humor, thought, and the occasional impromptu community celebration.