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How To Manage A Large-Scale Online Community
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."
The most common slogan of MMOG developers:
"Players? Fuck em."
How we know is more important than what we know.
(And when it comes to general attitudes to paying customers, watch what Sony do then do the opposite of that.)
"'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."
Proactive, eh? I call it "Drop the banhammer on the fuckwads".
Missions and goals, early adopters, passion, being "in tune", and a mission / vision statement...
Wow! I think I just won buzzword bingo!
No WONDER Star Wars Galaxies is in the dumper.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
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.
Here's what I posted at another message board, I took notes and it is mostly accurate:
I went to a conference today where Rich Vogel spoke on how to run an online game community. I'll try to post more later but it was somewhat telling. One of his main points was that the community leader needs to be a 'politician'. Also, he said one thing they often do is that if things are getting out of hand (negative stuff) to distract the fans with something else. He said, I quote, "Don't look over here, look over here!". He also recommended to strategies for dealing with the know it alls who post diatribes on the forums. Either, use them by making them leaders in their niche so that they work FOR you, or ban them because they're more trouble than their worth.
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He also said regarding griefers complaining about game design. "If they are complaining about a design flaw, they are probably right. Maybe you can fix it. Another solution is to ban them, even if they are right."
I swear, the nerd in me wanted to stand up and ask him what made SW:G such a failure, if it was poor design documents, poor execution, poor leadership, etc. But I didn't.
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Here's my little write up I wrote for my coworkers:
Rich Vogel
The former producer of the MMORPG Star Wars: Galaxies talked about how to run a large online community. He highlighted the benefits of a large game community:
Captive audience
Useful data collection
o Polls
o Play Habits
o Marketing to a key demographic
Great for Brand Awareness
And the drawbacks:
Expensive to maintain
Negative feedback spreads quickly
Can't use the normal PR speak
What does the community want:
They want a dynamic environment, there should be new information on a regular basis.
Entertaining and informative
A place to gather with other fans
A place to vent passionately
A direct link to the developers
His main advice was to realize that you will need a politician as a community spokesperson. Communication is also key, he recommended exploiting all the internet has to offer including websites, E-mail, newsletters, forums and even instant messaging. One thing he stressed however, is to keep the marketing people away from the E-mail; only use it to send relevant, interesting information regarding the game that they are playing.
An interesting aspect of the presentation was how to handle troublemakers. I found it to be somewhat underhanded however it is effective. The first type of troublemaker, the verbal troublemaker, can be described as someone passionate about the game who tends to write long diatribes about certain aspects about the game. One way of handling this is to promote these few people to leadership roles in that field. Make them the spokespersons and use them to your advantage. His other recommendation was to ban them since they are more trouble than they are worth and such a small percentage of the actual community. The second type of troublemaker is the hacker. Surprisingly he recommends befriending them and to use their pride to find out their tricks, as well as access to websites that deal with these hacks. Finally, the griefers complain about design flaws. Often times they are right. Either ban them or fix the problem.