MMOG Industry Community Vet Speaks Out

Sanya Weathers, known for many years as Tweety, was the Community Manager for Dark Age of Camelot essentially since that game's launch. Known throughout the games industry as truthful, caring, and innovative, she almost created the position of Community Manager out of whole cloth. Many elements of Massively Multiplayer communities we take for granted today originated at Mythic in Sanya's hands. Now doing work freelance, she has time to blog about her experiences keeping Massive gamers happy. It is entitled Eating Bees, after a Penny Arcade strip on the subject of forum management. So far she has two posts up, one looking at what professionalism looks like in the position, and a hilarious fictional day in the life for a CM. "Bob forwards Gertrude's email to Jake, a programmer. Jake is not the one who coded the original element on which Gertrude's system is based. THAT guy, Wayne, is somewhere in the Caribbean coked up along with a bunch of strippers, where he has been ever since he cashed his FunFactory stock options, opened his own studio, and sold THAT one to MegaCorp for millions of dollars. Wayne was also a self-taught genius who adhered to no known coding formalities and whose comments were in haiku. Since Wayne left, approximately two dozen programmers of various levels of ability have added layers of complexity. Jake is very young and enthusiastic, but his joy at finally being in the gaming industry is starting to dim from coping with a ten year old pile of what is called "spaghetti code.""

Comments

Community Managers

[Shadukar]

I realise that the TFA deals with slightly more programming/develpment type of CM but i'd like to point out something about the more communication related CMs.

Possibly demeaning name (manager, come on) but I think very few people consider how difficult the job is. I have done a similar job for a medium sized MUD but i also speak from experience of wasting my youth reading general forums of Everquest for 5 years and wow for 2 years.

You are dealing with Anonymous. Basically, hundreds if not thousands of bored people with the mental age of kids. These people have little to do, plenty of angst and plenty of time. They generally have little or no education (cuz skool is 4 lozrz) but because they have wasted X number of years playing particular game they think they have a right to be rude. Worse than that, they are absolutely convinced that they are right.

So we have that audience who are pretty much from the word go hostile. Now give them any news, seriously, ANY news. Suddenly they are not only twice as hostile and aggressive, they feel downright wronged! No matter how good the news is, someone will always complain. Buff one class? Well clearly the company hates all the other classes! Introduce new content? Clearly the devs hate casuals/hardcore/veterans/newbies/roleplayers. Introduce new feature? "omg y r u doing that useless stuff when soooo many bugs are not fixed lololol"

Add to that the fact that these CMs are actually working representing a company. They have a certain image to uphold and while they are their own people and are allowed to have their own personality, there are very clearly defined boundaries which CMs are not allowed to cross.

As much as they would like to tell someone that "no you moron you are wrong on every point please go back to school" or "if you hate this game so much you cant see anything positive about it then quit or fscking die".

It is similar to call centre workers. Everyone has a funny story how they got a call from / or called India and got some person on the other line and said some oh so witty stuff to them and i tell it was soo hilarious cause thet stupid robot couldnt think of anything to say because i was so witty and funny i really told them!

No, you weren't funny. You weren't being witty. The person on the other end of the line was working and despite really wanting to, they just couldnt say what they really wanted to say which was "No Idiot Sir, I don't masturbate to Krishna but i do often wonder if all westerners are as dumb as you or are you just a special example?".

Same is with CMs. Quite often they'd love to say what they really think about the latest complaint or threat to "omg my dad's uncle is a lawyer and we r suing u for stealing our childhood. also having undead in your game is offensive to my religion so i am suing u for that 2"

I wish i could say these are isolated, rare examples but unfortunately that is not the case. You have people making wrong assumptions (eg "you make $10 a month off 5million people that is clearly 50million dollars every month you should be able to afford X" or "you never add new content" or "you only nerf and never buff") Problem is that very often these wrong people are very very loud and for some strange reason their wrong BS stays in people's minds a lot more than the actual truth. A very sad but very human phenomenon that i am sure many others have observed in discussions about politics or religions.

And lastly, not all CM's are Developers. Some are, some aren't, it varies. It is their job however to let the players know that their university qualified team of statisticians came with result that ability X is overpowered by 1.2% and therefore the developers have decided to decrease ability X by 1%. The amount of crying and complaining and rudeness and insults and lets face it, plain stupidity is astounding. It is frigging 1% it is not your life and if it is you have much bigger problems than your toon losing 1% of something imaginary.

What i am trying to point out

Re:I have seen good CMs, and bad CMs.

[ajs]

I have seen similar things happen to what you say, yes all nerfs are taken in badly, even when it is -CLEAR- they are for a reason. Nerfs?! Hell, buffs are taken badly. The problem is usually that people who deal with the public in any company get focused on the BAD customers, and forget that a huge fraction of their customers are silent, and those most motivated to speak are not even remotely a representative sample of the prevailing temperament.

Re:Tseric

[fractoid]

More info, please? I can't get the WoW forums at work. :P

The reason the playerbase hated Tseric wasn't that they were unwashed 13-year-old n00bs. It was that Tseric approached his CM position as if it made him High Priest of WoW. You can get away with acting superior, condescending, and in general derisive towards your customer base if and only if you are always, infallibly, right. You can't get away with it if you then go to post things that are not only incorrect, but that display your complete and utter lack of comprehension of some of the game's basic mechanics. For instance, the declaration that spellcaster gear was properly itemised because "mana = dps", when then-endgame geared dps spellcasters didn't scale appreciably. The claim that the warrior talent Enrage (a damage buff procced on receiving a crit) was nerfed because "warriors were popping enrage every time the cooldown was up".

If he'd posted as a messenger from the devs, he'd have been excused. Caydiem, for example, passed on outright furfies from the devs plenty of times and was still loved by the community. As it is, when you tell someone that they're an idiot, and in the same breath prove that you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, it will slaughter the community's opinion of you. That's why the forums ate him alive.

That's not a game industry feature

[Opportunist]

Spaghetticode is pretty much common in most large corporations with their hire&fire mentality. At the same time, they never ever enforce any kind of commenting or at least coding style (even if there is a formal guideline, more often than not, there isn't), simply because of a "it compiles, ship it" mentality.

Nobody who would care checks the code. Nobody. What is checked, at best, is whether the compiled program works to spec. The only people who do actually see (and suffer from) the code are the programmers themselves, who got other worries than to recomment or relabel anything.

First of all, you never ever get the time approved that would be necessary to remodel the code to be on par with the specs. And you only dare to do it once on your own, but only if your coworkers don't stop you in time. If it breaks (hell, as soon as it breaks, who am I kidding?) YOU are the one who gets the blame for trying to fix it.

So why should you care?

So, after about 3 years and 6 teams, maintaining that code becomes a burden. The simplest changes have side effects you can't even begin to imagine, because one of the teams earlier didn't get a database change approved, so they took a seemingly unused table to fill it with different data. And for them it worked, because the code that would access this table was commented out by the team that had the code before them, since it was no longer needed. Now you get to reactivate that code and it tries to access the data in the table that has nothing to do with what it expects there.

Nobody commented any of those changes sufficiently, and nobody who even knew what was supposed to be in that table still works for the company.

Re:Tseric

[geekoid]

"Tseric wasn't an ass, he only responded in kind. "

That shows that the person has no place talking to the public. You dn't "respond in kind". The peoplec ausing problems will just get more support.

I work for the public. I have my work scrutinized by a lot of people, sometime publically. Going out and saying "YOur all a bunch of nitpic SOBs that have no idea what your doing" would be bad.

If responding in kind makes people precieve you're an ass, then for all intents and purposes, your an ass.

Trying going to a public forum(meat space) to openly discuss a budget. Shit, internet forums are EASY in comparison because you can ignore the really, really stupid ones.