Slashdot Mirror
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.""
The inherited code I work with is in a language all its own. Run it through the preprocessor one way, and it becomes object-oriented ANSI C. Run it through another way, it becomes object-oriented K&R C. Run it through a third way, it becomes C++ with classes.
The really exciting part is that this is a cross-platform GUI library, supporting classic MacOS, Windows 3.1, OS/2, and Motif on Unix, with the last full re-write in 1994. The software it is used in supports MacOS X and WinXP.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Tseric the big CM for the World of Warcraft forums was fired a few weeks ago after he finally lost it with the forum base.
Yeah, I know, it's a Japanese MMORPG so it doesn't really count, but you have to love their approach to CM: nothing.
They have no public forums. They have no way for players to contact the developers. You can only report bugs to GMs, who then can safely respond that they heard the complaint and then ignore it.
Questions about gameplay are never answered. Questions about what item descriptions mean are never answered. Nothing is ever revealed except through the patch notes.
There's a reason I don't play it any more...
Having been in a similar position (not for an MMO, but I was in charge of Community Relations for the dev team of a popular game for a while) I can say that the way you sleep at night is by having a firm grasp of the fact that the vocal idiots you so succinctly described constitute 2% or less of your player-base. So while the vocal minority can be used as a quick sounding-board, 90% of what goes on is soundly ignored.
As a CR,L (Community Rep, Lead), I wasn't interested in individual rantings. I was more interested in overall treands and I came to quickly recognize the vociferous trolls who could be counted on to argue, insult, demean, etc, no matter what we said. Then there were the players who were actively posting and could generally be counted on to give a reasonable description of their opinion without resorting to grade-school-bully vocabulary. And finally there were the gems of our online community - the fine few who could be counted on to provide insightful and well-reasoned responses to whatever we posted. Those all wound up on my "watch closely" list and I tended to let them lead the charge in debates to whatever our latest announcement was and if they were doing a good job, I'd just provide backup.
There were lots of posts where I was treated in "shoot the messenger" fashion. LOTS of posts. Yet I never lost a single wink of sleep over them. I had better things to worry about.
Thankfully our game catered to a crowd that tended more to the "mature" end of things, so the concentration of Leet-speaking retards was less than it could have been. I wasn't in charge of Dev efforts, I didn't even really have a huge say in what they were doing. I just got to tell the Devs what the forums were saying and report the actions of the Devs to the forums.
Funny thing is, it's been almost 4 years now, and I don't know that I could name any of the truely troglodytic denizens of the forums. But I still remember the handful that displayed above-average class in their dealings with me and with each other.
</ramble>