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:Community Managers

[Drogo007]

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.

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Re:Tseric

[LaXaTiVeDK]

You can read all about it here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Tseric