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Games Entertainment

How To Manage A Large-Scale Online Community 32

Posted by Zonk 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."
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How To Manage A Large-Scale Online Community More

How To Manage A Large-Scale Online Community

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  • simple, short slogan (Score:5, Funny)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Monday November 28, 2005 @05:39PM (#14133136) Homepage Journal
    The most common slogan of MMOG developers:

    "Players? Fuck em."

  • Q: How Do I Manage A Large-Scale Online Community?

    A: Come up with a good slogan.

    Umm.... perhaps you've stumbled on the wrong site [typepad.com].

  • Easy! Watch what Blizzard do... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Monday November 28, 2005 @05:46PM (#14133201) Homepage Journal
    ...then do the opposite.

    (And when it comes to general attitudes to paying customers, watch what Sony do then do the opposite of that.)

  • What kind of manager-speak BS is THAT? (Score:4, Funny)

    by larsoncc ( 461660 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @05:51PM (#14133242) Homepage
    "'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.
  • Slogan for an MMORG combining hi-technology & magic ... I'll call it "SlashDog".

  • Get rid of message boards (Score:5, Interesting)

    by giverson ( 532542 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @06:21PM (#14133467) Journal
    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.
    • 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
    • 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/sm
  • Here is what I see as a World of Warcraft player:

    I would love to play an MMO where the developers constantly monitor and respond to player input. However, due to the size and complexity of many of these games this is all but impossible. The main problem is that players invest way too much time into MMOs, making each and every change a personal matter. Developers cannot win here. The majority of posts will be whining and complaining. Players routinely flame, berate, threaten to quit, claim that they are quit
    • So what's your take on a game like Guild Wars? They place a decent amount of emphasis on PVP, but since they have a 4character/account set and they let you create new (maximum level, best quality-equipment, use-any-skill-or-item-you've-found-and-unlocked free) PVP-only characters trivially, so you can swap your PVP characters in and out with relative ease.

  • I Was at this Seminar (Score:4, Informative)

    by Cyclone66 ( 217347 ) on Monday November 28, 2005 @11:04PM (#14135071) Homepage Journal
    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.

    ---

    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.

    ---

    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.
    • You could also go the route taken by Victor "Sporkfire" Wachter, the Dungeons & Dragons Online "Community Manager" - just ban anyone who posts anything critical of the game at all, thus ensuring a message board full of nice, positive posts.
      • That name sounds familiar. Was he the community contact on Sovereign back before SOE canned it?

      • My understanding is he was the community rep for Planetside. With regards to Sovereign I couldn't say.

        In conversation with a few former Planetside players about my getting booted from the DDO Beta (actually just from the beta discussion boards, but functionally it's the same thing) it seems this sort of reaction to criticism was par for the course where he (Wachter) was involved.

        I'll admit I was pretty hard on the game in my comments - it's deeply flawed, to say the least. But I was always polite & thou
  • Look how Sony Online Entertainment drove Star Wars Galaxies into the ground. Learn from their mistakes!!!
  • Why MMO creators try to use bastardized versions of proven failed market systems is beyond me.

    To me the ultimate MMO is actually very easy to create. *A market driven economy

    *player world interaction (building homes, villages, guilds, shops)

    *player driven content (I want a new sword that can only be had in the depths of a cave that I can't get, I put out a quest and a reward, raids on other villages, and completely random monster and loot placement)

    That's all, basically the MMO creator just needs a basic st
    • "That's all, basically the MMO creator just needs a basic storyline with a few warring factions and a big interactive sandbox in which the players can live and play with randome monster placements. They just need to come at it from a new more simplistic angle."

      The sandbox idea doesn't work out so well. Turns out that most people willing to fork out cash each month want more content delivered to them... they want to be led and motivated to do stuff. I think that MMOs are far more complex than you give t
    • *A market driven economy

      That's what WoW has or are you defining 'market driven' differently? As long as I can sell something for whatever price I want then that is market driven. If I can only sell my 'Boots of Escaping' for 5g then that's not.

      *player world interaction (building homes, villages, guilds, shops)

      I don't see a problem with this except it's not so easy. The world has to be pretty big to handle all those homes. On the server I play on in WoW, if every player had a home and/or shop
      • Of each point I made you managed to miss every one.

        No one said anything about EVERY player gaining housing. And making a big sandbox and allowing player driven quests takes almost no logic and is not that difficult. Also, obviously random monsters means area appropriate random monsters.

        The reason it has never been done is because no one takes the simplistic route. Everyone is wrapped up in complexity, and nobody has really tried it yet. MMO's are still young and none have gotten the formula just right... no
  • Damn I tought I would have useful information on how to manage an entertaining MMO not a lucrative one. Well I think I'll just try to do the exact opposite of nearly all that refers to "Please every whinner, but never, never, ask the extreme gamer that does not whine, because the game is already Ok for them, they are just a small part of the population society."
    • Hell yes. The corps (guilds) in EvE are massive and well organized. EvE is the only game I know where a person can get togeather 200 people to go invide someone else and the defender can accually get 200 people of his own on short notice to put up a fight.

  • SWG! (Score:1)

    by Darlock ( 7305 )
    Too bad the company this guy works for doesn't follow ANY of the things he's written.

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