MMOG Industry Community Vet Speaks Out 61
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.""
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
You know, that language where when filtering against a list of files, you can just build one gigantic regular expression, and then just match against it.
I rewrote that piece of code to use a hash like any sensible programmer would...
Re: (Score:1)
Well written Perl is good. It's easy to write bad Perl.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and I've known this for awhile, it's just like English. It's easy to write bad English, but well written English is good.
I just kind of don't like the flexibility that it gives one to write bad code, even if that is at the expense of being able to make code more readible with the right hands, and the right author.
Re:Inherited code (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Vet says community at risk from Mad Cow Disease (Score:4, Funny)
Community Management 101 = Pop Culture (Score:3, Informative)
It appears that Community Management for MMOG's and the game industry has suddenly hit the pop-culture wave and is gaining a lot of attention.
Sanya's posts are somewhat lacking, but entertaining. Whereas, Terra Nova's Lisa Galarneau has repeatedly taken on tough topics [blogs.com] that stand out against the miasma of current trends.
On the other hand, blogs like Virtual Cultures [typepad.com] take on the Gamer's motivations and explore the society that forms through these communities.
It surprises me what in the chaff is separated from the wheat.
Re: (Score:1)
Countdown to book release in 3...2..1...
Community Managers (Score:5, Insightful)
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
I have seen good CMs, and bad CMs. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Community Managers (Score:5, Interesting)
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>
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Tseric (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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 utte
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Tseric (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The fact that other C
Re:Tseric (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, his post was great. It's so true about MMO communities, particularly ones of super public popularity (EQ, WoW, DAoC, etc). I got this all the time when I first started MMO's and 'speccing', like DAoC. "Hey, I would love to be this kind of character!" l3w3tt
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
More info, please?
He finally said exactly what he felt, which is that a small percentage of posters to the forums were subverting the morale of the majority. He said it rather pointedly, and in a very insulting and condescending tone. He was right, of course, but that's not how you interact with the public. He didn't really melt down. The people on those forums, for the most part, don't know what melting down in public is. He just lost his cool, and said what I'm sure every other CM thinks.
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.
The need to be constructive goes
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
He's said basically as much before. In fact, other CMs have said it before, but they were ones who had engaged with the community successfully enough before that it was seen as a harmless venting of steam, as opposed to being their basic opinion of the entire community.
The need to be constructive goes both ways. Sadly, you can never get a large audience of random posters to be completely constructive.
I think Tseric's problem was that he se
Then there's the FFXI solution... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:2)
FFXI is utter crap.
Re: (Score:2)
I managed to snag a copy for about $15 and it came with a free month for me, and a free month for a friend. I figured it'd be worth that... I hope my friend enjoyed the $15 worth of game, because I was bored to tears.
Here's how it went: Run (slowly) around town. More. More. More. Ah, a shop. No money. Run... etc/etc/etc Ah, an exit. Kill something. Health doesn't regen... Wander back to the middle of town to find a place to rest. Back outside, kill, rep
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
To sum up, you not taking the time to know how to play doesn't make the game "utter crap".
Re: (Score:1)
Not true, that warning comes up only if you unsubscribe improperly. If you unsubscribe using the proper methods they will retain your account, though any characters will be deleted after 30 days (if I remember correctly.) I've gone through this process, unsubscribing, waiting quite a while and then signing back up, and was able to do so with no problems an
Re: (Score:1)
Out of curiosity, what's the point of canceling a monthly service for less than a month?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
She has it easy (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
DAoC I've heard very good things about too, have been tempted to play it, but try to curtail my MMO addictions to only one at a time.
Re: (Score:2)
It is (or rather was) a community of frighteningly helpful players. As long as you weren't a complete idiot you'd have people offering to hand you gear and help you out left and right.
Re: (Score:1)
Massive gamers (Score:1)
Any fool... (Score:2)
Same old. (Score:1)
Oh well, maybe it's just me being a bitter old man, but all this recent action with some former mmo community nut yabbing abouts
That's not a game industry feature (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So you get X mandays. This, of course, means that you have to write unmanageable spaghetticode and zip docu...
MMOG Industry Community Vet Speaks Out (Score:2)
I didn't even know they existed. I guess someone has to take care of the animal development and maintenance in the games.
Re: (Score:1)
How to quit being a CM (Score:2)