Post by Morreion on Dec 3, 2009 10:32:32 GMT -5
Two Kinds of Developer Relations (Elder Game)
Developer communication as it affects games (Massively)
comment:
There seem to be two main ways that MMO developers interact with players. These two ways have serious pros and cons, but usually the choice isn’t made consciously. Instead, the choice comes from the culture and situation the team finds itself in. But if you make an explicit decision, you can stick to it and you won’t screw up nearly as often (or as dramatically).
Option 1: Everything is perfectly fine, citizen. Move along now.
Option 2: We suck and you know it, please bear with us
Option 1: Everything is perfectly fine, citizen. Move along now.
Option 2: We suck and you know it, please bear with us
Advice For All Community Management Types
If you’re an Option #1 game, you need to keep your developers away from the forums and blogs. You can’t have a distant and aloof ivory tower development team that occasionally stops in to chat about game innards. That just makes everybody look stupid. Their message gets taken as having far more significance than intended (because it’s so rare that they get information), and people will be confused and upset about why devs took time to talk about this one issue and not the 500 other issues people are concerned about.
If you’re an Option #2 game, you have to expend significant amounts of developer-time communicating with your audience. If you stop, people will freak out. “They stopped caring!” is what they will hear. If you only have one developer posting on the forums, you can actually expect your forums to get nastier when this developer goes on vacation. It’s that sensitive. You need to allocate significant resources towards communication, and that means maybe 20% of four or five developers’ time. Really. (This is also why a blog is a better choice for developers to post on. You can queue up little tidbits and release them one a day, requiring less posting overall to get the same feeling of participation.)
Whatever you do, you have to stick to your guns. Explicitly decide what your community plan is, and detail it, and write it down, and make sure the people who matter agree with it. (That does not mean getting the whole company on board. It means getting the key people on board.)
If you’re an Option #1 game, you need to keep your developers away from the forums and blogs. You can’t have a distant and aloof ivory tower development team that occasionally stops in to chat about game innards. That just makes everybody look stupid. Their message gets taken as having far more significance than intended (because it’s so rare that they get information), and people will be confused and upset about why devs took time to talk about this one issue and not the 500 other issues people are concerned about.
If you’re an Option #2 game, you have to expend significant amounts of developer-time communicating with your audience. If you stop, people will freak out. “They stopped caring!” is what they will hear. If you only have one developer posting on the forums, you can actually expect your forums to get nastier when this developer goes on vacation. It’s that sensitive. You need to allocate significant resources towards communication, and that means maybe 20% of four or five developers’ time. Really. (This is also why a blog is a better choice for developers to post on. You can queue up little tidbits and release them one a day, requiring less posting overall to get the same feeling of participation.)
Whatever you do, you have to stick to your guns. Explicitly decide what your community plan is, and detail it, and write it down, and make sure the people who matter agree with it. (That does not mean getting the whole company on board. It means getting the key people on board.)
Developer communication as it affects games (Massively)
comment:
Way back when, when I actually worked on a game, I discovered how difficult managing open communications with players can be. The problem is who you end up communicating with. Too many times the loudest voices are not indicative of the game population as a whole, and you can get a seriously skewed opinion of your own game by listening too closely.
Or to put it another way, in most cases, the players you really want to keep satisfied, those that make up the bulk of your game population, are not the ones posting thousands of times to the forums. Listening exclusively to the squeaky wheels often leads to that endless cycle of class balancing which we've all come to dread.
Or to put it another way, in most cases, the players you really want to keep satisfied, those that make up the bulk of your game population, are not the ones posting thousands of times to the forums. Listening exclusively to the squeaky wheels often leads to that endless cycle of class balancing which we've all come to dread.
