…is stupid. I understand the desire to guarantee profits. I grasp that people pay licensing fees in order to have exclusive rights within a territory. But there’s no “right to profit” anywhere that I’ve ever seen, and if we ever want to pay more than lip service to the concept of a global economy, we should pay attention to the world we’ve created that doesn’t have borders (beyond economic ones, a topic for a whole ‘nother rant).
At any rate, TERA just announced that they will not be IP blocking. Players can freely choose between North American and European servers. Bravo.
http://211.43.148.85/forums/showthread.php?t=9682
Money quote: In a time that players are becoming more connected around the world, we believe that IP blocking has no place in a world class Action MMO.
See, people, this is how you prove you have a sense of humor when one of your employees goes bonkers on one of your (admittedly deserving) customer/troll hybrids:
From JetBlue:
Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)
That bit about privacy matters to customers and employees.
No kidding, guys, actual headline about a big league community manager: “…the White House press secretary’s candor may be a sign he should switch to less visible role.”
It is a standard of conventional wisdom that people are idiots, can’t handle the truth, and facts must be dressed up and spun in order to be palatable. And it’s a fact that people who do tell the truth are usually “in trouble” at best and run out of town on a rail at worst.
Now here’s my problem with the conventional wisdom, besides it being cynical: It’s not actually true.
An audience is always composed of two groups – one, actual customers (or voters or whatever). Two, people with their own agenda. You might as well blow off the second group entirely, because they are never going to listen. It does not matter how much time you spend on spin and packaging and whatever. They are going to find a way to twist your words, take quotes out of context, and if all else fails, lie. Why waste time catering to their nonsense? I’ll tell you what, if your community is bigger than a thousand people, you don’t have time. Your only hope is to break people off from the herd at live events and get through to them when they don’t have an audience.
The actual customers are different. You still want to put your best foot forward. You still want to choose the perfect words, the words that will communicate your feelings and your intent as well as the facts. You still want to convey a sense of inclusion, of partnership, of value. You need to be in sync with your team in terms of your message and your timing. And you should never be rude to an individual (rude to hypothetical groups/strawmen – we CM types call that a “technique”) and you don’t need to say every little thing that pops into your head at the instant it does the popping.
But you really, really don’t have to avoid candor with actual customers. When you think you do, then… and only then… is it time to switch to a less visible role.
The actual post is up at my employer’s site. (It’s hard to see hotlinks on that site – the article I was riffing off of is here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2262544/) But comments there are borked, and I figured, if y’all wanted to talk about the post, I ought to give you a place to do it before I pimped it all over creation.
If you’re looking for a diatribe about Sarah Palin, you aren’t going to get it. If you’re looking for me to admire her community management, you sure as hell aren’t going to get it.
But brand management is a different animal. I respect the hell out of whoever she’s got doing brand management, and I stand in awe of what they’ve accomplished on behalf of their client. The client is doing her own part, though. If someone came up with a natty armband and some good slogans for her, she’d be unstoppable.
Some thoughts:
- I’ve always said employees should be using their real names to provide transparency and accountability. If you can’t handle being the public face of a company and all that implies, get another job. It’s that easy. It is not always that FUN, mind you.
- My customers are not public citizens. Making them public citizens against their will is crappy. I can think of half a dozen reasons why someone should be allowed to be anonymous, and I’m not going to list them because any one of them is good enough. Want people to stop acting like asshats on the boards? Suspend in game accounts for out of game behavior. Hire more mods. Close the board. Whatever. This is just chickenshit.
- This will not kill WoW. Remember, the percentage of WoW customers who read [WoW's] forums is in the single digits. The number of people who post is even smaller. If this does anything major to their sub numbers, I’ll be very surprised.
- I am working for a number of companies right now and three of them were advised by their legal departments to… not do what Blizzard is doing. One does not allow me to use my real name despite my case for doing so. Another allowed me to use my real name after giving them something in writing that stated I absolved them of responsibility in the event of harassment or worse. And a third company doesn’t let ANYONE use any handle, in game or out, that Googles up as a real name lest the real owner of that name get harassed. As I said on Scott’s blog, Blizzard clearly doesn’t think they are liable. These three other MMO companies clearly think they could be. We won’t know the legal truth until Blizzard gets sued for wrongful death.
- Yes, I said death, and no, I’m not overreacting. Someone is going to get stalked through this tool because some whackadoodle fell in love with an avatar. Maybe the victim did a little roleplay and the stalker took it too seriously. Maybe the victim hurt the stalker’s widdle feewings during a message board discussion. Who knows. Marriages break up (and reform) every day thanks to MMO drama leaking out into the real world. Blizzard should know this better than anyone. Good lord, you can’t go a week without an international advice column posting some complaint about a spouse or a kid that is too involved in WoW. That’s not Blizzard’s fault.
But “Here’s the real name of the person who sexxored you and then changed her mind/called you an idiot in front of all your friends/won’t talk to you because you’re creepy” will lead to something disastrous. Unfortunately, the person to whom the disaster occurs will be one of the people who is sitting here today scoffing at the “scare-mongerers” and “alarmists.” Because the scare-mongerers and the alarmists won’t be posting.
The two are not related. The job is a QA job on an upcoming game, and while you will not grow rich doing this job, you will make some useful connections and make a little money without having to relocate or even put on pants. And guys, you know I love you, but “I did this open beta” is not actually job experience. However, something like a team lead position is, if you can shore that up by having at least sort of related professional experience. The posting is here: http://sacramento.craigslist.org/sof/1736581596.html
As for the ancient fish: I did my Metaverse Mod Squad post yesterday and I was maybe a little punchy. The seven of you who have been reading my stuff for… a decade… know that I sometimes torture analogies until they scream and break loose their chains to flee into the night. (See what I did there?) At any rate, I compared developers who post on message boards to coelacanths.
I started to write an anecdote in my post for ModSquad today (a brief run down on multiple feedback channels) to explain exactly how I knew some of these things and decided… nah.
But I couldn’t not snicker about it. The four of you who have been reading my ramblings for ten years (HOLY CRAP, TEN YEARS) will join me in a hearty laugh at this one particular bit:
Forum posters aren’t just telling you what you need to know. They’re also performing for an audience and getting feedback of their own. You don’t have time to filter out the nugget of truth in both the rant and the feedback letter.
Oh, the irony. It burns.
No, it’s not a Q&A, it’s my “managing questions” post at Modsquad.
It’s kind of funny – I let this blog go dark/dim because I felt like I’d said everything I could possibly say on the topic of community. Also, the MMO Underbelly series at MMORPG.com was completely sucking me dry.
But the Obvious Truth well apparently never runs dry. And I’m getting pings (but no jobs for remote employees, grumble crank moan) on how these little posts at Modsquad are really helpful to people doing strategic planning.
Well, yes. That’s why you hire a community director before you get into beta, after all.
Rant on: After ten years, the idea still persists that we’re forum mods – widgets you hire when you have customers and not before. You CAN hire community people that way, but you should call them “moderators.” Or you can hire someone whose job it is to babysit Facebook and Twitter, and that’s a useful job too, but that’s not a community director either. That’s a social media moderator.
Community directors DO strategic planning, tool development, customer research, and contribute to the design process both in terms of product development and marketing. We’re the glue holding the team together.
Today’s post over at ModSquad: Physical World Bonds
This is another dead horse I keep flogging, even though most companies do events in the physical world. My complaint is that the reasons for those events are usually aimed at marketing, aka sales and promotion.
I want to see more events aimed at community, aka retention. The motivation matters.
You guys will recognize the opening line from a post I made a month ago. But in the last month I’ve seen more than one example of how people aren’t born knowing this stuff, so I made it into a blog entry.
I’m enjoying the stories, posted and emailed, of those of you who’ve made use of this stuff outside gaming. We are the gaming generation, and by golly, we’re taking over.