Did you happen to compile any of this information anywhere? It’s been a few months and I was wondering if you found any neat trends or examples.

When I’ve participated in the forum community less frequently (all the way down to not at all), it’s been because I was told to shut up.

Frequently, it was the community management telling me to pipe-down. Especially if there wasn’t really much in the way of a dedicated CM staff up to the point that someone was hired to tell me to shut up.

Other times it was marketing (telling me and community management to stifle, which bothered CM a lot more than you’d imagine, considering they had no issue doing that to me).

I’ve had CM tell me that they were looking like the bad guys too often, and needed to post something positive for a change, and noticed that I was telling the players what they wanted to hear an awful lot, and I should stop posting and let them post what I’d have said… Yeah. And I wasn’t posting “what the players wanted to hear” at all – I was just communicating with them (which is what they wanted, but not the sort of thing one can “outsource”).

Alternatively, there were times I have been encouraged to increase the level and frequency of communication, starting with an apology for previous low levels of interaction and a promise to be more available henceforth.

Directives to shush-up following those episodes were especially effective in making me look like an ass to the community. I worked with guys who refused to fall for that more than once. “Everyone needs to post more? No way. I won’t do it.” – ’cause they knew that eventually they’d be gagged again and all their promises to communicate more, better, and so on would once again be taken as evidence of their own personal character flaw.

Management never posts, “We’re telling the devs to chill-out with this whole communication thing, and that’s why they’ll be posting less now despite having told you a month ago, at our insistence, that they’d be posting more often.”

So that sort of skews the perspective a bit, I think.

I’m not even trying to whine and moan about it, really. I suppose it’s part of the job, something we’re paid to do, on some level. Better for someone to think I’m a jerk than to think the company I work for, in general, is a jerk.

It’s just that in my experience, right about step 9 there, Ed tells John that if he has something to say to the community then he needs to say it to Ed.

It’s not even that Ed doesn’t have a valid argument there, either… just that when John stops posting it might not have been his decision to do so at all.

Maybe a better solution would be to have John post as “Posty McPoster” from the git-go, and then hand-over the pseudonym to Ed when he comes on board.

Then there’d be no break in the continuity. In terms of the players perception of reality being warped, well it still would be a bit warped, but at least not in a way that makes anyone look like a douche.

Please tell me Ed and the woman who had a crush on imaginary-John met, fell in love and rode off into the sunset together!

You actually have an email address at the Lum(p) of Mad’s site?

That’s like asking the neighborhood pyro to ‘fire up the barbie’.

That being said, I really don’t know why the GM of the game AND the community manager can’t work together communicating with the player base. I think that’s what would make most players calm and reassured if the two were in agreement instead of fighting all the time.