My old friend Rich spoke here: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/962/962114p1.html
I agree with his analysis of why this professional specialty is, within the game world, stagnating. Furthermore, I agree with his predictions that we will collectively fade into board weenies and toothless figureheads as the industry continues to learn the wrong lessons from games I grow weary of mentioning. The irony is that the importance of professional community work is actually hitting an all time high in other industries, with the unique skill sets getting more value than ever before. There really is no reason for a top flight community person to waste their time in games… well, except for that whole passion for games and love of players thing. Stupid, inconvenient love.
The only line in the piece that made me throw an IM at him saying “You, sir, are the wrongest wrong that ever wronged” was the line about “there is almost no reason that all our functions could not be directly integrated into marketing, PR or any larger communications structure. ”
He assures me he was trying to say that this would be the outcome assuming the current trajectory holds, and there again, I agree with him.
Yes, there are elements of PR and marketing in what we do. Yes, PR and marketing build relationships in their own way. But PR and marketing are NOT:
- Integrated into the player’s world as we are
- Aware of design implications and potential messaging as we are
- In a position to synthesize marketing, PR, design, and the customer base as we are
A community person, hired early enough to influence the interface, guild tools, chat design, and web presence (which, as Rich says, almost never happens) has an exponential effect on the power of all of those elements. The key word on my list there was “synthesize.”
Even the White House values the synthesis a good community specialist brings to the table. But in games, after a decade of hard work, a community weenie is someone you call when you realize your president should probably stop posting on message boards.
[...] The awkward state of community management in the gaming industry [...]
“…..a community weenie is someone you call when you realize your president should probably stop posting on message boards.”
Ohmai! He has a blog too you know lol.
[...] Weathers doesn’t want to agree, but does anyway: Even the White House values the synthesis a good community specialist brings to the table. But in [...]
“A community person, hired early enough to influence the interface, guild tools, chat design, and web presence (which, as Rich says, almost never happens) has an exponential effect on the power of all of those elements.”
That sounds to me like “if CSR had more design power, we’d be better in doing the PR and marketing for the game”. True, but then you’d be designers, PR people and marketing.
Then again, I do think CSR is marketing and PR through another channel.
The core issue is that games companies can never figure out why people flock and stay in one particular environment. “We delivered X, Y and Z! Why did they not come?” is probably a question asked by a lot of games studios, especially in the MMO market. I think it’s a point that you’ve been trying to drive home for…apparently around a decade now: A community is bigger than the game its attached to.
Look at WoW, since everyone wants to copy it anyway. In the original incarnation and even through parts of their first expansion it was a terrible game. It was chock full of things who’s sole purpose was to waste the player’s time, required large numbers of people to do everything, and it basically took the worst parts of MMOs to date and copy/pasted them in. So why did people keep playing, even growing? Because of the community…their friends were there, and that’s why they were too. Even if a game is better from a fundamental aspect, it has to win the community aspect as well.
This is what is hard to grasp, because it’s difficult for any designer to see their creations as broken, flawed pieces of garbage…but even Blizzard’s 500lb. gorilla was at one point for a vast percentage of people. However, the interactions people had and the communities they had formed over the previous years of Warcraft and Battle.net glossed over a lot of the rough patches, which allowed Blizzard to reach that “Tipping Point” (a great book to read if you haven’t) where it became a downhill run. Fixing a lot of the stupid helped as well, but how many MMOs fix their stupid well after the players left?
What strikes me as ironic is that they go for franchises like movies and such for the “built-in audience”…maybe if they rightly called it “the franchise’s community”, they’d understand a little better why their community people are arguably as important as any of the coders?
To that point, it always surprises me to see a company grab an IP and then ignore any kind of grass-roots marketing to that “built in audience.” Yet it happens over and over again.
@Krinsath:
“Look at WoW, since everyone wants to copy it anyway. In the original incarnation and even through parts of their first expansion it was a terrible game. It was chock full of things who’s sole purpose was to waste the player’s time, required large numbers of people to do everything, and it basically took the worst parts of MMOs to date and copy/pasted them in.”
This is simply not true. Perhaps you are new to the MMO scene… but for those of us who remember AOL’s Neverwinter Nights the ‘big game on the block’ MMO thing kinda went like this (rough timeline based only on who was leading marketshare)
Ultima Online was the first real widespread success – with FFA PvP and a system where you could loose most of your wealth if you forgot to login to refresh your house – it was pretty damn hardcore, but people played it.
Everquest took the throne next – providing a PvE environment – and dare I say it… the first real 3d experience – it grew very very large (400k + subscribers at one point!) – it’s features included rare spawn camping that took over 48 hours of real life in many cases (friday night – sunday morning camps can and *did* happen in that game to advance)
Raids that took over 70 people to achieve anything (yet the mob dropped 3-4 items!!!!)
Kill Stealing (two people hit a mob… well the one that did 50% +1 point of dmg gets the kill and loot!)
Quests that had absolutely no direction or coherence – try to get your Crushbone Mace? – heh have fun guessing at what to do if you read the quest text (btw you saw it in game as a tell – there was no tracker or way to remember what was said short of writing it down).
Dark ages of Camelot came out after this – but it was more PvP centric and to be honest – that’s not where the crowd is interested in going.
World of Warcraft followed this up – here are the things it *corrected* which caused it’s massive popularity:
* Long quest spawns – you never had to camp a quest spawn
* Tagging mobs – if you hit it – it was yours
* awesome graphics – yes – it was far and away the *best* game graphically at the time (and to be honest still gets it right in areas many many games don’t – WoW’s graphics appeal lies in the small movement details and animations that look natural – EQ2 for instance is very pretty – as a screenshot – until you see something move and it looks like a paper doll puppet)
* You could solo – the big daddy on the block at the time (EQ) required a 6 person group to do *anything*
* 40 person raids! This was awesome considering the nightmare of managing EQ’s 75 player raids – which I’ve done – with full groups sitting outside the ‘raid’ to add dps once in a while – it happened in Planes of Power
* It was *fast* to lvl – it took over 1 real life year to lvl to 50 in EQ when it came out. WoW allowed a race to 60 in a month or two.
* Nothing was broken (everyone else that had a presence at the time had horrible broken questlines etc – WoW came out with so much that worked – most people didn’t notice the bugs
In short – WoW succeeded by hiring people like Tigole and Furor to come design for them – sad as that is – they played the other games and took *out* everything bad about existing games and gave us a bucket of fun.
I very simply don’t think your opinion is based on fact, as if you had played MMO’s prior to WoW – you would have known the big reason for success was the fact that they only copied the fun crap and tossed the bad.
@ Del
Camelot did most of those things on your list, there
Except for the RVR mechanic (which, incidentally, took out the things people hated about UO – the stupid trashtalking, the lack of safety anywhere, the unfocused action, the lack of obvious teams, etc – and made PVP fun), the game was “evolutionary, not revolutionary.” Shared quest mobs – two people meeting at a spawn could group and BOTH get the widget – and mob tagging and realistic graphics/animation, lots of solo opportunity, small raids, fast leveling.
I have a weird perspective about the bugs, because remember, I was in a position where I only HEARD about bugs, practically never the good stuff. So my POV is badly skewed. Still, I did play it a lot, and I remembered it being much smoother than EQ, my first love.
@Del
Not new to the MMO scene at all. Been in many of them that did the exact same things and I know the frustrations of them all too well. Most of them pre-WoW seemed to prefer to treat the player as the enemy and punish them for being foolish enough to try to play their game.
Did WoW improve on things? No doubt, but it wasn’t any sort of revolutionary thinking that prompted the explosion of the game. Look at the original game where yes, you could level to the max level solo, and then do nothing else unless you gathered around 9-39 other people. It was a very long time until they added even slightly meaningful things for small groups to do, and that still wasn’t “solo” content. Then they added nothing but more content for the larger raids for over a year, ignoring that solo market more or less utterly until well into their first expansion. If you wanted actual advancement in WoW at the max level (which accounts for the majority of your time in the game if you play for more than 6 months), you were in the same boat as you were in EQ. This pattern actually persisted in less egregious forms until the latest expansion.
As Sanya pointed out…other games did the same things WoW did. Maybe not in totality, but nothing in WoW was really original thinking. It wasn’t even the magic combination of ideas, as later games post-WoW have shown. The biggest factor in the WoW juggernauts success was that Blizzard logo on it. Why? Because for *years* Blizzard developed a community via Battle.net and their addictive franchises and reputation and it was those community-building efforts, however unintentional on their part, which assured them that success. Did the fact that WoW was on its own a decent game help? Of course, but we’ve seen many decent games start strong, flounder and fall by the wayside. If you can’t compete with WoW as a *social platform*, you are now doomed to failure. That’s community, and that’s what these companies miss. It’s not about the game, it’s about who’s in the game. Even back in the “bad old days” when WoW catered to 2% of its population, it grew. That doesn’t happen because people like rerolling alts, or like pretty graphics, or love shorter quest spawns…it happens because there’s something around the game that keeps them coming back.
Another excellent example is Eve Online, where most of the game is so *tremendously* tedious and the penalties for failure extreme. Where much of the “old school” ideas still roam free…yet that game grows too. Why? Because they gave the players a complete sandbox on a single server which the community arranges as they see fit. This community-created “content” glosses over the rough edges of the gameplay and keeps people playing because they’re “a part” of something. CCP at least has some sort of understanding of this, allowing members of the community to be selected, flown out to Iceland to meet with the developers and (supposedly) having actual input on priorities. This from a company that has had massive cheating scandals and unforgivable technical oversights rock them on a semi-annual basis…and yet still the numbers go up…
[...] position in online gaming than many other development roles. Lum (honorary community manager) and Sanya discuss the article and agree with most of what Rich says, and there’s not much it says that [...]
Camelot did a lot of things more right than previous games which contributed to its initial success. They missed the mark in plenty of places though that cost them over time. There was really no PvE to look forward to once you were max level, a small amount of gear gathering but you were really just done.
I made the mistake of playing a healer and being pretty good at it, which left me never looking for a group but I found out that PvP was pretty much not for healers. This was a problem because I had come to Camelot with my pvp guild from Asheron’s Call (go Darktide!) and I just wasn’t interested in re-rolling. I tried to go through the level grind again with a character that sounded pvp friendly but it just wasn’t FUN to level that character so in the end it kind of killed the game for me.
Dead ends like that can hurt when someone has other options or just isn’t socially invested enough to stick it out anyway (the way many of us EQ players were)
Wow succeeded by identifying those dead ends and trying to build more game in those areas to keep people invested in their character and the game. The latest expansion makes me think that at least some of the people with the power to make decisions are well aware of what it will take to keep people out of those dead ends.
-”Even back in the “bad old days” when WoW catered to 2% of its population, it grew”-
WoW has never catered to only 2% of its population. Reciting paranoid message board drivel just makes you look foolish. You are of course referring to the raid content of original WoW and that of BC WoW which was experienced by far less people than Blizzard would have liked. This was, for the most part, entirely the choice of the people playing to not consume that content. Organizing a successful raid takes planning and some leadership ability and there are far, FAR too many people in WoW who simply have zero ambition or desire to advance their character past the easy leveling and questing and into more advanced play. Sure there were problems with raiding, but the lack of advancement is a fault of the players, not Blizzards.
@Krinsath:
“The core issue is that games companies can never figure out why people flock and stay in one particular environment.”
Some of them can, as I said further up, I think that Blizzard has a handle on the general concept of the Dead End, and the pit trap is that is your community. You need keep your players heading down the path long enough to be ensnared by something else before that path ends. The thing is that you, the game company, have to be providing all of those paths. There is no “build it and they will come” game. There are a number of games that I have played or seen played that focused as much flair as their could into the noobie experience of the game assuming that once they get 15 or 20 levels under their belt they were certain to stay. Never mind that after level 20 there pretty much was no more game. Horizons has this problem, as did Conan. They just assumed that players would stay after a certain point no matter what. Ohh how wrong they were.
MMO development isn’t some mystical Voodoo but it takes a lot more than just pushing a product onto store shelves before the Christmas rush.
“WoW has never catered to only 2% of its population. Reciting paranoid message board drivel just makes you look foolish. You are of course referring to the raid content of original WoW and that of BC WoW which was experienced by far less people than Blizzard would have liked. This was, for the most part, entirely the choice of the people playing to not consume that content. Organizing a successful raid takes planning and some leadership ability and there are far, FAR too many people in WoW who simply have zero ambition or desire to advance their character past the easy leveling and questing and into more advanced play. Sure there were problems with raiding, but the lack of advancement is a fault of the players, not Blizzards.”
So basically, if you did not have a circle of friends that encompassed 39 other people with the same schedule for multiple hour blocks, this was your fault? If you want to talk about sounding foolish, I think that statement more than takes the cake. The guild I was in had 80 people during that time, but owing to scheduling conflicts and the fact that we were geographically diverse it was rare to get more than 15 of us on for appreciable amounts of time together. In the current WoW, that’s fine…in the old WoW it was near-useless. You could zerg the 5-mans, which had rewards that were utterly outclassed by MC gear. Crafting provided no real supplement to gear, and really only the 20 man raids were any sort of alternative. Sure you could raid 40-mans with another similarly-sized guild, which we attempted multiple times with different guilds and had the same unsatisfactory results each time.
The point was that was our guild was there for the *people* more than the content. If doing content meant we had to tolerate people being jerks and extended drama because someone has shinier pixels than you, then we weren’t going to do that content. Is this a choice? Yes, but if I said you had to be punched in the face to get your meal at a restaurant, or you could only have pretzels at the bar…I’m betting you wouldn’t eat there very often.
While I can agree that there are many people who did not have the ambition, just as significant were the people who didn’t want to put up with the inevitable situations that cropped up as a result of raid guilds simply because it was the only way to be even remotely fair to the whole group. Having to log in for a set number of hours to earn “credit” which you can then later exchange for items you actually want sounds eerily similar to “work” for many people and not a “game.” While not every guild that raided did these, you’d generally find some sort of restriction due to the loot:raider ratio being so low and to give people incentives to spend their hours doing things with no discernible reward for them otherwise (note: that’s a community-based problem that the players had to invent a system to resolve). These issues were even worse when you started dealing with multiple guilds, and heavens forfend they handle loot differently. I’m not saying that they were unfair rules on their face, but they were a large reason of why a lot of people just never bothered with raids in a serious fashion. The idea of their leisure time being dictated to them by some random person on the Internet was something they took a pass on. See above about the restaurant.
Blizzard eventually realized the a major reason nobody was doing the content wasn’t that it was “oh so hard”, it was, among a few other no less significant things, that people disliked dealing with the social aspect of raiding guilds. The organization and outside record-keeping and drama resolution (because with 40+ people those are all inevitable…heck with 10 it’s still common) just wasn’t worth it to a lot of people in their *game*, and it finally clicked where Blizzard changed how they set things up. Raids can use as few as ten people, loot/raider ratios are a lot better, badges provide a baseline reward, in-game calendar was added, heroics are more properly tuned as a stepping stone to raiding and the instances themselves are no longer the hours-long slogfests of the original. Some things seem a bit too easy for my tastes, and many others, but at the end of the day you pay the fees for fun not to be eternally frustrated.
That, however, proves the point. The social, community aspects that surround a given game are generally as strong a force as the game itself (if not stronger). People were *not* playing the game owing to negative community aspects, even when it was the intended route and only one that was really available. Yes, in Blizzard’s case, they are wise to take everything the *forum* community says with a grain of salt. They do, however, have at least a basic idea of what’s going on with the community at-large which is part of why their game continues to be a license to print money. If you’re a developer and you want your game to do that too, you need to understand that the meta-game of the community is just as critical as the on-screen game you’re coding (for MMOs, other games may vary).
*snip*
Look at the original game where yes, you could level to the max level solo, and then do nothing else unless you gathered around 9-39 other people. It was a very long time until they added even slightly meaningful things for small groups to do,
*snip*
That is why I disagree – you find they had little for the ‘EQ’ population to do – but the game didn’t continue to grow for 2 years until BC came out because most people became bored.
I never bothered with the raid content in WoW until well into the expansion – even though I had led raids in EQ and gotten up to the citadel of anguish prior.
The main question becomes why…
In EQ – there was *NO* other way to advance besides raiding.
In WoW there were hundreds of other things to do.
I think you dismiss battlegrounds without understanding that in vanilla WoW – they provided the masses with an amazing amount of content that was available to them that kept the game fun for long after it would have become stale.
As to community….
(from Wikipedia on Battlenet)
“By September 2004, their active user count was up to nearly 12 million, spending more than 2.1 million hours online each day, and they had an average of 200,000 concurrent users, with a peak concurrent user count of 400,000″
Certainly you could attribute much of WoW’s success to the battle.net community… but the numbers they listed look alot more like EQ’s numbers at the time… and that was for a free service.
I postulate that the battle.net community was full of alot of people who would not (or ever) pay monthly for a game. I know several people who won’t even *try* WoW due to this reason (who loved diablo, warcraft, etc. and still play them today.)
In game it wasn’t much better. Warhammer Online for instance has a better communication interface than WoW did at launch for all the complaining that people do about it.
WoW felt very lonely. You never had to group to max level – groups were limited to 5 people – guilds were so easy to make there were thousands of them without any real way to figure out if they fit your play style.
In game chat was horrible – hard to read with the spam – and fighting was so fast that there wasn’t a lot of time to chat.
EQ made a community – the forced grouping and long downtime left so much room to chat you really got to know your companions. WoW still sucks in that regard – unless you get people to use a 3rd party chat program (vent, teamspeak) you still don’t really interact with people in your group that much.
Most people can’t type worth shit. Most can’t type fast enough to keep up with WoW’s pace.
All this makes me think… if a game wants to create a community going forward – then they should support voice chat out of the gate – and make sure it sounds good – because crappy voice chat will be shot down (in game WoW voice chat is *never* used for example).
Community is made by the people who play your game – the ones that never post on a message board because they can’t type. The 2-3 people in real life that are playing together – that as long as they have the *opportunity* in your game to make a connection – they will meet that other group of 2-3 people with similar time to play.. and get to know each other.
The better the opportunity for people to connect – the more avenues they have to step out of their bubbles to get to know each other – the better your community will be – and the more people that gain friendships in game… the less likely they are to quit or jump ship for anything less than catastrophic real life reasons (loss of income, computer, or other things) because people are social.
@Del
You ignore the initial version of the honor system, the underlying reward mechanic for Battlegrounds, was horribly broken. That the stories of the people committing to patently unhealthy amounts of time in-game which were not only true, but sadly almost the norm at the top levels showed Blizzard that the system they put in was flawed. In one infamous rant from one of the chief PvPers on the server I was on “Nobody PvPs for fun” which is a rather illuminating, if twisted, view on the inside of those High Warlord farming groups (this was uttered when one of their team decided he was sick of PvP and de-ranked himself back when that was possible). They did fix the system for BC to their credit, but by the time BC came out the “I need 39 other people to advance” had been at least marginally corrected already. Today, there’s a dizzying number of ways to advance, so you are 100% right about the present state of the game. Original WoW that was wholly untrue of.
I think you’re misreading numbers on Battle.net. EQ never had 2.1 million subscribers, and their servers would have likely melted if 400,000 people logged on at once. Their peak subscriber base was about 550,000 (based on mmogchart.com’s numbers). Subscriber and Concurrent Connection are different. Since they’re one of the few to publish the concurrency numbers, Eve Online has about 400,000 accounts with a peak concurrency of about 50k. I’d venture EQs numbers were similar in its heyday. In otherwords, at best a quarter of the people on Battle.net.
That’s almost a pointless tangent though, since Battle.net was significant because it kept people in touch with the Blizzard brand. There’s a reason they’re huge in Korea and B.net is a big part of that. That’s community, and WoW was a cash-in on that. Your postulate could be correct, but it could also be horribly flawed (I know many people who said that before playing, and now go “it’s a pittance compared to the time I play”). Neither of us can prove one way or the other, so we’ll say “Battle.net didn’t hurt” as I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
Voice comms integrated into the game are a mixed bag. WoW and Eve and assorted SOE games do it and nobody uses it as one of the chief advantages to Vent/TS is that they’re external to the game. If the game crashes, you can let people know still. Not so much with in-built VoIP. Maybe it’d be different if it started off rather than being added in later as is usually the norm. What might be better would be to integrate your client with them…but that’s what a community person on the design team could suggest while most coders will go “we can implement that!” and, as you say, have nobody use it.
I think we fundamentally agree on the point that if you want a game that has any social aspect at all to it, you must provide the community tools to make the connections that make the game meaningful to them. A community is really the chief among the nebulous factors that become the difference between a blockbuster and a dud. A good community can make a dreadful game bearable, an ok game good and a great game into it’s own market force.
@Krin
quote:
“You ignore the initial version of the honor system, the underlying reward mechanic for Battlegrounds, was horribly broken. That the stories of the people committing to patently unhealthy amounts of time in-game which were not only true, but sadly almost the norm at the top levels showed Blizzard that the system they put in was flawed. In one infamous rant from one of the chief PvPers on the server I was on “Nobody PvPs for fun” which is a rather illuminating, if twisted, view on the inside of those High Warlord farming groups”
There is a reason that I ignored that however – many (myself among them) realized that farming for high warlord was something that we could not do within our playtime (i.e. not online all the time)
I turn the argument around and would say that you are ignoring:
* large endgame group dungeons which had upgrades and a path (Scholo, Stratholme, BRD, LBRS, all 5 manable – with the next step being UBRS – for example – later Dire Maul) these places were not the current go in and be done in an hour dungeons… a *full* clear of BRD for example could take a 5 man group a full day if done in one run. However they were designed so that you could go in and do ‘sections’ of the larger dungeons – even if they were not ‘winged’ – Strat live, undead. BRD w/key once you had it.
* PvP up to rank 9-10 was doable without having to grind, and achievable for the average person. There is a reason why most people from that time have a ‘Knight or Blood Guard’ title. Yes the upper ranks were hard… but that also meant a General or Warlord were special – at least until the groups started to game the system (which admittedly happened very quickly).
* Social advancement that came from just starting an alt or exploring.
* The massive (yes – it is and was) amount of lore and fun items you could discover by running around and just reading books, and other items found around the world.
But that’s the endgame.
Ghostcrawler recently made a statment (back in early December I think?) about how if you were already level 80 you were probably hardcore.
Ohhhh how the boards went up in flames and howls of anguish as those who even thought they were ‘casual’ were offended at the callout.
We don’t get to see the numbers – we didn’t in EQ – we don’t in WoW – perhaps Tweety knows the DAoC numbers and (might) be able to tell us…
How many people play endgame – remember you are in the raid/high warlord school of thought – but when Bliz admits that 3 months after release a very small % of their playerbase is even 80 – you might understand why they are lowering the hardness curve.
I know a couple of people like that – a buddy of mine – keeps his sub even though he is lvl 73 on his main – spends most of his time on one alt or another and is very happy that way.
Those of us who consume the content the fastest, the ones that are posting on message boards and blogs… we are not the casual majority that makes up the bulk of the subscriber base or the community.
I think the better question is how do you reach out to *those* people without frightening them away when the rabid board dogs come out at the first whif of a newb asking a question?
I think at it’s heart what a company wants from CM’s is someone to deal with the great noise of the playerbase screaming at the walls of the castle…
What the players most often want boils down to two things I think:
* An advocate for the players
* Someone to actually acknowledge that they are being heard.
The first usually is opposed to the role of most CM teams as they are the voice and advocate for the company – which leads to frustration on behalf of the playerbase.
The second is a hard one to achieve – as your fanbase grows – it’s impossible to listen to everyone – at the same time people never stop demanding verification of their thoughts and ideas…. thus the call for ‘BLUE RESPOND’
A great CM is able to weed through the posts and at least make sure issues which are reposed on over and over get at least a ‘nod’ that the company is aware.
This is just like Office Space.
——
So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and
you bring them down to the software engineers?
TOM
That, that’s right.
BOB PORTER
Well, then I gotta ask, then why can’t the customers just take the
specifications directly to the software people, huh?
——
Even when you discount the need for building a community (which is foolish, as the other posters agree), a person knowledgeable about both groups that facilitates communication between those groups is incredibly valuable. A good community liaison can filter the player input and find the pressing issues, prioritize them and watch development to make sure they are addressed. At the same time, they can translate complex software engineering tasks into responses a clamoring public can digest.
If game companies can’t grasp these ideas, it’s no wonder that companies are building baseball diamonds in cornfields and no one is showing up to play.
–”So basically, if you did not have a circle of friends that encompassed 39 other people with the same schedule for multiple hour blocks, this was your fault?”
I don’t think what I claimed was foolish at all, while the original claim is refuted by Blizzards own actions throughout the history of their game.
I stand by my claim that it was a choice to move on to that content or not. In the original design, for many people, it was an impossible choice. It became a choice of their guild of RL friends consisting of 20-30 people all of variable levels and skill, or moving on to a guild that leveled and played at the pace they were looking for. These people felt they did not have a choice, and I would have to agree in a way.
It sounds like your guild and my guild were in the exact same position during that time and pre-BC my guild had cleared much of AQ 40. Your guild could have raided successfully, but you can’t just sit around and hope you find enough people on at the same time to raid. Someone would have to step up as a raid leader, talk a core group of people into being the tank, healing and DPS leaders willing to help people understand their role in any given raid. None of the beginning raid content required 40 people to succeed. My guild beat most of it with around 30 on average some of which were simply not very good players. Many people had the mentality that all the raid content was going to be really hard and it wasn’t. My guild beat Onyxia on their very first attempt with only 35 people. It required more advanced play and more attention than the 5 man content but it was a lot more accessible than people think.
–“…sounds eerily similar to “work” for many people and not a “game.”
A lot of things worth doing sound eerily similar to work. Most hobbies readily fit into that category once you’ve been doing them long enough I think.
And so this worthy catalyst for discussion about the very odd, malleable and largely self-defined position of “Community Management” has descended into a WoW thread. I’ll ignore that bit and return to the original topic.
The linked discussions certainly resonate, and although I’ve not been a CM myself, I know a great many of them. Each one different, blending their own particular corporate cultures and imposed limitations with personal style and ability (or lack thereof). I am very curious to see where the profession stands five years from now.
Community Management,has certainly changed, subtly, in the last five, but still rests, amorphous and undefined, on the periphery of career paths in the gaming industry.
We shall see.
#
Thanks for the article and the links. I’d not seen this particular round of discussions yet, and it’s about time I emerged from my little cave to listen.
Brasse
[...] have been a few very interesting blog posts in the last weeks after a IGN Vault post by our estimated former colleague Richard Weil [...]
[...] have been a few very interesting blog postsin the last weeks after a IGN Vault post by our estimated former colleague Richard Weil [...]