I have mentioned before that one of the obvious truths of community management is respecting your players.
The fact that it has to be said is a little disgusting.
Don’t get me wrong, at industry events I was just as likely as the next CM to sit around participating in the Crazy Player Olympics. (The judges once gave me all 10s for the guy who flew out to Virginia from Illinois to demand his lost hammer back.) But the nuts are the outliers. If you do not genuinely care for your players, and think of them with respect, you are going to burn out like a White House press secretary.
Having respect for players means caring about the things that are important to them, both in the game itself and with the influences that shape their response to your product. So, in a traditional sword and board game, you should both care about the game, and at least respect the RPG mentality that leads people to your game.
That’s not to say that you have to have written modules in your bedroom in order to properly manage an old school MMO… but it helps.
I was thinking about that while I was reading a feedback thread on my current game (Quick Hit Football). As a whole, this community is a little different from the ones I’m used to. Certainly much is the same – the guy who uses no paragraph breaks, the guy who doesn’t get out much, the guy with a penchant for twelve paragraph essays on game balance predicated on fundamental misunderstandings of the product’s design. There is also the guy driving the welcome wagon, the guy writing documentation better than we do, and the disturbingly brilliant tactician we’ll probably hire someday if we ever get out of beta.
But this is different for me. For one thing, they ARE almost all guys. There are a couple of women, and as with fantasy games, the ones most vociferously claiming the girl parts are the least likely to have them. Still, this is an overwhelmingly male crew.
And for another thing, it’s a sports game. The characters on the forum are the same, but the story is very different. I’ve always enjoyed watching football, especially the Redskins and the Hokies, but I love the beer and the pennant waving as much as I love the sport. Sometimes they throw the ball, sometimes they run the ball, and for special occasions, they kick the ball. Then we have beer. After the beer comes either a two hour wait in line for the sole functional ladies room at the stadium or a cheerful invasion of the men’s room, the latter option being much preferred by me. But I digress.
The aforementioned state of my knowledge is crumbling beneath the onslaught of my players. I haven’t learned much football to be honest, but I have learned that football is much more like chess than I’d realized. Hairy, sweaty chess. There are a finite number of opening moves, but the number of permutations is so near as to endless that it’s astounding.
I took this job because I thought the product was worth believing in, and because people are pretty much people no matter what the topic is. But having deep, sincere respect for what it is that my players love is going to fuel me for the long haul.
“So, in a traditional sword and board game, you should both care about the game, and at least respect the RPG mentality that leads people to your game.”
Years and years ago (okay, 1993) when I briefly worked for TSR UK, the general manager there hated and despised (pretty much his words) the tabletop gaming community. Granted by then TSR UK was just a distribution/translation arm and didn’t make modules or anything anymore, but still. It was as jarring back then as it is now.
You don’t have to play the stuff and you don’t necessarily have to love the stuff, but it sure helps not to despise your clients/community.
Don’t ever lose that fundamental willingness to respect that makes you good at what you do.
This is why I feel Mythic has lost such a valuable “asset” (and I do apologize for referring to you as such, as well as bringing up Mythic). While you are certainly full of your share of piss and vinegar, you actually care about what you do and how you do it.
I’m sure having been on the other side of the fence as an MMO player, with your own share of concerns and problems that you wanted addressing, fuels your desire to simply do what you need to do to be the best CM possible. I know I sure appreciated your candor during the DAoC heyday, as well as when WAR was in its infancy. Of course, I also appreciated your and Lum’s vitriol before even that.
This new project/team you’re on sure has gained someone valuable, and I hope they realize that.
~MikeR.
Does it make it more interesting because of the real application of the discussions instead of fantasy? I mean your players could cite last night’s game, whereas Ghostcrawler could never cite a murloc.
Does that like raise the intelligence level, dude?
Snicker. Dude, I am not touching that with a forty foot pole. Another key to community success is spotting traps before you step on ‘em.
By the way, I do a bad job thanking people for saying nice things. I’m much more comfortable with… the other way around. But thanks to the people who talk sweet to me.
I work in a large bookshop. Any day of the week you can hear booksellers talking about customers as if they genuinely hate them. There are exceptions, but mostly it’s “them against us”.
Before I became a bookseller I worked for a few years in telecommunications, mostly in customer service. There, too, the customer was generally seen as the enemy.
While some customers would indeed try the patience of the proverbial saint, I completely agree that if you’ve decided to take the customer service shilling it really is your responsibility to show the customer respect. Anything less is unprofessional.
If you can manage empathy too then you might even have a vocation.
Well one never knows what good, safe answers they will get from asking with the dangerous alphabet, and I know you’re pro anyway. =D
It’s not just community management. I don’t believe anyone should be working in this industry if they don’t respect the players.
I’ve been in meetings where an external partner basically said that the potential players of a game were morons. This attitude informed their entire approach to the game’s design.
Lack of respect for players is how shovelware gets made.
Respect is not given, it is earned. It can also be very easily lost after having previously been so hard fought for and earned. Those truths are not limited to the gaming community. Those truths are applicable to every aspect of customer service, be it technical, retail, whatever.
So many customer support organizations totally blow. And I’m talking both internal support organizations, as well as external ‘customer facing’ organizations. I work for one of the largest companies in the world. Their internal support system is worse than the mom-n-pop fly by the seat of everyone’s pants computer store I worked for in the early 80′s.
The support axiom for today seems to be Customer Disservice: because we’re not satisfied, until you’re not satisfied. I’ll admit that’s not original, but it’s very true for far too many service and support organizations.
Tom
This is why I think it would be best to have two separate customer service teams. One team is the Good Cops, the team that helps customers with problems, the first string that gets to always be helpful and kind. They never have to get their hands dirty, because that’s what the other team is for. The Bad Cops are the ones that bring down the banhammer, and do the dirty work needed to keep a game running smoothly.
Most importantly, other than the minimal contact required to pass off cases back and forth, these two teams do not have a common culture within the company. They’re kept separate, so that the Bad Cops can feel free to look at the customers as the enemy without polluting the Good Cops with that attitude. This setup has the additional advantage of having somewhere for your more bitter customer service staff to go if things are getting ugly.
It’s not a very refined idea, but one that I think has some potential.
TPR: That’s one of those ideas that makes a girl go “Hell, that might work!” until she sits up and goes, “OH GOD NO.”
Dirty work – aside from banning – involves saying no to angry people. Angry people who, if handled well, will stop being angry people and will speak well of your game in public. If they remain angry, they will speak ill of your game in public. Saying no with humor, grace, affection, and genuine regret is not a task for a embittered and burned out hulk of a CSR.
And giving one team all the hard jobs that involve dealing with customers at their worst means that team will burn out in days, not the usual months. Being able to make someone happy is practically the only reward the job HAS.
[...] Respecting your Players at the excellent gaming blog “Eating Bees”. (Yeah, I sometimes wish the Bar would let me name a legal blog something really cool… ain’t gonna happen though). My favorite quote from this insightful article is ” I took this job because I thought the product was worth believing in, and because people are pretty much people no matter what the topic is. But having deep, sincere respect for what it is that my players love is going to fuel me for the long haul.” It’s a reminder there are, and will always be, a lot of developers, moderators, and administrators in the video-game and online game business who treat it as more evangelism than simply business. Thanks to them! [...]
You know, this carries over to other mediums as well,
The most notable example of which I can think of would be the movie “Quantum of Solace” (By the way, whomever thought that name up deserves to be tarred, feathered, then slow roasted over a chemical fire).
The director of the movie DIDN’T LIKE Bond movies. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the movie went over like Mission Impossible, in the James Bond universe ( /gag )
“the guy writing documentation better than we do”
There can be many different red flags but I believe that this is one. When players routinely write better documentation than the game creators/game company, it is a dangerous situation.
It is one thing to talk about caring for the customer; it is another to put it into action. If a company actually and truly cares about the customer the game documentation should not lag far behind the reality of the game patches or mods.
Lets face it, how would we all feel about an auto manufacturer if the car manual said the gas tank fill was in the center of the back and the actual gas gauge in the dash had a little arrow that said the fill was on the right, but when you drove into the gas station, after much searching, you found the gas cap was on the left rear of the car? Then when you inquire at the dealer you are informed that no one has gotten around to sorting all that out because everyone is just too busy on other more important projects.
While I have never seen an auto company that poorly managed I have seen game companies that though nothing of documentation that was so out of date it described a game that did not actually exist. (I wont mention the name.) It actually sounds like many game companies, which is very unfortunate.
I am not saying that your company fails the test and player documentation being very slightly better than the official documentation is completely acceptable. But it is still a red flag that needs to be closely watched.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, John… but I am saying that every job I’ve ever had, every game I ever consulted on, and every game I’ve ever played have seen the players writing better documentation than the devs.
Furthermore, every program I’ve ever used, every tool I ever downloaded, and every plug in I ever installed had the most useful information on third party sites.
So if it’s a red flag, the entire software industry is flying it.
If I had to guess as to why, it’d be that the company is writing documentation based on their intention at the point of creation. Users write documentation with no information besides what is right in front of them.
You are totally correct and I am sorry that I was not clearer.
Player generated Documentation that is slightly ahead of the companies or player generated documentation that expands on what the company published or player information that dramatically surpasses the companies guides but fills a gap that was not intended to be addressed by the game company, like Allakhazam’s game information as an example, is not really what I was meaning.
There are many users that publish game information that far surpass what a game company ever intended to publish, and that is actually a great thing.
But the bad side: I know a game company that has guides that still discuss character abilities that had been removed many years ago. While game changes are implemented monthly, large parts of the game information on the game companies own web site has not been updated for well over 5 years. It had always really been that way, even shortly after launch of the game, though it was not as noticeable long, long ago. For players to get accurate information concerning how the game works, they need to look to third party sites rather than trust the game sites information.
An example of good: I was surprised at WoW when they came out with a change/patch to part of the game. I read the patch notes and wanted to compare the old system to what the new patch notes described so I went to the WoW game web page to look for the old information, thinking that it would take a while for the patch notes to hit the game guides, and surprisingly the game guides had been updated before the game servers were even back online from the patch that was being installed.
Out of curiosity I searched through many parts of the WoW game www site looking for information from the patch that had ‘not’ been updated on the web page and I did not find any. I am sure that there was probably something that had not been updated that I missed, but everything that I looked at had been updated to reflect the current status of the game, and it was published on the web site before the patch had finished going live.
At WoW there are many player sites that far surpass what Blizzard intended and I do not consider that a red flag at all. Player generated information often surpasses the general information a game company publishes.
This seems to be a sore spot with me and I took your reference and went off on a rant with it, sorry.