…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.
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.
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.
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.
1. The work you do is on the game, not endless rounds of “executive demos” and “press event demos” and other assorted Potemkin villages that ultimately accomplish nothing but make the team feel like hamsters running on a wheel.
2. Pre-launch expectations aren’t skyhigh (that is to say… delusional).
3. There are few conventions/features that you have to include lest everyone cry, “why,” and die.
4. There’s an assumption among users that “launch” is not the starting point, but rather a milestone on a multi-year plan.
“We’re community – we SURF the catastrophe curve.”
I started to write this somewhat wonky piece for this blog, and realized that I had a column due at MMORPG. That happens to me a lot, lately. I got the kernel of the piece – that bit of research – from my friend and former minion Jeremy, who also wrote a blog post about it.
The article ended up being a little different from my intended writeup, because the audience there is more general than the seven of you, who read, presumably, because you care about community stuff.
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In my never ending quest to make enough money to pay for dog kibble without having to relocate, I do a lot of different things. In addition to talking, writing, and consulting about video games, I also ghostwrite, proofread, and edit. I clean up resumes and write sample cover letters. I tutor. Copywriting is on the menu. Customer service is available. A friend of mine swears that my time beating on incomplete patch notes written in Swahili makes me a technical writer. In short, if the written word is involved, I’ll do it. The one thing I won’t do is lie, unless the result is clearly labeled fiction or satire.
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There’s a lot I can’t say about Mythic right now. But there are three points I can make, in direct defiance of silly children on message boards:
One, the people who lost their jobs today were not just a few extra QA folks, or a couple world devs hired on for the big push to completion. The pile included some very senior people, people who expected to stay at Mythic until they retired.
Two, many of them were good people who deserved the loyalty they’d been told so much about. If anyone reading this happens to be hiring (people still do that, right?), please give me a buzz.
Three, um, and I say this with love, but the mouth breathing troglodytes who post on boards in between bouts of masturbation and nosepicking should probably shut the hell up about how this was EA’s evildoing at work. I don’t know firsthand what EA was like before they bought out Mythic, but if “acting like adults” and “allowing the studio to set their own expectations” and “paying a decent wage by the standards of the game industry” are bad things, I don’t want to work for a good company again.
One of the reddest flags in the game industry is hearing that an experienced professional didn’t get a gig because he didn’t demonstrate any “passion” during the interview. There’s only two situations in which this is okay. Don’t worry, I’ll get to them. Eventually.
Here’s the deal for everyone who was born yesterday: “Passion” in a job description is almost always code for “the hours are long and we’re not planning to pay you enough to live on, so if you’re not starry eyed with the wonder of finally making it into the industry, you’ll burn out in two months.”
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