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.

I’m working on a couple of projects now where we’re struggling with the best way to handle user feedback and prioritize it correctly. I’m always insanely nervous at this point, because I know that what I lay down as policy now will live for freaking EVER.

And dear god, I wish there was some research to rely on. Right now, my experience tells me that answering posts with links to a knowledge base is the fastest way to train people to use the KB. Great. Duh. The real sticky bit is how do I train people to use a bug reporting tool. Personal response is my most potent weapon, and as with all potent weapons, I’ve become overly reliant on it as a technique.

But I don’t want to personally respond to the bugs I get through the tool, because personal response is simply not sustainable with a game that has any level of success. If I respond now while it’s possible, it will train them to use the tool, and I will totally fail to manage their post-launch expectations. What is a sufficient reward for using an automated tool? It’s not an automated response, that’s for damn sure. I’d like to see a study comparing usage rates of bug tools with different kinds of “rewards,” so I can set a policy and move on with my life.

Anyway. This has been an update from the Bureau of “This Blog Isn’t Really Abandoned.”

A slightly more nuanced take on the general topic, if not specifics, appeared ten written drafts later at MMORPG.com. Gonna be my final word for awhile. My feelings are… mixed.

As soon as preorders are available for the tell all, I’ll let you know.

But I don’t just navel gaze, no sir. I’m still working on the football game. To that end!

If you are/were a Steelers fan, and if you ever wanted to ask Coach Cowher anything, my Quick Hit friends are doing a podcast with the illustrious coach as a guest. If you want to submit a question, send it to askacoach AT quickhit DOT com. Send your real name and address too – the chosen questions will get the asker’s name read out on the air, and you’ll get  a thank you t-shirt. The contact information will go on a spam list over my dead body, so please send your real address.

Finally, if any of my team leads or guild leaders are reading this, and you think your various groups of players would like to take a break from elves and beta test a browser based football game, give me a buzz, please. Each “game” is 20 minutes long, maybe a half hour with the various extra bits.

Thanks!

I have a column series at MMORPG.com called the MMO Underbelly, where I try to show the seamy, dirty, behind the scenes stuff of MMO production. The latest one is here, and you can find links to all the older ones under my cartoon picture. I love that picture, by the way. That’s how I wear my hair as a civilian, yes, and go ahead, make fun.

No, I do not use this series to discuss the incipient alcoholism of my nearest and dearest.

Apropos of booze, and to prevent this post from being total pimpage, I was going to do a piece on the Examiner about my favorite E3 memories in honor of the show this week. I pulled up all of my photos of the event from 2002 to 2006, and discovered that they featured:

- Setting up the booth with drinks in hand;

- Hanging out in the booth, near the booth, and the floor beside the booth with various disreputable friends from the gaming media and the volunteer program;

- Dozens of identical pictures of my space in the booth doing the same thing in 15 minute chunks for three straight days for five straight years;

- People making horrible faces near booths for games we all knew weren’t going to launch that year regardless of the date printed on the banner overhead;

- People staring, slackjawed and drooling, at demos for games that I cannot remember;

- Four hundred pictures of myself standing under a replica Stargate, and six million shots of Richard Dean Anderson who was there that one year pimping a Stargate game that never launched and was standing THREE FEET FROM ME, AIEEEEEEEE;

- Several dozen pictures of booth babe cleavage from a scavenger hunt where bonus prizes were given out for nipple shots;

- A lot of pictures of the coworker I had a crush on and eventually married;

- Sitting at various restaurants with drinks in hand, getting steadily more crocked because when you sit at a table with Scott Jennings and his Food Service Curse, you are 100% certain to not get your meal until everyone else in the restaurant  is onto dessert. And booze on an empty stomach following a twelve hour working day is a recipe for Fun Times;

- The drunker members of the family getting their hotel names and room numbers written on their hands in case the taxi driver six hours later can’t understand Drunken Babbling;

- Various industry notables giving the camera the middle finger or even more obscene gestures;

- Blurry photos taken at some of the seedier after-hours destinations in the City of Angels;

In other words, after five years of doing E3 I have nothing that can be used at the Examiner.

But back to the columns: There is another site that will host ramblings of mine, assuming I ever get myself together and send in the forms, and that one will focus on community issues. And finally, I have a new game-related gig that I’m really excited about, and I’ll be posting soon. Anyway, that’s why I’m not updating much…

I do not actually have swine flu.

I have some other kind of flu. The kind where you don’t want the details. Really.

Actually, it’s more like past tense, now. I’m upright, writing for some deadlines. I’m just not hungry and will never be hungry again.

Meanwhile, enjoy the game.

Basically… the kids are all right.

There was an article in one of the major dailies on how most people are actually fine, but all the gloom and doom in the papers is (are?) making us pull in our belts. That seems proven out by the people who say they’re fine, but are still cutting out discretionary spending items. I mean, 10% of the people self-described as “fine” are still not going out to dinner.

Thanks for your contributions, guys. I worked some of your themes into the article itself, so as usual, you guys make me sound smarter…

Okay, one little comment.

Do you know how depressing it is to listen to a bunch of guys in their mid-thirties talking about how they’re pretty sure they’re next on the layoff merry go round, because they simply can’t sleep at the office and still function the next day? You don’t? Go work at a game company.

The elderly beagle you’re helping to support expressed her appreciation by horking up a wad of hair and carpet fuzz in the fireplace this morning. I do not know what this means.

*I* thank you, and in words, not disgusting fluids.

The latest post is on Darkfall, and what mass market MMO players have to mentally do in order to have a prayer of enjoying it. I am still not entirely convinced. I really enjoyed DAOC PVP, and being able to enter that kind of environment on *my* terms. Having that choice taken from me (or rather, having my last free choice being the one to log in to that environment at all) just doesn’t appeal. The people who want to love Darkfall loved the original UO… but I think most of the people who tried it were entirely turned off by the experience. The Ultima series had a tremendous following when UO launched. It could have been a heck of a lot bigger than it was. And I honestly don’t think UO would still be alive today with so many dedicated fans if the team HADN’T gone carebear.

But that’s just me. YMMV.

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.

And with that, I would like to tell you guys where I’m ranting at this time.

One of “my” guild leaders from back in the Camelot days has been a pain in my ass and a thorn in my side for so long now that he’s practically a friend. One day, he pinged me and said, hey, you know what the world needs? A forum that is totally unmoderated.

Put down the bong, was my translated reply.

Fast forward several days, and I was on board to wrangle editorial content, and rant. What can I say – he’s got a plan, and even though it’s not foolproof (the internet is really good at inventing bigger fools), I do believe that his plan *can* work – and if anyone can pull it off, I think he can. Also, while there isn’t going to be traditional moderation, we can and will delete spam and kiddie porn and the like. But the intent is unmoderated, occasionally foulmouthed, always interesting discussion of games and the people who play them.

Think about it this way – what plan has a greater chance of success:

1) Attempting to compete with the market leader on its own terms, or

2) Identifying an underserved niche and owning it?

I realize that if you are the head of a major gaming conglomerate or functionally illiterate, you cannot help but choose the first option. I know. I also know that I have been watching a lot of people leave a lot of niche money on the table going after the mass market. A comfortable living can be had with the niches. There are plenty of forums for pontification, plenty with overwhelmed staffs of moderators trying to hold back the floods, and these days plenty of official forums. I think this forum will serve a pretty big niche (normal players, not analysts, savage but not automatically on the attack), and is a pretty interesting experiment. I admit, I was starting to get a little calcified in my thinking, and if I’m gonna try something new, this is definitely new.

Side note: I am working in a number of different niches right now, ranging from straight reporting to ghostwriting to editorial. I hope to be able to show off the links to some other projects really soon. Unmoderated, however, will be the only place you’ll find foul mouthed ranting. I tune my voice for every outlet, which sometimes confuses people who aren’t writers.

I have to admit… I missed foul mouthed ranting. By the way, if you have any good rants, confessions, or something you need discussed in an environment where nearly anything goes, but the other members are more players than game analysts,  sign up at Unmoderated.info and submit your screeds. I’m not just a ranter, I’m also the editor.

What’s funny is that the last one I did that went there, I’d written especially for them, but instead they did a… hasty… rephrasing. This one, I wrote for the GamerDNA audience, and wasn’t trying to draw any real conclusions, just point up some nifty patterns… and here it is under my name. But hey, Gamasutra. So I’m cool.