Eating Bees

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.

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Any time you change a post, a FAQ, an announcement, or a story for ANY REASON besides a very minor typo, you must put “EDITED mm/dd/yy HH:MM.”

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I love automatic trackbacks. I’m always interested in seeing what people are saying… or not saying. One example of the latter, my little reference-laden post about certain parties and their piss poor timing? That little post is one of the most heavily hit features on this entire blog. And yet? Almost no one is discussing it. They’re just passing the link to their friends, in emails or IMs or other means not trackable, saying “READ THIS.” And yet I’ve got almost no email on it, or any crankiness in the comments. I don’t preapprove my comments, and have deleted three comments in the history of this blog, so it’s not like I’m editing out the hate or anything. I have theories about the reasons for this strange aberration, but no evidence.

But as usual, I digress. I followed one of the trackbacks (in the Quid Pro Quo thread) to a blog called Geek Critique, where a fellow named Rob disagreed with some of my text. I nodded a bit while I was reading, seeing where he was coming from. One of his points, though, made me realize that I hadn’t fully explained my reasoning, and so I started to post a reply. The longer I typed, the more I realized that my response was covering a topic that is actually rather central to the way I conceive of true community work.

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One of the things that makes reading this blog full of hot air and profanity worth your bookmark (I think) is that I’ve done time on both sides of the fence. After my last post, where I complained about what a reporter owes the reader, it occurred to me that any reader could have written such a screed. So, today’s will be something any CM could write. What does a reporter owe a studio after drinking the free booze and hauling away t-shirts in the free tote bag?

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It seems like the Age of Conan community is more… agitated… than Hellgate: London’s community.

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