Archive for the 'Meta Community' category

Questions and Answers

Apr 28 2010 Published by under Meta Community, Related To Work I'm Doing

No, it’s not a Q&A, it’s my “managing questions” post at Modsquad.

It’s kind of funny – I let this blog go dark/dim because I felt like I’d said everything I could possibly say on the topic of community. Also, the MMO Underbelly series at MMORPG.com was completely sucking me dry.

But the Obvious Truth well apparently never runs dry. And I’m getting pings (but no jobs for remote employees, grumble crank moan) on how these little posts at Modsquad are really helpful to people doing strategic planning.

Well, yes. That’s why you hire a community director before you get into beta, after all.

Rant on: After ten years, the idea still persists that we’re forum mods – widgets you hire when you have customers and not before. You CAN hire community people that way, but you should call them “moderators.” Or you can hire someone whose job it is to babysit Facebook and Twitter, and that’s a useful job too, but that’s not a community director either. That’s a social media moderator.

Community directors DO strategic planning, tool development, customer research, and contribute to the design process both in terms of product development and marketing. We’re the glue holding the team together.

7 responses so far

Get Out of the Cubicle

Apr 21 2010 Published by under Meta Community, Related To Work I'm Doing

Today’s post over at ModSquad: Physical World Bonds

This is another dead horse I keep flogging, even though most companies do events in the physical world. My complaint is that the reasons for those events are usually aimed at marketing, aka sales and promotion.

I want to see more events aimed at community, aka retention. The motivation matters.

12 responses so far

I Made This One Funnier

Apr 07 2010 Published by under Meta Community, Related To Work I'm Doing

I did sound kind of formal and nervous in the first one, didn’t I. So I reverted to my actual tone in this one. The seven of you give awesome feedback ;)

It was hard to not go off on a tangent about leaderboards, and how the original Camelot leaderboards were pretty much entirely Scott Jennings going rogue and me going, “Ooh! Ooh! What about this?” and Scott saying please stop touching stuff on my desk.

Also, we crashed the game servers because we were complete effing n00bs.

But we had fun.

That last point about designing/building a back door into the system from the start… there aren’t many things in my career that I’d like to do over, believe it or not, but that point I’d take back in time and scream DO THIS! at myself at three different jobs.

7 responses so far

Respecting Your Players

Jan 18 2010 Published by under Meta Community

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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16 responses so far

Feedback Column at MMORPG.com

Jul 23 2009 Published by under Just Thinking, Links Of Interest, Meta Community, Related To Work I'm Doing

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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33 responses so far

Go, Read This, We'll Talk About Afterwards

Mar 13 2009 Published by under Links Of Interest, Meta Community

My old friend Rich spoke here: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/962/962114p1.html

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20 responses so far

PSA: Editing The Internet

Sep 19 2008 Published by under Meta Community

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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9 responses so far

What I Did For Love

Sep 15 2008 Published by under Meta Community

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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14 responses so far

Quid Pro Quo

Sep 08 2008 Published by under Meta Community

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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13 responses so far

Expectations

Aug 21 2008 Published by under Meta Community

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

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50 responses so far

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