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?

- SAY SOMETHING. I never pushed my reporters to say something in particular. Oh, sure, I usually had suggestions for some self-serving fluff if anyone tagged me on a slow news day, but I rarely had an agenda.

That’s because it doesn’t matter a damn what you say as long as you say something. Whatever you post about my product, assuming that you checked your facts and that my product doesn’t suck, helps me in the long run. Really. Anything you want. There are only two ways for a reporter to get on my shit list when I’m wearing my CM hat – one, lie. Two, drink my booze and wear my t-shirt without giving me so much as a paragraph on your blog. That’s a one strike and you’re out offense, there. If you come to my press event and you haven’t written up something related to my product within a week, you’re not invited to the next one.

- SAY A LOT IF YOUR INVITATION COST ME SOMETHING. For better or for worse, few studios recognize the power of the small website, the fansite, the struggling comic, or the ranter. If I had to cash in chips to get you invited to the press event, you need to do more than a half-assed paragraph underneath your machima porn expose. I’m in the trenches arguing that you have more value than PC Gamer, so don’t make me look like a schmuck by “forgetting” to post anything substantial.

- DON’T REPRINT THE HANDOUT. Some professionals may disagree with me here, and their logic is sound enough. If twenty fansites just reprint the handout, well, that’s a pretty sweet job of saturating everyone with our talking points, right? If everyone says it, the intended playerbase will believe it.

However, that’s the problem. The handout is often written by someone who isn’t playing, someone who trusts the producer to not exaggerate, someone who wants to steer the development agenda by publicizing unfinished features, or all of the above. If twenty fansites print the handout verbatim, every item becomes received truth to the players and causes the CM no end of aggravation. Also, your particular readers will bitch that you only posted what everyone else did, and you’ll be back to me in hours asking me for exclusives that I can’t give you. Better for all of us if you use the handout as a starting point, colored in with investigation, questions, and experience.

- REMEMBER THE PURPOSE OF THE EVENT. Marketing’s budget paid for everything from your pleather dice bag to the steak you had for dinner. The purpose of the event was therefore to market a product. If your precious ethics prevent you from giving the studio publicity as a result of the event, you had no business eating the steak.

The actual event is benign, because MMOs are difficult to promote to people who have not had hands on experience with the actual game. It benefits everyone to get you in a room for a full day or two playing the game and talking to more than one project lead. The steak is designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy towards the product, but I believe it is possible to eat the steak and write fairly, even critically, about the game… assuming you had your ass in the seat, watching the demos, taking notes, asking questions, and shooting video instead of passed out drunk in your hotel room.

So, in short, if your ethics won’t allow you to write about a product after you’ve been wined and dined, don’t come to the event. And if you come to the event, come to all of it, not just the party.

Duh.

Anyone else want to chime in on what they expect from the press after an event?

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

I see two reasons.

Size: Lots more people playing AOC, and therefore lots more people threatening to quit/quitting/quitting and taking THEIR WHOLE GUILD WITH THEM. Volume counts for a lot, here, but I don’t think this is the main reason.

Expectations: HGL was always a little more niche-oriented than AOC. And HGL’s beta was rougher around the edges than AOC’s. When people expect a huge success and then find that they aren’t getting what was advertised, they are cranky.

Please note, HGL doesn’t have a word about their current troubles on their website. By troubles, I mean “lack of dev team.” Given that, you’d think that perhaps a note on the game’s website might be appropriate. But there’s not. Instead, new people come to the game every day. The existing customers are left scouring other news sites looking for information. Half of the players left to hang out at a rant site that sprung up from the fields of bitterness.

And yet those guys are still not as publicly bitter as the AOC players, who have a more complete and fully supported product.

I’ve been preaching the power of expectations for a long time now, and I still find myself startled at just how furious people get when their expectations are not met. The actual state of the game, and even the existence of the game’s company, are completely irrelevant to the size and tone of the reaction to perceived failings.

In other words, don’t leave your pregame community work in the hands of your marketing team, volunteer developers, and fate.

There’s an old joke that goes “For every time you have sex before you get married, put a jellybean in a jar. For every time you have sex after the wedding, take out a jellybean.” The punch line is that the jar will never be empty. That joke is so old that originally, you were supposed to put the jellybeans in the jar during your first year of marriage. But (as usual) I digress.

You could make the same “joke” with developers and how much they post before and after launch.

This is why my road rules for developing a community include the statement “Don’t post at all unless you are willing to commit to a post-launch posting schedule, and are willing to hold yourself to the same rules that apply to the community team.” That deceptively simple statement is short, but the execution with all its implications is a full time job requiring a professional (or a clever person trained and supported by a consultant).

It is so much a full time job that a certain drop off in posting occurs even with the professional community people, as other elements of the job (feedback, ombudsmanship, customer service problem resolution, patches, design meetings, and events) cut into time that used to be reserved for posting. But the difference between the community person’s drop off, and the rock star dev’s drop off, is the size of the Grand Canyon.

The timeline with amateurs looks like this:

1. John Developer, pure of heart and intention, makes a public “statement of intent” about his game. John is enthusiastic, and his typing is mostly free of spelling mistakes. His grammar is similar to that of Koko the Gorilla, but the enthusiasm makes his occasional incoherence easy to forgive.

2. No community professional is on the team as of yet. The other devs are either busy working, or experienced enough to know that posting in public is a trap, or both. John is also busy, but with no mate, no pets, and no other hobby, he posts before work, after work, and during lunch. John becomes the public voice of the product by default.

3. John generates a thousand paragraph essay on why the new game is awesome.

4. Players (whose current game of choice has gotten to step 25) post their adulation of John, and by extension, John’s project.

5. John is afloat in a sea of warm fuzzies for the first time in his life. He personally feels so good that he gets personal with his fans. He replies publicly, for the most part, but indulges in private messages with his most rabid fans. Particularly the females. At least he thinks they’re females.

6. He releases a barrage of posts responding to every topic related to the game. If anyone has a criticism, he promises (using the phrase “I promise” with abandon) that it will be addressed. He discusses systems not yet implemented.

7. Beta begins. A community manager named Ed is hired. Ed starts making a list of what was promised, and threatens John’s life if any more promises are made. John smiles at Ed, and says that Ed just doesn’t understand how special and unique the community is. John is certain that the players will understand if things don’t quite work out as planned.

8. John continues his prolific posting schedule. He is falling slightly behind in his regular work, but he finds time to address questions on every topic from the death penalty to crafting to armor customizing.

9. John realizes that deadlines are not suggestions, and skips checking the boards for a few hours. Exhausted after a long day, John goes home, hits the beta boards, and has a mild outburst towards the lone naysayer.

10. Ed tells John that this is not acceptable.

11. John is not listening. John’s ears are filled with the kudos from all of the people who have genuinely grown to love John. John is also basking in the light of the million flames directed at the lone naysayer.

12. Now emboldened by his obvious community wrangling GENIUS, John indulges in a stronger outburst towards a handful of people who are negative.

13. Ed and John wind up in the producer’s office. The producer is reluctant to crush John’s spirit. After all, John was there at the beginning! Ed realizes he is probably screwed, here.

14. John throws his first public tantrum at testers who were expressing concern with some unfinished elements of a product that is supposedly going live this quarter.

15. Ed presents the number of moderators he will need to cope with the way things are going. Ed is laughed at. (At this point, Ed’s future diverges – either he has the pull and the sense to get John muzzled, or he’s a wimp and decides to knock himself out working overtime, following the orders of people who don’t understand community, and cleaning up after John. Or he quits. We’ll assume for the rest of this post that Ed doesn’t have enough pull to make the pain stop, but for some reason needs to keep this job at any cost.)

16. John goes on a banning spree. People are removed from the boards simply for disagreeing, because at this point, ALL disagreement is proof of a lack of faith. All negativity, no matter how presented, must be silenced before anyone can agree. He convinces himself that he’s doing the right thing. He doesn’t just lock the threads, he deletes them. Leaving the threads might cause someone to think that the banned guy didn’t say anything terrible.

17. Launch day! John posts a heartfelt thank you to the community for all their efforts, and makes a final promise – he will continue posting at the same rate that he always has. Ed cries on the inside.

18. At the launch party, to which a number of the more ardent beta testers were invited, John meets up with one of the girls he’s been PMing for the last six months. The good news is that she’s an actual girl, with a vagina and everything. The bad news is that she’s built him up in her head to be a real swashbuckling hero capable of bringing her to peaks of ecstasy all night long, and faced with that expectation, John cannot actually perform at all.

19. She puts this bit of information into a PM to someone else. Within an hour it gets back to Ed. Ed laughs. On the outside.

20. In the excitement of launch week, meaning the twenty hour days fixing the bugs and exploits that were not reported, John neglects to post for two entire days.

21. John flames the crap out of the guy who posts “For shame, John, thought you were going to keep posting.”

22. Ed jumps in and explains what things are like behind the scenes, and the drama simmers down.

23. John flames the crap out of the person who lists out all of John’s promises and concludes that the finished game is batting .125 and that only if you count the “broken calendar” as the “robust raid scheduling system.”

24. Ed starts to post that those promises were made before Ed was hired, and were delusional even then. Ed hits the backspace key just in time. Ed gets drunk instead.

25. John responds to one description of a character development bug with “it’s working as intended.”

***

I will now ring down the curtain on that drama. Even if Ed is desperate to keep his job, so desperate that he will give any number of hairy, hairy people elaborate tongue baths, he will still be looking for an edged weapon after step 25. And even if he lives, John is not likely to post ever again – but he’ll swear until his dying day that he only stopped because Ed was unable to manage the community.

But if you’re still reading, I’d like to develop THE definitive drop off formula. And I need YOU.

Either post here, or email me (sanya AT brokentoys DOT org) the following data points:

- The name of the forum

- The name of the developer and his job/function/role at the company

- The number of posts a developer made to that forum in the six months prior to launch

- The number of posts that same developer (or that developer’s publicly designated replacement, and no, the community person is not the developer’s designated replacement) made in the six months post launch

- If the product is not yet launched, or if six months have not yet elapsed since its launch, be sure to note the beginning and ending dates of the period you’ve observed.

I will remove the names (I only want them for the purpose of verification), and post the results. I’m betting that the drop off rate is dramatic for all but the community pros – and again, some drop off is expected there. This isn’t intended to be a giant game of gotcha. This is just an attempt at working out a formula for gaming jellybeans.

What’s the difference between art and porn? Context.

I’m the main moderator for my company’s site. Since the product I’m promoting is “inclusive community” and not “a subscription,” my standards are a lot more relaxed than they would be on a game company’s forum, but a little stricter than they would be for my own.

I have to be stricter at work because the community is much larger and much less… shall we say, self-selecting. However, we’re targeting gamers of all stripes, and that means some of the content is going to be unsuitable for small children. And since we’re providing something less tangible than a game, there’s less of a target that I have to guard from guilt-by-association, or as I like to call it, “shit sticking to our fur.”

I allow cussing to a degree, and to that same degree I allow people to display themselves however they wish to display themselves. I tend to think that if someone acts like a misogynist homophobic jackass, it saves time for the rest of us. If you sanitize public discourse (and in “discourse” I include the bane of every mod’s existence, the signature file), you run the risk of allowing some scumbag to come across as a decent human being. Then an actual human being tangles with this piece of shit, and gets blindsided. Better to let the species of feces alert people to their existence by the smell alone. I also feel that sanding off the rough edges of the internet is a pointless task. Sometimes, people are going to offend other people, and a mod just has to say “Put on your big kid britches and cope.”

Obviously, the line is crossed when the festering genital sore starts attacking others. Then you swoop in and cauterize the wound. As I’ve said before, I don’t advocate thread removal under any circumstances. It gives rise to conspiracy theories and ultimately creates drama. But a simple post edit, along with a pithy explanatory note, does wonders. Serves notice to scum, reassures the decent people, etc. If you get to the thread late, and your other members have been a little too enthusiastic with the quote feature, sometimes in the interest of “not spending the entire damned afternoon cleaning the thread” you do have to shut it down. In that case, locking is the correct choice.

In fact, the only time I advocate outright deletion is for spammers. Everyone claims to hate spam, but there’s always that ONE POSTER in the thread who will click the spammer’s link, which rewards the spammer just enough to make him do it again. Only killing the thread before anyone clicks it will help.

But enough of my favorite problem. My current problem is Age of Conan.

I have nothing against boobies. HAVING boobies takes some of the fun out of it – you don’t hear fish getting all excited about water – but I appreciate them. I prefer boobies to bloodspatter. (Europe was a freakin’ revelation to me. Leipzig ‘06, the WAR booth got shut down for a brief period because the while the promotional video had been approved by the venue… the blood spattered ending wasn’t really visible until it was playing on a screen that was twenty feet tall. And blood was a no-no at a kid-friendly event. But outside my hotel room was a banner with twenty foot bare breasts, nipples the size of Volkswagons, and that was totally fine.)

AOC players are predictably uploading screenshots of their characters’ assets, which is acceptable by our terms of service. Players who upload standard stroke magazine material have been told they have to remove their images, as those pictures violate our TOS. This puts me in a bit of a pickle. I don’t happen to live in a country that has evolved enough to think that a violence fetish is more dangerous than a naked lady fetish, so I can’t just say “Free for all on the skin pics.”

So instead I’m going with “the difference between art and porn is context.” Believe me, this causes less trouble than my alternate justification. I’d really rather not get into a discussion of image copyright law with the citizens of virtual worlds.

This link amused me, particularly “What are some other things I should know?” I feel like this should be made into a pamphlet, and it should be provided to those new to MMOs in some sort of welcome basket, along with asbestos underpants and chicken nuggets. It was last edited on April 15, 1997. This tidbit was at the bottom:

Final Word

   Playing a mud of any sort is NOT a right. The people who run the game
   and the people who owns/runs the system that you are playing from are
   not required to let you play. If you abuse your privledge [sic] of playing,
   there are good chances that it will be taken away.

Side note: Chicken nuggets are the ultimate one handed food.

Edited – ooooooooookay, the link’s not working, and it’s not working from the place I got it from (http://www.dikumud.com/links.aspx) either. I’m looking for another copy now.

Edited again – I love you, Wayback Machine! http://web.archive.org/web/20050828045301/http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/mud-faq/diku/

Google gets in the act. GoogleSpaceBook!

Wonder what this will do, if anything, to the walled gardens.

FWIW, my vote is “not much.” Look at internet dating – you have eHarmony and Match, and you also have Jdate and Atlasphere. (The latter is a site, with a dating service for people trying to live their lives by Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Wow, a dating service for those who say they’re into open marriages, but later turn out to be less enthusiastic when they get moved to the back burner for a younger sex toy?) Look at internet news. You have the CNN, the BBC, and yet people read Matt Drudge on purpose. Just saying, sometimes people want to specialize.

- You delete anything that isn’t porn, advertising, or one member calling another member a “faggot retard.” If you are deleting things because someone posts that such and such a decision is “poorly thought out,” you are too sensitive and need to not be online. Ever.

- You delete threads more than once a week. Most situations should be handled by locking the threads. Locking allows players to see what it was that got locked (people learn from example), prevents reposts of locked material, and prevents conspiracy theories. If you are having to delete more often because of violations of the porn rule, you need tighter security on who becomes a member in the first place.

- You are constantly revising your board rules. If you have to have fifty rules that all boil down to “play nicely,” either you have an unusually obtuse community (possible) or you are making rules against things that annoy you personally (likely). Take your ego out of the game. If you cannot, you are not qualified to moderate a board.

- You have more than a handful of rules. A board rarely needs more than ten rules, and there are literally thousands of rulesets that at this point you can just cut and copy. The older, the more time tested. The one I usually start with was originally a usenet post.

- You avoid posting something that might cause drama, even though the something in question is most certainly going to be part of the game. Man UP, you chickenshit wimp.

- You whine about how the content of a particular post wasn’t your idea. This usually happens when the CM doesn’t have any balls besides the ones he keeps in his mouth.

- You talk to members in PM for any reason besides acknowledging reports. The best way to start drama is to indulge in whispering, making special friends on the forums, and putting in writing that you like some members more than others. A private message becomes a public post the moment you think it’ll never happen to you.

- You cannot separate your feelings from your work.

- Frank: Your first reaction to a negative post is “impotent rage” or “immediate denial.”

Add your own in the comments; if they sound like global rules to me (as I believe these are), I’ll add ‘em with your posting name.

When you say that the ideal candidate has nine years of experience and will be responsible for your online message, your product’s online look and feel, your communication with customers, your first contact with disgruntled customers, a team of not less than two other people and possibly a dozen, contributing to your marketing strategy, managing live events, and building global partnerships…

…you cannot seriously think you’ll only pay that person fifty fucking grand a year.

This list does not replace sensible exit polling, quit surveys, thoughtful CSRs, or community people. This isn’t just about games. This could apply to any product or service, to the point that I remember seeing similar principles in b-school textbooks. Also, if anything on this list is a shock or a surprise to anyone who has been in the workforce more than a year, kittens will be killed, drowned by the tears of the baby Jesus. I am blogging this only because I have managed to be trapped in a conversation on this topic TWICE since the year began. Twice, people. That’s embarrassing for everyone involved.

People quit games, products, services and relationships because:

- They wanted something different, and your product did not match their expectations. If you’re getting a lot of this in the early weeks of a product’s release, but your numbers rebound after word of mouth spreads, the problem was your marketing. You sold them an experience that they could not possibly get in the actual product. Eh. It happens. I’ve lost track of the number of movies I’ve gone to where the trailer was cut and scored by someone who hadn’t seen a script or read a synopsis. Occasionally, the movie was drastically edited after the trailer’s production.

Of course, in gaming, there are two possibilities sometimes combining into a swirly choco-nilla ice cream cone of hell. One is, as mentioned, that the marketing was not in sync with the actual production. There are entire websites on this phenomenon, so let’s leave it at that.

Two (and this applies more to games where the betas are kept limited and under NDA until the last second), the people who actually played the game for reviews spent the entirety of their time playing a version of the product that never existed.

It is very, very common that members of the press receive premade characters, wearing top of the line armor and equipped with spells and abilities. This is not a problem, if the development team has ethics and standards – one cannot get a taste of how an MMO might be to play after six months in one afternoon, or even one month. What IS the problem is when the demonstration characters have armor, spells, and abilities that actual production characters will not be able to achieve or receive.

Ask anyone who ever spent the two months before Old Skool E3 painting barns just so Catherine from some print rag could drive by and wave – the elaborate demo facades take nearly as much development time as building the damned product in the first place. If you hear about a development team regularly (not once or twice, which is expected and necessary) crunching to meet a deadline for press demos, as opposed to actual milestones, stay away from the product unless the top management is replaced a year before release. Anyone who can so thoroughly and repeatedly lose perspective is not equipped to produce a top quality game, and will do so only if they promoted competent middle managers. Hint: Anyone who crunches more than once or twice for a press demo without standing up for his product and his team most likely promoted sniveling yes-men that resembled him.

- The customer is burned out on whatever it is that you have to offer. Did you make a clone of a more popular product and slap a coat of New and Different on top? Once the players lick the icing off and realize it’s the same damn cake, they’re gone.

Did you make a clone with a major, significant innovation, and the players still quit at an early stage? You didn’t hold them long enough to find and experience your innovation. Trust me, if you really innovated somewhere, the rest of the product is solid, and the player got to the innovation without being hassled, the rest of the cloning won’t matter as long as you made it shiny. Sure, the bloggers and the board whores will cry “clone,” but frankly the vast majority of everyone else licked off the icing and went “ooh, this one’s got blueberries!”

The above two scenarios involve customers who bail out early. If they bail out after a few years… the problem is just that they’re burned out. No amount of game tweaking, balance changes, or incentives on your part will hold them. It’s really not you at all. The only things keeping them are their relationships – to stuff, to vault contents, to houses, to titles/reputation, but most importantly, to their friends. But you have made guild/clan management and communication easy, with a GUI and lots of fun tools and features, right? Your community team is out there celebrating the player’s contributions, right? You’re facilitating guild-run events, right?

- You suck. Really. Occam’s Razor, here, y’all. To be fair, I’m mainly talking about the situation where people buy it, try it, and bail almost immediately. If you can’t hold ‘em for at least a day, you bored them or you annoyed them. It’s not a mystery. Don’t blame overwhelmed servers, beta testers, the process, last minute revisions, timing, or my favorite catchall, “factors beyond our control.” (I love mysterious “factors.” Yeah? Like what factors? If you can’t spell it out, don’t include it in a press release, wanker.) Also, “it’s not you, it’s me” always translates as “it’s me not liking you.” When someone says that to you, do not call or email asking for more information. This applies to mates, dates, and people who already filled out an exit survey when they left your game. Asking for more information is just going to make both of you feel awkward.

Of course, if you drastically changed the product (thanks to not listening to your community weenie and mistaking the board whores for the silent majority), or did something that negated every player accomplishment to date, or dramatically changed your level of support for the product, then “you suck” could be the reason for sudden sub drops years after the try/buy/bail scenario has faded.

*

I really think that’s it, kids. Everything else I’m coming up with is a variant of the listed items. Content not compelling? Point three. Two waves of quitting, one right after release and one right after the first batch hit max level and started posting? Point one. The whole guild quit? Two with a smidgen of three. The whole guild quit and says it’s because of X change? Maybe three, but honestly, there’s usually a lot of two involved, especially if they didn’t all quit at once but exsanguinated after the raid planner and the treasurer quit – check with your community professional, he’ll know.

But comments are, as always, welcome.

This exercise is taking place entirely inside my head, since I don’t know any software company that actually does it this way. Also, since this is MY dream, everything has been set up for the convenience and peace of mind of a community weenie. But I admit… I’m being a bit disingenuous when I say that. See the question at the very bottom of this post.

Up to several weeks before the patch:

- I have been getting patch notes as work is completed.

- I am getting ALL of the patch notes, meaning a note for each completed task. The programmers and designers have indicated which notes they do not believe should be made public, and their opinions carry considerable weight, but the actual decision to post or not post is up to me and the producer. If we are not certain why the programmer or designer has tagged a note as Do Not Release, all we have to do is ask, and the answer is provided in complete sentences without the arrogant son of a bitch smirking and saying “because I said so.” However, I have learned over time that the response to such obnoxiousness is not “try again or I’ll punch you right in the junk.” If the person with the information is behaving badly, the problem is one of management – a manager is encouraging this attitude, and without fixing the manager, the problem will merely continue for the next thousand years.

- I have been translating the notes into plain English as I go along, and checking with the programmers to be certain I have not changed the meaning of the notes.

- When I see a note certain to cause drama, I raise the issue with the producer immediately. The item may require additional research, volunteer input, rephrasing, or outright removal. Honestly, sometimes people are working in a vacuum, and may not have considered the repercussions of their decision. This is rarely because the programmer or designer is stupid, but because he lacks the data he needs to make the right call. My job includes providing that data, if my company does not have many internal metrics. If I am lucky and my company DOES have those metrics, my job is communicating that information with the context of how the users behave. A community person serves the community – and a development team is as much a part of the community as the customers are.

Back to the potential drama. It might be best for the game if we just go ahead and kick the hornet’s nest. But even if I think the producer is forty kinds of wrong, my job is to advocate for change right up until patch day, and then to shut up and post it as though it were my idea. Unlike patch note phrasing (my job), deciding what things go in or out of the game is HIS job. My job may be eating bees, but I’d rather have it than his job, which looks to me like a combination of spreadsheets and pure political ass. Gah. Technically, you probably could pay me enough to be a producer, but I wouldn’t enjoy it.

One week before the patch day:

- I receive notice from the producer or his designated minion that there will be a patch at a certain time and date. I immediately post this information to the community in as many ways as I can, including but not limited to the patcher itself, my community web page, the product’s blog, and the marketing website. (The marketing website and the community website are not the same webpage, having different goals, different language, different purposes, and different people controlling them.)

One day before the patch day:

- I receive notice from the producer that everything is going swimmingly, and we will indeed be patching on the morrow. I immediately post this information, along with my best guess as to how long the servers will be down.

- I have learned that the programmer’s estimate means “actual server downtime” and he is NOT including the amount of time the servers will be up but not available to players due to testing. I have given up attempting to explain that all I care about is whether or not my players can PLAY.

- I have drawn my own conclusions as to how intelligent the producer is and added or subtracted time accordingly.

- I have cross checked the estimate I was given with customer service and QA.

- I may add an hour or two to the official estimate based on the patch notes, because certain types of changes have not once failed to break the servers in the decade I have been watching MMOs run patch days.

Patch day:

- The person in charge of taking down the servers was told in advance what time patch day festivities would kick off, and took down the servers on schedule. He made an in-game announcement thirty minutes prior to doing so, to take care of the players who do not read announcements on the patcher or the web. He did NOT learn about the patch from reading the company website, and if he did, the producer got punched in the junk.

- I hang out on forums, and I have forum moderators at my fingertips via IM. Forum traffic is insane, because the players who normally post during the day while they are at work are now joined by the players who normally play during the day. I have prepared a statement about why we do not patch at 4 AM on Tuesdays, why we always “screw over” the same group of players by patching at the same time every month, etc. I have already discussed this topic with the producer, and totally lost the argument, so the topic is closed. I made him help write the explanation, though. I cut and paste from this statement repeatedly.

- I address the drama-prone note to the best of my ability. A significant number of players mainly want to hear the explanation and be reassured that we didn’t just randomly nerf the most popular weapon in the game by 50%, but rather, we did it for valid reasons… such as the massive improvement we made to the statistic that had been so pathetic that everyone felt compelled to get that one particular weapon. This explanation is given a test drive first internally, then on the boards, and the final refinement goes on the website and added to the patch notes. Since the population on the boards is a minority of the player base, what is essentially a draft explanation is fine… but they’re so vociferous that they can hammer a piece of coal into a diamond.

- I do not collect any feedback whatsoever on patch day while the servers are down, though I might finish getting information from those who played on the test server. All other feedback being sent in on patch day is being based on what people think of my patch notes, not the actual patch. The development team does not need data based on anything but results.

- Two hours before the estimated time of return, I start asking questions. Hint: When the programmer in charge stares at me wild-eyed and cannot articulate a response, I add three hours to the estimate and post the new time immediately without pestering him for more information. I also post the reason for the delay. The truth is always better than reposting “we are working as hard as we can” fourteen times. If I have a producer who is not smart enough to recognize the value of truth, it is my job to attempt to compensate, and help the players to see that the developers are in fact working. This can be done by describing the process, the number of people working, or any other details that can be scraped up. I am the only window to the development team that the players have, and parroting boilerplate is not good customer service.

If I am not able to get the information I need, I take it up with the producer after patch day if he is frantic, and on the spot if he’s just sitting there playing a competitor’s MMO.

- If the downtime has wildly exceeded even my worst case estimate, I stop posting times and retreat into “as soon (TM) as possible.” I also stay on the job. It is vitally important to the sort of user who is camping the website to see changing time stamps, and proof that I will in fact post at 1:30 AM just to let them know the score. That user is disproportionately influential among his less-anal retentive friends. Also, once downtime has gone six hours or more overdue, the most senior community person is the one who needs to be posting, to prove to the customers that the company is serious. Staying on task during a disaster is why senior personnel get paid the big bucks. Well, buck, but compared to the rest of the team, it looks like a big one. Forcing a low level person to bear the load after bedtime is crappy, intolerable behavior, and that sort of manager should be punched in the junk.

- I announce the return of the servers, but I hang around for another hour doing shots with the exhausted and hilariously insane team. I’m still hanging out in case either a) the servers need to come right back down, or b) the servers are going to come back down the following day. Admittedly, if it’s 1:30 AM, I may go straight to bed, but the customer service team has my phone number, and they know they can wake me up to make a post.

After the patch:

- I gather followup feedback according to specific, scheduled benchmarks and present it to a producer who has not been drinking recently, and he takes action according to established protocols. Message board traffic is only one data point, and used as supporting, NEVER primary, evidence.

***

That is my selfish, selfish dream. Well, in a DREAM some of those steps would be skipped and we’d go straight to doing celebration shots because the servers are up on time with no trouble, but even on a bad patch day, communication and teamwork can go so well that I think I’m dreaming.

Here’s why I dare to dream: Which of those steps in my dream would not be in the best interests of the producer, the development team, and the customers?

Wurden bisher Communities zu horrenden Preisen an Unternehmen verkauft, so kann sich inzwischen jeder Internet Surfer in wenigen Schritten eine eigene Community aufbauen. Diese Idee hatte bereits 2004 der Gründer von Netscape, Marc Andreesen, mit seinem Unternehmen Ning.com. Inzwischen sind auch einige deutsche Unternehmen auf den Zug aufgesprungen. Myfaible.de, Mixxt.de, six-groups.de, groops.de und mypeopls.de bieten mit ein paar Klicks die eigene Community, obendrein kostenlos. Zwei Fragen liegen nahe:

1. Womit verdienen die Geld?

2. Wo ist der Haken für die Betreiber einer kostenlosen Community?

Die meisten Anbieter verdienen Geld über Werbung, die sie in die Community hineinschalten. Alternativ kann der Betreiber die Werbung gegen Bezahlung ausschalten und eigene Werbung schalten. Hier unterscheiden sich die Anbieter – alle setzen langfristig darauf, mit Zusatzservices Geld zu verdienen. Dazu gehören neben der Freischaltung der Werbung mehr Speicherplatz, Schnelligkeit und weitere kostenpflichtige Community Module.

Darüber hinaus setzen viele Community Anbieter auf White Label Lösungen für Unternehmen. Aus unserer bisherigen Erfahrung als Web 2.0 Consultants und Community Enabler stoßen die Anbieter schnell an Kapazitätsgrenzen. Dann wird die Entscheidung schnell fallen: Entweder die eigene Meta-Community, oder alternativ die White Label Lösungen. Solange immer noch die Big Deals bei Community Käufen realisierbar erscheinen, bleibt das Thema Meta Community interessant.

Wie werden sich die Anbieter der “schnellen” Communities entscheiden?

Auch die Qualität der kleinen Communities ist meist nicht hoch, da viele Community Builder zu wenig Erfahrung mit der Vermarktung und dem Betrieb einer Community haben – mal ganz abgesehen von der Technik. Womöglich ist auch das ein Grund dafür, daß selbst Ning bisher kaum Communities besitzt, die mehr als 10 Mitglieder haben – und das bei 150.000 Social Networks! Aber vielleicht ist auch die Zeit noch nicht gekommen.

Unserer Meinung nach werden die Meta-Community Anbieter nur dann erfolgreich sein, wenn sie effiziente Erlöskomponenten einbinden und ein vernünftiges Marketing Konzept fahren!

Wir haben eine Studie erstellt, die die bisherigen Meta-Communities gegenüberstellt und im Detail analysiert. Bei Interesse bitte eine E-Mail an info@brain-injection.com

I really hate the term “in real life.” It’s commonly used to denote an activity or a relationship that occurs offline. But the term marginalizes we who enjoy online pursuits, as much as “girl gamer” makes an ordinary person with flaws and strengths into a circus freak. If a real person is doing it, then whatever he’s doing is happening in real life.

Sure, it’s just a phrase, one so commonly used as to be nearly devoid of meaning. But it still says something about our default mindset, our cultural expectations of online experiences, and the value the larger culture ascribes to our lives. What would happen on a subconscious level, on a wider cultural scale, if we said “physical” (as opposed to “real”) and “virtual” (as opposed to… well, the unspoken assumption that if it’s online, it’s not real)?

Would our pursuits, our friendships, our love affairs, our hobbies get more respect? Would we treat those online relationships more seriously? Would we stop being such fucking jacktards on message boards just because we were anonymous and slightly intoxicated?

Probably not, at least not entirely. But a low grade wave of civility wouldn’t be such a horrible thing, either.

I wound up on four panels at AGC. One of them was an accident. On the website, I was on two, and in the program, I was on… a different two. Oh, well. We don’t go to AGC for the rational planning. Hell, community is lumped in with marketing according to the people who nominally run this drunken orgy. (Incidentally, the way marketing and community fight for the same resources – resources they MUST use towards different ends in order to succeed – is how I got the word “cock” into the microphone. I referred to this scenario as a “total cock-up.” And no one would have realized it was part of a bet if the entire panel hadn’t started laughing. Well, that, and if Certain People hadn’t been holding up signs that said things like “SAY COCK! YAY FOR COCK! YOU ROCK AND THAT RHYMES WITH…”) But I digress. The following is taken from my notes for one of the panels (Community 101).

1. Treat your customers like sales units. Don’t hire a community professional. Instead, communicate with potential users in polished, professional marketing-speak, with as many buzzwords as possible. Talk about all the great features the game is going to have without checking to see what has actually been implemented (or checking with the programmers to see what has a prayer of being implemented). Start hyping the game two years or more before it actually goes on sale. Don’t worry your pretty head about long term relationships or the credibility of your representatives – it’s all about first day sales numbers and getting that #1 on the chart for your resume.

EXCEPT NOT. MMO products are services, not products, and first day sales are flashy, but ultimately not that meaningful.

2. Treat your customers like your friends.Don’t get me wrong, now. Many of my customers have become my friends, now that I’m back on the light side of the force. Given all that we have in common – preferences in games, books, TV shows – it’s hard to escape warm feelings towards my customers. Marriages have been built on less than I have in common with the weirdest, most Asbergery guy at a fan fair.

But while I am representing a product, the customers are not my friends. I can tell my friends that they are whining, occasionally. I can have a bad day with my friends, and storm and rage and cry. I can lose my patience with my friends. Customers, however, are paying me good money to not show my ass in public. Terseness, rudeness, and frustration are 100% understandable, but not acceptable.

Oh, and “public” includes the precious NDA-covered, private, password protected internal boards. One can be more casual in that forum – not less patient.

3. Act like the eighteen whiners on the boards are the majority. Sure, you can cater to people with no life and a propensity for calling your mother a three bagger. Design and deliver expansions just for them. See how far that gets you.

Without solid usage data, polls designed by someone who doesn’t have an axe to grind (and by the way, the guy whose idea the poll is testing? NOT THE RIGHT GUY TO WRITE THE POLL), and other (likely proprietary) sources of information, any conclusion you draw from the message boards is representative of the kind of person who writes five paragraph essays about why you suck, as opposed to the kind of person who gives you money.

As a side note, if I never again see someone whine about how Mean and Greedy game companies are for wanting to make money, it will be too soon. I hear this whining from both the customer side and the development side, and I can’t believe I’m still hearing it in 2007. Making games is a business. The idea is to trade “something fun” for “something that I can use to purchase goods and services” without having to barter. I want to shake the people who whine about how it’s all about the money, and send them to run cancer hospitals for orphan porcupines.

4. Ignore the eighteen whiners on the boards. When all eighteen of them are saying the same thing, you are the one who is wrong, not them. (Admittedly, it can be hard to tell #3 and #4 on this list apart… if you’re a developer by trade, as opposed to a professional community weenie hardened by years of battle, with multiple sources of data to cross check.)

5. Mismanage expectations.The fine details of this category would take a lifetime to delineate. The big details could be handled by a semi-retarded hamster if only that gentle rodent could press the buttons on a keyboard without crapping on the wrist rest.

If you aren’t going to show progress on something within three weeks, shut up. Don’t discuss delivery dates until you are within six months or less of that date. Do not discuss features that haven’t been designed. Do not talk about betas unless you’re about to sign people up… and then only if the first round of testers will get in within three weeks of signing up. Do not allow developers who have not been trained to talk on the boards. Do not allow developers to post without commitments from them to post AFTER the launch, not just before when everyone loves them. Do not send private messages to customers. Keep all behavior public and above reproach.

Final, side note, if we’re going to talk about fucking your community: Do not have sex with customers no matter how drunk you are. No good comes of this. She either wants a job, or she’s a developer groupie who will someday start a website. At best, she is telling stories about your lack of manhood to the next developer she catches. And THAT guy told everyone about it at the September trade show.

Man. I’ve been either on the road or typing for a month now. Three random thoughts before I get back to posting:

Why would anyone in their right mind bet me a hundred bucks I wouldn’t say “cock” into a microphone? Much <3 to Troy, the fool with a hundred bucks to burn, whose beta for POTBS just started. I had the pleasure of meeting a huge part of the Pirates crew, and even more than ever I wish them good sailing.

A few people thought Raph Koster sounded like a dingbat at AGC. Heaven knows I’ve criticized the dear boy in past years for being so consumed by conceptual ideas (and design-for-design’s-sake) that he forgets to take into account human nature. Without context (context that is now known), he did sound like a lunatic… but with context, he had a good goddamned point about what makes a success, and what a little original thinking might look like. Also, he had balls to show up and talk, despite knowing that his best points and his market research had to stay off the debate table for a few more weeks. Considering the decided lack of testicular presence at the show this year, I was glad to see some displayed. Finally, FWIW, if I could have relocated, I’d have interviewed with that team, quite happily. I think Cuppycake (the Metaplace community weenie) has a hell of an opportunity before her.

I find it telling that nearly every professional community person at AGC knew all the words to “Tainted Love.”