My Escapist Debut
Check out my first article in the Escapist, “How to Win Friends and Influence Gamers.” For those of you who read my site regularly, this won’t really be anything particularly new to you, but it turned out better than I expected it to. There’s a whole lot of stuff that I cut out of it (as in, about three times as much as is in there now), but I think I got the appropriate points across. Feel free to let me know what you think about the article!
I must say, while it was a nice read.
The above quite is basicly what most players HATE about SOE, Pandering to “Uber guilds”.
There is a HUGE connection to key members of SOE and the FOH guild.
There are a number of other guild that this is also true of. Most recently, its quite apparent that Brad for Vanguard holds that guild in very high regards , more so than the average players, he has many, MANY posts there that basically are Taylored to that guild, and what they want to hear. In fact rumor has it that members of that guild and others were part of the “Focus group” used to dismantle SWG. No wonder it was taken from a viturial world to a PvP and (coming) Raid and loot centric game.
I dont know how deep that guild, or other “Uber Guilds” influence runs at SOE, but it seems very strong. Using a Rading guild as a major source of feedback is wrong in my opinion, and many others.
I know that this will be denied and reputed.. but there it is.
Valid or not, it is seen as playing favorites…this is the “internets”
Truce.
Good read man! I actually took the reference to “community leaders” to be people with mass followings (readers and the like) such as online press networks, webcomics, etc. I wasn’t really thinking uberguilds, but I guess I can see what Trucegore is saying. It at least lays evident a certain perception out there anyways.. /shrug
I think of community leaders as anyone who can influence the opinions of a large volume of people. That includes people who run websites, people who talk a lot on forums, major guild leaders (not necessarily hardcore guilds, just guilds with a lot of people), etc.
I never exclusively get the feedback from uber players. I’m not one myself… not anymore anyway. There are people who are popular for making really cool house designs, or tradeskillers who are well known but don’t belong to a big guild.
I’m interested in what all of them have to say, and I like to be sure to keep in touch with players of all types so we don’t run into the issue of catering only to uber raid guilds (or just casual players, etc.).
Using an uber raiding guild as a major source of feedback is by no means wrong. Using it as an exclusive or more abundant source of feedback, however, is.
I do understand what his article was about,and its vaild and a good idea.
But what i am talking about is a REAL side effect of an unbalanced approach. Very evident in public spaces.
And very much a view of SOE’s Practices that is common.
I mean, for a while there, Smed had more posts in FOH then all of the SOE game community’s combined. Brad is approaching that line also.
It says something when the CEO of of a company comes to your forums to get YOUR opinion (as in guilds) but does not do so on his own company’s forums, where his/her player base “lives”.
This leaves the impression that you do not care about what your current player base wants, or feels, only that you care about what very large guild you can sway to your game ($$) and what it would take (in changes to the game) to get them.
Completely compounded by the SWG issue. Read the FOH forums in Smeds posts, they HATED the original SWG (because it dosn’t fit the loot, raid, uber guild supporting), and they raved about the NGE’s changes, yet…still don’t play. lol.
I guess my point is, as long as its balanced, that is, the interactions in the public space, its fine…Start tipping that scale, or doing things that become quite clear where the influences come from…and your in bad shape.
Sadly, in terms of perception of the “Internets” (Love that term), any closed feedback/discussion ETC.. are irrelevant, only the public ones make an impact, good or bad as far as perceptions go.
Because those are the ones that can be linked to to support, or denied the conspiracies.
One thing I have to say in defense of Smed and them…
The SOE forums are not much of a place for good feedback anymore it seems. They never were. Too much whining flaming and all that.
What I think they need is to monitor /feedback and /bug reports (even /typo reports) and invite specific people that seem to contribute to a secure part of the forum (kinda like a beta forum, only always there).
There, the Devs could actually talk with those players; they’ve been screened, they’re not flamers or anything. And if any turn out to be, it’s simple enough to kick them out.
In my time in EoF’s beta, the Dev interaction was fantastic. And even after, I was supprised to get a PM from a Dev for eq2players about a bug list I had made. When people can see the Devs interacting, reading the feedback and such and commenting on it, they feel a lot better. I know I do; at least then I know someone is taking the time to read it.
The problem with the open forums is there is simply too much to read, especially when for every “good” post about something theres usually 100 wasted posts, often in the same topic, in a number of hours. It’s sad really.
That was an environment they created.
In marketing speak, create brand champions and empower their activities. Those who are ambassadors of the brand are not necessarily players of the game, and they aren’t necessarily leaders of communities.
Many communities, in my opinion, are democratically influenced in the sense that the “guy at the top” is usually a reactive manager, not a proactive leader. Listening to constituents and pandering to their interests is not leadership. That’s politics.
You (meaning whoever reads this) might want to check out what Steve Farber has to say about leadership. I found his website while looking for the store hours for the local Quiznos, and coincidentally he’s probably my neighbor.
Ryan Shwayder has an excellent article up on The Escapist magazine site. Well worth reading and inwardly digesting. (sorry, too tired to make more sense, lol)
As far as forums go, I think SOE has managed to show us both the best and the worst. I have a checklist for what I look for on official forums now based on my experiences with SOE games:
1. Are the devs active on the forums? Are they replying to posts, talking about concepts that players bring up, responding to community feedback? Or are they quietly lurking, and hardly ever poking their heads in.
2. Concept discussions or blog entries from key developers. Are the devs bringing up things they’re thinking about for the community to chew on and talk about? Or are they eerily quiet on what they’re up to.
3. How much secrecy is perceived on the part of the dev team? Do the red names (or blue names, or whatever) seem to be open and honest about where they want the game to go? Are they being up front with the players about the challenges they face? Or do they all seem to be afraid that if they reveal details about the super-secret plan, they’ll lose their job tomorrow.
4. How organized are the community forums, and how organized does the dev team seem to be based on their forum interaction? One of the things that I’ve realized over the past ten years is that games that do well are those that have well-organized teams and feedback mechanisms. If a game has bazillions of posts in a general forum because there aren’t individual forums dedicated to that topic, then it means important feedback is getting lost in the noise. Also, games tend to be better if the roles of various developers on the teams are clear-cut and come across in communication (soandso is the tradeskill guy, and soandso is the UI guy, and soandso handles combat mechanics), then it’s probably going to be a better game than if every dev seems to have their hands in every part of it.
Ultimately the biggest feedback I have as a player for any MMO publisher is this: Don’t hide things from us, and don’t lie to us. Your players are your allies – we are the ones who will ultimately be the biggest voice for or against playing your game. It’s better to talk to your forum playerbase early, and often, and use the tool for all its worth, than it is to do something stupid and then get bitten with a huge word-of-mouth backlash.
On the whole question of community leadership and guilds – I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a guild leader myself, of a fairly large guild, but I tend to not be very active on initial forums unless I have something important to say. I have never, not once, been approached for any sort of community engagement program. A lot of the programs that seek to identify community leadership seem to be haphazard, or based on one community manager’s assessment of individual players – and thus, they always come off biased to the community as a whole. The examples about FoH are really right on the mark. The perception that normal players get is “the publishers are in bed with the uber guilds”, and whether that’s true or not, it’s the wrong perception for people to have.
To my mind, a true community leadership engagement system would be more representative, and rotational. So maybe you selected 20 random guild leaders every six months from your game servers, and 3 or 4 registered fansite operators, and then after their “term” was up, you picked another random selection. This presents the image of fairness to your playerbase. These people are still forming relationships with developers, and there will still be the private emails, etc. that go back and forth even after someone’s “term” is over, but it insures a fresh influx of new thoughts and ideas, and more importantly, it doesn’t look like you’re playing favorites.
My Escapist Debut
The obvious discourse and public relations efforts do tend to focus on the more vocal communities and leaders. It doesn’t make any practical sense to focus on people that don’t really care who you are or what you are doing for them.
With that said, there is a definate need for the games to delve into the common/casual mans world and interact more intimately with them. From my personal perspective, I founded a guild for EQ in 2000 that is still alive and kicking, albiet in a different game. In the 6 years that our guild has been breathing in the online world, not a single member went to a Fan Faire or a similar event.
We aren’t a vocal cutting edge guild we are just a casual group of friends and families that play online games. But we aren’t necessarily a small group of people. When we left EQ we had around 500 characters and 150 unique accounts and in our current game we have around 300 characters and 90 unique accounts.
We have a lot of extremely active players and forum hounds and some of the choices that have been made in the past with these public relations efforts just made us laugh due to the people selected to participate. These people may have an online community or a website, but they don’t have the sense god gave a goose or represent anyone other than themselves. They may think they do, but their efforts are more indicative of masturbation then community involvement.
So, if guilds and people very similar to my guild tend to represent the majority of the players in these games, why haven’t we had any interaction with the games themselves?? The obvious next question is, if community is that important and relationships are one of the most necessary things to the lifetime of a game, how do we find a way to work with the everyman?
A solution to that question would go a long ways towards making games that your player base actually wants to play.
In your article, you mention about little extras, like out of game communication with the guild, that would be nice to do. EQ2 has this but uses it as a source of additional revenue. It turned from being a nice part of the user experience to what is seen by everyone as a grab for more money; and so nobody ever uses it in my experience. It could be a unique feature (like eqim was for EQ1) that drew people closer and kept them in game even when out of it; now it just makes SOE look greedy.
Same thing about all those points-hungry developers who make games for Xbox Live. It’s not enough to just buy the game, they want you to keep buying the game. Sure, makes sense as a business decision; you never want your customer to ever stop sending you money, or to ignore a possibility where they might want to send you even more money, but it hurts the community.