http://dan-e-gray.com/

Yes, catchy, I know.

It’s become more prevalent that community manager’s are less interactive with their communities and have turned into a simple marketing tool. It’s become almost common knowledge that a developer is simply there to code and meet that impossible deadline, rather then loving a game and participating with their fellow gamers. I don’t believe this is the fault of the CM’s or developer’s themselves, but rather that companies want a tighter control over their message. With that control comes scripted messages, dissenting opinions silenced or marginalized… all the while telling their community that it’s for our own good. It’s done under the guise that they are providing a clearer message, that they are focusing their communication with fans.

Unfortunately, the fans aren’t buying it. The more effort a company expends in crafting and orchestrating their message, the less familiar and more distant they seem. Currents fans are a generation that have been bombarded and overwhelmed with marketing and advertising our entire lives. Skepticism and  cynicism are inherent. The more controlled the message, the higher this inherent trait becomes.

Gaming companies are coming very close to their interaction being nothing more than an advertisement. The more we are fed the company line, the more we are bombarded with the eternally optimistic company message, the more we ignore it. 6 out of 10 of us all ready ignore advertisements. I would challenge that among gamers, who statistically are more heavily connected to the internet, this figure rises dramatically. Which just means that their message falls on deaf ears. We pick through, scan and summarize their word heavy messages. Arguments of a gamer simply missing the message entirely when done via other formats are no more effective or visible if there are proper tools in place: search, archives, dev trackers and more. After all, a twitter message is quickly pushed down the page if you follow more than a handful of active people. A facebook status is lost in the crowd of your other 50 friends updating their own.

All of this leads up to the recent revelation that Blizzard will be pulling back from it’s fans even more. Of course, they are telling them that it’s simply an attempt to get a “clear and clean” message to their players, all the while acknowledging “that it removes the conversation that we know is appreciated quite a bit”. Blizzard’s dramatic turnaround to becoming more worried about their image than their fans is apparent:

• Their carefully architected company Blizzcon and abandonment of traditional conventions.
• Community Managers are now restricted from posting on fansites.
• PR drones that give scripted non-information answers (i.e. nothing confirmed or denied).
• Media access continually being reduced.
• Their new official blog sites where they can pass along PR approved company messages and restriction of any outside linking away from their own official sites.
• Their announcement of developers now being silenced at all from posting.

It’s not just Blizzard though, a lot of gaming companies are locking down with fear and paranoia of any public negativity. Gone are the days, unless it’s an up and coming gaming studio, where developers and CM’s took the time to become a part of their fan community. Instead, CM’s act merely as messengers now. They work in the background with many in their communities wondering what they are doing. This leads fans to believe that their jobs are mysterious and complicated, which is the wrong image if these are the “public faces” of the company. A Community Manager title should be self-explanatory, their presence and saturation in the community holding deep ties. There should be a familiarity and a fan should feel that this is their advocate, their connection to a company. Instead, we see them more and more as just a stumbling block. They are there to give us the company memo rather then to engage with their fans.

The irony of all this being that they have nothing to fear. Call of Duty: Black Ops, with the negativity surrounding their server hosting capabilities and a petition of over 75,000 signatures, caused outrage in the gaming world. The outcome being it lead to one of the most successful gaming debuts every with $650 million in sales in just 5 days. For as passionate as gamers are, we are still just kids at heart (or still!). We will seek out and devour that next big title in the hopes for a thrill while criticizing every facet of the game. We are a complex and ever changing beast latching onto a game while ripping it apart. It doesn’t mean that we don’t truly want better, that we don’t have valid feedback and opinions, but we are ultimately driven by our love/hate relationship with games.

We are a community that feeds off each other, with word of mouth still being the biggest motivator for a purchase. 33% of those who had purchased a game in the last six months cite word of mouth from family and friends as the biggest influence on their purchase. Not an online or magazine review, a metacritic score, a demo, or the latest developer posting. We are a connected community, and we want to be connected to our game developers. To see gaming studios pull away from their fans, to relegate us to nothing more than bystanders with no connection… all done in order to preserve a carefully crafted company image when evidence to the contrary shows that not only do we see through the facade, but would love them regardless.

Modern, innovative, web based businesses have become masters at implementing this feedback loop via smart monetization of their services, whether it’s subscriptions, micro-transactions, one-off payments, sponsorships, advertising, or (more often) a blend of any number of those. It’s generations ahead of the traditional product/service -> payment model. This is due, in large part, to the hugely competitive market for web services, where competition isn’t restricted by physical boundaries.

This morning a friend of mine was complaining about the poor quality of services her university offered to students. Specifically, comparing a fairly sophisticated achievement tracker in an MMO to the universities page for tracking your academic progress. The reason for this disparity is clear: To universities, investing heavily in a system like this is just another budget drain, benefiting a group already invested in their service. To the MMO in question it was an opportunity to create a positive feedback loop, increasing their return and improving their image.

To move forward, universities need to consider their student body in the same way the MMO developer considers their player base: A community which can be leveraged in all kinds of ways, from generating income to increasing exposure. They need to utilize modern monetization methods to provide a better service, creating a positive feedback loop which encourages students to invest back in the university.

• Most fundamentally: How much are you doing to encourage a sense of community amongst your student body? Are you providing avenues for casual engagement both online and off? There’s nothing like shared common ground and interests to bring people together, allowing them to achieve much greater things.

• Do you have a donation scheme? What kind of reward systems and recognition do you have in place for those who donate? Are they realistically targeted to appeal to the average student, rather than wealthy alumni?

• Are you doing enough to collect feedback about the improvements or services your student body would like to see? How much do you encourage them to consider and discuss these subjects?

• Have you empowered your student body to embark on their own fund raising efforts, to solve help tackle popular issues? Are they invested enough in your establishment to want to do so? Are you transparent enough about what is necessary to create tangible goals?

• Can you monetize the development of further services via any of the payment models mentioned? Even if it doesn’t seem particularly lucrative, the goal is improving your image and the satisfaction of your student body more than balancing your books.

• Are you encouraging your student body to create and participate in activities to raise your profile online and off?

This is where you reach a meta level of the feedback loop: It’s no longer about individual services, it’s about satisfying your student body to a point where they are generally happier to invest in and contribute to the university. It’s about creating an environment where donating time, energy or money is the accepted norm and not the exception. Finally, it’s about converting that investment and will into further improvements and sustained or greater satisfaction.

It’s about recognizing and correctly managing your community, and this principle applies to any establishment which develops an audience.

If your community seems directionless or inconsistently toned it’s probably because you haven’t done enough to encourage the formation of a hierarchy – and you should. It allows you, as the administrator or community manager, to much more effectively shape the community. One person can’t effectively influence thousands on their own, which is why you grow a chain of influencers to proliferate your message.

• Give some visual recognition to senior members who are particularly helpful and constructive. It rewards their efforts and contributions, and it makes them immediately apparent to new members as role models.

Social media took off in the second half of the last decade, and revolutionized communication online. The cornerstones of this movement are now household names and it’s easier than ever for anyone to create, share, and discuss content online. Brands are also prevalent, constantly finding inventive ways to piggyback on the viral nature of large social networks. Thus, in addition to personal relationships, social media has become the new home of customer relationships, tackling anything from significant announcements to individual customer responses.

In comparison, forums have remained pretty much untouched for over 10 years. Packages like vBulletin have wedged in a few web2.0-esque features, but pretty fundamental cracks are beginning to show. There just isn’t the same focus on building networks, so each member soon becomes lost in the bustle of larger communities. However, these larger communities are probably the only reason forums still exist as such a major component of the web today: No other platform offers quite the same scalability, thanks to the straight forward categorization and navigability in the way it presents a massive number of interactions. That said, while it can cater to the size of large communities adequately, it’s only in the shallowest sense. You just can’t influence the flow of content enough to ensure that members are finding that which interests them most without adding endless layers of categorization and losing the ease of navigation. Conversely, and equally as bad, members wont feel like their content is being found by those it is intended for, instead being drowned out by sheer numbers.

So, how do we go about modernizing forums to solve some of these issues? What lessons can we learn from the success stories of the last few years? Where to start…

Promoting Quality
If the core problem with the format is signal-to-noise ratio, then we must create a way to highlight quality contributions in a seamless and intuitive manner. Here are some factors to consider when designing this system:

- It should be democratic and community driven.
- It should be based on positive feedback only, to avoid burying unpopular but valid opinions.
- All members input should be equal, always. Weighted systems are powerful but highly exploitable.
- Mechanisms should be entirely transparent and automated, to prevent controversy.
- The threshold should be flexible, scaling with the size of the thread/forum.

Essentially what’s described here is something like the YouTube or Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, but for posts. The most liked posts or threads (once they meet a threshold of votes) would receive a subtle highlight (a colored trim or lighter background, for example), would display the number of likes, and who liked them. There would be a cap on the ratio of highlighted posts/threads to non highlighted, to ensure the system remains meaningful and scales with activity. It has the added benefit of making redundant the act of posting just to agree (QFT, what he said!, ^this, etc), which alone will help to keep threads cleaner.

Do note that this system is not intended to replace regular moderation in any way. Keeping the forum environment pleasant, constructive and focused will always come down to the regular staff and good policy.

Creating Micro-Communities
One of the benefits of sites like Facebook and YouTube is the micro-community effect. You choose who you are friends with or who you are subscribed to, and generally they are likely to have compatible tastes/interests. It’s not just a source of shared content, but content that is reasonably likely to appeal to you. It is this core mechanic that makes such huge communities work, by keeping members engaged on a personal level and tailoring the content they are presented with. It would have the same effect in a forum environment, no matter how large.

- Members should be able to easily ‘follow’ or ‘unfollow’ other members.
- Posts or threads by these members should be highlighted whilst browsing the forum.
- Followed users would generate an activity feed on the home page.
- Member profiles should contain a similar, individual activity feed.

The goal here is to help each member find the content that is relevant and interesting to them via their network. You could be following guild mates, respected community members, or even developer accounts. It also creates a positive feedback loop for those producing quality content, via gaining followers. Finally, it ties in nicely with the idea of ‘liking’ posts. You would be able to see what posts or threads your followees have liked, and suggestions of who else to follow could easily be generated based on related trends.

Reward Mechanisms
If the development of gaming oriented social networks has taught us anything, it’s that people love collecting and showing off achievements, and they are a powerful motivator. However, they can also be a corrupting influence. Avoid awards that accrue over time, as you will alienate newcomers. Avoid making rewards visible whilst browsing a thread or forum, as they should never supersede the highlighting system in terms of drawing attention to a post. Avoid rewards which constrain users. Keep the process automated (where possible) to avoid controversy (and eliminate the manual effort). Here’s a few to get you started:

- A rank on your profile that reflects the ratio of ‘likes’ you have received to the number of posts/threads you have submitted in certain sections, relative to other users.
- A congratulation for gaining your first follower.
- A congratulation for your first highlighted post or thread.
- A profile badge for involvement in community events or contests.
- A profile badge for your first featured post.

The first suggestion is a balanced representation of how helpful, insightful or entertaining that member is, and emphasizes the importance of getting even one or two ‘likes’ on a post. The congratulatory messages are simply designed to educate new members and encourage them to contribute, and the badges recognize worthy achievements.

Regarding featured posts: You have a forum full of content, so use it. Feature outstanding forum posts on your news feed, the same way you would an article or blog post. This kind of recognition, a major spotlight, can be the most powerful on its own. The profile badge is merely lest your achievement be forgotten.

So there you have it, three key areas in which the forum platform could be improved, based on three important principles of social media. Together they create a robust platform for discussion that can not only sustain large communities, but will recognize and encourage quality, help users find content that meets their individual needs, and motivates them to continually better themselves.  This is just the beginning. I have a feeling that should this process ever begin, should forums be recognized as worthy of the innovation they direly need, there will be a vast array of different ideas and executions.

This evolution is observable in community management, where much official communication now comes through third party services. Developers maintain these outlets and draw in consumers with exclusives or contests largely because it has been established as good practice. I don’t want to imply it’s a trend, but I’d be less inclined to if there was a broader understanding of why those services are used. Having greater means to engage your audience definitely makes it worth the effort, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. You have to appreciate the nuances of each service to get the most out of your time, rather than just maintaining the accounts and thinking that’s all there is to it.

Why are you active on Twitter, but not promoting hashtag discussions related to your product or engaging the other people your audience follows? Why are you feeding news into Facebook, but not creating albums and uploading images, or using custom tabs? Why are you putting videos onto YouTube but not encouraging people to subscribe, favorite, or comment, or not using annotations to embed links to other videos or relevant news? Why are you submitting links to Reddit for traffic, but haven’t considered taking the temporary podium of an ‘IAMA’ Q&A? What about thinking outside of the box, like creating an official Formspring profiles for your staff to take random questions from a curious audience?

Being a recurring part of peoples lives, showing up on their Facebook walls or Twitter feeds, is good. It keeps them engaged and aware of what you are doing. Still, it’s a fraction of what is possible. Social networks are designed to be spread through, and they have ways to reward good content and spotlight those who deserve it. They are a massive aspect of the web today, and used properly are capable of directing huge amounts of attention, yet their sophistication seems to escape many who would benefit most.

If you’ve ever owned a website that provided some kind of popular service you’re probably familiar with the cost involved. Registration, hosting, software licenses… It can start to pile up pretty quickly, and that’s if you’re planning on doing everything yourself. You may also need to shell out elsewhere to make up for any skills you lack, buying templates, stock images, plug-ins, and so on.

Then there’s the endless maintenance involved. At the very least you need to keep all of your software patched up, take backups, and keep up with possible security issues. You may also have to try and recruit volunteers or even paid staff. The sheer amount of time involved can be the biggest killer.

Unfortunately, the internet has a culture of consumption. There is this general feeling of entitlement to content which doesn’t accommodate for the producers. The internet does not run on pixie dust. Like many of the best things in life, it runs on cash.

This particular rant was inspired by this image I saw on Reddit this morning:

In short: The poster had gone onto the Fallout: New Vegas wiki, intentionally broken the embedded adverts, and then posted on Reddit to brag about this achievement. I find this kind of behavior pretty disgusting. Abusing the wiki format to deny income for a resource you are using, because it’s a little irritating? I don’t think I need to explain how utterly selfish and small-minded that is.

Yes, ads annoy everyone, including the people that own the website. That’s pretty common knowledge, so any sane admin will keep them to a minimum. It’s far better practice to increase profitability by expanding your user-base than by adding more and more intrusive ads. Even ‘the Diggslayer’ Reddit had to launch the ‘Reddit Gold‘ premium membership to stay afloat, and Wikipedia currently has an appeal from the founder for donations.

There are thousands of awesome free resources on the web. Wikis, file hosting services, forums, news sites, aggregators, social networks…  All of these services are kept free by advertising, which far too many people just don’t recognize. Sorry folks, but it’s what makes the internet go round.

Unfortunately there’s nothing better right now, and forums are still the backbone of pretty much any large online community. How else do you provide a method for hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people to get together and enjoy structured discourse?

Well, structured at least. Discourse implies conversation, back and forth, which on a busy forum is nothing more than an illusion. Posting in a thread of ten pages or more is already like shouting into the wind, and that’s relatively small. Still people try their hardest to make their opinion heard, praying for a response, a sign their point of view was recognized. Sadly a well thought out response is far more likely to be overlooked than a blatantly ignorant or silly one.

As a community manager how do you give recognition to insight and intelligent commentary on a matter that might be very subjective? How, as someone looking to improve the quality of discussion, can you say “This person is the most correct, read this post!” without being accused of bias?

In a traditional debate all participants will hear every viewpoint. When people aren’t speaking, they are listening. A good point is hard to ignore, and wont be smothered by the ranting of others. This is a very important difference. If there were some way to ensure a forum member read all previous responses before participating the quality would probably rise dramatically. That your participation would become more of an investment is no bad thing either. However, this can be struck off the list of solutions due to being virtually impossible to enforce.

The second solution, something already in place within some communities, is system for members to rate the contribution of others. Whilst this notionally rewards quality, it isn’t truly effective at anything but self-moderation. Let’s face it, most people will give negative feedback to all others just so their own opinion may stand out a fraction further. It’s thoroughly exploitable, and many will find themselves being shut out unfairly for having an unpopular viewpoint rather than a bad one. The minute any system like that becomes a respected tool for measuring quality it becomes even more attractive to abuse it, and even without intentional abuse it often ends up promoting particularly witty or cutting posts over intelligent ones.

So, to summarize: Forum communities are capable of growing too big for their own good. The signal to noise ratio will at some point take a nosedive, and you are basically left herding cats.

Depending on how your forum is structured, I think 5000 members is about the limit within which quality can be promoted via manual moderation/administration methods. Unfortunately, for professional community managers, a small community is not going to be on the list of their objectives, however healthy it is. It’s also very difficult to keep a community small – if you’re not growing, you’re usually dying.

So, how do we change forum software to solve these problems, or what alternative solutions can we come up with?

Here’s a start:

What if, instead of threads, creating a topic would open a chat room available to anyone online. Active participants would be able to discuss the issue in a conversational manner, with everyone being heard. Limiting interaction to those currently online would help signal:noise ratio significantly, for a start. It would also be difficult for members to participate in multiple rooms (rather than multiple threads, which is easy) and would encourage them to focus on issues they are really concerned with. There could be a button to call a moderators attention to the chat, anti-spam/profanity filters, and the ability to download a log of the entire conversation up to that point for analysis.

That’s just one idea, and I feel there should be many more out there. Right now we are forced to love forums for providing something no other solution can, but ultimately, they still suck.

Many of the great classics of our time start off by placing us in the shoes of an already fully developed character. April Ryan, Guybrush Threepwood, Jade, Kate Walker, The Nameless One… The list goes on. They are charismatic, deep, interesting, compelling, and memorable.

Does it bother me that I may not share their gender, attitude, or physical appearance? Of course not. Do you feel like a good book is less entertaining because you can’t choose the physical and psychological attributes of the protagonist?

The whole character creation thing revolves around getting to create your very own bad ass alter-ego! Sounds great, right? Unfortunately no matter how much you scroll through those same old options (cheekbone height, SWEET!) you will inevitably produce the usual shallow, dull, generic character – no matter how crazy your facial hair choice. It’s ok though, because you’ll end up covering up all of those finely tuned aesthetic details with gear anyway, and any stats you picked will be obsolete by the time you’ve progressed a few hours into the game.

Like multiple choice dialogue options, alternate endings, and optional side quests, it’s just an illusion of ownership, there to make you feel like you are making a difference rather than following a trail of breadcrumbs.

A great example of this is found in the recently released Fallout: New Vegas. To demonstrate, I’ll throw in two gameplay videos, commentated by the wacky but hilarious Toby Turner. Note how long he spends in various clunky menus, how frustrating the process is, how little he actually cares, and the fairly pathetic attempt to mesh the whole awkward process with the game world. I’m not saying he represents every gamer out there, but it’s certainly a good illustration of my own feelings on the matter.

Enjoy.

Last week saw the release of ”A Rewarding Experience‘, another highly praised installment in ArenaNet’s series of articles about Guild Wars 2. It came packaged with the usual promises of innovation and improvement in the MMO genre, and as usual was well received by an eager audience…

Well, generally well received.

One small factor caused a bit of upset. A tiny nugget of information… A mere handful of words slipped surreptitiously into an otherwise innocuous sentence. Perhaps the author hoped we’d be distracted by the the typically fantastic concept art, and skim past it unaware? Perhaps they just wanted to ease us in to the subject of this controversy with a tiny taste of what is to come. Either way, it was certainly a very casual way to reveal what turned out to be a lit-fuse to many of the more vocal community members. If you missed it, it’s this line:

With the transmutation system, you’ll be able to acquire new items known as Transmutation Stones through our in-game store that allow you to customize your appearance.

Now to many people, those familiar with the proposed business model for Guild Wars 2, this may not come as a surprise. You may even be wondering what the hell I’m talking about. I see you sat there, scratching your head in confusion… We knew the game would be funded by box price and microtransactions. We also knew that microtransactions would include cosmetic or convenience items, a definition which seems to fit these ‘t-stones’ perfectly. So why all the controversy?

Firstly, this was a rather surprising introduction to the Guild Wars 2 item shop. We’ve been drip-fed the genius of ArenaNet for months, with lack of subscription reinforced at every turn, only to have the spell broken by a tiny comment with a powerful message: “Here’s how we are going to take your money”. It brings people back to the harsh reality that participating in an MMO is a service that needs to be paid for, and that ArenaNet is in fact a business, not a rainbow factory.

It’s tempting to say that ArenaNet should have done a blog entry on the business model and the in-game store first. Given people a thorough introduction, providing reasoning and reassurances, nipping some of the more pressing concerns in the bud. Of course it’s difficult (and foolish) to write about something that may not be fully specified yet – which I imagine is the situation.

On a similar note, there are many questions about the example itself. We know the basic function of a t-stone, combining the looks of one piece of equipment with the statistics of another of the same type, but beyond that it’s a free-for-all for negative speculation. Are they consumables? Do they have charges, or are they single use? How much will they cost?

Another significant factor is that the bar has now been set for other microtransaction items, which to skeptics means ‘the top of a slippery slope’. After all, why would ArenaNet use anything but their most appealing example as a poster-child for microtransactions? Surely it only gets worse from here? Right?

That’s all pretty minor nit-picking on ArenaNet’s delivery, though. What I struggle to explain are some of the more visceral and irreconcilable expressions of dislike. We all knew microtransactions were coming, we’d heard the plans, yet when presented with a sterling example of the system many seemed to recoil in disgust.

Eugh, I HATE stones!

I can only imagine that this crowd was hoping cash items would be unappealing enough that they would never face the prospect of actually spending any money. They may have comforted themselves with the idea that others more fanatical and loose with their wallets would do that for them, contributing to ArenaNet’s bottom line on their behalf . In short, they wanted ArenaNet to rely on selling a lot of unappealing junk to the tiniest percent of die-hards actually willing to buy. That’s obviously not a smart way forward, and I’m glad the indication is otherwise. ArenaNet have clearly put a lot of thought into designing Guild Wars 2 with appealing microntransaction features, though importantly without falling into the poisonous trap of ‘selling power’.

It’s a shame that Guild Wars 1 didn’t have that same degree of planning. For example, the costume mechanic which gave ArenaNet the ability to fill the store with all kinds of cosmetic goodness, fitting the microtransaction ethos perfectly, wasn’t added to the game until almost five years after release. Even name changes and ‘makeovers’, the only other content that has a strong presence in the store, took until early 2009 to appear. This is surprising, as Guild Wars was apparently designed with microtransactions in mind from day one, yet it took them so long to populate the store with a reasonable amount of appealing content. Had they been a little faster off the mark the additional revenue might have brought about all kinds of benefits for us players.

So we’ve gone some way to establishing the microtransaction model’s place in Guild Wars 2, but why use that model at all? Surely the good old subscription model is a far simpler and more profitable approach, or something else? Well, there are three problems:

1. Subscriptions are a barrier. A lot of potential players simply aren’t open to the idea of committing to paying monthly for a game. Microtransactions give you the freedom of choosing when or if you spend your money.
2. Subscriptions are harder to justify. Established subscription MMOs usually have a large amount of polished content to offer, and a core community firmly ensconced within the game. This is something very difficult for any newcomer to compete with if they also wish to charge a monthly fee.
3. There is no other option. You either have microtransactions, or you have some form of subscription. Anything else is not going to provide the revenue necessary to maintain a top-notch MMO.

Those three points aside, the biggest plus for microtransactions was mentioned further up: If you don’t like microtransactions, other people will pay to support the game for you. If the items being sold are purely cosmetic or convenience, then you still get to enjoy the full, unfettered gameplay experience, without spending an extra cent. Theoretically speaking, the more attractive the stock of the in-game store the more will be sold, the more money ArenaNet has to sink back into development, thus the better your gameplay experience. Even as someone who doesn’t use the store, you benefit from it being attractive to others.

That all of the above can be true, yet people can still find a way to moan about the evils of microtransactions in Guild Wars 2, is truly beyond me. It is a system designed precisely to give the customer more choice in where their money goes, whilst still enjoying the benefits of a financially sturdy MMO.

I don’t blame cynics for being cynical, either. There’s certainly been a fair share of disappointments in the Guild Wars universe over the last five years to justify some degree of that. Still it’s quite another thing to rant about something without making any effort to appreciate the many positives, or the weakness of alternatives. A plethora of recently failed or faltering subscription MMOs has made it clear to me that microtransactions, when implemented well, are probably the future of this genre.. At least until someone designs a service really worth paying monthly for.

Ah, well. At the very least this whole issue has made for some incredibly amusing reading.