Alan Crosby, now producer of EQ2, once Global Director of Communication for Sony Online Entertainment, once told me about the difference in SOE Community Relations and those of another rival mega-corporation.  He pointed out that forum moderators of this particular game were given generic usernames such as moderator13.  He said that one day the trolls would get to moderator13 and he would rage, threaten to ban everyone, and burnout in a fiery and often comical (to third-parties at least) forum rant.  A few hours later the posts would disappear, and no one would hear of moderator13 again.  At least until a month or so later, when a new fresh-faced moderator13 would emerge — no explanation needed.

Customer service is extremely difficult, especially over and through the Internet where anonymity sometimes “empowers” usually calm, rational people to act like reality TV show characters.

Broken Toys wrote about a CM breakdown over at SOE.  Rather than treating the incident like a car wreck, I read through the poorly considered by forum posts by the CM and then read through the 2 pages of very passionate comments by present and former Starwars Galaxies players.  In the end, it is important to understand the community you have been charged with managing, especially if you’re replacing another manager, or you lack the social capital to pull your weight in a particular situation.

More than just some funny videos, and related flash games, L.O.S.E rewards and encourages your pariticipation with customization options for your avatar, and his own villainous lair that can be purchased with Evil Points and Tokens of Doom. Once you sign up for a character, in my case I called myself Smoking Silas the Sycophant, you can begin playing games, making friends, topping leaderboards, and customizing your digs and pad. Any fans of Animal Crossing will know just how addictive this genre of game can be, and L.O.S.E does not disappoint.

From a community standpoint, L.O.S.E has a live team actively using Twitter, YouTube, and other social media outlets to connect with their players.

Good luck on your total neighborhood domination!

Today, I’d like to introduce you to my current company and project – Veil Entertainment’s Rise & Ruin.

Rise & Ruin is a Trading Card Game (TCG) with a number of twists that distinguish it from the pack. It allows you to level up a character (or characters) that will improve the cards you collect. Additionally instead of just playing cards, some sound effects going off, and a summary of what just happened being displayed in text, Rise & Ruin provides dynamic 3D Battle sequences – all from the comfort of most any web browser.

Very soon, Rise & Ruin will be entering Open Beta and I will have the privilege of both managing its community and also working on some creative design content as part of its on-going storyline saga.

If any of the above at all sounds like something you’d like to check out, sign up for an account and subscribe to the Newsletter and we’ll let you know when everything is ready.

Rise & Ruin is a fun and furious game that is extremely accessible – I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.

I have been lucky enough to have another company take me on as their Community Manager and Designer, which I’ll write more about in another entry.  Thanks to GameLayers, too, for seeing the potential in me, and allowing me the opportunity to learn an extrodinary amount about this industry.

To the Stewards:  I really cannot express in words how much your assistance made not only my working hours, but personal time, too, all the more manageable.  I applaud you for all of the hard work you have done for The Nethernet Community and will continue to do.  I am eternally in debt to each of you.

To the players: I hope you continue to foster the wonderful community you all have built around our little piece of the Internet.  I know I will never have the opportunity to serve a community as unique as yourselves.  I will sincerely miss our interactions.

To anyone who wants to get in touch with me: I am on AIM at burdenday, or you can e-mail me at burdenday at gmail dot com.

Again, thank you all – there are so many other things I could say, but I think this sums it up the best.

Yours,

Joe

As a online community manager, I’ve found my job directly and on a daily basis revolves around setting expectations and driving desire for continued play of the product.  I’ve always approached this without gimmicks or smoke and mirrors, despite some encouragement to play marketer rather than community manager.  Setting expectations is as simple as being as honest as possible as soon as possible — this alone will drive customer satisfaction.  If you honestly tell your community it is unlikely “x” feature (or request) will ever come to fruition, there will undoubtably be some flames to put out on your forums.  However, if the approach taken is silence or too general of an answer (see: “It’s not a bug, it’s feature!”) the expectation is never set and therefore never can be met.

While there are certainly times to remain quiet, especially when something has yet to be coded or even planned for, maintaining an open dialog with your community cannot hurt your player satisfaction and leads to continued play of the product.

To end with a quote from Steward, “the ultimate responsibility of everyone making a commercial game is to [sic] customer satisfaction. And everyone in the group can contribute to that goal by committing to making everything they do just a little bit better than it has to be.”

I really can’t agree more.

Early on in PMOG, we had a number of players who saw a gaping flaw in our design — namely we awarded our currency, which served as both money and experience, for visiting unique domains. Players quickly created scripts, used “drinky-drinky birds,” and other methods to exploit the system. Unfortunately, suggested daily hard caps set above humanly possible numbers were rejected by the development team. And so, my only defense against this behavior was to use our suspects list, which flagged players that were most likely cheating, and my wits to compel problem players to stop exploiting and to come back from the dark side.

I was able to convert a number of players through varying degrees of conversation. Some players just wanted to know we knew of the issue and were planning to do something about. Others were thwarted just by letting them know I knew what they were up to. And still others required their accounts to be suspended for a period of time to let them know was serious about the behavior being unwanted.

One of these initial “problem players” became one of my top moderators. By inviting him on my team he talked his friends who were also cheating into stopping and eventually set a great, humorous tone in our community.

At ION 2008, a number of prolific community managers discussed this topic and others. Katie Postma of the late Myst Online: Uru Live said, “You can convert them!” I completely agree; it just takes a lot of patience and being willing to make some friends and possibly some enemies.

However, after three separate developers looked into it, I was told it could not be done and the ticket was closed.  About 6 months later, after I had been given a little more freedom to edit and update code, I did a simple search and replace and noticed that it took little to no effort to change the designation and did and received many thanks from our Taiwanese players.

It turns out each of the developers were looking for a permanent solution, as any successive update to Rails would revert any basic text updates/changes. (Note that the default Rails application uses a list of countries that includes “Taiwan, Province of China.”)  Considering we have yet to update our Rails code since I made the change, the fix was both easy and meant a lot to a group of players, albeit a very small portion of our game’s overall population.

These types of player feedback can easily fall on deaf ears to a development team.  I encourage any community manager to research and strongly lobby their company to pay attention to these small requests.  30 seconds and a “search and replace” action is well worth avoiding negative press.