Dear Stargate Worlds Community Team
(Shamelessly stolen from Darren at CSG.)
In light of Mark Jacobs of EA Mythic announcing that WAR won’t have official forums, the folks at Stargate Worlds asked the community whether they wanted official boards for their upcoming game.
Honestly, this shouldn’t even be up for discussion. Allow me to give the SGW crew the correct answer:
YES, you should have official forums. What’s more, you should establish tough but fair rules and enforce the hell out of them.
Everything Mark Jacobs says about the dark side of MMO message boards is absolutely true. But it doesn’t matter, because not having official boards is a poor decision that has been proven to backfire. Here’s why.
- First and foremost, it’s YOUR community, paying you a monthly fee for a service–not just a product. You shouldn’t leave any aspect of their care in the hands of strangers.
- You can maintain official forums while still encouraging fansites. Keep the core boards in house (general gameplay, tech support, announcements, update notes) while leaving some of the deeper topics for fansites to run with (class forums, raiding, crafting, etc.).
- You can keep your community team in constant communication (I mean at least weekly) with approved fansites to keep them up to date on information and assets. Yes, I said approved fansites–ones that prove they can update their sites regularly and maintain sane community standards in order to reflect fairly upon your game.
- You can establish clear boundaries for behavior on the official forums early on, thereby preventing things from spiraling out of control. This is one of the things I believe I was most successful at doing as a community manager: I posted rules and made sure they were enforced. I had no fears about banning jackasses from the boards, and neither should you. And the best part is, once you have proven that you mean what you say, the people on the boards will help you keep troublemakers in line.
Yes, things will go badly sometimes. Yes, it will get ugly, and there will be days your community managers will wish they had never been born. You know what? Suck it up. This is what you get paid for. A man don’t set foot on the lot lest he wants to buy, and you better damn well be ready to put your money where your mouth is if you want to play in this league.
Community is awesome. Community sucks. There’s nothing more satisfying. There’s nothing more demoralizing. But I can tell you this: you need to solve legitimate problems no matter where they’re discussed, and it’s far better for you to find them in a place where you control the volume.
Oh, and that “proven to backfire” part I mentioned earlier? I will cite EverQuest’s shutting down of their official boards and Sigil’s decision not to have official forums after the launch of Vanguard as examples. In the case of EQ, it scattered an already fragmenting community across a ton of unconnected boards, leaving it to people like me to put all the pieces together into digestible bits. In Sigil’s case, they talked a big game of building a strong fansite network but let it fall apart before it even began. And just for good measure, I’ll throw in EQ2′s recent woes as an example of what happens when you don’t keep a tight leash on your team’s interaction with the community–it goes to the wolves.
It takes brass balls to be community. It’s not a sport for the timid. But it’s part and parcel of the MMO experience for your customers, and you owe it to them to make it as positive and enjoyable as the game itself.
Spot on. As a survivor of the Sigil debacle, I can tell you it WOULD have worked, had the commitment and follow-through been there. They had planned to do just what you say, and keep the basics on their site, and leave the rest to the fan sites. That’s not what happened of course. Unfortunately, many of the sites went wanting for developer participation (not mine, I was a lucky one) and official participation from management and marketing on all the sites was wanting. There, I made a little Glengarry Glen Ross reference myself.
I’m actually on the other side of the fence here.
Coming from my history with IGN’s Vault Network and seeing what opening official forums can do to the communities on those sites, I’d personally rather that the community manager(s) take time to visit the ‘approved’ fan sites and communicate with the people there rather than corralling the posters to one forum that isn’t at all tied to a fansite.
EverQuest II is a good example. There were a few forums that you interacted with pre-EQ2 release, starting as early as a year before beta was even underway. People migrated to these various forums and communicated specifically on EQ2. The sites themselves worked to keep the news up-to-date, provided development discussions, and the such to keep people interested in the game itself.
But, as soon as the official forums were opened, most of those people left and never looked back. Official comments on the fan sites drastically went downhill, there were a lot less people involved in overall conversation and more of your regular trolls that never left the forums tramping about, and no matter what content was created for the game it was linked on the official forums and discussed more there than on the official site.
Genda mentioned the ‘Sigil debacle,’ but I personally believe that, with the proper amount of community interaction, what Sigil had planned was better for the fan sites and the community, harkening back to the days when the various EQ class sites were thriving communities, where AC devs posted directly on fan site message boards, and there wasn’t just one place that had the majority of the community but the culmination of all of the community that made the whole.
I believe that official forums/community sites has only led to the diminishing need of community/fan sites as people who once would volunteer their time to provide content for a community/fan site now just provide it on the official forums where they know the majority of players who look for such information will see it.
This is, of course, my perception of the situation as seen through the eyes of a former VN Site Manager/Coder and long-time MMO community fan.
My kingdom for an edit button
Sorry, I just type what I think without any editing.
Genda wins for recognizing the Glengarry Glen Ross references!!!
cgoodno, the reason I am so adamant in my point of view is that I realize we screwed it up on the EQ2 boards. Instead of channeling the strong pre-release community via minimal official forums, we pulled the rug out from under them by trying to cover every possible topic of discussion. It wasn’t intentional by any means, but the result was the same.
You *can* achieve a healthy balance, and I believe that this approach is what will work best for a “classic” type of MMO (which, as far as I can tell so far, both WAR and SGW are). But you need to plan the balance in advance, not do it ad hoc.
This goes for website features too, by the way. Instead of trying to wrap up every single feature you can think of into a single service, consider supplying some of those data streams to approved fansites instead. Use the official site as a conduit for getting people to branch out in the community.
I’ve learned what I know by virtue of watching my own mistakes and the mistakes of others. The next generation of gaming communities should learn from us as well, which is why posts like Jacobs’ frustrate me.
I’ll agree with you that there is a possibility, not because I believe in what you say but because I understand that nothing in this world is definite. My skepticism now showing through, all I can say is to please prove me wrong.
As my title on VNBoards says: Community > *
cgoodno has some valid concerns. Some of this is the nature of doing business in an evolving market, but some of this risk can be alleviated by community management. Pre-release fan sites have to transition to a post-release existance. The needs of the users change after launch, and determining your role post-launch is critical to your success. When the game’s not out, you’re dealing with a high-anticipation market. Dev news is critical. People will spend longer chatting about a new announcement.
Nearing and after launch, things change. People have more ready access to the game, so the anticipation is lower. People seeing a dev announcement are more likely to jump over to experience the change, not stick around and chat about it, so you need a larger critical mass of users to maintain the same illusion of activity on your boards. Their needs change from “getting excited over new disclosures” to “making sense of all this information” and that means that the successful fansite needs to adapt to that new need.
This is where the community relations team can probably mitigate some risk. I love features like EQPlayers, the WoW Armory, and the upcoming CoH Vault, but can you imagine how a fansite developer that just spent months building an “item database” must feel when the official site suddenly replicates much of what he has? The more “vision” that community relations can provide, the better the fansites can plan their purpose out.
I’d love to see more developers take advantage of rss feeds, XML data, and the “mashup” capabilities you see flourishing online to give the community members a huge toolchest.
- – -
Should there be an forum? Absoloutely. You’re not going to have the datamining functionality when you’re just a visitor on someone else’s site. You’re not going to feel as much of a “pulse” on a community, nor have as many tools at your disposal when you see a problem with that pulse. You’re not going to have the fidelity of message or level of control that you’d have on your own site.
You do NOT want to lose any of that.
Both moorgard.com and CSG are overlooking an important part of the first post of the thread in question, “Here at Stargate Worlds we feel Official Forums for the game are an important part of the developer-player relationship, not only during development but through beta, launch and far beyond.” They are not trying to decide if they will, or will not, have Official Forums in the thread, they are discussing a topical news item with their community.
They asked the question: “What do you think? Are Official Forums necessary?”
So I answered them.
I don’t get why people think ‘no official forums’ means ‘no dev interaction’. Developers and communtiy staff can read and post on communtiy forums just as effectively as official forums.
One comment about Mark Jacobs’ statement is that regardless of whether there’s official forums or not, the people who work on Warhammer Online are going to be lambasted online, on official forums and anywhere else people can post. It’s a weak excuse, at best, for not having an official forums, which would allow you to at least properly moderate such occurrences.
Personally, I believe Mythic had a huge sting to its ego and a wake up call about the type of people who use gaming forums with the now non-existent DAoC Development board at IGN, made worse because of the game’s RvR centricity. This has led them further away from actually listening to their team leads and has even resulted in a mind set that any feedback they receive from players should be heavily filtered using oftentimes very limiting poll options that don’t allow players to address certain issues they have with the game, but only issues that EA/Mythic is willing to handle at that time.
Looking at the WoW boards in comparison, though, and they got off very easy from the community. But, I can see how EA/Mythic came to their decision. Doesn’t make it right, but I can at least sympathize with them at a certain level.
I do have one thing to add about the Mythic DAoC output that should be a strong example as how to do it. And that was giving an XML feed of the information to player base. It was do as you want with it, we’ll just control the output. As Moorgard mentions, the game hosting company should not do everything, alla SoE as it generally ends up being a selection of good items and not a core selection of amazing services. Examples of controlled output that the player section wouldn’t get is ranking boards data etc as thats key to game. But output like items and spell charts are something that can be expected of the wiki/fansites that will always be around for core information.
What’s funny is one of the things that bugged me the most about DAoC was the lack of official forums. It meant dev posts were scattered about a variety of fansites here and there and it was very hard to keep up with what the official word was on anything. The Camelot Herald was UTTERLY inadequate as a replacement.
And now DAoC 2, er, I mean Warhammer, is going the same route. Unsurprising, but lame nonetheless.
I don’t even know how I found this post again but…
I think the current state of the WAR community is proof that you need official forums. It’s such a pain to find the information I want to find out about it, I’ve given up looking and just wait for people to tell me anymore. They usually just post on WAR Alliance and WAR Vault, but those are two distinctly different but yet the same communities and the devs who post on each differ. It’s too much.