Archive for category Community
Methods and madness
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related on March 20th, 2009
Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.
Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.
I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control.
That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.
If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.
Bye-bye, Lighthouse
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related on November 17th, 2008
This was a surprise. Looks like it took place end of last week, but with my ear very much not pressed to the ground regarding these things, it’s no surprise Massively was the first I heard about it. (Also shows how much of a WoW-obsessed press we have when this took days to surface; everyone’s busy reporting the most intimate of details from the frozen north.)
Straight off, I’d have to say it’s a shame; just because it’s always a shame when someone moves on from a job that they most probably loved and enjoyed, because of internal pressure or because of a mistake they might have been able to weather. You can probably sense my ambivalence here though, and that’s simply because I didn’t know Alex (AKA Lighthouse) as well as others did. (Not to be confused with Alex AKA GhostRaptor, EU Community Team Lead, by the way.)
I did meet Alex once, a good while ago when he made a quick visit to the Brighton office to get to the know the EU team, just as he was starting in the job. He seemed enthusiastic and excited about what he was doing, and the fact that he lasted two years means he must have liked it. That he’s moved on at this point doesn’t necessarily mean he was pushed, or that he wasn’t valued, but I can’t really comment as I don’t know the situation.
I do know, however, how much developers can sometimes be swayed by an angry community, and how sometimes (just sometimes, and this may not be one of those times) that can backfire on the community managers. Remember people (and I’m talking to devs and players here) community guys aren’t always there to give you good news; sometimes they’ve got to give you the bad. Even if you don’t want to hear it.
Anyway. I’m not going to soapbox. I hope Alex lands on his feet somewhere, and soon.
Want to come to a party?
We’re planning one last blowout for NC folk – but we’d like you to come, too. Yeah, you. (I forgive you for that thing you did one time….)
We don’t know where it might be, except ‘in Brighton’ is a good guess, and I would expect it’ll be next weekend (Saturday 20th is a good guess, although possibly Friday, too). It’s looking likely that for most (if not all) of us affected by redundancy, Thursday or Friday will be our last day.
So, y’know, want to come to the pub? After all, you guys and gals are part of what made our jobs so good over the last few years. We’d love to see you.
More details to follow – but let me know your views, okay? And spread the word… I don’t want to be standing around with a pint, alone.
Set the Stage videos
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related, Pimpin' on September 13th, 2008
Almost the last hurrah, this. Below the ‘cut’, if you will, you’ll find two videos that I edited and subtitled (well, except for the actual translation). Both were shot by Jörg ‘Kerensky’ Koonen during the Games Convention in Leipzig.
They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)
The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)
As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal time we had and the environment they were performing in, and I’m very proud to present them to you.
NCsoft’s panel at PAX
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related on September 3rd, 2008
By complete coincidence – I was looking at Aion-Welten.de, who’ve been driving traffic this way recently (Hello, Germans!) – I found a video of NCsoft Interactive’s panel presentation at Penny Arcade Expo, which is embedded below. This first part deals mostly with Aion, and is a good general overview of the game.
You’ll quickly see that this has been recorded by a fan in the audience, so excuse the quality. Come to think of it, that leads me to ask your opinion: wouldn’t you like to see this stuff recorded and presented officially through NCsoft channels?
Indeed, perhaps this is something my team should be doing (given we’re doing so much other video stuff). Hmmmm? Do let me know in comments. The more of you who want it… the more likely it’ll happen for future events.
Hint. Hint. Read the rest of this entry »
You said what?