Love thy community
I’d really expected to be able to write that re-review by now! I’m sorry, guys. Soon<tm>! (It’s almost as if completely revamping your game and having a 1000% increase in players makes you busy or something!)
In the meantime, I’m going to blather on about something completely different: communities. (These are the things I think about while at the dentist.)
When most people hear the word “community manager,” they think of forums. There’s a whole lot more to being a good CM than just reading and moderating forums, though that is a big part of the job as well. This infographic, which I found thanks to a number of the CMs I follow on Twitter RTing it, really is incredibly accurate.
A good CM serves as the developers’ eyes and ears within their game’s community — and that community’s voice within the development team. They have to be able to accurately represent the playerbase’s wishes and needs to the people who are in a position to change the game and meet those needs, and oftentimes they have to know enough about the game development process to help explain, in layman’s terms, what’s coming down the pipes in a way that gets their players excited enough to stick around and play with them.
A CM represents two communities at any given time, really. One plays the game. The other makes it. In an ideal world, you want those two communities to feel a certain kinship and mutual respect, an interest in seeing the other one thrive and succeed. They feed off of one another, and as one grows stronger, larger, more productive and happy, the other benefits.
"You and the players form a symbiont circle! What happens to one will affect the other, you must understand this!"
CMs also help create events for their communities — like helping organize a player/developer meetup for their game during PAX or E3, or helping come up with and promote in-game events — things that help build bridges and friendships between the players and developers.
One thing that I wish more games would do, though, is involve their community team in the creation of in-game community-building tools. Maybe they do — but the fact that I actively wish that they would probably means that they could do a better job of utilizing the talent they have available.
Your game’s community does not live or die based on your forum or ability to write a blog from your game account — it lives or dies based on how easy it is for it to communicate, find each other and play together in the actual game. It just so happens that the forums are one way of allowing that to happen. There are plenty of other, equally effective ways to do it, and most of them can go right into your game. Some games are doing this, which rules. Others are not, and I really wish they’d reconsider.
Custom chat channels (and tabbed chat, for easy sorting) are probably the easiest way to allow your players to form communities within your game. MU*s do it, a lot of MMOs do it. Hell, AOL did it, and it’s AOL. Don’t let America On-Line out-innovate you. Your players want to form cliques with like-minded players so they can more easily ignore the people they don’t get along with, and that is okay. Let the roleplayers create their own channels where they can organize and recruit for their guilds, while hardcore raiding players create their own, other channels, and PvPers create another one still. This is a good thing. Your players may be segregating themselves from one another, but they’re all doing it while playing your game, and your allowing them the opportunity to meet people with whom they share interests (and have an easier time dodging those they wouldn’t get on with very well) will do a lot to make them like you and, subsequently, your game.
Good guild tools are a must. A guild, from a game design standpoint, really needs to be more than a second friends list. I really like what Champions and STO have done with their guild functionality — you have a log of transactions made to/from the guild bank, a log of recent characters in the guild who have leveled up, a roster that shows character classes and levels with space for notes (written by the players about themselves, and a second set written by the officers about the players which not everyone can necessarily see!), a page for recruitment information (website, description, and a bunch of clickies that go into what kind of a guild it is (RP, PvP, Hardcore, etc)), and an events calendar with RSVP functionality.
Look at all of this FUNCTIONALITY! It's gorgeous!
It’s a good start — but it’s just a start. Take that guild window and add, say, DCUO’s voice chat and guild-wide broadcast of character achievements (though make them something people can mute), guild housing (I loved my kinship’s hall in LotRO, and as soon as STO has fleet starbases, I will be playing so much more frequently) and some form of guild progression (the more your guild plays, the more cool stuff the guild can put in their hall or use in the costume creator or any one of a number of things). You want to encourage guilds to be tight-knit, collaborative mini-communities of their own, because they are still a part of the overall game community. A bunch of awesome mini-communities can only help the bigger community that they are all a part of.
At the same time, don’t limit an events calendar to guilds only. Have an in-game events calendar that anybody can contribute to. Not everybody is in a guild, but they might want to create or join in on other events with the playerbase. Help them do it. Again, a forum can serve this function, but not everybody who plays your game uses the forum. Everybody who plays your game, however, plays your game.
Make this, but for the whole server to use. If MUSHes can do it, so can you.
Everything I’ve just been said has been geared towards MMOs, since that’s what I play the most right now — but this is a mindset that can be adapted and ported to other types of games as well. FPSes have clans and leaderboards — integrate the hell out of them! I’m currently trying to come up with some ways for Facebook games to do this, which is harder since not everybody is playing at the same time, so that interaction between players is rarely direct and instantaneous. Tricksy.
