Ghostcrawler, as you may have noticed, can irk me a bit. Since he’s such an obnoxiously common presence on the forums and the only blue poster who comments extensively on design decisions as a designer, rather than as a forum moderator/customer support person, I feel obliged to read what he says. And I’d like to share the pain, along with some commentary. So here’s some GC posts from today:
First up, a paladin poster whining about a lack of GC talking to them:
GC, I’d like to state that in the recent weeks there has been very little commmunication between the Paladin community and yourself. Why is this? It seems as though you guys are planning on making some major adjustments to all the trees.
The wow forum community is huge. GC, hopefully, is working on design stuff. That is, after all, what he is paid to do: be a Lead Systems Designer. Presuming this is the case (largely belied by his continuous forum presence), he really should have time to pop in and answer this. If he feels paladins need concerns addressed, the logical manner of doing this, in the context of the forum, would be to create a stickied forum post explaining their plans, apologizing for the lack of communication, and soliciting feedback. He could then engage the players there, on his own terms. He has, in fact, done just that before.
Not this time:
As I often comment, I cannot answer every thread and that is not my intention. When I get some free time, I read as many forum posts as I can and I try to respond to a few of them.
If you make a post in the role fourms, I’ll see it. Chances are I won’t respond to it. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.
When there are so many threads begging for a response, it concerns me that Blizzard may eventually decide that my posts are too disruptive and we go back to almost no posting. I don’t want that, but unless you guys chill out the “bump for blue response” that may be where we’re headed.
P.S. Rogue and mages have gotten far fewer response as far as I can tell, and there are plenty of players who feel the aspect of the game that is most important to them is being ignored. There is not much I am going to be able to do to fix that except stop posting.
Let me get this straight: you actually reply to a post obviously designed to provoke that in order to inform them that really, we can’t do this sort of thing. You then threaten the player base with a blanket “We’ll stop talking to you!” for posting “BLUE REPLY PLZ?” threads. Please note that the closest thing I could find in the forum guidelines that disallows “Blue response please” posts would be potentially under spam…which oddly enough includes language telling you not to use “fad phrases” such as “TLDR”, “IBTL”, or numbering the thread (which I presume refers to “FIRST!”), but says NOTHING about soliciting a response from a blue employee. You follow that up with an attempt to mollify them by telling them mages and rogues are even worse off? Seriously?
The correct response was: nothing.
But we’re not DONE! He kept posting in the same thread:
Q u o t e:
You know, acknowledging a small child when they throw a tantrum only encourages them to keep doing it, right?It has been an epidemic in the last few days though. I’m not quite sure the best way to handle it. Deleting “bump for blue” posts is tedious and tends to anger players more than it educates them. Shrug.
Why are you deleting posts that follow forum guidelines? Of course it angers players: they had no way of knowing they weren’t allowed to do that. And if it were against the forum guidelines…then forum mods should be deleting the posts. That’s their job. They’re paid to do tedious work. Like deleting infringing posts. That certainly is not the job of Lead Systems Designers.
He continues further on:
Q u o t e:
But how difficult is it to respond to a post with a simple: “We’re aware of your concerns and are considering our response” to something as valid as PvE JotM recoil damage?
I used to try that, but in my experience it rarely works. You get a lot of “I poured out my heart and soul and that’s the only response we get?” It also means I pretty much need to do that for every thread or else the couple without blue responses feel really, really ignored.
Q u o t e:
You do realize that the reason we are bumping for Blue responses is because we have gotten almost no communication on the 3.1 ptr patch.
But you only do that because there are actual blue responses in the forums now. If those stop, I bet the bumping stops.
Here is the only way I think this is going to work:
1) If you have a question, a concern, an idea or just some feedback, post it.
2) We will read your posts.
3) Sometimes, but not very often, we will respond.
4) Don’t give us a hard time about where or when we respond.
5) Be aware that we ban a lot of people who just don’t get it. We just don’t publicly shame them (most of the time)
Several things. First, the last time I saw GC trying to respond to every idea post was back in the Lich King Beta Test, when the community was smaller and he felt like he could be on more intimate terms with them. Since then, he has had a hard time finding the wherwithall to talk to everyone in the community. Of course he couldn’t do it for every idea thread, and of course people would feel bad. It’s why you don’t do it, period. That doesn’t mean don’t engage the community. It means engage them as a professional.
As for “But you only do that because there are actual blue responses in the forums now. If those stop, I bet the bumping stops. ” Are you serious? These posts have existed for as long as I’ve played the game, which is 6 months after vanilla release. And yes, it is because blues respond…but they’ve always responded. There have been CMs in the blizzard forums discussing potential class changes, game issues, and other game realted things since launch. And there have been the response requested threads for just as long.
The suggestions on how communication between players and devs on the forums should work is spot on. It should be a single post, on its own, locked and stickied at the top of every forum.
From there, the obvious next move is to demonstrate to the community that you are listening. Only respond directly to threads when they warrant a timely response. In terms of discussing ideas, only engage in the conversation to expand the conversations direction or to insure it stays on topic. Try and keep both interactions limited. I think you want the player base to know that you are there, you do care, that you like them and will treat them with respect…professionally. You can’t be a player, too. You can’t talk like them. You must be a customer support provider when posting to the forums. But you should show the players you are listening. Would it be so hard to collect a list of issues every couple weeks, sticky it, comment on those issues as you see them from the dev side and how you are going to address them moving forward, and ask for feedback. Then be done. Repeat next time, along with an update on the last issues and additional commentary. You want to make sure the playerbase has a chance to see what you’re thinking in one place, and you need a place to keep them talking. Centralize this.
[...] to do is put up twelve billion forums and walk off, until your designers get bored and decide to play community manager. And it’s all good, because as long as the core game itself is fun, the community will just [...]
To be honest, I do not understand your problem. You are not a tad better than him in the way that you rant about something totally unrelevant, since the communication above was not directed to you.
On a sidenote, can you please provide me some insight on what kind of community management experience do you have on a similar scale to the World of Warcraft community? Since you giving advice about it, you must have to have some clue.