MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?)

[Tom "cro" Gordon]

Friday, July 23, 2004, 11:13:11 PM, Douglas Goodallwrote:
> Tom \"cro\" Gordon wrote:

>> What I do find interesting about MMO games and MMO game
>> development is the pre-existing work and experience in very large
>> and ultra large communities is not being applied in any
>> meaningful way, and the tools available to create, manage and
>> support these communities in an online environment are really not
>> being applied as well as they could.

> Could you expand on this? I am curious about what tools you refer
> to, and whether a "community" can be imposed from the outside (the
> developers).

I'll touch only briefly on what I consider to be 'tools' for
community building and management. For a more in-depth look, you'll
have to wait for the next MMPGems book - as this is what I'm writing
about. But first, whether or not the developers can 'impose' a
community? Not strictly, although the developers can 'create' one
where none existed before, (and this is one of the things we do
commercially)

When building or managing a community the 'tools' I use (or rather
my staff use :) ) are a combination of software and websites, along
with a set of work practices aimed at ensuring a great level of
transparency and communication between the people in the community
and the people 'running' the community.

Amongst the most powerful 'tools' we use are guidelines for staff
when welcoming new users into the community, guidelines for dealing
with forums threads and posts, and ensuring that there is proper
communication between the community members and the people running
the sevrice they are subscribing to/a part of. This goes right down
to the level of customer support provided and beyond this to *when*
customer support is provided.

We even include hiring practices and remote-working principles when
implementing a set of 'tools' and procedures.

I remember reading with horror a major MMO developer advertising for
support staff who would only be working 9am to 6pm monday to friday,
and from a central location. When we get started setting up a
community - at the quoting stage! - the first thing we do is ensure
that 9am to 6pm monday to friday is the *least* supported time
frame.  We're realistic - we get started at 6pm of an evening, and
finish at 2am, as this is the peak times for us. (I can't rememebr
the last time I employed someone whose working hours were '9 to 5,
mon-fri').  Weekends we're going all day saturday and sunday.

Another major 'tool' is interaction. Serious, ordinary interaction
on a daily basis, between the game providers and the game users, or
the service providers and the service users. One example of a
previous job had the Managing Director of the service provider
online on IRC all day every day, and customers could interact
directly with him without going through intermediaries. And it
worked beautifully (estimated community size was 300k or so,
although daily interaction was limited to a couple of thousand
users)

The focus always seems to be on software or hardware tools, or
designed forum layouts, or guild channels, or team channels or guild
websites or anything else where the community is designed before the
community exists, and where the developers or publishers are placing
expectations on the community before they join of how they will
interact with each other, with the game and with the providers
(publishers, developers etc).

These tools should only be the physical extension of what you're
doing overall for your community, encompassing information flow,
communication, support and other forms of customer interaction -
they should not be the end product of your community support
planning. If anything, you should be able to provide all the
community support you need without using any custom tools at all -
only things you can download already. A decent forum, a decent
website, perhaps a form of communication (I swear by IRC - *not* IM)
and a decent set of customer support practices (practices, not
software!) and you're set.

Regards,
Tom "cro" Gordon
CEO, AlienPants Ltd
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