This is in reply to what Lum wrote about community managment. I couldn’t disagree more.

Picture the guy who’s been plucked from the community of gamers and is LIVING HIS DREAM! He gets to WORK ON GAMES! WOOOH! And MMOS! HOOAH! It’s the big show, and every day… every FREAKING DAY he’s sitting in on a meeting planning out incredibly cool stuff that is going to ROCK YOUR WORLD OFF, and he just has to tell SOMEONE… and then the producer gets to deal with the community seeing yesterday’s brainstormed three bagger as a promise with the weight of Holy Writ.

I just cannot picture a situation in which a significant portion of the players are playing a game because of devs promises. That only works for beta hype, and not so well even in that case.

Players choose their games and get deeply involved in them when they like them. When they are caught in. And when they are caught in, as it happens with every activity you dedicate to, they develop their own ideas, perception and expertise. The dialogue here can be good for a very simple reason: it could lead to a better game.

It’s the “better game” that the players judge and react to, in the end. Nothing else. If one of the devs goes to explain and discuss an idea in detail this just means that he is analyzing a potential, opening a confrontation, a research. It just means that he considers that idea potentially interesting for the game and he is examining all the different faces it presents.

It can be then implemented or not. In stages or all at once. It’s mostly a matter of prioritizing what needs to go in sooner than later. Have a good grasp of the overall structure, define a good long term plan and “vision” for the game.

All these things are possible and useful again for a precise goal: make the game a better game.

And at the end the players will decide to play if the game is good enough. And not because of devs promises.

If they rant, let them rant. The problem isn’t about keeping them quiet. The problem is about interpreting what they are saying. And search a dialogue in the measure you find it useful. It’s a need that should come spontaneously and not imposed. What is important is to remove the self-censorship, the discouragement. Which is what Lum actively promotes, instead.

It has been my whole point for all these years: there’s nothing to be scared about. No reason for damage-control. What matters in the end is the game. The dialogue is useful only in the case where the necessity of it comes directly from the developer.

From a pragmatic point of view: NEVER force the developers to talk with players. But instead let them absolutely free to establish the kind of relationship they find more useful. Without any form of self-censorship, control, inhibition or whatever. There isn’t really anything to worry about, if not the potential loss of one of the most useful resources that a mmorpg has: the community.

Is this too naive? Or maybe just free of unfounded fears.

A note: CCP is *contantly* promising and failing to deliver. This becomes a delusion for a lot of players, me included. But it doesn’t change the fact that they are keeping pushing the game, set interesting goals, trying to make the game a better game. And people are there for the ride because they recognize themselves in those objectives. Both in contemporaneity (what the game is today), and future (what the game will be tomorrow). The journey between those two states will be always filled with mistakes and misunderstandings. The points is about deciding whether the community can hinder or help that process.

Another example: the Honor system in WoW was firstly implemented around April of the last year (If I remember correctly). I, along with others, started to rant heavily against it in January, when the first details were disclosed. More than one year later Blizzard recognizes that the system didn’t work as they expected. There was no dialogue to be had.

Maybe even with a dialogue the Honor system would have been implemented exactly as it is now, maybe the dialogue could have lead to a better acknowledgement and a better solution. At the end the dialogue or lack of it wouldn’t have created a greater discontent or a dissatisfaction. The game did.

While the endless efforts from the community managers to justify the system, doing damage-control, trying to convince how the system was going to be open to casual players just because casuals are the majority and so on. All superfluous for a very simple reason: it was a fake dialogue with a puppet.