Port, please improve your Community Management

I came up with these suggestions in another thread, but thought it might be good to generate some discussion around this in its own thread.

The game can and will continue to improve. They seem to be fighting like hell to make that happen through the post-release period. Part of that needs to be fighting smarter - not harder.

I think one of the great issues is that there has never been a consistent approach to community input, and DS recently vented about the expectation-less feedback process. If there are no expectations, you can't really complain about it. I just think Port does not have a great system yet for managing a very unwieldy and engaged community, and that this lack substantially harmed Episode 1.

This is a broader issue than forum moderation and I really want to steer clear of that in providing ideas (PLEASE!), and broader than what past "community managers" were responsible for.

Here are a few suggestions I would make:

- Eliminate the ability to directly PM or email a dev. They don't need these distractions and it disturbs focus. They could have all the input they need through a streamlined system. Maybe this could be allowed if this was a smaller project with less interest. People may scream about this, but the devs already have clarity for where they want to go and sometimes people just need to put their damn heads down and work. Basic project management: managing communication so the team doesn't lose focus.

- Decide on one streamlined method for input... stop the multi-channel system. Is it forum, email, Twitter, facebook, etc? For example, as most have learned, Twitter is the way to get RG's attention and he will add JIRA's from there. When you have no streamlined process for feedback, there is going to be a flood and disorganization. Better if they invest in or create some form of automated system.

- Find a way to incent people to do bug reporting and dissuade open-ended commentary for a while. Come up with an easier method to both search for bugs already identified and report new ones.

- Be very clear about when input is needed, provide a format for it (like Chris did with the combat survey a while back but it can be unstructure forum thread for a while), and have a plan for ending it (the decision is made). A simple, no-brainer step to resolve DS's recent post is to add expectations to the feedback forum.

- Eliminate the perception (please pay attention to that word) that certain players have special access unless it was clearly laid out how and when this would be provided (for example, a KS reward). Casual and uncontrolled access to the devs has created frenzy and high-schoolish drama. I get it, devs like this because it adds the personal dimension to what they do. But in periods when you really need to work, do the work. Save the interaction for structured times like the conventions and when things are done well and everyone can relax and enjoy more freedom in interaction.

- Stop fulfilling silly unecessary requests. For example, someone jokingly requested that they put POT upgrades on sale on 4/20. (For those who don't get the reference, 420 is slang for marijuana or pot, hence the connection to POT's). DS responded right away that was a great idea and made it happen. That may be a small thing, but with the distraction factor and the uncounted times this has happened, it really adds up. If people need more examples, I will be happy to provide them. Now, apparently he's working like hell to fix bugs. Ok, why wasn't that happening sooner instead of paying attention to all the silly requests? Silly requests ding you for a little time here and a little time there, adding up to huge amounts of time wasted. I'm sure someone will argue that they may have earned a bit of $ from that... who knows and who cares - it wasn't enough to make or break the project, but projects face a real danger in losing focus little-by-little until people are left scratching their heads at the end saying "what happened"? And ultimately in the long run, the dollars will drop to 0 if that happens.

Remember please don't limit your ideas to the issue of forum moderation please... if it becomes about that I just ask a Dev to lock the thread. I am not at all seeking big restraints on the forum as I have enjoyed all the discussions about development on here and being able to talk about issues like this. This is about honing the community input process so that the devs have great input and can focus on what they need to do.

 

Vyrin, all very good points.

Some feedback from me -

Re: Testing
I've always felt that the community here, although we don't always agree on how or why - has been very responsive and active in the giving of feedback and testing of the game.
However I feel the 'incentive' system to do so, frankly, needs some work. By holding out a carrot that essentially 'randomly' awards testing efforts, it does two things: it encourages people to over-report/repeat post bugs to get 'noticed' by the reward schema, creating unnecessary admin to churn through it all - and two, it is demoralizing to people who do put forth significant effort but due to poor luck never seem to get anything for it other than the warm fuzzy feeling you get for knowing you 'helped'. I used to download and play around on QA every release, and I've never gotten anything out of it. "Random rewards" is almost as bad as random crafting, and random loot drops....a tiered structure of rewards you could incrementally work towards makes more sense.

With regards to testing, I agree its a bit of a mess - there's no reliable way to see what others have reported unless you try to read through hundreds of similar issues which aren't always evident by the title. If you've not got time for that, should you not report something in case someone else has already reported it, or risk duplicating (and causing more work for the filtering through of things). Its similar with requests, suggestions, wishlists - the game has been in a development a long time, and players have no visibility into what has already been JIRA'd, what is being worked on, what they can't reproduce, etc. so we just keep reporting the same things over and over and over. To the point where I think sometimes we're no longer completely helpful.

The point is to help - without requiring additional input/admin time spent by the devs in order to manage the 'helpers'. I'm sure that there's a lot of people in the community with spare time, an interest in helping the game, and basic JIRA knowledge who would be happy to take on the role of 'helper management' without the need for financial compensation. Perhaps a title or something to acknowledge them.

There's a lot of inconsistencies in the game too - not just in terms of testing, but I mean like ....this node in this scene gives wrong xp, this deco item doesn't display properly, that sort of thing. The players, who spend countless hours playing the game, pick up on all these nuances but they are either too minor to itemize or, if done, too low priority to get dev traction to fix.

I'd honestly suggest selecting a committee of players - similar to the ambassadors for example - who have limited JIRA access and put them in charge of managing the player-bug-submission mess, adding new information to existing tickets, etc. JIRA permissions system is fairly robust so easy enough to hide things they don't need to see or keep them from messing things up. Would save a lot of time that I think is currently being spent just managing community input.

Last thing about the bug forum - the categories that we have, if this is going to be the method for submitting things, I think are not really fit for purpose. If I'm having an issue dragging a piece of deco out of my inventory, do I post it in items and inventory? player housing? UI issues? How many pages in all 3 of those areas should I read to see if someone else has posted something similar? If I've got an issue with a node in a zone, does that get posted in world/scenes or does it get posted in harvesting/gathering ? What's considered a critical issue? What's considered a blocker? If I have to reload the client to solve the problem, is that a blocker? Is it only a blocker if I can't access a scene? Or the game? These things should be well defined to prevent over-inflating (or underfinlating) the significance of bugs.

I work in software development and I find that we, and other companies, use an incident management system that captures emails and formats them appropriately, assigning initial priority etc. and puts things in nice neat boxes for the people who are going to have to fix it to be able to quickly filter, sort, identify, etc. Atlassian (JIRA) software has a tool that does this. A player-staffed service team could assist in the sorting, labelling, and prioritizing of issues into some sort of sense and, players wanting to report bugs could easily find if something already exists. In addition, a quick dump of the logs will show who has been logging in and doing stuff if they want to hand out rewards for helping without trying to find out how many bugs someone has posted or how many hours they have spent on QA server standing still or actually doing something.

Re: Forum Moderation
While there are exceptions, I think most players can generally agree what is, and isn't appropriate. While there's always a risk of abuse of power, player moderators are a 'thing' in many other games in order to keep the forums from becoming too toxic, or ensuring things are in their proper place, etc. Find some sensible people willing to keep an eye on it who are in good standing and give them a go - see if it helps.

 

Reading and considering, thank you for your post.

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