/v/ - Video Games

>>15941263

It's not really TL;DRable, but I'll try:

Discuss the best ways to communicate with a dev to give better updates to his game, assuming he's not a little bitch. Does that involve a middle men to give dev more space to actually develop or should the dev separate some minor time to get in touch with his playerbase?

Discuss the possibility of less control in multiplayer games where nowadays is common to apply reputation systems, censorship and pre-scripted bans to combat "toxic" behavior.

Community managers exist solely to enforce the hugbox mentality modern online games promote. And anything outside of that they do more harm than good, people complaining about balance in your game? Some faggot telling them "we're looking into it" or "I'll pass it on to the devs" empty corporate speak just makes people more angry, especially the longer the complaints go on because they know that someone is there to atleast pretend to care. Problems like exploiting or game balance or anything of the matter should be made with some sort of professionalism to it, not from some sort of "friendly community manager twitter guy".

I am against community mangers, mods or whatever. My reason is anyone who is willing to take said "jobs" is more often than not an attention hungry, power mad ultra retard who wants to enforce his/her way while also remaining a figure of attention in the community, which is more or less an echo chamber of drones who are too scared or too rigid to go out of line. I believe a community should be mature enough to create and maintain its rules and cultures over time instead of having an attentionwhore go nuclear every time someone calls out shit.

Devs being out of touch I blame completely on external factors like publishers pushing bullshit on the devs or the devs wanting to push bullshit on the player.

>>15941251

>Should it even exist?

A "Community Manager" is basically someone taking what the fans bring up to him and boils it down into an easy to understand summary. There are people who do need a community manager because they're exactly the type who would be consumed by social media at the expense of pretty much everything else. You want them to be productive you need a buffer to stop them from being consumed by the thoughts of strangers on the internet.

The term "community" is tainted; it is conflated with 'consumer base' and 'customers'. True gaming communities are few and far between, and often form on their own outside the realm of influence of the game developers/product representatives, and therefore rarely communicate directly with the devs/reps.

Where a PR official, or "community manager" is deemed necessary or desired, it should be that the person is assigned from within the company or team, rather than promoted from members of the consumer base, or "community". This mistake has been made and witnessed time and again, and it never goes well.

True communities shape and govern themselves, often inhabiting their own server and/or forum where possible, and should never be interfered with by representatives of the game. Artificial or forced "communities" are–though the term is overused–an absolute cancer, and are usually comprised of the worst the consumer base has to offer, never reflecting well on the product itself.

When it comes to communicating with and managing the behaviour of users, it is important to keep conduct professional. Personal beliefs and opinions should not be carelessly shared by developers or representatives. Measures can be taken to mitigate unwanted behaviour through further development of the game, but developers must accept that users will do as they please within the confines and possibilities of the game, and that the developers' personal feelings are insignificant.

I've been a Community Manager for a game for a while, ask me anything

>>15941251

I work on the simple premise that a job wholly dedicated to posting on social media has no right to exist. But beyond the simple absurdity of such a job existing, a community manager that does nothing but that acts like a buffer between developers and community, inevitably leading to some gatekeeping and dev isolation, unintentional or otherwise. The only good community manager is one of, if not all, lead designers of the project.

>>15941333

Alright, I'll start with the obvious.

>did you feel your job was necessary in the first place, like before starting it?

>once you were working in it, were you really helping? Did you feel your contribution was helping the project go forward in any way?

>did you like the game you were managing?

>were you operating alone or did you have company? If you did, how did you relate with other moderators?

>how was your particular relation with the players? If you had company, how did the other moderators relate with the players?

>did you ban or censor anyone? If so, why? Did you personally find justifiable or were you just following orders/rules?

>how was your particular relation with the developers? If you had company, how did the other moderators relate with the developers?

>Was there any publisher involved? If so, did you have any relation with them?

>If it doesn't break your anonymity, can you share what platforms you used to communicate with the players? How about communicating with the devs? What were the advantages and disavadvantages of using said platforms?

>would you do it again?

>>15941333

Did female "fans" reach out to your dick so that they can get close to the dev team?

>>15941263

TL;DR; people think community manager is a legitimate role that's not just given to hambeast women and minorities.

I have and it is imageboard and/or classic forums like rpgcodex.

Community managers exist to control / suppress the community. Why do you think they are universally hated? People hate being controlled / manipulated.

>>15941406

Some guy got stabbed over a KOF97 match

>>15941591

"back then" community management was actually an interface between community and company to improve the game thus have more sales by growing the community.

these days they're just tardwranglers working out of the marketing department keeping their customers in line so they buy more of their shit.

there's a reason hardly any game these days has community features or the tools to support one (so they can regulate themselves). and I'm not talking about "join our discord and follow us on twitter/facebook"

>>15941251

Jesus fucking Christ, OP, just have mod positions that delete shit like spam and enforce some basic rules, and leave it at that. None of this bullshit social engineering crap where a "community" is dev-enforced echo chamber of dicksuckers. If people are "toxic" to each other on some online forum then who the fuck cares? Why the hell should the dev care that little Billy got called a faggot? The community is there not for the dev or for the game, it's there for the fans, who then MIGHT be in touch with the dev through it.

>>15941805

>slavs

>outmarketing a western dev

hahahaha

>chinks

>caring about some EULA

AHAHAHAHAHA

>>15941813

>what is mobile

>what are regions

>what is precedence

kindly neck yourself

best management is no management

t. sysop for many popular servers

>>15941823

After all the Chinese are known for stealing indie game ideas and well known for respecting IP. And are you seriously trying to say there aren't 900 copies of every god damn game that ever gets released as a "mobile verson" made by some retard to try to get your personal info? Are you seriously trying to say that somehow releasing some indie game first will somehow stop the literal bootleg industry?

I'm struggling to comprehend here how you think somehow your idea is so outstanding in the literal shit sea of the internet that someone will see it, put more time and effort into it to release first, all the while making the literal same game down to the mechanics that you are.

>>15941727

>>15941251

Replace community managers with surveys

Community managers are PR monkeys who are there to log complaints for developers to ignore. Ever since I heard about CM's it's been bad news for games because all CM's do is block and ban anyone with a negative opinion about the game. Most of the time if there is a major problem it's better to bypass the CM and go straight to the devs. However everyone is on Twitter with blockbots now. Which means official forums and e-mails are the only way to address the issue. But then they get ignored in favor of Twitter circlejerking.

All game communities are echo chambers now. Whether it be by law or by terms of service. Honestly instead of managing the community as a whole which is a lost cause it's better to curate which communities you visit and get your information from and acknowledge rather than rely on a single monolith. The communities closest to the developers are the ones that suck the most dick anyway.

In the end as long as devs get their money from shareholders influencing their company and not live or die from the consumer who buys their product then the developers have no need to listen to the consumer.

Good thread.

>>15941251

Community management is HR applied to the customer. And just like HR, it's irredeemable cancer. Their only real purpose is to professionalize/sterilize communities so that only the corporate-approved kind of fun is allowed, which depends mostly on their desired image.

Add to that the fact that they serve to isolate devs from the community so community managers can easily have their political bias influence the entire company, and it becomes not only ridiculous, but untenable.

>>15955236

I think a complaint-based system might work well.

You make sure you have a very streamlined and easy-to-use system to file complaints, point out that you take them very seriously and react swiftly.

Then you just wait for people to file reports and ban them. Might still be worth glancing over the report, just in case it's a false positive and someone's actually pointing out a spammer or something.

>>15941251

Let's put it this way, If fucking Mark does a better job than any of these hambeasts and does it for fucking free, then you know there's a massive problem in the video games industry.

>>15955301

(I deleted the post because I forgot a few things, polite sage because repost)

The problem is that a community doesn't just magically get to the part where it's capable of policing content itself. Community management is necessary to engineer your community in the early stages so that it ultimately reaches that point, but sjw power trippers manage to botch things to an unfathomable degree and make their communities implode rather than properly nurture their growth. It's not fair to equate community management as a whole to those outstandingly bad examples. It isn't a question of whether or not it's necessary, but to what extent that it is and who should be the ones doing it. You can't leave a vital task like that up to people that do not have the capacity to manage an entire community.

>>15956216

>a community doesn't just magically get to the part where it's capable of policing content itself

Of course it does. What you seem to be talking about is engineering a particular type of content policing by having mods to serve as a sorts of role models and nudge common posters in the "correct" direction. You can certainly do that if you have a particular vision in mind for the kind of community you want to create, but it's not necessary at all. Left to their own devices, communities will naturally develop and enforce their own sets of behavioral standards, different though they may be (see Reddit vs. Twitter vs. here).

The only time this system fails is when a sudden invasion of foreigners shows up that is too big to be policed. If the newfags outnumber everyone else, they can post whatever they want and change the local culture to their own. A good mod should have the wisdom to step in under those circumstances, but recognizing that they're pretty uncommon.

>>15941299

Fuck off cunt

Community managers only need to do one thing and that is remove spam or repeated posts. Anything else is a violation of the NAP dont tread on me.

Honestly, I find communities worse. If there wasn't a community, then there wouldn't be a need for a community manager. Let's be real with ourselves here, when has a community produced anything of value?

The only time a community manager is necessary is when a game is foreign. However, this creates problems. There have been times when it's been proven that a chosen community manager wasn't doing the communication they promised to do, or communicated poorly or the wrong things. It's good when there's a direct line between a western publisher, the western community, and the Asian developers. However, it gets tricky when the publisher and or manager has different ideas or doesn't have the playerbases interests in mind.

It's far better when Koreans/Japs self-publish and then communicate with the western players as best they can, which is what Neople does with Dungeon Fighter Online. Instead of hiring English community managers, the Koreans just host streams for the English players and use their best English so everything is direct.

No, the less they speak to their consumers the better. It's filled with low iq trash anyway so let them have some fun atleast. Never open up the pandora's box of listening to complaints from the "community".

Ｓｌａｙ　ａｌｌ　ｇａｙｓ

>>15941251

Community managing becomes more of a chore and you sometimes might give yourself something to "do."