Take for example this interview from Computer and Video Games on July 1st:

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is “very friendly to the WoW player” and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.

“Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself,” Bilson told CVG. “I’m a diehard MMO player myself – going back to EverQuest. I’ve spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I’m going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It’s very friendly to the WoW player.”

“The brand is fantastic – it’s so deep and so wonderful,” he said. “There’s just so much for us to play with. There’s more vehicles in our thing [than WoW], the combat’s completely different; you can get four guys in a tank and go.

“[40K] is stunning. It’s going to be a masterpiece. It’s been in development for three-and-a-half years already. It’s got two more to go. Look at it.” Go on then: Look at it.

“It’s sensational. I believe within the next six months we’re going to be showing playable sections of the game, not just a movie.” According to the THQ exec, the online game only needs to poach “a million” World of WarCraft players to be successful.

“They’ve got 14 million players! Gimme a million and I’m good! We’re real good at a million, right?” He added: “We don’t need everybody to migrate. We just need some of them – and I’m full confident we’re going to get them.

Two things that strikes me about that interview. Firstly I’m gong to be generous to him and assume that the ‘we only need a million players’ line was just playful banter that he didn’t actually mean. The history of such claims for other games is an unhappy one. Secondly, I couldn’t help but notice that he mentioned WoW a lot more than he mentioned his own product. Which is an unusual marketing tactic by any standards. I thought this was a one-off and perhaps reflected a certain single-mindedness on the journalist – I certainly remember talking about WAR to press who were basically only interested in framing the interview in terms of how that game stacked up to WoW. This week however at the Gamescom in Cologne, Mr Bilson was at it again, this time talking to Eurogamer.

Eurogamer: I’ve been excited about the Warhammer 40K MMO for a long time. When will it be out?

Danny Bilson: A couple more years. It really is about two years out.

Look, there is an 800 pound gorilla out there called World of Warcraft, which is a fantastic MMO that’s going to get updated with Cataclysm soon and drive a lot of people including myself back into it.

I’m a big MMO fan and player. I’ve played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, I’ve got a few level 80 characters in WOW. Now, imagine that the people making Dark Millennium Online are all a bunch of guys like me, who love WOW and the expansions it’s had along the way.

We all say to ourselves, ‘We’re not going to get all the WOW players to move to 40K.’ 40K has its own unique coolness and edge. And that edge and glorious gore is not going to appeal to everybody. It appeals to you and I.

But what I know about our 40K game is that if you’ve played WOW you’ll be able to pick up and play this instantly, and you’ll find all these things that feel like upgrades, in a way.

Wait.  WoW again? Sure I guess it’s a reference point for the industry and he’s certainly right to describe it as the ’800 pound gorilla’ of the scene but really, could you, y’know, talk a bit about 40k online rather than WoW for a change?

It has a lot of the same qualities of WOW in terms of ease of use and how the interface is. I want to say that if you play WOW, you’ll be able to jump into Dark Millennium Online really easy.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe. The road there is a great road, and they are in the game.

WoW once again. Man can this guy stop talking about the competition. Seriously Activision Blizzard can afford their own PR guys and.. hold on for just one moment. Run that past me again.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe.

In a Warhammer 40k game ‘you won’t be able to be a Space Marine’ straight away? What the hell? The single most iconic thing about the IP, the poster-child for the entire setting, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when you say Warhammer 40k isn’t going to be playable at launch?

Scott Jennings said it best so I’ll just point you at his rant here.

Dear THQ, please don’t make this suck. Also please stop talking about WoW and tell us about your game instead.

My talk is going to be all about how community experience can be an asset in other areas of the games industry – either for community managers who want to move on to new roles or those who simply want to expand the scope of their current position. This is something I feel pretty qualified to talk about as I’ve worn quite a few hats over the past few years and ‘community’ has been at the core of nearly all of them. In fact, in my current role as a games designer I’m mostly responsible for creating social and retention systems. These are clearly areas where a strong understanding of player dynamics are essential.

Plenty of notable CMs will be there too, I’ll be in such august company as Donna Prior, Jörg Koonen, Sean Kaupinnen, Martin Rabl and a former colleague of mine, Fabien Alexandre. This is the first event of its kind in Europe and hopefully will become a fixture in the industry calendar – there’s certainly been a lot of lively discussion on the main CM industry forum and it looks as though Two Pi Team who are organising it intend to build on it for the future. For me it will be a nice change to be at the GC without needing to be on my feet for 14 hours a day and to be able to wander round and chat without feeling guilty.

There’s also a strong possibility that a Warmachine game between myself and Donna Prior may happen at the event. Should such a titanic struggle come to pass then it will of course be properly chronicled over on my other blog.

Now what we have here is a policy initiative by the Republican party in the US to collect policy suggestions. They launched the America Speaking Out website where anyone can suggest policy ideas over a wide range of different topics including energy, defence, American values and so forth. Before I go on, I’m going to say that this isn’t a political blog and I have no intention of making it one. I do have deeply held political views but they aren’t relevant here. This is me critiquing the concept as a community guy.

On the surface it appears to be a good idea – engage with the greater public in a big open forum to let people bring forwards ideas for consideration. No arguments there from me. The more that voters are challenged to think through the consequences of their opinions the less likely they are to hold bad ones. Additionally, the more that legislators engage with their electorate the more they should be in tune with their concerns and issues. When it comes to democracy and giving your target audience a stake in the larger process I’m all for that whether we are talking about the players of a game or the voters in a country.

The issue is in the execution (as it so often is). What we have here is basically a huge noise machine. You know that 500 page thread on the main forums that started with a blue response and now players use it as a ‘Will the devs ever do X?’ thread? This is that thread. What the GOP are finding (and as anyone who has ever been a part of any online community ever could have told them) is that there are a whole lot more bored people on the internet who will ride your idea down into terminal, blazing hilarity than there are earnest and conscientious posters who once had a good idea about something and would like you to consider it.  Naturally in this case given the target and the visibility, the site has become a magnet for either actual loons who want to deport the President, go back to using gold for currency and start enslaving black people again, bored trolls who are posting parody worthy of The Onion, or idealogues who want to tell the GOP how much they disagree with their platform and who somehow think that their incisive comment is going to shame the party into a 180º policy reversal.

As a community manager I know that feedback is only as useful as the filters you apply to it. If all you want is static, then this is a great way to generate that. If you want an actual debate and to have honest conversations on various topics then you need to set things up to produce that result. You must frame the question in advance, lay out all the relevant information and then ask your community to participate in that conversation. When it takes off you need to stay with it, keep it on track, prune out derails, unconstructive posts and actual misinformation so that the people who are involved get a higher quality of discourse and you get a higher quality of feedback. It’s like tending a garden – you won’t get much of anything unless you prepare the ground properly and care for your plants as they grow. A big online suggestion box basically fulfils the same purpose as an open field that you can yell in for a bit whenever you feel like yelling. This is why games often run focus tests in the mid beta period and why the best games are often the ones with the most closely managed beta programs. If you only rarely see your community manager on the beta forums and there’s no serious attempt to solicit specific feedback on critical topics then I’d be suspicious of the importance of the beta to the final launch.

I suspect that this will continue to be a theme as we move on.

You’ll find my official campaign thread on the Eve forums here and my general campaign site is here.

Vote early, vote often and tell your friends. Voting is open from today through to the 19th of May.

Thank you for your support.

Today’s rumblings are inspired by a post made by Gav Thorpe on his blog about criticism. He’s specifically talking about criticism of his work as a writer and how he reacts to that but a lot of what he says is applicable to other fields and especially the field of community management.

In case you don’t know, Gav is a former Games Workshop games developer who is now a freelance author. While he was at GW he wrote Codex: Chaos Space Marines (an army supplement for one of the popular Warhammer 40,000 factions) which launched to mixed reactions amongst the notoriously passionate fans of Warhammer 40k. Nowadays he earns a crust by writing fiction for GW’s publishing imprint Black Library as well as for more mainstream publishers. His post on criticism is clearly a result of the huge amount of feedback readers of his blog decided to give him about the Chaos Space Marines.

So, what does this all have to do with computer games?

Well, firstly criticism is criticism. The kind of things that are useful for an author to hear about his work are also useful to a games designer. Collecting and analysing criticism is also a large part of the job of a community manager (a hat I wore for several years). Generally people are pretty bad at providing criticism for a variety of reasons, many people are also bad at receiving it for entirely different reasons. We’ll address those people later.

Giving criticism is something that a lot of people are not comfortable with. While they may have deeply held opinions, it can be hard to express those opinions without sounding hostile or rude, thus many people prefer to stay silent and keep what would otherwise be useful feedback to themselves. Not all opinions are negative of course, but the ones you hear almost always will be. This is because things that meet your expectations tend not to incite you to write about them. If things are simply ‘ok’ then we smile and move on, things have to be significantly outside of our expectation zone before we are moved to comment on them. This is usually manifested in gaming circles as a rule where, for every person posting in a 200 page threadnaught on your game forums, there are several hundred people playing the game quite happily oblivious to this apparently all consuming issue.

Another problem with criticism is that people are always right when they say what they do or don’t like but are usually almost always wrong when they try to describe it. This is because it’s easy to get hung up on symptoms without thinking through the issues to identify the actual problem causing them. A large part of being a successful community manager is listening to problems that are described by the players and trying to determine what it is that they are actually complaining about rather than what it is that they are saying.

Taking feedback can be difficult for other reasons. Gav mentions confirmation bias and that’s certainly a problem that needs to be confronted. It’s not always so much of a problem in games where a team is responsible rather than an individual but it certainly still exists. A bigger problem is enabling useful feedback at all. Most games companies run forums for fans to discuss the product, most have a community team to filter the useful nuggets from the vast seas of noise and most have some kind of feedback form or CS ticketing system for more direct contact. All of that by itself doesn’t make people want to tell you the things you need them to be saying though. Companies should be training their customers to give feedback effectively, the tools to do so should be seamless and it should be regularly solicited. If spamming customers sounds bad then incentivise it instead, reward those who tell you what they think and encourage quality over quantity. Ask people to think about your product and give you those thoughts, help them to frame them and give them the tools to do so easily.

In all the projects I’ve worked on, getting quality commentary has always been the hardest part of my job. I wish people would express their opinions more.

So, what do we have for you today?

I’ve been following (and sticking my oar into) a debate on Broken Toys about the rights of players ingame. It didn’t start out that way but somehow the to-ing and fro-ing over Blizzard’s new mod policy devolved into an argument about how much control players should have over the game they play.

Now I’d be the first to argue that players should have as much control as possible over the environment they play in but here we are talking about not just the ingame and meta game experience but the way that the game is operated.  And the answer to that is somewhere close to ‘none at all’.

Oh, sure you can have robust community feedback that informs design and production, you can give the players a platform to make their case and that’s all fine and laudable however the operator needs to have the casting vote. Sometimes it’s necessary to do things that your players won’t like for reasons that you can’t adequately explain in public. Sometimes your players are simply wrong and you need to give them what the game needs not what the players say they want.

MMOs foster a strong sense of investment in players by their very nature. Not just the ‘I pay you 15$ a month so you’d better listen to me’ type of stuff but also a deeper level of belonging that comes from fostering a strong community. People feel attached to the game and the communitythey play with and that sense of attachment leads naturally to a sense of obligation regarding the same. Between this investment and sense of belonging, perspectives are often lost. Worse, the situation can devolve to the point where the players feel the game owes them something.

The reality is one that companies are usually unwilling to point out. For the player it’s a game, for the operator it’s a livelihood. No matter how invested the player believes himself to be, ultimately he can walk away whenever he chooses and be no worse off. So, when a developer makes a decision, the only party that can really win or lose is the company itself.

Very often I’ve had to be the person who had to front bad news to a community. For a lot of those times there were very good reasons as to why that bad news had to happen. In almost none of those instances was it possible to properly explain the situation. Many times the decision was better for the game but worse in the short term for the players. You can’t ask people to lay aside their self-interest and do what’s right because 90% of the time they’ll pick the wrong option (the other 10% of the time is when they pick the right path entirely by accident).

I’ve said it before but people are generally bad at expressing what they want. They will point at a symptom and ask for that to be fixed without thinking about the underlying cause. Or they’ll work backwards from a premise to reach a faulty basis and insist on that. Or they’ll simply assume that their own short term self-interest is in the long-term interest of everyone.

This is why you should never listen to what people are suggesting but instead look closely at what they are actually saying.

Jeremy’s post is mostly a critique of some points that Ryan Schwayder made on the pros and cons of official forums, but amongst all of that she makes some very interesting points on community scalability.  Communities, it is very clear work best when they are small. How small? Jeremy brings up Dunbar’s Number as a possible limit but in reality I think the answer is mutable. For a game community, a single server is probably too big to be considered a single community, an alliance or a guild is a better basic unit of community and those tend not to exceed a few hundred. If your alliance exceeds that number then the chances are you have several communities within that umbrella that can be said to be independant of each other as discrete communities. For all that we might talk about ‘the community’ on a particular server, the reality on the ground is a lot grainier than that. Just because we might end up fighting the same battle, we aren’t necessarily part of the same community. It isn’t necessarily limited to the number of simultaneous relationships any one member can sustain – hence why I don’t think Dunbar’s Number applies – but once you start going beyond second degree associations then I think you can start to define a boundary. The smaller a community is (above a certain sustainability threshold) the more tightly knit it tends to be,  this is something we see in every aspect of life from geographic location through to international associations.

The basic point of Ms Dalberg’s post is correct. However we are measuring the cohesiveness of a community, 5 million is way too many to be considered as a single entity. That’s crazy talk and is akin to assuming that putting the entire population of Belgium in a room to chat to each other and then trying to manage that would be in some way productive.

So how do you manage a 5 million member community? You don’t. You chop it up and manage a few hundred smaller ones.

By now the latest EvE dramaquake is old news but the discussions are still happening. Scott Jennings gives a pretty flippant account which then turns into a threadnought in the comments as is usual. The actual story is pretty simple once all the extraneous bits are trimmed away – guy gets fed up with life in one gigantic power bloc, defects to different gigantic power bloc and turns the lights out as he leaves the building.

People have argued the morality of the issue and whether or not that should be cheating but I’d like to concentrate solely on the question of how much power should a game invest in a single player?

EvE is something of a contradiction to established MMO wisdom. Players are very much in the driving seat when it comes to the big political movements in the game. Because of the almost complete freedom for players to interact with each other, players have a lot of individual power and, the more players they are associated with, the greater the scope for issues. Add to this CCPs very hands-off stance on intervention in player interactions and the stage is set for some industrial grade drama. Some people hold the belief that CCP actively encourages this kind of thing, personally I believe it’s simple pragmatism that drawing a line and upholding it is hard work and open to misinterpretation. In any case, it is possible for EvE players to amass a staggering amount of ingame power and responsibility – which translates into a gold plated opportunity to shaft a huge number of people at once.

For many EvE players (myself included), this freedom is precisely what attracts us to EvE in the first place and thus any attempt to restrict player power needs to be approached carefully by CCP in order not to alienate a very large chunk of the playerbase. This very open and abusable framework is not found in other games, limits are placed to prevent the damage that a single player can do to his ‘friends’.

I’ve advocated before for greater freedom in player interactions, I’ve also been fairly open in my conviction that players cannot be trusted to run important parts of the game so where is the happy medium?

For EvE, I don’t think there is one. Checks and balances can be put in place to prevent this particular issue from arising again, but enterprising players will always find ways around them or entirely new ways to be jerks to each other. For a hypothetical new game though, I think this should underline why community systems and player accountability should be at the core of the design and not simply a fancy LFG UI and some chat tabs.

Basically there are people who aren’t us in our game. Sometimes they’re annoying and we want to smack them. Sometimes they’re awesome and we laugh and laugh until our eyes are red, there’s bizarre white goo coming out of our nose and the wife has wandered in to make sure we aren’t having some kind of seizure. Mostly though they’re background, they are an ever changing tapestry of additional content that we can sample and pick through as we like.

Still though we increasingly tend to play by ourselves.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone. In all the MMOs I play (3 currently) I have a fun and supportive guild or corp, I have plenty of virtual friends and a network of people I can tap up for help, advice or just a chat. I don’t mind sharing my toys, I have no funny ideas about the purity of solo play, I don’t care too much if I put my advancement on hold to go and help out my friends but still I end up logging in and running around pretty much solo the whole time. It’s like playing a slot machine, you pull the lever, see how the reels fall, collect the shinies and then reach for the lever again. It’s safe, it’s mostly predictable, you get something at the end of it but it’s still pretty much the least fun you can have in the house.

I’ve been in terrible groups to be sure where I was convinced the other players were friends in disguise playing some elaborate prank on me. I’ve been in groups where every member appeared to be actively hostile to every other member. I’m aware that a decent percentage of other players suck and that people will tend to do crappy things at bad moments for no readily discernable reason. However in all my time in MMOs, across every game I’ve played, I can’t remember one truly awesome moment that I had when I wasn’t in a group. Every defining experience I’ve had has been when I was with other people.

Playing with other people is hard work. You need to put a little bit more effort into it than just logging in and getting on with whatever you were doing. It’s often frustrating, people have different priorities and you often stand around doing nothing at all because someone else thinks feeding the dog is more important than being your healer. It’s totally worth it though.

Games in the current market need to cater for the solo player, there will always be people who can’t or won’t make friends, there will always be times when you just don’t want to have to deal with other people but you still want to play for a bit. That’s all fine, I’m not suggesting that solo play is necessarily bad all the time. Some games seem to actively discourage you from grouping – at least in some gameplay aspects. EvE online missions for example are horrible to run as a gang. Low level quests in most MMOs are often faster and easier to run solo than they are in groups too. Exploring is hard if all the other guys want to do is set up next to a big spawn and farm all night. The game should never put itself in the way of players however. Games with a stronger co-operative element form stronger and more durable communities. Stronger communities bring better retention and better word of mouth.

How do you play? Do you find that your reality is more massively single player these days?