Tim-ONeil Posted October 6, 2012 Share Posted October 6, 2012 This is a very very long post and more of a business model proposal so it is not based on brevity but actual examples of concept. If you are of the tl;dr crowd move along it is not intended for you anyway. Overview: Currently most of the news about this game has been mainly negative. Sub losses, layoffs, etc have given the game a black eye so to speak in terms of gamers perception of the game and its future. Changing the game communities perception is essential to long term growth and stability of the title. It will take a combination of increased, more effective communication AND deliverance on communicated objectives to achieve this goal. Failure to achieve BOTH will result in continuation of this trend and the complete loss of the potential of this product. The product has improved greatly since launch however getting that message to your intended audience takes a focused strategy. The current one isn't getting the job done. This post will focus on how to improve on the overall flow of communication between the current and potential player base and the game representatives. To borrow from the Episode 3 opening crawl: "War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere." This prologue is true in the gaming realm as well. You have multiple different factions from the potential game audience, media, developers, and the community team that bridges the gap between them. Each faction has their own sub factions with differing motivations and agenda. The end goal of increased communication is to present a unified message of what you are offering to the game audience while controlling the direction and scope of the discussion in the media and setting expectations for the product. There and back again: How did we get here? The game is nearly a year old and we are at a crossroads where we can see different paths for long term growth or paths that will continue the downward trend. An examination of what has occurred with a focus on lines of communication by the Community Team and Developers will follow. Prior to the game's launch the official forum was a very busy place full of speculation, back and forth interactions with key members of the development team and the community staff. This forum was the place to be for information on this game and it still exists as the only decided spot on the internet for company controlled information. In other words the website is the hub of the SWTOR galaxy. Given the initial success of boxes sold this approach worked very well. People had a central hub to buzz about the game and there were actual results produced from the time invested here. More recently they have moved away from this centralized model. It's a mistake. Continuing the story line, after launch our lead community manager disappeared from these forums and started to focus solely on social media presence. This is a much different approach than other games have had in the past. The audience is made up of gamers accustomed to best practices of other MMO titles and this was a pretty large departure from that established route. Additionally communication dried up with the exception of one developer who posted fairly regularly. Bioware and Lucas Arts adopted a very strict policy of non disclosure of future plans. MMO's thrive on anticipation perhaps more so than other games. No matter how much content a game currently has the player base will always want more. Giving regular updates on future projects helps satisfy this and gives a clear direction on where the game is heading and answers the ever popular 'what's in it for me?' line of thinking. In August the community team decided to change their approach. It was a needed step but has not gone far enough to really make a difference in terms of perception and two months into this strategy we are right back where we started. The dev tracker has been pretty bare on substance over the last 2 weeks since the launch of 1.4. When something goes wrong we need community team presence more than ever. The next segment will talk about targeted areas of improvement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim-ONeil Posted October 6, 2012 Author Share Posted October 6, 2012 (edited) Community Team Daily Presence Everyday there are thousands of posts on the official site giving the community team ample opportunity to jump in and control the direction of the discussion. There are going to be natural ebbs in the flow of information depending on where the dev team is in the current development cycle. The community team can't disappear in these instances. Posts about lore, game mechanics, etc are opportunities for interaction and community building. Community building is something that is missing here. What is your favorite class? Story? Quest? Etc. These are threads that can either be created by the community team or the team can jump into existing player threads. Questions of the day, polls, etc. Be creative! Show the flag, even if you don't have anything new to say about game development there are lots of other places to be involved. Interacting with the community in a more friendly and open manner allows you to control the atmosphere of the forums. This is essential to changing existing mindsets about the game and to get more people positively engaged in what you can offer. 'Exclusive' Developer Interviews. There are a lot of talented people behind this game at Lucas Arts and Bioware and it shows in the polish of their marketing videos. That content tends to originate and be hosted on this website and is being used effectively to drive people to the website. This is an example of something that is being effectively leveraged to maximum potential. Developer interviews on the other hand have been mismanaged from the start. Since launch the game has been making developers available for short but highly informative interviews with other gaming sites. That is a sound strategy but the delivery of this information to the players is a major missed opportunity. As an example Gabe Amatangelo gave a outstanding interview for one of these websites back in September. There was never a mention on the SWTOR page about this interview having ever taken place. You can read the interview below: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/swtor-star-tour/ Based on the information in the interview there is hope for the future of PVP and many other questions were answered but how many people actually saw it? Not nearly as many as it could have reached with the right approach. In fact to find that interview even though I knew what I was looking for took me 5 minutes on Google to try to refine the search to hit it. What are the chances that other people stumbled upon it? On the dev tracker this was once asked directly to a community representative why they didn't have an official post linking an interview that had been done and they sited contract limitations with the sites and giving them an exclusive on the info. This is terribly managed business. At the very least link the content for your audience; that's the sole reason the interview took place. Information about your game is your leverage. Gaming sites want the traffic directed to them from the interviews to sell their ads. It seems clearly the interests are aligned and you should be posting a link to their interview on your website, not giving up the ability to do so via a contract. The quick rebuttal to that is to never link off your site because you might lose the viewer but common sense then states that if they are excited about the contents the interview and therefore excited about the game they'll be back. This might be the biggest missed opportunity out there. Social Media Outlets and the Modern MMO Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit have clearly changed the landscape of how we use the internet and interact with each other. Social media streams should be a component of the communication model but in a different way than they are being used today. Effective use of social media should directly funnel to people to this site. It's great to have a presence there but those places are not exclusive outlets for your game. Releasing info only on social media sites and neglecting to post that same info on the main website is a terrible business practice and it happens constantly here. The goal should be to reach the widest audience possible or you are wasting your limited resources. Any easier way to ensure that this site is a catchall for SWTOR info is to have a direct twitter extension with updated posts in real time. I can see the reason this isn't actually used right now is because the community team members on twitter use them as a shared space between work and personal interactions. No one wants to know what someone had for dinner and certainly that has no place on the company website. Solution: have each community team member create official twitter handles and use them only for work related questions and musings. This could allow them to be linked to the main page. At least on one occasion a community team member happened to mention there would be no scheduled maintenance the next night on twitter but forgot to post anything at all on the main site until reminded on twitter to do so. Players shouldn't have to dig for that kind of information. Edited October 6, 2012 by Tim-ONeil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim-ONeil Posted October 6, 2012 Author Share Posted October 6, 2012 (edited) Direct developer contact: Regardless of your personal feelings on the game or the decisions he made Georg Zoeller was the most active developer we've seen in terms of community engagement and forum usage. It's an overlooked part of what is important when you are trying to create a game that you "play forever". Being able to interact with developers and read their intentions or feelings on a particular item is engaging and plants the seed that they care enough about the community to talk to them. Since his departure developer contact has been sparse at best. I propose that each developer (or lead from each team if this isn't feasible) be allotted time (1 hour?) per week to view and respond on the forums if necessary during business hours. There is a wealth of player ideas here that can be salvaged and even popping in on a thread and letting someone know they cherry picked their suggestion is a huge acknowledgement. The more often this happens the less players have the "they never listen to our feedback" discussion. Not all developers will have want to post of course but the ones that want to make a name for themselves should be given the opportunity to do so. Humanize the game development process and remind everyone that actual people work behind the corporate facade to bring the game to us. Innovation isn't everything: Existing Ideas within the Industry There are tried and true methods to present your long term plans to the community while retaining control over the date of release and flexibility to change those plans. Innovation is great but there's a reason why best practices are fairly standardized industry wide. It has become a standard to model to have a semi regular post from the person in charge of game development about the current state and future of the game. SWG called this the Producers Note; STO calls it the State of the Game. The premise is the same it's a monthly or semi monthly post detailing the current content they are working on and framing expectations for the short to long term. These posts are crucial to community development because they give players a clear expectation of what's to come short term while are vague enough on long term plans to whet the appetite for future content. STO specifically had a very nice model based on three broad categories loosely representing their status in the overall development queue. The same model used here would give the players new long terms goals- something every MMO needs to keep their subs. SWTOR hasn't embraced this model and it's somewhat confusing. Perhaps the constantly changing development team has something to do with it but even if the post is rotated by a few different people or done by someone like Dallas Dickerson then stability shouldn't be a problem. Being this open to the community has risks if you can't deliver on your plans. This is the reason everything is locked up tight with an NDA until it's finalized but at this point the game's reputation and overall view in the market place can only improve. That should be an indication of where it is currently. The players are your investors now. EA might control the purse strings but it's all based on the revenue generated from the game. Subscriptions and cash shop purchases fuel the development budget. Give the players a glimpse of why they should stay in this game 6 months to a year from now. Use broad terms and as soon as something is finalized tell them about it. Conclusion: This Is Just the Beginning Everything listed above was part of the expected MMO experience. Not having this model in place was surprising and disappointing. The community team while improved can certainly do more in terms of engagement even when there's nothing new to report, developers need to be more active here, and swtor.com needs to be THE hub for EVERYTHING with this game. After making these changes to increase communication and change the perceptions of the game the second part is delivering on the content in a timely manner. Easier said than done but Bioware/EA have the resources. Make it so. Edited October 6, 2012 by Tim-ONeil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Styxx Posted October 6, 2012 Share Posted October 6, 2012 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=517855 We know how that turned out by now... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim-ONeil Posted October 9, 2012 Author Share Posted October 9, 2012 Posted this on a Friday night, bumped for exposure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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