Honest Question Re: JackieKo

[sharpenedstick]

Not trolling or mean spirited, but an honest question. What does JackieKo do at work? Because it's not interact with the community.

How does a community manager fill their time? Last week there were four total dev posts. Did each one take 10 hours? Of course, posting on the forum can't be the sum total of a community manager's duties, and if we presume that Jackie and all other CMs have been working diligently (which we should, even if it's not necessarily effectively), then what else is happening that is managing the community?

[ThanderSnB]

I'm not sure exactly, but this is what I think she does:

• Gets feedback from the community and presents it to the dev team.
• Gets info from the dev team and presents it to the community.
• Writes a lot of (maybe all?) of the news posts for each patch or major update.
• Plans out the livestreams (what they will announce, what guests will be there, creates the slideshow, coordinates with dev team for anything needed like images/videos from the next update) and co-hosts the livestreams.
• Manages all the social media for SWTOR (posting updates to twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.)
• Coordinates with all the content creators in the content creator program.

Bioware is understaffed. They have one person doing things that other companies would have a whole team working on.

Edited May 26, 2023 by ThanderSnB

[Stradlin]

10 hours ago, ThanderSnB said:

I'm not sure exactly, but this is what I think she does:

• Gets feedback from the community and presents it to the dev team.
• Gets info from the dev team and presents it to the community.
• Writes a lot of (maybe all?) of the news posts for each patch or major update.
• Plans out the livestreams (what they will announce, what guests will be there, creates the slideshow, coordinates with dev team for anything needed like images/videos from the next update) and co-hosts the livestreams.
• Manages all the social media for SWTOR (posting updates to twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.)
• Coordinates with all the content creators in the content creator program.

Bioware is understaffed. They have one person doing things that other companies would have a whole team working on.

 

Ok, now let's do Eric Musco!

 

When I heard they had actually made a former  community manager into lead of the entire team, I  thought of Bonnie Armstrong, the lead producer of an  ancient MMO called Ultima Online. Her career trajectory is similar to Musco: countless years of work in various positions similar to community manager, steadily climbing the corporate ladder each time people left or EA moved folks around.  Like Musco, she eventually landed as the  leader of the small  dev team that remained. I think she went from forum moderator/playterster into lead producer, without any programmer or game dev  background.  Her DNA and roots as a former  community manager show so clearly. Incredible amount of outreach towards the community for years.  She must have done hundreds of meet and greet things by now, as the lead developer. Little scheduled events where she   shows up in-game, players gather and then they talk about Ultima Online, ask her questions, make suggestions.  Visiting each server in turn.  She was never a programmer or a writer or a developer, but she has played Ultima Online for decades, and worked on it for..about as long I guess.. She knows every..single..little..thing about the game, from players' perspective. During these meet&greets, players aren't some crowd that  is expected to sit quietly and listen as devs read a literal script on livestream.  These encounters are about interaction, Questions and comments of community  and Armstrong's replies  are the whole  beef of these things. 

If somewhat clumsy analogy is allowed, while lead dev is the captain of the ship, imo the helm is always located in rooms where the og expertise of the new captain was such that it landed him the position to begin with. Writer, or programmer, or community manager evolves into the final form of whichever pokemon they were pre-promotion.

There is virtually no normal organic real interaction between players and anyone from BW on these forums. 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Stradlin

[JackieKo]

Hi all, I wanted to chime in here because there are a lot of perceptions on what a community manager is and I’m happy to shed some light on this. Of course, I can’t give out every little detail but I can offer a high level overview. 

First thing I want to address is that the SWTOR community expands outside of these forums. While we do post official communication here, this platform is included in spaces where I interact and gather feedback. Players and their experiences, feedback, and engagement can be found all over the internet. 

Second, not every community manager’s responsibilities will be the same from team to team. There are different types of CMs in the industry and there can be overlap and similarities in responsibilities and also different responsibilities entirely based upon what the role requires and what the CM’s skillsets are. 

ThanderSnB’s bulleted list is pretty close! Some other things that can be added is answering players' reports whether they be bug reports or a heads up on problematic behavior. A lot of these happen behind the scenes. Sometimes, these reports go beyond the initial report and there are additional conversations that need to happen to find a resolution, so that takes up more time. 

Another thing I enjoy doing is surfing through SWTOR streams and listening to players' experiences, especially if they are newer to SWTOR or coming back. I will interact every so often regardless of the size of their audience. What matters to me is their overall game experience.  

Along the same page, I also manage the content creator group as well. They and the players from their respective communities are yet another source of feedback we pull from as well. 

Last but certainly not least, CMs tend to work with every department of a given project so they have a base understanding of what’s being worked on, what future plans are, etc… That doesn’t mean that we can do another dev’s job. That just means CMs have a broad understanding of what’s going on so they can interject as needed, offer insight based off of player feedback, and/or assist with marketing initiatives or helping plan future projects.

That’s the general idea. Of course, there are other things that can pop up from time to time that were not anticipated and I have to adapt and change course, but that’s the nature of any role ever. 

Overall, the role of a CM is one part publicly/privately engaging external community, one part managing internal community (the dev team), one part processing and generating a variety of reports, one part gathering and processing feedback, one part writing various communications, and one part handling issues or projects that pop up unexpectedly.  

I know there are a handful of players who are actually interested in becoming a CM as well. If that is a career you would like to pursue, I’m happy to offer more insight and give some pointers. Feel free to send a PM! Hope this helps shed some light! 

Last note, as this thread isn’t about the game itself, the mods will be moving it over to the Off Topic section at the end of the day. 
 

[AdsAillard]

20 minutes ago, JackieKo said:

Overall, the role of a CM is one part publicly/privately engaging external community, one part managing internal community (the dev team), one part processing and generating a variety of reports, one part gathering and processing feedback, one part writing various communications, and one part handling issues or projects that pop up unexpectedly.  

I know there are a handful of players who are actually interested in becoming a CM as well. If that is a career you would like to pursue, I’m happy to offer more insight and give some pointers. Feel free to send a PM! Hope this helps shed some light! 

Last note, as this thread isn’t about the game itself, the mods will be moving it over to the Off Topic section at the end of the day. 
 

Honestly, someone who doesn't think that just keeping up with these forums, alone, is worth 40 hours work/week has never really bothered considering the amount of data that is constantly generated by all of these continuous posts - add to it twitter, twitch, etc etc and it's more than enough to fill several plates.

Maker only knows how long I spent per week keeping up with a single guild's discord , imagine with wider community.

The real issue is that, as always, person-oriented work is treated as less valuable than technical work, all while complaining of not being heard enough. 🤷‍♀️

[mCion]

What I'd be interested in, broadly speaking, is what importance community managers put on spending time listening the the broader and generally silent playerbase along with the loud players and generally less in number players that do more posts/emails/etc. 

Many times I've felt that changes to the game have happened because of a lot of "outrage" but many players I've known including myself did not really align with said outrage. When others like me try to express those different viewpoints they get buried under the more notorious viewpoints. 

I know that in any job of any industry 20% of the people take 80% of your time. If not careful, it could be more.

Just curious how that works community manager wise.

Thanks,

[Ardrossan]

14 hours ago, Stradlin said:

 

Ok, now let's do Eric Musco!

 

When I heard they had actually made a former  community manager into lead of the entire team, I  thought of Bonnie Armstrong, the lead producer of an  ancient MMO called Ultima Online. Her career trajectory is similar to Musco: countless years of work in various positions similar to community manager, steadily climbing the corporate ladder each time people left or EA moved folks around.  Like Musco, she eventually landed as the  leader of the small  dev team that remained. I think she went from forum moderator/playterster into lead producer, without any programmer or game dev  background.  Her DNA and roots as a former  community manager show so clearly. Incredible amount of outreach towards the community for years.  She must have done hundreds of meet and greet things by now, as the lead developer. Little scheduled events where she   shows up in-game, players gather and then they talk about Ultima Online, ask her questions, make suggestions.  Visiting each server in turn.  She was never a programmer or a writer or a developer, but she has played Ultima Online for decades, and worked on it for..about as long I guess.. She knows every..single..little..thing about the game, from players' perspective. During these meet&greets, players aren't some crowd that  is expected to sit quietly and listen as devs read a literal script on livestream.  These encounters are about interaction, Questions and comments of community  and Armstrong's replies  are the whole  beef of these things. 

If somewhat clumsy analogy is allowed, while lead dev is the captain of the ship, imo the helm is always located in rooms where the og expertise of the new captain was such that it landed him the position to begin with. Writer, or programmer, or community manager evolves into the final form of whichever pokemon they were pre-promotion.

There is virtually no normal organic real interaction between players and anyone from BW on these forums. 

Lol it's an amazing comparison. It's pretty clear that Armstrong effectively used her community management experience not only to leverage the higher position she won but also that she remembered those experiences and continued to use it when interacting with the community.

And as that applies to swtor, it's equally clear that Musco and Jackie do none of that. Instead they make excuses for why they are never to be found on the forums and react defensively when it comes up. They promise greater communication which never comes--It's a miracle that she responded today, but the fact is that there should have never been a need to do a callout thread in the first place, the CM should be a visible presence on this forum, not just retreating behind locked announcement threads. Active participation, not just one-time, is the only way to reduce player frustration with this situation, and that includes bioware staff taking their lumps and acknowledging it as constructive criticism because they are not the only game in town and we can see that others in the industry have done much better in the same job. 

So @JackieKo if this interaction is real and a positive sign of greater communication--then stick with it. Continue to post on a regular basis, not just to dispense information but rather acting like someone who enjoys this game like all of us here. Yes you will get criticism, and that criticism is valid because it comes from years of being ignored by this studio. I don't expect that you can change bioware's lackluster content updates, but I do expect you to be visibly around and receptive to player feedback because that is what will change hearts and minds, but it's a slow process. If you only want blind praise you are in the wrong business. 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Ardrossan

[ThanderSnB]

2 hours ago, mCion said:

What I'd be interested in, broadly speaking, is what importance community managers put on spending time listening the the broader and generally silent playerbase along with the loud players and generally less in number players that do more posts/emails/etc. 

Many times I've felt that changes to the game have happened because of a lot of "outrage" but many players I've known including myself did not really align with said outrage. When others like me try to express those different viewpoints they get buried under the more notorious viewpoints. 

I know that in any job of any industry 20% of the people take 80% of your time. If not careful, it could be more.

Just curious how that works community manager wise.

Thanks,

The dev team can pull data directly from the game/database to get an idea what the silent majority thinks of things. For example, they can see:

• what type of endgame content players are engaging in - indicates what is the most popular and least popular, which helps them decide what endgame content to expand
• how many characters the average player gears up to 336/340 and how fast or slow they are gearing up - indicates if the gearing system is working or needs to be fixed
• how many people played the 7.2 story - indicates whether the story is going in the right direction or they need to change course (such as less mando, more Jedi/Sith)
• which companions are most popular and least popular - indicates which type of companions they should add going forward

Game data is not going to show everything, but it's a lot of useful information available to them whenever they are making a decision for the game.

[Hrafnhildur]

8 hours ago, ThanderSnB said:

 

• which companions are most popular and least popular - indicates which type of companions they should add going forward

 

This is a bit unfair, you know? Forcing a very popular companion on everyone's throats isn't cool at all, for example no matter how cool is X and how many people use him/her, there will always be players like me to prefer Y instead. 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Hrafnhildur

[ThanderSnB]

19 minutes ago, Hrafnhildur said:

This is a bit unfair, you know? Forcing a very popular companion on everyone's throats isn't cool at all, for example no matter how cool is X and how many people use him/her, there will always be players like me to prefer Y instead. 

They can create a ratio based on popularity. This ensures that all types of companions are added to the game while catering to the greatest number of players. For example, say Force user and Mandalorian are 2x as popular as other types of companions. That's a 2:2:1 ratio, so they can add companions in this order:

1. Force user
2. Mandalorian
3. Force user
4. Mandalorian
5. Other

When they get to the end, they start at the top again with another Force user. It's not set in stone. They can look at the data each time they are thinking about adding one and adjust things as needed. And, of course, this isn't the only thing they use to make decisions. The dev team has their own ideas for interesting new companions that won't always be popular. Sometimes people don't know they want something until they see it or try it. Player behavior can also be misleading. For example, CZ-198 is a popular daily area, but it's not because people just really love industrial office type zones. It's simply because this daily area is the fastest to complete in the game.

Edited May 27, 2023 by ThanderSnB

[Nee-Elder]

24 minutes ago, ThanderSnB said:

 This ensures that all types of companions are added to the game while catering to the greatest number of players.

hey BIOWARE: i'd say between Class originals + KOTFE/KOTET chapters + Star Fortress' + CM's + Seasons  that we have quite enough companions by now , dontcha think?

Edited May 27, 2023 by Nee-Elder
Reason: EA has no concept of Quality over quantity !

[LD_Little_Dragon]

19 hours ago, ThanderSnB said:

 

• which companions are most popular and least popular - indicates which type of companions they should add going forward

 

Then that data is seriously flawed because all companions are NOT created equal.  For some players it's not a matter of liking this or that companion, it's 'who's the best at dps/heals/tanks' issue.  Story decisions (aka: new companions) should never be based on stuff that's affected by gameplay issues.

It might explain why they keep shoving more mandolorian stuff at us.  "Ooh, look how popular Shae is, players must love mando crap."  No, Shae is hands down the best dps companion, and plenty of players just have to run with the 'best'.

 

[Hrafnhildur]

10 hours ago, ThanderSnB said:

 This ensures that all types of companions are added to the game

.. all types?? there are only 3 Mandalorian companions : Akaavi ( only 2 classes get her), Torian ( but according to Vettelorians, he's dead) and Shae Vizla ( but not all players have her, especially the newer players ). 

Jedi? PLENTY ! 

Sith? PLENTY!

Privateers/unaffiliated? PLENTY! 

IT seems to me that the BHs are the unlucky ones.. 

 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Hrafnhildur

[sharpenedstick]

Do you see how much back-end stuff is in her list? That's not community managing, that's community reporting. Obviously, being a conduit between devs and players is useful, and there are many other ways to interact with the playing community than simple forum posts. But it should be painfully clear the amount of communication on these forums from the devs is insufficient, and that is something the community manager should take on to improve.

[Estelindis]

While I appreciate that this topic's question can be sincerely asked, I still find it surprising.  I spend some time in my job updating people, but not a whole lot.  The rest is spent researching and developing content, plus testing if the things I develop work the way I thought they would.  I can't imagine my communication-to-other-work ratio is massively unusual compared with the average job.  Or am I just out of touch?  😅

[jedimasterjac]

On 5/26/2023 at 2:33 AM, Stradlin said:

I  thought of Bonnie Armstrong, the lead producer of an  ancient MMO called Ultima Online

And now we’ve come full circle. How funny.

[Stradlin]

3 hours ago, jedimasterjac said:

And now we’ve come full circle. How funny.

Heh, yeah I'm clearly much more of a prophet than I realized.oO

 

[AdsAillard]

On 6/7/2023 at 3:12 PM, Stradlin said:

Heh, yeah I'm clearly much more of a prophet than I realized.oO

 

If you have some sort of hint on interesting numbers, please let us know.

[AdsAillard]

On 5/27/2023 at 6:21 PM, LD_Little_Dragon said:

Then that data is seriously flawed because all companions are NOT created equal.  For some players it's not a matter of liking this or that companion, it's 'who's the best at dps/heals/tanks' issue.  Story decisions (aka: new companions) should never be based on stuff that's affected by gameplay issues.

It might explain why they keep shoving more mandolorian stuff at us.  "Ooh, look how popular Shae is, players must love mando crap."  No, Shae is hands down the best dps companion, and plenty of players just have to run with the 'best'.

 

TBF: Shae's been popular from day 1 - hell, before; people were surprised (negatively) she wasn't in base game after kicking ass on Deceived trailer. 

Add to that: The Mandalorian is by far the most (positively) popular SW content created since Disney took over; it has brought massive influx of players to the game and wanting to ride that wave is smart. 

 

Add to that: Mandalorian crap sells exceedingly well on CM; which implies lots of players are attracted to the aesthetics & lore of it.

Add to that: they can see the amount of players rolling BH and choosing to affiliate with Mandalore during the vanilla storyline, which probably also gives them a good idea of what's the real amount of players engaging in it.

Sooo... Shae would be one on a long list of reasons why they've been focusing on "mando crap".

[Shayddow]

Companion usage is also based on the following: (for me, and I'd imagine for some others as well:)

1. Best in "slot" - Shae - DPS

                            Lokin - tank (plus watching him transform into a Rakghoul is fun especially when fighting during Rakghoul event)

                            ZO-OM- Heals

2. Requirements for Season goals. I wouldn't use Amity at all except I have to certain weeks for season goals. I hate his voice. Same for the seasons Droid. If I want to run a droid, I'd rather do it with Scorpio. She speaks basic, not random "ABOOSHALANGASHERAunintelligibleGoopta." I like the Drall speech better than the Rat-things.

3. Romanced Companions. Would rather run random dailies (CZ) with whatever "spouse" my character has.

4. Roleplay considerations :  My Sith will take random "Jedi" companions to Korriban for Heroics in an attempt to "convert" them to the Dark side. Vice-versa for my Jedi characters.  

5. Legacy achievements - I've completed these for some time on most, but there is a goal of so many NPCs killed with various companions for achievements.