I could sum it up by just providing this link and this link. But for an additional sentence, Mark Jacobs (CEO, Mythic) started a blog and has responded there to the public outrage about EU database servers that malfunctioned poorly during this weekend’s WAR Open Beta. It has caused a bit of a conversation over at Scott Jennings’ blog about whether it was appropriate or not for Jacobs to post there directing his commentary towards the WAR community.
Official forums are a Community Manager’s playground. It is where they have gotten to know their members, where they set the precedent for good reaction and communication from the executives of their company on down. It’s where the players go to see commentary “from the horse’s mouth” and where they expect to be heard when they react to it. It’s where you build a relationship – one with trust and better understanding. And on a semantic level – it’s where a good CM can control the tone and ensure that the correct message is being received.
Mythic made the decision early on to skip having an official forum and thus, a blog is born. Regardless of the intentions of the initial reason for starting this blog, it was evident by his latest post that Jacobs is in need of a place to talk to his community and read and respond to feedback from them. Developers having blogs is not a new thing. You’ll notice however, that there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.
Right Ways:
You have a blog, you have a disclaimer that says that anything you say is not representing your company. You know full well that everything you say still DOES represent your company when you put your full name on the blog and people know who you are. You talk about whatever the heck you want, but you’re addressing the people who read your blog AS a blog writer, and not as a developer of your company talking with your community. Generally you’re chatting about the industry or your profession as a whole, or linking LOLCats.
You have a blog hosted by your company and linked to from your company’s official or corporate site. You talk regularly about what’s going on in your game and with development. You may or may not allow comments as it may be more of a news post than a conversational post. This is an official blog and it’s branded as so.
Wrong Ways:
You start a blog up on Wordpress, state your name and your affiliation, and then proceed to discuss things like your server downtime, your plans for changed classes and races, and your release schedule.
What’s wrong with this? Game companies have community, marketing and PR departments for a reason. Messages are carefully crafted (not fabricated, but crafted) to portray the right message. An accurate message with the right tone. Almost as important as the message itself to the player is who is giving the message. When it comes from the CEO or President of a company – they’re going to give it more weight. When it comes from a Community Manager they trust, they’re going to take it in stride. When it comes from a CM they don’t know too well yet – they’ll be wary and if all goes well…every bit of positive communication from a CM helps build a relationship with the players. You have to let your CM’s do their job if you want to have a smooth flowing community.
Like I said earlier, an official forum is a CM’s playground. It’s also a CM’s nursery and kindergarten..where they grow with the community as a strong leader and someone to appreciate and respect and trust. When you go through them and address the players on an external media – you are setting your CM up for feeling less able to react to the needs of the community, less approachable to the mass audience and less prepared for the backlash when it happens.
There is nothing wrong with CEOs, Lead Designers, executives etc. blogging. It should, however, be either in official capacity and worked into communication plans within the company – or completely casual and in ADDITION to a forum. Your dedicated community wants to be heard, and good developers want to hear them. You should always be prepared for 115 comments on your blog when you address your players and they have no other way to talk to your staff. Good conversation is important, but don’t forget about your CM and the relationship they’ve been working hard on building – it’s harder for them than it is for a VP.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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As a side note – I have not had an active blog while I was working as a game developer. I think my original rant site was updated a couple times after I started working in the industry, but I decided it was a bad idea… very quickly. I should have iced it immediately, but that was seven years ago and I’ve learned a lot since then!
The blog you’ve linked to was started after I left Mythic.
Just clarifying, thanks
Right on the money Cuppy. Anytime anyone from a game company posts anything on the Internet, disclaimer or not, it WILL be taken as gospel from the pulpit.
… And I was just going to write this exact post. Humph!
Well put, Cuppy, well put. That does seem to pretty much get to the heart of the issue. I really like the idea of a company blog. I also like the idea of developers/people in the industry keeping their own ‘personal’ blogs too – sharing insights and other such things (like this one!). However, these two things are very different from each other.
I agree and disagree. On one hand, a CM is a daily buffer between those with work to do and the community. They’re a filter of information, distilled and refined, and passed out to the masses. It’s efficient, quick and clean. However, it’s also become too easy (and too common) for those making bad decisions to issue a press release through a CM and expect it to salve the wound.
I know you’re speaking as someone who is in the position of being that filter, so you have the perspective of someone who’s on the inside looking out. I, on the other hand, am a consumer, who’s on the outside looking in. When I heard that Jacobs himself was speaking out on this, it showed me that someone was saying that “the buck stops here” rather then just letting the “official channels” handle the dispersal of this info — or to not mention it at all.
A good portion of Jacob’s post addresses the violent nature of the backlash. I got the feeling that he, himself, took this situation personally. He has a right to express himself in this capacity in an attempt to deal with his experience in whatever way he feels is appropriate, and it would be inappropriate or impossible (and would instantly generate cynicism from the community) for any response to this situation to come from Jacobs by way of a community manager. The fact that it centered around his profession notwithstanding, the guy is venting, and he’s 100% correct in his assessment that the response of the community far outweighed the offense.
I don’t blog about ANYTHING work related, mostly because A) it’s boring and B) I’m not high enough on the food chain to be able to get away with it
But I don’t consider this particular situation to be one where anything was said that wasn’t painting anyone in a good light. Mistakes were made and owned up to. A promise was made to try better (which is all one CAN do until future history bears witness), and a plea was made to look to the future. I don’t think a press release could have done that honest assessment the justice that it deserves.
Scopique – My post isn’t meaning to imply that his message is wrong or that he shouldn’t say anything. The point I’m trying to make is that doing it on his private blog is inappropriate.
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Respond here, if you prefer. It’s nice to keep conversations consolidated.
Cuppy – I have to disagree with you here.
I have always found Jacobs way of addressing his consumers to be very refreshing.
I can sum it up like this.
Hellgate London was not finished. They had talks with their CM’s and PR department and let them know this. I am sure everyone in the company who had any interaction with the title did.
The CM’s kept saying over and over along with alot of the fan base that what we were seeing was beta code. That the gold product was based on another revision. Im sure this was true, again nothing was fabricated, it was crafted. The crafted version was that a few more bugs were fixed, but in honesty the product was still far from release quality.
So what happened, was that Flagship released a game that was not finished to consumers to deal with a slowly sinking cash flow index. This in alot of cases is something that is seen more and more. One can even say, its a sound business practice as long as your PR department can put out the fires and you can fix the product before rats start leaving the ship.
In my opinion though, flagship knew what they were selling. I was convinced because of PR and CM spin that I would enjoy the product, and Flagship took my hard earned consumer money for a product that was faulty at best.
Should I trust them again? How about if they promised to fix it, if enough people would just subscribe to one of their subscription based models? If they came out and explained weeks after release that it was because they had to release it or go under?
This is the story of another great product that was released and went under soon after. Vanguard Saga of Heroes.
Yeah I know, a consumer rant about spending money on the games I love, only to find out i bought a lemon, but there is a point to this.
When I read Jacobs blog, I do not find in unappropriate. I find it refreshing. In the beta forums, I could tell this was a man who had not only passion for what he was doing, but in frankness and honesty that made me TRUST he would get us there.
He can be blunt, sometimes overly so. In my opinion, there is truth there though. No CM or PR represenative has EVER said the kind of things he says and the way he says it AND kept their jobs.
When he says that the buck stops there, and is a position to do it, it happens. When he messes up, he admits it.
I will take that over any PR interactions in a second.
That is just my take on it though.
Love the blog by the way, and looking forward to Meta.
We all know Mark is outspoken and not the normal run of the mill VP, GM, lead designer or whatever you want to call him. Now do I think his blog was the right place to say what he said, probably not. But I for one applaud him for speaking his mind no matter where he dose it. Its things like his openness and honesty that makes him a special person in the business. I hope this doesn’t stop him from speaking him mind in the future and telling us how he sees it. Then again I’m not very politically correct myself. Might be why i like him so much.
But i do agree there in very bad need of a developer diary or something along that line to speak to people officially outher than the news.
you may have some good points, but half of what I read was “CM, CM, I’m a CM”. you might just be important one day!
Maybe Mark Jacobs is the PR department at Mythic? Maybe, just maybe, he gets permission to say the things he says before he posts – especially considering the fact he’s working on a multi-million dollar project.
I for one appreciate that he’s bringing people into the game dev process, and also being – relatively – honest with them.
Yes, let’s have everyone hide behind the walls of deceit called PR.
Hello,
There are in fact two very seperate issues being discussed here :
- Mark Jacobs’ reaction to the EU CM’s response to a GOA problem
- Mythic’s refusal to implement “official” community tools and official channels of communication with the customers.
While I understand the solidarity of defending another Community Manager who was seemingly “out-ranked” in terms of communication, one must remember that the incident I assume you are referring to (communication from Mark Jacobs on his blog concerning the European beta servers) is quite uncommon as far as I understand.
“Uncommon”, because this incident concerned GOA (the European Company sub-contracted by EA or Mythic to roll-out and support Warhammer Online in Europe). GOA, as far as I understand it, is it’s own entity, with it’s own chain of command and communication. This is a problem, because the original manufacturer/developer has very little or no control over the image which is being presented abroad of their product – witness the massive fumble concerning registration servers being down for a couple of days. This was GOA’s problem and their problem alone – also a problem that Mythic didn’t let happen to them in North America – thus the outrage of fans and the concern of Mark Jacobs for the image of his product and company. I must add here that I in no way, fashion or form condone the threats proferred in the various reactions to this debacle.
So, the communication came from a GOA employee (Community Manager IainC) concerning a GOA matter. Mark Jacob’s blog is a direct response to Mythic (as far as I understand) refusing to have an official Community Forum and “official” American Community Managers – thus the positive reaction to his blog and his willingness to share information “from the horse’s mouth” as it were.
Being a European Community Manager based in a European company whose job it is to relay second- or third-hand information gathered from sources all around the office (US dev communicates with EU support – EU CM has to get info from EU support), or simply relaying “official” communications with no sense of their impact and no involvement must be a difficult and thankless task, particularly when you have to respond to the reactions they create. But in this case the buck stops with GOA, they are the sole party responsible for the European servers.
As a consumer, I am glad to see Mark Jacobs adress various player concerns, glad to have someone at the top communicating and doing when things go wrong, but i doubt he did more than yell into a phone in the States while European support technicians did their jobs to clean up the mess of the malfunctioning registration servers.
This might be a source of further conflict between Mythic and GOA down the line, but ultimately these are seperate problems because technically the European CMs are not Mythic employees and do not speak for the American side of Mythic’s operation either. I may be ill-informed, but does Mythic have US Community Managers ?
Cuppycake opines: “The point I’m trying to make is that doing it on his private blog is inappropriate.”
Says who? You? lmao. Who stepped up and made you the president of how to communicate to the public?
So in your OPINION, it is a poor move on MJ’s part. Well in my OPINION, it is a brillant move on his part. Mythic doesn’t fit your cookie cutter mold and that is why people like me appreciate them for their honesty up front from the top down.
I guess time will tell who’s opinion proved most worthy of people’s time. But like the poster in #10 bobston pointed out so well this is what I got out of your post
“half of what I read was “CM, CM, I’m a CM”. you might just be important one day!”