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Atlas

Community Management and Moderation in contentious environments -PCGAMER.COM article

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Omg, the irony here...

I post a well written article from games journalism about Moderation in ***TOWN SQUARE*** and it gets moved, by a moderator, to Wood Scraps.

Wood Scraps: the place where they send posts to die.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nevermind. Thanks!

Edited by Atlas
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HI Atlas,

 

While I appreciate the sentiment behind it (and also acknowledging the tough job!) Your questions posed tend to be more generic questions about developer communications with players, not specific to Wurm, which is why it was moved.

 

(and jeesh, those comments...)

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Nothing stated about certain games with notoriously toxic communities like LoL

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Well they only interviewed a Blizzard CM and a guy who is a CM for pokemon online trading card game so Idk why they would talk about League. League does a lot to communicate with its players. /ALL chat, PrimeTime league, LCS breakdowns, comprehensive patch notes with bug fixes and at least an attempt to balance things every patch, community content creation...but the community is too toxic to appreciate it.

 

Anyway, communication wise.. The dev to player span isn't really that difficult to bridge. In my opinion a lot ends up lost in translation when CM's do their jobs. Not speaking for just Wurm, but all MMO's. I agree with the article in a big way when Whipple describes Blizzard's community and how a lot of players think they are much smarter than they are. For example, players want X feature, dev knows it cannot be done without extensive overhaul of this or that, CM says we like the idea, we'll keep it in mind. Players then react with either 80% devs never listen to us, 15% wahh I'm never spending money on this stupid game again (buys currency/cosmetics same day), 5% thanks CM! Maybe someday :)

 

And of course you have the opposite. Players tell the devs what they want for weeks, months, years, it's never implemented, greed intensifies, p2w occurs, and awkwardly in this sort of situation, some players leave but a lot of players simply accept the inevitability that X game or X company that makes a bunch of these games will never change and it is what it is so may as well enjoy it the way it is.

 

I think that dynamic is the most interesting part of MMO communities. The lack of communication seems to make people more complacent than trying to explain or justify why a feature cannot be added or why there is difficulty balancing a specific aspect of the game. At least that's been my experience when it comes to all sorts of communities for online gaming. gPotato types, Blizzard, Riot, Wurm, Rift, GW2, etc. Wurm does a great job in communicating with its players in comparison with a lot of other games I've played, but some of the toxic comments I've seen as a primarily non-posting observer of the forums is just laughable. Not saying that there isn't reason to be annoyed or upset, but the intensity of certain comments just makes me worry for the average blood pressure of certain Wurmians.

 

That's my two cents on a very vague general topic.

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Hence my interest in hearing a similar discussion from such a mod from such a community.

 

I'm rarely interested in hearing how everything worked smoothly. Personally I find more value from hearing how everything can possibly go wrong.

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LoL and communities well known for being toxic often face different issues compared to those mentioned in the article.

 

The article more focuses on the issues of delivering bad news, informing players of changes that might bring a negative reaction vs updates that generate dislike. That's very different from moderating a toxic environment, or one that's known to be full of arguments and such.

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Get the development staff and the players into a bar, add alcohol. I'd get life insurance first though but they'd at least be communication, and alcohol!

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2 hours ago, FreeTineen said:

Get the development staff and the players into a bar, add alcohol. I'd get life insurance first though but they'd at least be communication, and alcohol!

Any excuse for alcohol right?

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On 09/27/2016 at 5:24 AM, Retrograde said:

The article more focuses on the issues of delivering bad news, informing players of changes that might bring a negative reaction vs updates that generate dislike. That's very different from moderating a toxic environment, or one that's known to be full of arguments and such.

Well there I disagree, have at thee!

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Quote

“I learned very quickly that my biggest weakness and my biggest strength was missing the forest for the trees. That is the main thing that causes anger and frustration for players,” continues Weathers. “What sounds like constant moaning is actually a hundred different complaints when you zoom in closer, and almost all of the issues can be handled by giving more information, by including people in the bigger picture. So I don't get numb to it, because I'm right there in the trees with my players. I can then take that feeling and use my privileged access to get the whole story and share it.”

 

It seems with most revolts on WO forums this is the thing. Still the bolded part is not developed enough.

Edited by zigozag

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