Effective Title: Community Management/feedback with the New World Devs.
GDC Year: 2024
Do:
Have two-way conversations between the community and the dev team.
Do your best to deliver what you promise. Helps improve credit with players for when something goes wrong.
Try to talk as often as possible with the community so they understand why certain decisions happen. They might start assuming things if you can't explain yourself.
Try to have the dev play the game as players. This allows them have understand how players are playing the game and what might be causing pain points. Also, each person might play the game differently so helps with seeing the game through different perspectives. For New World they try to target 300-1000 hours playing the game. If they reach 3000 hours this can also cause some problems where they become hyper-focused on aspects that might not be a problem or might become too lenient with the game and not think of it critically.
Donts:
When having conversations with the community and assuming you already know what they will say or mean. It will lead the team to try and fix problems that weren't the actual problem or answered incorrectly. Try to see if there are other people with similar problems or an underlying problem.
Doing things without explaining. Or not doing things.
Listen, Talk, Act
Listen:
Have different channels for people to talk through.
Reddit and forms tend to have the most devoted and hardcore players. Try to have other options for the less extreme players to best take into consideration what everyone might want or expect with the game.
Try to set up some channels for common languages found for the game. As it allows you to target the players from those communities better and give them updates faster.
Speak:
Have a goal for the amount of time the community team plans to communicate with the public. If you do your best to keep it relatively high it helps people understand where the game is and keeps it in their mind.
The more consistent and predictable you make the interaction or posting the more people know when to expect more information from you and will be willing to come back to interact with the team. Helps gain social credit with the players. If you have a long time between communications it might seem the team has lost interest in the game and players and they might start leaving.
If there is a video strategy then it allows the community team to show off different team members and what they are working on.
Make sure to keep the community interactions very iterative and keep on top of all the social media apps that are used and when popular apps appear.
Try to keep an extended channel strategy.
A website where you can post long-form blogs and information so that players can read on and understand why different decisions were made.
Discord allows a lot of people to interact in a more conversational manner as well as gives devs more opportunities to interact with the community.
Social media is for a more casual set of players who are part of the community. Usually, if people only play the game once in a while or dont care about learning a lot about the mechanics but will still interact with the posts made on social media.
Act:
Creating patch notes for updates and then having more in-depth explanations on Discord or the website will allow everyone to know roughly what has changed and if people want to go more in-depth they can go to designated areas and become more hardcore players.
Case Study; New World
The community where principally playing the game because of the universe and lore even when the developers started to transition more into an MMORPG.
Added better fast travel areas to reduce friction between players and said lore/universe.
Improved and increased unique quests available to players as a way to bring more lore and story to the players.
Many hardcore players want to start new games and worlds to interact with many of the new features which lead to the fresh start worlds being implemented.
Q/A:
Q: Common pitfalls when trying to understand feedback from players?
A: When trying to answer questions related to lore or future features the team is implemented try to watch out what and how you answer them. This is because players will surprise you more often than not and using very little information be able to deduce what is meant to appear in the game.
Also important not to make too many promises at the same time. It can get overwhelming or you might realize the team can't keep some promises which might affect the community's perception of the team and studio.
Q: How accurately do you try to make patch notes about backend optimizations?
A: Make sure you mention in what areas the players can see optimization. Normally you might not have taken specific numbers on how optimized the areas might have turned out. But if you can get some general numbers to expect it helps players understand what to expect and where.
Q: When collecting data from players how do you differentiate between harmful feedback vs useful feedback?
A: New World has a dedicated team that will go through the data to see what are the super harmful (I.E Death threats, hate speech, and other similar targeted hate to a dev or group of devs) then send the rest of the data to be interpreted and understood better. Try to keep some of the data that might go along the lines of “I hate the game so much it's very frustrating.” or similar anger towards the game as it might still help paint a picture of how the community feels towards the team. However, watch out for how this can affect the team's morale.
Q: How are you able to better discern the actual intent of player feedback?
A: You will need to work well with the community as well as set up correct systems to allow them to input feedback for the players. Having a form linked in the game allows the dev team to get more information on how the players are feeling at the exact moments of playing the game and not later when they might have calmed down.
Q: How do interact with the more casual players and get their feedback when they might not interact as often?
A: Try having the team play the game or read chat logs from inside the game. This is the most common area where people interact with each other no matter the dedication levels. Many team members will pull up the current player chat in the game and read it while working on things to get an idea of what is happening what are current people's thought processes and what are they doing.
Q: How do you know that a system needs to be canceled and how do you interact with the community because of this?
A: First thing is players will find different ways of interacting with the team to express what they want or dont want to see in the game. At the same time, internal testing and planning may reveal that a system may be too complicated to implement in the current build.
The best response at this point is to continue talking with the community as radio silence will allow for speculation which isn't the best and spends more credit than the team has gained than desired. Try to explain why something is being changed how this may affect players in the future and what the team is planning on doing in the future to help stop this.
Q: How do you keep the team safe from doxing or other aggressive acts?
A: Make sure that team members decide how much they want to be seen by the community and how much of their details are revealed. Maybe dont show last names unless told by the person.
Find ways to support any team members that have been targeted. And take any threat against team members seriously.
The first week that a post has been released try to stay on top of the post. Log any type of threats made to team members and delete the comments. They can greatly affect team morale.
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