Lessons of a Community Manager

Let me start of by making it clear that no I am not a community manager. This post is about a lesson that I hope the community managers at GOA have learned now. In particular our dear IanC. By now I will assume you at least have a rough idea of what happened with the Open Beta launch of Warhammer Online in Europe on September 7th, otherwise go read a few of the entries just before this one. Once a lot of people had gone to sleep after a long day of failures IanC decided to post a “Letter from IainC on Open Beta Situation”.

NOTE: The original post has since been edited been IanC to obscure some things I will talk about below, but if you check this link of the first reply that did a full quote you can read the original. Either way I will quote the interesting part below.

At first I thought great some feedback, something we were all lacking severely that Sunday. I get a bit through it and realise it is mostly him trying to make excuses and downplay the mistakes that were made. However the post so far didn’t really have much impact. No negative effect but not any positive either, a blank filler post in my opinion. Then you get a little further down near the end and you see the following:

A lot of what was said yesterday here and on other forums was entirely out of line. Of course you were disappointed and criticism is certainly warranted but frankly many of the posts made about the situation were borderline sociopathic. If having delayed access to a beta test really drives you to such depths of anger and fury then - and there is no polite way to put this - there is something wrong with you.

In that small piece of text he manages to light an even hotter fire under himself and GOA by displaying a complete lack of respect and understanding of his customer base. The player base, or I should say potential player base, is one that has a very large hope that this game will succeed and bring them many fun and exiting times with the game. All this hope has been building up over a very long time and then with all these problem people naturally get worried. It is like they can see the games potential wither away right in front of them. Now what do you do then in that situation as a community manager? Well for one you do most certainly not go on the attack against your customers. There is one post and one post alone you can do that will help in the slightest. That is the “we fucked up, it was entirely our fault” post. Do not make any excuses, just stand up and take the blame head on, show your customers some respect and put out a plan on how to move forward from here.

Fortunately there is someone in the Mythic/GOA partnership that at least seems to understand this. Marc Jacobs posted the following entry on his own blog. He writes:

3) I have read IanC’s post on the situation and I have just communicated to GOA my thoughts on it. I’ll simply say this, I do not agree with what he said, I do not support what he said and his comments were, in my opinion, way out of line.

At least there is still a glimmer of hope for the future. Time will tell if IanC will be able to regain the trust and respect of the EU community which is a requirement to be able to perform his job as community manager.

Sidenote: Through persistence and strong determination I actually managed to enter my open beta key in the account system and entered the game 00:22 the night between Sunday and Monday. I promise I will actually begin to write about the game Warhammer Online again and not just on the failures of GOA. I started a runepriest since this is so far the one I think I might do as my main char for live game. My first objective with beta, beyond testing and giving loads of feedback, is figuring out if this will be my main and how healing works in the game especially in large-scale rvr. I will bring you my views on this situation as soon as I get a little more playtime with my dwarf.