Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

I don't want to put this on the main twitter thread either, since Conal hasn't been with BioWare for a couple of years now. But he was the BioWare community manager for quite a while, so in this thread, he is speaking from experience. (I've certainly seen all of this online in interactions between "fans" and devs... I'm not even a dev and I get so frustrated and disheartened by it; I can only imagine what it's like for them.)

wow, I wonder what Conal was referring to. maybe just stuff in general

I don't want to put this on the main twitter thread either, since Conal hasn't been with BioWare for a couple of years now. But he was the BioWare community manager for quite a while, so in this thread, he is speaking from experience. (I've certainly seen all of this online in interactions between "fans" and devs... I'm not even a dev and I get so frustrated and disheartened by it; I can only imagine what it's like for them.)

Conal Pierse @conalpierse
The community management trap:
1: People are acting like assholes
2: You try to calmly explain an issue
3: They ignore you and continue being assholes
4: You ask them to stop being assholes
5: They feign outrage, act like bigger assholes, and call you unprofessional

“We weren’t being assholes” - say assholes, who are the reason you had to contact police on a Saturday morning due to death threats to your employees

“How unprofessional to say I’m an asshole” say assholes, who are the reason developers have to explain doxxing and swatting to their confused parents and family ahead of game launches

“Just ignore them” say assholes, who purposely follow devs around the web to yell at them on all their personal accounts

“It’s your job!” Say assholes, who ignore customer service funnels designed to help them and complain to you about your game while you are in public trying to buy lunch.

“We’re just concerned customers” says the asshole, who you specifically have to talk out of showing up at your office to yell at your reception team

“Sorry, I was an asshole” says your once positive team member, who after working every weekend for a year and using their limited spare time to do unpaid player engagement, finally snapped and called an asshole an asshole.

Back when Mass Effect 3 MP was really popular, me and my friends would often joke around about me being a developer for BioWare. I used to always ask questions about how people felt about certain mechanics and kits in the game, and people thought my inquisitiveness was akin to that of a community manager trying to gauge feedback in the community. While it was all in good jest, and sometimes I'd even go along with them, we all agreed it would be a shit job to take during "hard times" in a games lifecycle. When the sarcasm of the joke ended, mainly to explain to people who weren't in on the joke, I'd often end the conversation with, "I don't envy any game developer." Having looked at community/dev interactions with other games, whether the game has done good or bad, I'd probably flip my shit if I had to be a community manager dealing with some of the stuff I've seen.

Definitely. That said, and I'm not singling out BW here specifically, I think many Community Managers out there don't have the proper training for the job. I think anyone looking to get into a position in Community Management, or hiring a CM in this day & age, need to have the right education. Marketing, Psychology, Public Relations, Social Media, Consumer Behaviour. Especially if you're a CM for a large company.

Yeah, it's rough watching CMs take all the heat when things don't go to plan, just as it's tough to see one get in over their head and not know to do.

I don't play the game, but I think the jest of it is that the pricing of the cosmetics for this season (or event) is too steep for a number of players, which caused player uproar. Apparently, some developer got really heated about the whole situation, and basically called parts of the community, "asshats" and "dicks".

Well what conal says is correct but I also have no idea what venue he is talking about because as a community manager I never saw or heard from him at all as far as interaction goes unlike previous community managers.

Anyone here play Warframe (I used to, but don't anymore)? How do they normally price their micros?

Maybe someone could publish an official guideline of how much I gotta spend so I'll neither be a whale nor a freeloader and avoid the contempt of the devs for those that stray from that golden middle path? Thank you very much.

Seriously, if a dev studio or publisher has a good idea of what their game is worth, they should have charged that price to begin with. Like with any other thing out there, if people feel that the things being offered for microtransactions are worth the money AND they are attached to the game enough to make that investment, they'll buy it. If they aren't then they won't. If an offer doesn't appeal, it's up to the person making the offer to determine why and rectify it.