Hey IMC could you have an official staff like just talk and chat with the community.
Coming from SMITE moba the staff from that game are so active with community discussions and even joke around. Ofcourse it wasnt always fun and game as there were bad moment but atleast the staff and community are having a relation ship.
Hold trivias World of Tank/Wargaming constantly produce trivia videos even though there are no new content just to keep the game alive,
forum mini games with no prizes just for the heck of it. Dont make any promises just simply do small talk.
Get ex-RO staff even to hype about ToS, a standard pretty girl in your international CM staff for the boys, or utilize user that have participated in korean CBT such as Kiyoshiro here or the more popular Steparu.
A community manager is something nice to have, and necessary.
Seems like @STAFF_Marikim does most of the community posts/updates.
I understand there isn’t really much to say, or announce (or is there ) but forum involvement is always great.
You can do small forum events (drawing contest? Etc) or answer community questions on a weekly basis, maybe through a mega thread for questions.
Forums these days also have devtrackers, so people can track all the important messages by staff, if you can add something like that here it’d also work really well.
@FatePGN Even if it’s something appreciated, they aren’t forced to talk to us. I wouldn’t say it is necessary at all.
I find it a bit exagerated to complain about staff forum activity at this stade of developement. I mean, the game isn’t even released yet.
Please don’t pressure people -who certainly already are working very hard- for something you didn’t even pay for yet.
@MementoMori On the contrary I believe community involvement in even (especially) early stages is key.
Community involvement shouldn’t be forced, but rather someone should be hired to do that role if there isn’t one yet.
Lime Odyssey had almost 0 staff/community involvement and ended up never coming out. Smaller indie games end up with the same issue. Indie games that aren’t even super amazing but have great community/staff involvement end up doing better and more people learn more about the game.
Games that have constant community/staff involvement tend to do well, and the community appreciates the company more.
I’m not saying we should have a CM constantly keeping us up to date when there isn’t much to say at the time, but interaction with the community is always good and welcome (maybe in the form of mini events via social media/forum, etc), and key.
I don’t really mind if they post in the forum. I don’t really care about community managing or anything. But one thing I think we NEED is weekly updates! I don’t care if it’s on the Dev Blog or here, but give is updates! We want to know whats happening. >_<
Even if it’s boring or not much. Any little tidbits would do.
As you can with all the current upcomming Western MMOs are always constant producing content to give the community something to talk about though these games are still in development.
Key for what ? Commercial success ? If that would be true, I guess developers would know it after 20 years of MMORPG history.
I agree it is a very good thing for hardcore-players who invest a lot of time in this game (most likely a lot of us here) because we feel listened and important when the staff communicates directly with us.
However, it isn’t primordial at all for a large base of players, who don’t care at all about the forum, and still pay for the game like the rest of us.
That requires time and money. Maybe they prefered invest it in the actual game at this stade of development ? I wouldn’t blame them for that choice.
In programming projects with multiple teams, everything isn’t parallelizable, you can’t throw X people on a new task and expect it to work gracefully.
By experience in a serious project, you take a lot of risks if you don’t keep the plans you decided at first.
So okay, let’s request a CM, fine, they probably took note of that. Maybe they already have recruited a CM from the begginning of the project in a future stage of development, we don’t know.
But please, don’t pressure them or make other players into thinking we *need* one or the game will fail.
This argument is invalid, fallacy of composition doesn’t prove anything. I didn’t find any research showing strong correlation between community involvement in MMORPG and commercial success. Maybe it creates a lot of problems that you don’t see (dev team pressured by the community thinking it can decide everything, for instance.)
Pretty much what Memento said, it’s pretty unnecessary, what would they even need to talk to the people on the forum about? There are no bugs/issues that need to be addressed as of yet, are people like expecting ToS to be perfect or something?
Keep in mind this game hasn’t even been fully released in Korea yet and they’re already working on NA, that ALONE for me is good enough that they’re putting in the effort. On average it takes years or maybe even never for a game released in Korea to have an International/NA release.
I don’t mean to gang up on you @FatePGN but I actually would go as far as saying that the Devs should stick to whatever vision they have for the game regardless of the whims of players. Sure its the players that will either play the game or not but most of the time players can be whiny bitches XD
If the Devs were consulting with the forum about game design I’d actually be more worried than thankful. Just my two cents, im sure a lot of ppl will disagree. =P
Yes commercial success, but beyond commercial success, having early community/publisher interaction builds strong communities. It doesn’t always have to be the hardcore/time invested players, but the players that spend money, and the players that don’t, just anyone that has any opinion will be able to share it and see a response even early on. Right now, IMC is responding to major forum things, which is cool, but for the most part their doing it from the background, and you don’t see a lot of it unless they mention it. At the same time, it’s really good but it’s also not really community interaction.
Also right now is when players are not playing the game, because it’s not out. This is when it’s key to interact with the community, because everyone interested is more likely to visit the forums. If I’m a person that doesn’t normally visit the forums, and decide to hop in because the games not out, and I see amazing community interaction with the publisher, my first impression is great.
Yes it does require time and money. I’m sure IMC knew this when they decided to become a self publisher. This means they have to split money between the development of the game and publishing it now. Part of publishing a game is having a community manager. CM’s aren’t there to be pressured into anything, their there to interact with the community. It’s true that we don’t know if they have hired a CM or not, but this thread is just to suggest it, because they haven’t announced it thus far. If they do have a CM, now is the time to speak out.
Take steam reviews with indie games, as soon as the dev team goes quiet, and community interaction dwindles, steam reviews go negative. Look at Cube World. Amazing game, suddenly they went super quiet after having tweets/etc all the time. Now who even remembers it? Sure there’s no research done about this topic (or if there is, I haven’t found any), but I’m basing it on the various games I’ve seen, I’ve played, and I’ve paid for.
Lime Odyssey was one of those as well, as a non-indie, major MMORPG.
Community involvement also isn’t necessarily there for commercial success. But players like sticking to games that have a strong community.
Look at Planet Side 2. They have an amazing community and lots of interaction. They asked the community to come set a guinness book record, and the community responded and made it happen. It could only happen with great community interaction. Now that might not directly lead to commercial success, but it does separate a game from good to great.
Truth is, IMC is no longer a developer here. And we need to stop treating them as just a developer. Their doing an amazing job just as a developer, and currently their publisher interaction is okay at best. Their publishing in a Western/International market, and a lot is different in this type of market. Having a CM is one of them.
@FatePGN
Well, your point of view is based on your own gaming experience and biaised by being a CM in your own community.
I have a different gaming experience that leads me to think the contrary of your PoV :
I already have seen many new CMs doing terrible job in already etablished strong communities. I also have played MMORPGs with lovely communities, without any needing of the intervention of the staff.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that communication of the staff can be something good for the game and the community (such as some of the games you mentionned). But I also believe it can be something really bad that makes thing worse if not well managed. I personally prefer silence than bad communication.
In fine, I prefer the idea to let them decide the right moment to introduce a new CM, if they want to. I don’t like the idea to order them to talk to us.
I’m inclined to agree with @FatePGN & @Karjalainen in looking for a CM involvement.
To @Aries point, this shouldn’t be put as a task for the Devs, as others have mentioned that since the game isn’t released yet, there really isn’t anything to chat about in that aspect yet.
However, a good CM is great for any community. They serve as a point of contact between the community and the dev team to help filter any genuine issues to the appropriate parties.
I’d love to see the CM team getting involved and posting within the community, even in just a more laid back fashion. The more they get their name out there, the more comfortable the community can feel going to them for assistance. Right now, we’re in a spot where if someone has an issue on the forum or a post that needs to be addressed, we simply just flag it and it’s anonymously taken care of.
Personally, I’m all for transparency. I’d rather be able to point a community member in need to a source directly rather than just say “yea, go post over there for that”
But to each their own and IMC will do as they feel necessary. But I think it would be great to have a member of their team involved in the community.
Connecting with your audience is crucial. Many companies made wrong calls and had to apologize to their costumers for doing things in the wrong way. For example Bethesda took the desition of making revenue from Mods for Skyrim and people hated it and they had to take a step backwards.
You should always hear your fans, but never lose your own standars.
That’s completely fine and understandable, however, nothing really has even happened to this game yet, no major decisions being made without playerbase feedback, so not having a CM right now ain’t gonna destroy the game…
) but forum involvement is always great.
I made a billion accounts to try and get a beta key, then I just gave up and bought the founder pack.
