Great Expectations, Part Eight: Developer Involvement On Forums

By Sanya Weathers

Players love their community managers (mostly), but their most intense emotions are reserved for actual developers, those exalted beings who are actually creating and designing the game.

This is partly because players envision designers sitting around in a beautifully appointed room, having wonderful conversations about elves and/or plasma rifles. That image is not entirely wrong. What players do not realize is that there are maybe four people like that at a company, and everyone else with a developer job is a spreadsheet jockey. Even the four lucky ones aren’t that lucky, because they drive spreadsheets *and* sit through interminable meetings with people prone to outbursts like “well, why can’t you just add another zone /show more skin/have a new demo done by Tuesday?”

Such is the customer’s love for the developer that every word is cherished. Before launch, it is nearly impossible for developers to resist coming to the forums/blog/Twitter feed and getting a hit of adulation.

But a developer with time to do that on a daily basis is a developer who is not doing his actual job. And a developer who comes home from a sixteen hour day and posts in a delirious drunken hysteria is a developer doing no one any favors. Finally, the developer who maintains a forum presence post launch equal to his presence prelaunch is like a coelacanth – they exist, but you see them so rarely that it’s easy to assume the breed is extinct. And they used to be a heck of a lot more common.

Our job as community managers is to help regulate the flow of posts and manage expectations for both the customers and the developers. Here are a few things to consider:

–    Ask the developer to post no more than twice a week… and to not post at all if he isn’t willing to commit to a schedule. This is hard for many developers to handle, because most if not all of them are themselves players. They are accustomed to posting on a message board when the spirit moves them.

–    Create a backlog of content. If the spirit moves them a lot, have them save their text for the weeks to come when the spirit will be absent due to deadlines.

–    Make the posts do double duty. Remember, most of your customers will never see your forum, but they will still enjoy reading the content. Repost the developer’s comments (with context) on your company blog, your newsletter, and your knowledge base. Don’t forget to include the date. No utterance is too small for such treatment, unless we’re talking about off topic fluff.

–    Don’t post much off topic fluff. Yes, it’s fun. But customers have an exquisite sense of proportion and react badly when more fluff is being posted than data. You disturb that balance at your peril.

–    Give customers perspective. You are a community manager, not a member of the Secret Service, and your developer is making games, not hiding from assassins. Go ahead and give the customers a sense of what’s going on, and the kind of work the absent developer is doing. We’d all be better off if everyone had a realistic idea of what it takes to be an industry professional.