Great Expectations, Part Five: Moderation Style

By Sanya Weathers

When you moderate gently and lightly, you create the expectation that it will be always thus. When you respond to a user’s feedback with an immediate change in the game, you create an expectation that you’ll always be so responsive.

But if you’re successful, your traffic will demand ruthless pruning (and locking, and merging) to keep the rot from poisoning your entire tree. And even with this most cold hearted, hard edged moderation, you will simply not see every post that your users put out there for your perusal. Assume success, and moderate decisively from the beginning – and don’t mistake iron fisted moderation with style.

Your style before launch is the one customers will come to expect from you. Don’t let your style just “happen.” Decide in advance what you want your public face to sound like, and hire accordingly. Do you want people to think of your company as warm and approachable, with employees who are basically players with cool jobs? Do you want to be mysterious? Do you want to be a faceless, inscrutable monolith?

(I am the strongest proponent imaginable of the approachable style, but even I will concede that inscrutable monoliths deal with a lot less attitude. That’s not to say they don’t get the attitude, but they don’t have to deal with it, as in “respond.” If you are planning on drastically understaffing your community team and never allowing them to say anything beyond a carefully controlled message, go with the monolith approach.)

Choose the style that reflects your corporate culture and desired impression. Hire people who naturally communicate in that style. Finally, remember that the goal of an MMO product, regardless of your chosen style, is a community that is as inclusive as possible of as many people as possible. Here are three basics that work with whatever style you choose.

–    Zero tolerance for bad language. Think this just means swearing? Think again. “Gay” is not an acceptable pejorative no matter how many people argue that it’s part of gaming culture. It’s a bad part of gaming culture that should be amputated and the bloody stump cauterized. Ditto “pussy.” Ditto slang for other races. This isn’t about being politically correct. This is about not alienating people with money to spend.

–    Explanation of moderation (but not discussion of moderation). Without telling people why you’ve made a moderation choice, you risk appearing arbitrary.  Explain your actions – “deleted for unacceptable language” or “aw, look, the troll trap caught something” depending on your chosen style. But stop there. Never engage in debate. Just offer the explanation and drop it.

–    Never post angry.