Bridging Community Divides in Cross-Platform MMOs

[Music] okay well it looks like it's time to get started thank you guys all for joining us uh bright and early this morning this is bridging the community divide communities and cross-platform mmos so uh first off i'm going to introduce these fine people who are going to be doing most of the talking today i just get to ask questions that's uh my payment for having to stand up for the entire talk uh we're going to go through uh what the different communities are that we're talking about and similarities and differences between them some of the uh challenges made by certain decisions in the development process styles of communication we use you know uh some of the interplay uh between the different communities and how differing platforms affect their growth and then uh if we are nice and quick we will get time for some of your questions so i'm eric ocho cleaver i'm a community and social media manager at nedi's my background is heavily in pcmmo

games like city of heroes and everquest i spent about eight years of my career working in pc mmos and i said i really want to do something different i'm gonna go work for a mobile gaming company so i applied to work at nedi's and they were very excited they hired me on it was great and about two months in they're like hey we should launch a cross-platform mmo not only on mobile but also on pc so uh it gave me a really interesting perspective in looking at how pc mmos was a straight one platform play differently than cross-platform mmos and it was something i thought was interesting so i thought we should talk about it so uh em why don't you introduce yourself um i happen to work with sir cleaver over here i'm taking full credit for being the one who hired him this is the second time i've done so very very happy as always um i have been in the gaming industry since straight out of college so uh since 1991 and i always kid that i

kind of did it back afterward because most people come in and sort of a support function and then jump into development and i started off as a writer game designer back in the sega genesis days and after doing that for five years i was approached by sega who said we love your communication background and uh we think you should try the communication thing on our peer-to-peer platform and that's how i jumped into community relations i did the hands-on thing for about 10 years and then jumped into management and i've been building community teams ever since so that's a little bit about me we also have linda carlson right i do apologize i came here with a uh sort of a bad cold so if you have a bad cold don't come anywhere near me because then we will breed a superbug that will wipe out humanity i always thought that would start off in

l.a but san francisco is a good segment i i do enjoy working with communities simply because i love learning about human nature it is most often depressing but sometimes you get pockets of brilliance and i remain convinced that the online interactions that we have are helping us to grow a reasonable rational global community and so while i work specifically in games it's because i want to work with humanity and yeah there's my games listed on there and that's not even all of them i i would also like to add that eric cleaver has worked for me twice so i see a pattern emerging here it must be like when i get sick of working with him he goes over to work for m and then he comes back over to me so it's my turn next mr cleaver over my dead body uh our most intelligent uh panelist is uh john here and uh john smart because he doesn't work in community full time something like that yes uh so i uh i

started uh our game company um we started development back in 96 actually but we became more of a formal startup in in 98 with our own office and everything and uh being the wide-eyed inexperienced person that i was i was like hey why don't we try making a giant online game no one's done that before that seems like a great idea so uh as a result we've been making the same game for like 20 years and uh and it's been a hell of a ride uh we you know it went online in 2002 and uh we've continually expanded it since then including platforms bringing it over to uh to mobile in 2010 and then uh you know more recently into into vr and and starting to consider other platforms beyond that so uh our community's been i think like everybody who interacts with the community it's been like one of the greatest aspects of our game and also one of the most challenging and uh it's it's a huge part of the reason why we're still here so very happy to be here and our final panelist is troy hewitt

too soon definitely carrie i love her anyway um yeah my name is troy hewitt um unlike him i began my career when the internet was here so i uh been doing online community management my background is actually uh human services and so like linda um i i fell into this community stuff um with a belief that people are good when you give them the opportunity to rise to the expectations of the community and and i really have enjoyed uh that piece of it and i do believe that our work is creating people who are taking these skills into the real world and so i'm very passionate about it um as far as the cross-platform stuff um i have living the dream at an indie studio with a bunch of friends that i've worked with throughout my career on mmos and and it's been very interesting but we are working on a cross-platform user-generated content

game where they can build their own stuff and then share it with their friends and it's sort of sort of like minecraft meets uh combat meets good community citizen meets and we call it quark which is uh quantum universe interaction and replication kit so a lot of science a lot of fun but we started on the htc vive and then moved to pc mac os um and then added mobile so we have all the platforms and uh yeah so we'll talk about that and what a wonderful challenge it is okay so let's talk about communities on different platforms one of the first things i get asked when talking to anybody new about communities is is there a difference between say pc and mobile gamers how do console players play uh into it so let's talk a little bit about these groups so linda are these groups uh the same are they different

uh both neither wow thanks for asking me to talk first nobody else is going to get to go for 40 minutes now you did it one of the interesting things that i find is that communities are very very different from one another i worked on both eq and eq2 and although those two games had superficial similarities their communities were completely different from one another and when you're talking about cross-platform games anything that runs on the playstation or xbox on mobile and on pc i mean if anybody's done that quadrafecta i mean i've certainly worked on communities that that bridge three of those divides and the communities do act very differently and the thing that i have found over the years is they each prefer a different communication platform some communities prefer to be on forums some communities do almost all of their communications on twitter some really like the reddits discord is a really rapidly growing community

platform and it's one of the hardest to manage um and you have to go where your players are because you can set up your own platform and think that's where the players are going to go but that's not true you have to be prepared to support where they naturally organically want to go based on their communication preferences so john you have an established game that you've added to new platforms over time do you find that people come to the existing communications platforms or does each new wave of uh players go to a different communications platform it's kind of a mixture um you know when we added a lot of mobile users you would certainly see like more interactions via facebook and things like that and social media at the same time our game is incredibly hardcore and uh people tend to interact with the existing players uh pretty commonly and as a result there's a certain degree of like training that goes on from the existing players saying hey you know if you want to get developer attention or whatever you should really post on the forums or

you should use a support ticket or whatever so we do have that happen but we do definitely have to monitor other channels in addition to that so um i think that uh has something similar to do with your experience because the game uh that you're working on right now it's class platform crusaders light uh is a very hardcore game uh with very long uh play sessions so how do you think that plays into uh where communities form and how they communicate yeah well as you're very familiar with uh we see a lot of action on facebook actually um so you know like everyone said we we modify to to uh to there you know when you're dealing uh we so this is a mobile game but it's very hardcore mmo uh you still are getting a lot of those classic pc gamers so there's a lot of discussions that they they get really really into it there's so much having to do with that game you know message boards don't play a part in that because people want to get into real deep discussions because the

game is so multi-layered and has so many so many different things going on so you know in that case there's a lot of that kind of interaction going on on message boards and they really really react to facebook so that those are the ones that we concentrate a lot on so uh one of the things i think is really interesting is how different decisions play in from a development perspective into how your community interacts with one another our play space is shared between the different platforms are the xbox players playing with the pc players all in one playground are they walled off into separate little gardens similarly can a player log in on pc play on pc log out log in on their phone and play their same character maintaining their same progression um how do you guys think this inter this these decisions interact how you're going to talk to your community later troy you want to jump in yeah i do um so right now the experience that we had

trying to create a product that had uh playability parity uh vr versus you know pc and mac os was a really interesting challenge for us because we didn't it's definitely a different way of doing things and and the vr space is still trying to figure out what how users should be using their stuff and so it was fun to kind of explore that um in the future in just a few months we are bringing the mobile folks into the fold and that'll create an even more interesting how do we balance what a vr player can do versus what a pc mac os person can do and a and a person on the phone um for me it is uh you know how do you how do you get all those folks in the same place if you want to how do you you know for instance with our mobile phone uh with our mobile app um i have a real hard time incorporating any kind of of chat uh especially when you start looking at

what happens on a global launch um our game is really geared for younger kids um that right now we're in the philippines with the mobile app and they communicate they use facebook a ton way more than i thought they would um and whereas other gamers maybe not so much on facebook maybe they're more on discord we try not to depend too heavily on twitter just because it appears to be the place you go to get you know harassed and abused um but uh but yeah so it's uh it is interesting to try to find those pockets of people and to bridge that divide but we really do want to have this this unified cross-platform experience and we need to sit down and start talking about what are those mobile player expectations versus the pc gamer expectations versus that vr expectation what we don't want to do is focus on one and have the other two lie fallow uh or not recognize

great strides and jumps in what's happening both on mobile and on pc stuff is really easier for me to track just because that's where my head has been but there's a lot of new stuff coming down the pike technologically and we want to make sure that we are offering ways for them to build relationships and maybe they will take that mobile piece and get into the pc piece because maybe there is you know our game um has aspects of building in it maybe it's easier to build on on a pc or on a mac um and and we find a way to allow folks to have their fun casual gaming experience while they're running through a particular map but then transitioning over to the pc when they want to spend a good two hours building and then you know vr folks um we have people who have spent you know six hours on a stretch and how many of you have put on a vr rig i can do about 10 minutes so you know like these people are committed and

they're building and they're using so you know we they're very specialized groups we do really want to make sure we're finding a place for them all to get the information even if that information isn't going to be the same by platform so it's a really interesting challenge what i don't want are three different skus where they all play together i want there to be information that you need depending upon what phone you're using and what country you're in and all of those little details but to have a centralized space where you can belong which i think to me is the core of what community is all about so john you've added more platforms over time layering in additional groups of gamers how is your approach to the shared play spaces login fungibility so um did you use the word fungibility i did i even included your bingo ten points ten points out kids so um i uh basically one of my overall goals is that i

i both oversee the design of the game as well as things like you know community engagement things like that and when we approached mobile it was what this idea was it was quite early that you know hey this is really cool that my phone can now run this stuff i would really like to be able to run my game on this and if i want that maybe someone else might want that so it's not very complex analytics driven decision making or anything like that but as a result you know when we got into it it was with uh continuing our model of all platforms interact in the same shared universe and everything would be seamless from one to the other and there are definitely some really significant trade-offs in using that approach we have a twitch model combat game so our combat's like completely real time and really you're not going to be able to be as effective you know from a ux perspective of using a game like that on a mobile device even with a game controller as you probably will be on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard so there's always a certain degree of you know the perception of that trade-off within our user base

at the same time we have driven a lot of mobile people to also play on pc and a lot of pc people to play on mobile you know and they're like hey i'm i'm on a bus i can interact with my guild they're doing some sort of big raid thing right now i don't have to like you know i can be some sort of support thing in the background or i can just be hanging out with them or whatever so it's been really popular but there's always a degree of this kind of like ongoing competition between different subsets of people and also just the expectation of the respective user base like you know pc players especially pc mmo players they're expecting something that's going to be pretty intense when they get into it you know there isn't really i mean there's certain mmos that are kind of casual but they're not casual like angry birds casual and when you ship a mobile mmo the expectation of the user is often like hey this is the second game i've ever played or something like that and that it's really hard to to bring that user along into a really complex environment and

kind of you know teach them about what's going on in a way that that they're willing to accept so i'll say that it's been a really cool experience overall and it's still an ongoing challenge that we haven't really cracked the code on we also have a lot of vr users we've got about 10 000 vr users over gear vr and daydream things like that we've got people playing you know three four five hours at a time which is a lot of you know time spent optimizing the heat threshold of a mobile phone and things like that uh but uh it's it's not a simple problem and if someone were to come to me and be like you know should i do one or the other i would say that would really depend on your game design and your community because it's really hard to make a single game that works the that is the best possible game across all the different platforms because the usability constraints are so significantly different so you can the behaviors of you know i want to add and i i wanted to ask you a question personally just because we're kind of running through the same mental exercise

sure but with the mobile space you have so many different phones and that have been treated and you know dropped and you know all kinds of crazy uh layout schemas you've got to try to figure out how that's going to work those thumbs are different lengths we invited some kids in to come play test our game and uh and so i handed a couple of them uh because our focus right now is android so we had some of the tablets and these poor little kids were like i can't like you know because they're tiny hands and so it was just a very interesting uh piece for us because it really informed the way that we had to design the game through tapping as a little less you know like taking it holding it and trying to put it in the middle of a screen when you're a tiny kid you just don't have those fingers what's interesting is you may be hearing us talk about

um how to manage community and all that stuff but we're also having a deeper side discussion which i hope everybody takes with them and that is community management once upon a time was about jumping on forums and telling people to be nice but it needs to be embedded in the process of design and delivery and the people who are heading up organizations need to be invested and understanding that community management um with some any marketing people in here so we have a game right now called if any marketing person says relationship marketing we go welcome to the club we've been doing it for decades uh relationship marketing is just a way for our friends in marketing to say community management um but when we look at the development of these things having a community person in to be the uh interpreter and the arbiter and to talk about hey you're gonna make this happen on pc that's gonna be great but

you roll that onto mobile and you're gonna get a lot of hate um so so it's important uh to know that you know your community manager your your your social engineer your your uh friend wizard is as somebody who ought to be baked into the process from the very beginning and um relationship management is a horrible or a relationship marketing is a horrible term so wait wait wait wait wait can i first of all john seriously how dare you how dare you sir call angry birds a casual game you've clearly not played with my grandkids but the point i want to make is that there are some areas of cross-platform play that you can never make work together the the xbox and playstation are jealous gods and they will not they will not work together and your the pipeline to go to those to those platforms is very different as well it so if you're publishing to playstation to xbox and the pc you've got three different

publishing paths and and it's unfortunate that those communities can never play together and i don't know where this is going to go in the future because they're protecting their market share they want people to be loyal to their their one hardware product and yet the players want to communicate together so i find that they often do their communication on other channels yeah i'm just joking about the angry birds the artificial constraints i think we've seen that as a a a an old model um i think and players do find ways around that kind of stuff um but can you play on uh so right now we're focused on uh android learning a lot is there that artificial wall between ios and android no yeah because yeah they play well together yeah very well yeah it's made our life a lot easier crusaders of light is on um facebook game room and just launched on steam and then as an on ios and android and

you know on a good day it just seems like you have you know one whole community right and on a bad day something goes wrong for the android players and they lose a bunch of stuff and you have to deal with it and it's a problem but um it works you know the fact that we're cross-platform on those specific platforms or at least android and apple and uh facebook game room players can all play together on the same servers works really well for us and um you know being able to give them the opportunity to uh game wherever they're most comfortable right like we were talking about you know go home they've got a few hours to spend straight onto the pc they go and then they can pick up that progress as we said commuting on their way to work on the mobile phone oh gosh and if you're a small developer and you are dependent upon those numbers and you've got all of these platforms that you're managing your your player base is just it grows exponentially because they're you know they're finding different ways to get into the game through different devices you're making

it as easy for them to play wherever they are as possible yep so communication styles and channels how have your communication styles what channels you pick we've talked about this a little bit uh changed just based on multi-platform and do you do shared or combined communications has anybody tried breaking it out so this is game x for xbox this is game x for mac os in in gen in terms of general communications especially on social media we keep all of our platforms together yeah however in forums especially because forums are where people in our gaming communities go for the latest updates or for uh issues that they're having that sort of thing so we'll have a forum which is broken into here's the pc section here is the playstation section here's the xbox section because there are differences between them but in the general section it is where we tend to communicate best and on

social media it's all interchangeable and we'll address it as you go along we're doing the same thing yeah we're going to use hashtags we don't have enough of us to go around yeah hashtags are a great idea yeah yeah yeah we break out our forms by platform we've always done that just to try and keep it from being completely chaotic too you know it's like the sheer number of posts that you get but uh yeah there's only so many channels that we can focus on and uh and focus on well so we do try to channel all of our users to something that's a little bit more manageable and then do the rest of it ad hoc as we have to you know yeah um communication style wise um when i'm you know communicating to folks on mobile i'm like hello fellow kids um but honestly it was really funny the transition because you know coming all of us coming from mmo space the bane of our existence has been patch notes [Music] they are always lengthy they are uh rarely uh 100 correct and when i rolled over to mobile i was like oh man i gotta do this again

and then it said you have 500 characters and i was like like angels fell from the heavens and it was oh so i had 500 characters to share just get got to the good stuff and i thought i'm going to take some of that back to the to the pc because i think people don't need to see all of that maybe they want to have access to it but that first interaction so i so there's a blending going on it's true and you know one of the uh the most interesting things i've learned because my career has just jumped back and forth between pc mmos and mobile is that you do absolutely communicate completely different to those two those two right because mobile gamers man you have to be short to the point if you can use pictures instead of words you know to convey what's going on that is super effective with those folks when you're on the pc you know much more elaborate communication happens but you really do have to gear your method and way of communication based on that platform sorry

the tone of communication varies as well from platform to platform we adopt a very different voice when we're on facebook as opposed to twitter as opposed to forums uh and now i've got a question for you guys this is something that uh at tryon worlds we've recently started doing and that is we spend more time in game talking directly to people there on on global channels have you guys done that much so we're rolling out a an events system where our developers are going to be in game during certain hours and certain times because there's nothing more effective in my opinion uh than having the person who's making the game it's great then go in and and we it's kind of crass but we said you know eat eat your own dog food like go in and you play and i'll tell you bugs get fixed like that and even somewhere they're just like i can't believe i've been making people suffer like this or this is really irritating to me and then the next day it's fixed but the real part of that is more interaction we don't allow chatting in-game because

i am worried about the way we present uh i want i want the interactions to be important and i want them to be fun and i want them to be positive but i also want to protect kids and protect them and protect anyone from from abuses and game and people in my office were really stressed out about that and i said well so what how many is acceptable like how many problems is acceptable is one okay and they're all kind of quiet and i was like oh two then three then and they're like shut up troy we get it um so uh but we're looking at ways to get creative with that communication but in i think that getting your devs in game that that's uh a wonderful thing to do nothing excites the players more either if they see a devon game you know and it shows them how much you care that you know you're just like them you play the game as well you have you want to know that they bonds them to you loyal yeah well i i get in game uh periodically um

for like major messaging like major points that i'm trying to make or something like that i generally do it on the forums and our users are really used to that because of the persistency of the information rather than just being the current audience who happens to be online at that moment but uh they do really like it when i show up for some kind of event or something like that or when any of us are online we're usually online before major patches so we'll be talking to them about like what's about to drop and managing those expectations yeah exactly i think we'll only be down for five minutes maybe you know we'll let you know if it's exactly like that yeah you know if you're ever responsible for messaging never actually try to measure it yeah yeah that's your favorite yeah i usually say probably three days only an hour wow isn't that amazing exactly exactly i had a quick question for the audience eric and i don't mean to derail us how many of you have an actively launched app a mobile app in a game store

yeah interesting how many of you want to reach through your phone screen and throttle your reviewers oh yes let's have a talk about that later yeah yeah i mean steam reviews come on yeah they're just as bad really yeah obviously it is really unfortunate that people don't put a lot as much thought into their reviews as they do on yelp if we had a yelp type system i'd be much happier or as many different ways to contact them no i'm just kidding i'll i'll take the i played your game for 10 minutes and gave you the honest feedback for 10 minutes over the i'm trying to be witty on yelp any day of the week i don't know we got a review that said stinky with one star and i'm like i don't even know what to do did you tell them you showered i know what i did i said no you seems legit yeah i wanted to though one of the interesting trends that i have found with mobile apps because i have i have great discussions with my boss let's just say we disagree sometimes um and i'm glad he's not here right now but he's somewhere around gdc

and and and he says well nobody uses forums anymore oh oh i beg to differ and he says you know and mobile apps mobile apps none of them use forums so i open up heyday and i i say supercell let me just go to their forums for you because it's it's strange to me now that mobile games are growing up that they're starting to spread out across more communication channels and you're getting so much more in-depth communication and back and forth because they're growing up i think they're growing up and i also think that the hardware is allowing for people to do that kind of stuff to run background apps that are voice you know yeah i think it's a part of it but i also do think there are a lot of people that mobile component of gaming is kind of connecting a little bit more with what we've been doing for decades um and uh and i also think that gamers are holding mobile app developers responsible for

the quality of the games that they make absolutely yeah and and i think that's good really yeah you've got two weight communication going which was missing from mobile games for many many years yeah yeah are we totally derailing your your derailleur okay but good that's okay i'm here to get you it's back on track accomplished so how often in your games have you run into competing communities where the android players feel like you love the ios players uh better uh that you know the pc players are clearly the favorites because the ui is optimized for the larger screen and keyboard and mouse so how have you guys run into this situation uh in the past and how have you handled it that's a really really tough one i mean we just launched a progression server called rift prime which is subscription only and we're seeing we're seeing running arguments between the prime players and the free to play players and and it's really really strange their perception is we favor one over the other the prime players feel that free debate

play players are getting all the stuff first and they've got everything easier and we're focused on them whereas the free to play people think that we're investing all of our time in prime and not fixing any of their issues and neither of those things is true so we find that we're generally addressing both communities at the same time and trying to make sure that we mention each one every time that we communicate on that platform until they get used to it but i've seen the same thing with uh with console players versus pc players especially if there's a disparity in the production schedule due to the the numbers of tests and certifications you have to go through on console oh yeah well and i agree with linda that you definitely wanted to make everyone feel like you dislike them equally um that's not what you said that's a direct quote it's on video you heard it oh my god i hope this is reflected in a rating uh but the the real deal for us is that we are um really working hard because we we

started with our vr we added you know the pc component we're we're moving into mobile and mobile now will you know be kind of part of the we we call it the the you know uniting of the tribes they will all be together um but we play a lot of the uh you know indeed indy dev stuff is a currency and indie dev love and sharing what our plans are and making sure that those you know because we frankly we don't have enough people to keep the pc build in line with what's going on with the mobile build and we got some bills to pay and the activities that are on mobile maybe help in you know when we're visiting china and talking to friends who may want to help us um it's important that we focus on that but we never leave anybody out of our adventures they they know what to expect and they know that we've built really uh strong relationships and a lot of goodwill with those folks they they know they get

to see us unfold our plan and move through those spaces uh so it's not you know we always say it's not that we don't love you it's just that you know there's just too many of you to love all at once um but we are also very very open about timing even if we try to hedge our bets and say you know around spring that kind of stuff but we also have found because we're early in development and you've got you know well-established people who have done this but our process is just starting and so we find setting the um the tone at the very outset and even though we may be launched in the philippines we can still invite our people that are in vr and on pc to come be you know the vanguard of uh telling us how the game plays on mobile and what they think will be wrong when we try to connect it to pc and we listen um yeah so far so good really quickly i have a very specific example of how we had to deal with this

particular situation when we launched crusaders of light on mobile for business purposes we launched on android one week later than we did on ios so as you can imagine all these people are looking forward to jumping into the game and then they're told hey you know these people get to play the game first and these other people have to wait so um you know let's be honest about it we're we're in bus in a business here and things are kind of sometimes dangled in front of you like hey you could potentially get featuring if you launch on one first before the other so um so you have to make those kind of business decisions right because it can make all the difference in the popularity of your game so we went ahead and we had these two different launch dates and it was very hard it was hard uh because you know the players want to know why why can't why are we getting the game a week later than everyone else is and you just have to do your best it's good because you know i think it's

a little bit more commonplace now than it used to be it's not unheard of to launch on one platform you know on mobile before the other but um you know what we did we were very lucky in that situation in that you got to always look at the players motivation for why they get angry about these things and in this case you know they hadn't seen the game yet they just wanted to get in so once we were able to launch on that you know on android all the anger went away right because then they were in and they were concentrating on the game and everything much better situation than say you're way into uh you know release time and something bad has happened to one as opposed to the other and they're angry because they've invested money and time and everything in the game but for us we kind of battled a little bit at the beginning there with how honest do you be with your community you know we don't want to tell them you know the farthest we would go and say you know for business reasons we're launching on on this platform and then a week later on the other one but it's really hard to manage because those perceptions at the very beginning

are super important so they've been looking ever since to say hey you love ios more than you love android so you just have to do everything you can to to mitigate that and try to make them all feel equal they're like we've been here before yeah so we've always had a bit of a challenge with this uh because we started on pc so much earlier than we we moved to mobile and uh also because we are a relatively small indie shop we have relatively limited development resources so there was a perception that was very correct by the user base that the development on mobile was cutting into content drops and content development and that that really built up over time a still established degree of i would call it bitterness i guess among some pc players towards mobile development in general at the same time a lot of them have come to really like mobile and they they also use it and then there's a lot of mobile people who've come in and played on pc and there's just a lot of cross utilization so it's it's not that bad but it's always been kind of an ongoing

discussion point for us and for my own part dealing with these same kind of business versus uh communication struggles like i really like to opt to be blunt like i can't be blunt to the point of being like this is how much money we're getting paid to do this but i do like to try and you know be fairly honest with the user base whenever i can and when we started doing mobile this became more challenging just because of the diversity and the secrecy of the stuff that we were doing with all these different oems and you know we were we were in every verizon commercial for a year you know i couldn't tell them about that or like what went into that so uh you know a lot of the time i'm having to unfortunately make you know very vague statements of like this is this is really important to the game and you would believe me if you understood what was going on but you know you really have to come up with uh ways to try and to try and address that as best that you can to try and curb that degree of bitterness that can evolve over time it's really no different than if anybody here comes from a family with more than

two children if you have four or five children in the family they're all competing for your affection as well and from that i learned that you just have to keep talking to them on all the different platforms and we've also started to do if if if a feature is coming to one platform we try to get a commitment to when it's also available on the other platform so that we can talk about it right then because we found that people are actually highly accepting of it if they know when they're getting x uh but nowhere is this perception more obvious than when when we're doing a live stream and i'm talking about in the live stream and say why don't you fix that bug oh honey you don't want me touching that code if i go to do to work on that then everything's going to explode and you aren't going to have a game it is one of my favorites and that is one thing that i have seen uh across all the platforms and that is i can't believe you're putting in spring art

why haven't you balanced the gun that does it's like okay once again player this is not how it works just because we're doing a live stream doesn't mean that when we leave we're going to sit down and do some coding that's just like you know these two things can happen concurrently even if you feel like it isn't well so one of the things i found really interesting when uh working on defiance was uh what you could give away on different platforms oh yes uh if you sell it in the store on playstation or xbox you're not giving it away uh you know at least uh specifically hard currency uh they don't want you doing that that is not allowed but you can give it to the pc players so do you give it to the pc players yep or do you not give it to anyone you you do you you still do the giveaways where i mean the heck we we're we're multi-streaming with our live streams and the only people who can enter our draws are the people who are watching on twitch because that's where the randomizer thing is so if you're watching on facebook or

youtube or twitter you don't get to enter those so i mean that's another platform thing people get really mad that they can't enter from facebook but sometimes you just have to be open and honest at the outset yeah and make sure that they have the information it's when they find out afterwards that they they can't do something that's the biggest yeah yeah and i honestly i do feel that it's not one of those things where when you have those four children and they're not sharing and this person can't have the thing so nobody can have the thing uh right that's not i think you need to really lean on your communications people your community folks to describe the policies that prevent them from giving things away uh systems are wildly different across all those platforms but i find that they'll listen and if they have an issue with that i also find ways

not to be petty or petulant but if there's a bad policy um which i you know the policy that cleaver described i think is a bad one um there are ways for those players to share those thoughts with the people that are responsible for making those decisions and i just make sure to include that information and any kind of description so let's talk about unique bugs because coding is not equal and so that means that whenever you do a deployment uh one platform's gonna have bugs that other platforms don't experience uh one platform might lose progress lose items lose time that other platforms don't experience do you compensate only one group how does that all work and how do you guys approach those sorts of situations compensation yeah i think you have to really because you're you're looking at a group that is uh seeing everybody around them playing

and having a good time and they're upset and they're on the communication platforms to express their unhappiness and it is going to happen i mean what if you're what if your build for xbox went all wonky and people are crashing out all the time you have to deal with that we had some issues with with trove on this where we had some really serious stability issues on on one of the platforms you have to go in there and communicate as much as you can and then yeah if you can give them compensation for a minute there i honestly thought when you said that we really have a problem with troy oh yeah yeah no i always have a problem how do you know i'm playing what are you it's not all about you you and your persecution complex sir i but yes it i think you do i i think you do need to i think you're confessing you compensate generously and always you and i also think that when you add the layer of if you have one shared community one united community and you lose a chunk of those folks

that don't get interact with their friends that don't get to connect and if you're running a free-to-play game those folks who are coming into play who maybe aren't spending a bunch of money and i'm not going to use any of the offensive terms for the people that do um you're losing content and so i believe that if you have the opportunity if something goes wrong with your service i would rather be very generous in compensation across the board to all folks so that they know we care enough and we're taking care of those folks those folks feel taken care of and if it happens on their platform they they know that we're going to be paying attention um and the conversation changes the tone changes and it also underscores we're one community so yeah yeah i would agree with all of that um we we generally try to we try to generally treat everybody roughly the same you know across all

platforms whenever we possibly can and and compensate well and compensate early and and you know take good care of people and communicate very clearly about what's going on when something is going awry i mean yeah communication is so critical to just having that level of trust between your player base and the development team and it's especially challenging when you start breaking out onto these additional platforms like we we roll our own engine completely all around tech and uh you know we run into way more bugs and problems on mobile than we ever do on pc just because the stability of the the video drivers is just not as solid there yeah yeah new new devices are getting shipped all the time that have like brand new code in them and and you're like supposed to be a featured product on that device and the device you know blows up in some terrible way so uh communicating about all that and making clear what's going on and and how you're trying to look out for people uh you know that's that's critical but at the same time there's you know going goes back to kind of the the earlier question you know there can be a degree

of resentment from one platform that sees that you're spending a tremendous amount of time doing maintenance on another platform and that you know it all kind of rolls in together into the same sorts of issues i want to piggyback off of something that john just said that i think is really important if you are a developer that has one or more games that is multi-platform you just need to make sure that you have a community team and by that i mean more than one person because here's the deal when you are dealing with all these different communities and something goes wrong on one it if if you don't have enough community people because what i like to do is i like to take one person of the team and say go chase this down you're the tsar you are the tsar of this one thing on this one platform go talk to the developers you know the developer's going to ask for information go back to the players who are reporting the problem get as much details as you can you know be the go-between help facilitate figure out what the hell is happening so that you can then you know come back to the rest of us we can talk about communication strategy

and we can execute on bringing everyone publicly up to speed on what's happening when we think things could be resolved and all that stuff it's super super important because as we know you know daily live community operations you've got your plan and then we just also have to deal with all of these things that come up out of nowhere you know catching these little wildfires and putting them out so you need to have a robust community team you can't just have one person dealing with one or more products that are are out there um you know available on multiple platforms it's super important to be staffed appropriately absolutely and if you're a small indie developer you're also going to have to train and trust other people who may not necessarily have those skills baked in they may not have been born with it but they can learn how to do these things and to manage a tone in a tenor because a lot of times when you're dealing with reporting a bug or or sharing with the world what it is that's wrong with a particular thing you've got to write it up here but then you've got to prepare the tweet here

and then the facebook post goes here but it can't do that because you've got a link to the twitter and then you've got your cms and then you've got what all the stuff i mean so it is the calculus on how what pops off first is you know try as you might to automate some of that stuff you just can't um but uh but it really is important to spread out that work and to create those ours like you are the person who's carrying the water on this you need to be sure that you're communicating it and that our language reflects across all of our communications channels the same stuff i think one of the interesting opportunities is actually levering your leveraging your customers to help take care of this because if you spend a lot of time with your community you know that there's those people who are experts who you know they're the guy who's always giving you the bugs yes going to them and saying hey can you tell me what's going on right now because i don't have time necessarily to let look into every nook and cranny so i need to get as much work and help from you guys as possible if those folks

are using their powers for good sometimes you find out through them before you find out anyway that's what i was going to say how many of you run uh it would be the the modern day parlance is uh um influencer programs but uh yeah i mean we you know we've had a lot of experience uh here uh running and empowering groups of people because every game i've ever played even in mobile games how has this helper component um that of people that want to say here's how you do this do this thing they've you know they want to write they want to be a part of educating those are great great folk while they can sometimes turn out to be megalomaniacs you know you do it long enough and you can pick those people out before they get to be troublesome um but uh but really leveraging your community to help spread the word and to help um connect talk to you and say oh hey i don't know if you've seen this dark corner of the internet where they're you know they're having they're they're confused um

yeah i think uh that's another really great point have people on your team whether they're if you're the only communications person get your ceo get your you know i don't know i don't care what they are if they can type and talk uh and are uh amenable to your expectations as it relates to you know treating your customers right and then leverage those community leaders and uh they'll do it and love it for free yep for free so i want to give you guys a chance to ask questions and uh we only have a couple minutes left so if you guys want to file up to this uh microphone here in the middle that would be fantastic don't be shy come ask questions even if you don't really think it's a good question just so we have some people um and i'll take this opportunity to again remind you to fill out the evaluations thank you very much it's very much appreciated okay so um everyone can hear me clearly oh yes um so you talked about like multiple

platforms and messaging for different platforms but what happens when something like actually goes wrong for an individual what are your best support channels individually like if somebody has a problem on android how do you get back to them on android via somebody having a problem on xbox and you now need to get back to them directly on xbox well for for me uh i've been talking this whole time so i apologize uh again my name is richard weil but uh for android what we've done um i can only speak to that right now but uh we've actually captured their uh their tag and we know who they are and we can send them a direct message to their phone um but we also manage a lot of our stuff through zendesk zendesk has a really uh fabulous mobile component um i am definitely looking for other resources that may be more mobile friendly but um but yeah it's a it is a challenge uh ios i'm imagining will bring a whole new level of trying to get that person to

feel supported but get their email address yeah we email convert every user basically so uh it's kind of a worst case scenario option we would rather have something else but i like that he's like hold the phone you say email convert but what about kids um well i mean we're a 13 and over game so that doesn't affect me so you kind of just dump that what about everyone else so how do you communicate with kids on your platforms yeah i mean for mobile it's using a mobile specific tool is ideally uh you know the best way to do it something that can you know be integrated into your app or an api and uh directly message inside your client um that's what we do for crusaders of light uh the challenges is that our mobile specific tool doesn't go to pc so for pc we're uh doing email conversion and for mobile we're doing the tool in the app uh it works fairly well uh it's not ideal using email is never ideal but uh pc players tend to do better with

it than mobile players in my experience but the copa compliance stuff you're right it's it's challenging and it's challenging and it's different in different countries but uh yeah that's uh that's a tough one let me know usually if when you're dealing with with children usually you count on the parents to contact you and that's where we get most of our contacts is directly from them we're legally obligated to let the parent know that we can contact that child if they end up signing yeah we can talk about this later but again so i know community management is about a lot more than telling people when they're being mean and getting them to stop being mean but say you do have a griefy player just hypothetically or or you do see that uh coming into the community a lot how active should a code of conduct or community guidelines be in the discussion and and how much is that leading the uh fomenting of a better community

for any of you i think it's extraordinarily important to maintain a code of conduct or just some community standards because as you know i've done the math it's less than one half of one percent of your players will be griefers those are the people who are clogging up your communication channels being absolute jerks to each other and innocent bystanders and there is no reason to keep them in game even if they have a high lifetime value because they negatively affect hundreds of other people yeah so we at tryon we have been actively clamping down on this and our own ceo has been in game and giving people mutes and that's kind of cool to see and then he sends a broadcast down he sends a broadcast out across the server saying hey yeah you know we have just given chat mutes to the people who were disrupting our good time tonight have a you know have a great evening and the chat erupts

with applause because nobody wants to look at that stuff you know you've got filters in game if you don't want to see swear words but i i use the occasional expletive we don't care about that we care about ongoing abuse and disruption in the game we don't need those people they're not welcome in our house so but every company is different some some companies think that that sort of uh nasty toxicity is what the game's all about not not for tryon games but yeah any of you guys know i think that the the community uh standards um beyond the terms of service and all that stuff that nobody's reading but i actually like to engage directly with the community to say here's the fundamentals what are we missing and have them be a part of it and as the community evolves they start parroting that information they start being the arbiters and and helping people and self-regulating yeah and sometimes and

sometimes people who you know there are those people that linda's describing that very small percentage um and they're they're easily removed because they are toxic no matter how much money they contribute but um but there are those people that just have a bad day so so having the policy but having that way to get back into good graces um because so when you do that though that's usually escalating so we have five minutes left so we're gonna go to lightning round now yes so you are the first contestant in lightning round so may i ask him question right yeah yeah you have some time cool thank you for the great discussion um you know i'm a marketing guy not a community manager so i have a tricky tricky one for you when you run a big pc mmo with a lifetime of several years we usually usually see that there is a part in the community that behave toxic that usually complains about monetization bugs and stuff but when when the product changes

uh the problems have been solved and when you do a user acquisition campaign several years after the launch uh the users actually google the name of the game they actually confront they discovered this toxic part of the community that uh always complains about stuff but at this point the stuff are they're not the actual problems right now there are myths that have been sold before solved before so could you give any advice uh on how to communicate with the newcomers for the new players uh that discover this toxic part of the community uh so they won't fall under the influence so you shake off the old baggage and trying to communicate new players that this stuff has been fixed but there it is in google okay yeah it's it's quite challenging to pull that off sometimes because uh you know that people can come in with very strong expectations and bad memories and whatever else but uh i have found that probably the best single way of getting that addressed is having your user base be really well informed and be your biggest advocates

because they will go out there on every forum where somebody is saying something bad about some aspect of it that was fixed two years ago and they will they will speak to it like even without your involvement at the same time we also monitor a lot of communications and content that's out there yeah i think the one last thing i'd say is you have to be extra careful now from now on you don't get the luxury of having a bad day you have to be perfect because every time you screw up in the future calls back and reinforces what happened behind so i mean it's just constant vigilance is the only way to we also have at the end of this we have a little breakout session i want to give you a little some a little advice that worked for me for something like this but thank you when we're done we can talk a little bit thank you i can't really see you so find me i'm like hey i just realized i have way too many questions it was a great session thank you maybe i'll take it up later so i'm gonna try to keep it short um just some feedback regarding the kids uh i work with the mmorpg game for kids for girls between nine and fifteen

i'm for sweden hi stable here and just so you know uh we because we have underage kids copa is only for us and it always requires email verification and if you want to have a customer support for kids use the email verification system the parent email verification system sorry and soon the gdpr is coming for europe so get prepared for that as well just tips um now i also have uh okay i'm just gonna have one question so because we have um underage audience uh we don't have forum most of our audience is actually on instagram and facebook and what i mean a lot i mean we get like 20 000 likes on instagram and 500 comments and instagram is huge yeah well done yeah yeah uh but instagram is not a good platform to have a good conversation um so we are currently actually looking at how we solve this and i would really like to hear your feedback from your experiences from your experience would it be better to build our own platform due to the age of our audience or actually use one of the existing platforms for the community management communication real

fast use the existing platforms to move them into your own we are not on steam yeah we are very specific we we are just have website you have downloaded launcher and we are not on steam yeah i don't think there's necessarily a simple answer to that one uh but uh but we'll jump out we do have a little breakouts that we can chat some more yeah yeah yeah okay that's actually my question there we go hey philip founder of stump so we have developed a feedback platform for in-game feedback um and my question is how does your feedback process look like or feedback management process are you trying to close the feedback loop or it's hard to get back to specific persons on specific channels especially as you're collecting feedback from so many different channels so how do you manage that on is it even possible for you right now it's not impossible but it's important it's it's very time consuming with with our games uh each platform has its own feedback system because you're going to have

different problems depending on what platform the game is on but if we look at pc for instance our players can report issues within game and we regularly have live streams where we advise people on how to make the perfect bug report so that things will actually get changed oh that's smart yeah stealing that idea we'll do it because it's actually we we had a very good discussion about this but typically that that feedback goes straight to the qa team from within game and there is no feedback coming the other way so inevitably somebody will post something similar to the forums and we honestly use the forums because these can be very complex issues and there can be very long discussions following them as well so the people who are interested in getting the feedback on what they're submitting will go to the forums and typically this is in the bug report section of the forums that's all it's for and our qa guys will respond there our devs will respond there and of course we will respond there because it's a very public arena where uh you can also if the same question

comes up on twitter i can go yes this discussion is ongoing right now and put a link to that forum thread so that they can look into it as much as they want to lynn do you encourage your qa folks or people who may be solving those bugs or those problems to communicate directly with players uh if they we prefer to do it on the forums because then it's it's a one-to-many relationship so then they're they're responding to not just that one person but publicly to everyone but you do like them to go on to the forum oh yeah absolutely that's where they are yeah so cool yeah i tried to reach out to each of you we are linked in beforehand so if one of you could give me feedback all of you later on to the solution we have to yeah we'll step outside and have a chat yeah absolutely last question all right uh once again thank you for the great session uh going from a team that dealt with a couple thousand players to now three actively supported games and millions of players is there any tools you found especially

recently to help you just monitor the feedback you're getting any sort of automated systems or the these are tonal evaluations that you find work or is it all mostly pure there's a great panel that we need to yeah or a round table or something but we need to do that um there's a lot that come close but i find that oftentimes and painfully you've got to have this patchwork of you know firebase plus this plus that plus you know yeah there's no one tool that will do it for you and there's no substitute for the human mind to filter out what really needs to be addressed so what we have is we have a team of community managers and then we also have contractors the much-blind richard weil for instance works for mod squad and they provide us with and we only we're we have six games but we have one moderator on 24 7 and these people switch out of course around the clock and what they do is they go through all of our communication platforms just a constant cycle and they

they call out issues that we should be addressing and you know they bring that to our special channel then we send it off to dev or cs or whoever else or we dive in ourselves to do it but there is no substitute for having a knowledgeable individual with good instincts who's going through this stuff manually and it's not as expensive as you might think no it's not and also i just think you lose a tremendous amount like how many of you launched on uh through the google play store they're they're little random words you know like one word is like love and you know you're like what love what like love to hate your game it's like that doesn't make any sense but no it's a pain yeah yeah i concur us earlier because we've dealt with uh the steam negative review bomb before as well as other things and it mostly cleared up but when it happens it's like how do i react to this feedback it's not usable in any way right yeah yeah and linda's right and also you can't be awake 24 7. nobody can so uh yeah mod squad they're awesome there are lots of different

services that that do that for people but that happens to be the one that i do like mod squad two um hey thanks for hanging out we're gonna stand out and you