Crisis and Opportunity: Communities in Good Times and Bad

[Music] ok so I think I'm gonna get started it is 11:20 we still have some people joining us I'd like to ask that if you have noise making devices and I'm pretty confident that all of you do if you could mute them that would be ideal just because otherwise I might lose my train of thought and that would be a bummer so my name is Janet Epson I am the community manager for Kongregate dot-com I am here because of a really strange and interesting life I started out as a social worker I did I worked with adolescents with severe emotional and behavioral disturbances and then after a while I felt a little bit burned out about that significantly because I hated talking on the telephone which I've later discovered is common in

our world but at the time people thought it was a little flaky so I moved into own nonprofit management and other things and ended up a congregate a few years ago and it's really unexpected to me all the ways in which my various sort of wayfinding jobs have all sort of coalesced to make this to prepare me for what I do now which I love so in addition to that there's something you need to know about me and that's that I'm a storyteller if you ask me a question I will probably respond with a story and the story has a purpose I come from sturdy peasant stock and one of the values that I got from them is telling stories it's a way that we remember the people who came before us it's a way that we learn from their experiences and it's a way that we process and understand the world around us so today I'm going to be telling you some stories I'm telling it you those

four stories for reasons I'm hoping that well I'm confident that in a week or a month you won't remember my outline but I'm hoping that when you need them my stories will come back and they will teach you what you need to know at that time so let's get started it would be good if I could advance there we go so my first story is about this lady she is the CEO of congregate where I work more to the point for this story she's an aunt and she is a knitter Emily's niece Molly is now seven the pictures a little old but it's such a cute picture Molly asked Emily to make her a skirt a knitted skirt and those of you who have done any knitting know that this didn't happen overnight but eventually sure enough there was a knitted skirt but the problem was that it was a little big it

didn't quite fit Molly's slim through the hips as many very young children are and it just wasn't quite staying up so Emily had a problem and she didn't have a blueprint she didn't have a pattern what she did have was a crochet hook an idea and a willingness to try possible solutions so she figured out how to knit belt loops and she added a black ribbon belt to the skirt and so the net result was that this skirt is dramatically cuter than it would have been without the belt as soon as I saw this picture on Facebook I went oh my god that's it that's the beautiful thing that can come out of a crisis so what I'm hoping to tell you all about is ways in which you can find your communities or in crisis things are going wrong and you're not going to know what to do but figure out what you can do think creatively move

forward and hopefully you're going to end up with something that's better than it would have been if you had never had the crisis at all so a little bit about congregate Eric where are you I put that I chose this screenshot before I knew Eric was going to be here that's his game Crusaders of the lost idols but anyway we have over a hundred thousand games it's a gaming platform any developer can upload their game to our site they get in exchange for that they can have player feedback and they get a portion of the advertising revenue that's earned by their game page if they have purchases in their game they can integrate our virtual goods API and earn some additional money that way we usually have about 300 to 400 virtual goods games on the site at any one time a couple hundred forums lots of different kinds of chat rooms it's

there's a lot going on so within a month or so of my becoming community manager congregate had one of the biggest community crises in our history so that was great timing in the process of trying to manage that crisis we made a lot of mistakes quite a few of those mistakes made things a lot worse instead of better and so when we did our post-mortem at the end of about two weeks here was how it started and the lady who wrote that is sitting here too but the point is that not everything we did made things worse and so we paid attention to what made things worse and we talked with each other and we kept doing more of the things that didn't make it worse and so it was expensive and it took a lot of time it took a lot of work over those couple weeks but by the end of it we had actually figured

out the basis of how we handle all our community crises from now on ever since then the thing that we learned in that crisis have been what we do and we also made a lot of really great relationships with players and a lot of those folks are still playing on our site I get messages from them sometimes hey can you take a look at this game it's given me some trouble I really appreciate that thing you did four years ago I'm like sure I'll take a look that's great so I never would have thought it at the time but in retrospect I do believe that the effort and the financial costs were entirely worthwhile we absolutely got we it was worth the cost is what I'm saying and since then I have had front-row seats as many different developers have had many different kinds of crises with their communities on a day to day basis on Kongregate the developers and their

Community Managers handle the crises that come up so but for something to escalate up to the point where it comes to my attention usually means that everything is really hitting the fan and nobody has any idea what to do but the thing is that all community crises fundamentally come down to one issue and that's loss of trust for some reason in some way players are disappointed I had a lot of fun googling disappointed cute animals something did not go as expected they could be there was a bug in the game it could be that you didn't meet a launch date maybe it was that they went looking for some support and couldn't find any it could also be that they had unrealistic expectations but for whatever reason they don't trust you to make things right so to resolve your

crisis you need to rebuild trust and the confidence in you and how you're going to handle problems in the future and this is possible and more to the point it's it's also possible that after you have done that your community will know you better they'll trust you more and you'll have a better rapport than you would have otherwise so there is exactly one tool that all of us bring to every situation that we're in and it's ourselves in social work this is called use of self the understanding that the persona that we break we present will have an effect on whatever situation we find ourselves in and so this means that you're a tool and I have pretty much the best job ever no but persona you are a tool and how you how people see you is what determines how they respond to you you'll be most effective in both

preventing and managing crises if you're able to convey that you are intelligent principled unfair when I'm interacting with frustrated players I'm sympathetic but I'm also competent and in charge my underlying message is I care about your happiness and I am here to fix this now competent principled and fair is not at all the same thing is I know exactly what we are going to do and we'll have this done by EOD sometimes you'll know from the beginning what you're gonna do other times you're gonna sort of have to dive in there with your metaphorical crochet hook and figure out how to make some belt loops but the most important tool you'll have at your disposal is not a crochet hook but yourself like any tool you need to know what you can and cannot do this one is Army knife has a lot of great features but if you want to fry an egg you're gonna be sorely disappointed although I have spent some time thinking

about how I would make a frying pan using those tools but that's beside the point similarly you need to be able to accurately assess what you can and cannot bring to community crises don't probably try to project a strength you don't have or it will damage your credibility because they're gonna see through you I am NOT the most tech savvy person who works to congregate in fact I might be the least Jack savvy person who works at congregate so when I dive into a crisis there's a lot of okay so tell me what that means but because I don't pretend to be anything other than Who I am players find that disarming instead of accusation worthy and so owning who you are is going to be a great strength to you in the long run sometimes not easy but it's it really is worth that journey now jumping back to the first story when I was talking about the skirt that Emily made I feel the need to point out too

that she already knew how to knit when she started that skirt didn't she she had the core competencies that she needed to finish that project and I'm sorry to say that not every community manager I meet is great at interacting with players I'm sure that you all are amazing but for the sake of thoroughness I feel like I just need to touch on a couple of basics one of the things that Kongregate does is that we choose and train members of our community to be volunteer chat moderators and when we train those people we don't start out by telling them how the banning and silencing tools work we don't start with punishment at all what we do is we start with teaching them the tools that they need to manage the community the chat room and in particular conversations without needing to resort to punitive measures right and I believe that community management is the same way that if you develop a certain kind of

relationship with people they are going to be more likely to go in the direction that you are trying to herd them even though they are fundamentally cats so here is the big secret if people like and respect you they will trust you and they will do what you want it seems really obvious doesn't it and yet it's very common for people to overlook that I would say so this may come as a surprise but internet folks are not a big fan of authority figures we are just gesticulating at me like well that we all go through a life phase called individuation typically when we're adolescents but Monell was where we separate from our parents we start to question the things that they're telling us we and nmd begin we begin to challenge why they have authority at all

right like what why is why do I have to listen to you let's fluor that I think a lot of players sort of present as though they are stuck in that phase some of them actually are still adolescents and so that's life appropriate but regardless I think there's a culture on the internet that says respect needs to be earned it's not just granted to you automatically so in the face of this skepticism how are you going to go about earning respect and Trust so the first thing is to be lenient if you address only the most important things people are more likely to listen so you have two problems on this hand you have people who are posting in your forum in text speak and it's annoying some of your players over here you have people who are telling other people to kill themselves now I hope that you're gonna recognize that this is a much more important problem and so if you don't Yammer about this but focus on this people are gonna pay

attention right and so you want to appear reasonable to most people and you want to focus on the things that actually matter I'm seeing a couple of people laugh I love this slide when I was redoing our moderator training a few years back I googled images fairness and this is what I got be fair like the fairness frog because the fair this frog is totally a thing we've all heard of the fairness rock as a randomness is that really appealed to me in fact some of our moderators got together and bought me a frog squishable and sent it to me so be fair like the fairness frog but in the seriously seriously players will detect if you're biased if you tend to be more lenient with people who are your friends if you tend to be harsher to people who just annoy the piss out of you they'll notice and they will go

mmm-hmm this person is not really all that because they're biased the other thing that goes along with that is that you need to always be thinking about what's best for the community as a whole you can't please everyone dividual somebody's going to be pissed but reasonable people will be able to look at your decisions and go okay so someone so is annoyed but she's clearly thinking about what's best for everybody I'm gonna give her a pass so be lenient or sorry be nice rather but not a pushover so if you're nice to people they will be more likely to be nice to you and also if you are nice and calm it makes it pretty much impossible to troll you I could tell you stories but then I'd run over the other thing to keep in mind is that people will live up or down to your expectations this sounds like something that is just sort of happy clappy community manager nonsense

but it's like a real thing like there's psychological research about how people subtly communicate expectations to each other and how people will try it either to elevate themselves or debase themselves to meet those expectations so if you treat people like they're punk kids they'll probably act like punk kids but if you treat them like they're human beings who are capable of coolness they'll try like even if they are punk kids and they don't really know whether it looks like they're gonna try so the last thing is to be transparent as an authority figure players are going to want to know what the limits of your authority are and how you use it and if you're willing to talk to them frankly about what you do and why they'll know that you are operating within the bounds of it's not law than a structure right you're not they're not going to get banned from the game just because you had a fight with your significant other

or because it's raining and you hate the rain that they're not subject to whims there there's that there's a structure for the authority and that's going to be reassuring to them so finally remember the silent majority if you seem fair and reasonable people will believe in you for the most part even though some noisy complainers might not so having covered the basics let's talk a little bit about how to manage a crisis let's say you're flung into a crisis what do you do so the first thing is to try to understand the issues thoroughly when you first become aware of that people everybody's upset and the forms are on fire you won't know precisely why that is and you'll get bits and pieces of the story but you need to make sure that you have asked enough questions until you understand the whole story for instance problem is the game is done

okay that's a problem but sometimes it's really that the game is down and we're missing an event sometimes it's the game is down and we wrote to support and told them about it and they said oh no the game is just fine so in the second two scenarios you have an additional problem that you need to think about before this whole thing is going to be wrapped up just getting the game back online won't really solve it if people are still gonna be mad about the time they missed in the event or mad that support blew them off so make sure you understand the whole problem remember to apologize or express regret this is something that's really easy to forget because of course we're all thinking you know that I didn't do this on purpose but players won't necessarily take that for granted they're human and human beings want to

have their distress acknowledged by other humans and expressing regret or empathy is a way that we do that for each other right so for instance if somebody's grandmother dies you say I'm really sorry to hear that now you're not saying you're right I killed your grandmother and I'm super sorry for doing that no you're saying I'm sorry that you're experiencing regret and loss and pain so the same goes for communities these sorts of statements that are up here will let people know that they have been heard and that you sympathize and of course if you had a part in creating the problem or making it worse you should take it a step farther and actually apologize for that as well so this is another one of those things that seems really obvious and yet in the moment is going to be easy to forget explain your net next steps remember you're in a situation where people are not feeling very trusting of you they

have concerns about whether or not you're going to do a good job so the best way to start getting them back on track is or to getting trust rebuilt I should say is to tell them what you're gonna do otherwise they're gonna be like oh so she's gonna go down and kick the servers right no but I can call the people who can you know reboot the whatever it is see that's my tech knowledge right there so make sure that their expectations are ones that you can actually meet and then this is also important do it don't just say it and then be like yeah well I'll get to it do it and report back don't just because you've said you'll do something and you know that you're a person of integrity so of course you've done it but the players are in a situation where they're not feeling very trusting and so they're not gonna go

like oh well she said she would do it so I guess you did know they're gonna be like well who knows so just go back hey I did that thing is it better how's everybody feeling and so you want to keep iterating that until people are reporting that they feel better that they think the situation is improved no not everybody's gonna be happy but if most people feel like you have done everything you can then that's what you can do Oh last note that I had originally left out of my outline but my manager pointed out to me that it was important because I took it for granted see this is how crises go these things are so obvious that we take them for granted do better next time the first time you make a mistake or your team makes a mistake your community will forgive you assuming you you know make it right long about the fifth time you make the same

mistake it won't matter what you say or what kind of compensation you give they're not going to trust you again so you know I had that slide about the post-mortem be sure to have one of those and have it be an actual meeting not just a couple of conversations in the hallway take notes come up with a plan for how you're going to change your flow in the future so that these things don't happen again so this is not the most beautiful slide in my presentation but anyway an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is better than a pound of cure so I'm going to talk a little bit now about some pitfalls I've talked about how to handle the crises that you find yourself in but it's even better if you can steer your community between the pitfalls so that you don't end up in a hole in the first place right and these two are based in some people that I've seen end up in holes I'll tell

you a bit about how they handled them but also hopefully give you some pointers on how to avoid them in the future so first I'd like to talk about the moderate path which ties back to some of the things that I was touching on earlier with fairness and lenience so a couple years ago now I got pulled into a situation in a game forum a user who I will call Bob not his real name as far as I know had played the game before for quite a while and then he quit but despite having quit he returned everyday to be disruptive he would insult the other players he would talk trash about the game and he particularly liked to insult and bake the community manager who all call Amy and as I heard through the forum post that Bob had made I began to notice some things so to begin with he was a player who had spent a fair amount of money in the game and had some trouble getting support

this guy was a bit of a hothead and so he grouch de bout his bad experience in the forums so far all pretty understandable and normal well here's where things went awry instead of expressing concern about Bob's bad experiences Amy just removed his posts Bob responded with angry criticism and she got angry in return and they got locked in this power struggle right now bob was behaving badly and amy despite her best intentions was just feeding that troll every day she hide his post she talked about how terrible he was she was personalizing it way too much okay so clearly she didn't mean to get into this situation I know she didn't but she was in an unfortunate situation where she had overreacted initially and then not really been able to backpedal so the way to avoid that is to be to allow negative feedback within reason so the things underneath the heart are the

things that I would allow and encourage on our site the things underneath the other the circle slash are the things that I would hide and depending on how routinely the person had been posting stuff like that I might take a little bit of action on their count to be like hey I'd meant it when I said stop saying that none of those are actual posts those are actually examples that I made up because I have an amazing job hmm okay so back to Bob and Amy in one of Bob's forum posts he had asked why this particular game was still on Kongregate despite its many flaws which he described colorfully underneath the snarky comments that was a legitimate question about congregates policy and approach you know how do we let get why do we let games stay on the site what are our boundaries and so on and so

forth so that question was my opening because that's right in my wheelhouse so I chimed in and I'm I'm tricky rodent and I answered his question seriously he has some follow-up questions so did a couple of other players and I answered though seriously as well but I gave him along with the information a sense of myself as unruffled and competent he at some point made a passing common set he says I don't really give a lot of flowers with my post but I'm not lying I'm not making stuff club I said that's okay I don't expect a lot of flowers and I could tell that there was real stuff here so you know this was apparently quite disarming to him so this is one of my favorite forum posts of all time he he goes through a good bit of effort trying to get himself to say something nice and he finally manages it and then she has says he has to go lie down because it was so much work and then no what are the other

players responded before I could and this was something that made me even more happy because suddenly they see him in a different way than they have seen him before until now they all hated his guts and they're like oh you you can be funny and even kind of nice and reasonable and to which of course he was oh oh you can't prove it but from then on things really changed for him and for that forum and he and I had a little private side conversations and he agreed to leave the forum alone and go off and play his own game and in fact he is still on our site and he's still playing in assortment of games he occasionally has a kind of a feisty forum post but nothing like it was before so it is possible to sort of win people over and have them become more productive members of your community instead of destructive ones and the thing that I want to

highlight two is that handling negative feedback calmly and without defensiveness makes everyone respect you more if someone is trying to upset you the solution is to get as an upset as you can it makes you in charge of the situation and not them beyond that if someone has negative feedback consider what they have to even if they're being a jerk they might have some good insights one of the most important lessons I ever learned about moderation was back when I was a volunteer chat moderator we had a truly awful user and he made a point to me one day and I went oh and what he said basically formed the entire basis of a bunch of the stuff I've talked to you about and was this huge gift to my future professional career but it came in this like poop and insult covered wrapper that if I get away I would never have realized that there was really a

kernel of really good information there so I'm glad I didn't do that and I encourage you to do the same sometimes even jerks have good points and so and similarly like of course you're gonna feel the fence that's right like I know that we can't hear people say terrible things about us and not feel a smidgen of defensive miss hello Kay most of us can't but you don't have to let on me or feeling that way right so just sort of move that emotion into a separate place and be like oh okay I'm sorry to hear you feel that way let's talk about that and suddenly the situation is going to diffuse now so this is the moderate path right which means that it's possible to err on one side and it's possible to err on the other side as well so you want to listen to players but it's also possible to listen too much or to be too

responsive when you listen it's less common but it still happens in my experience it's usually when a game dev is just starting out maybe their team is very small so every time they make a change or a tweak then they go when they listen in the forums what do you guys think do you love it oh you didn't love it what can I do that would make you love it and so sometimes then the developers will go and make big changes to the game based on the feedback they got which seems amazing right it seems to gala terian and it seems very collaborative and all these really things that feel really good but there is a downside to this which is that sooner or later players are going to develop a sense of entitlement they're going to feel entitled to that level of attention so then the question becomes what happens when the developer is a success and when

they inevitably as they must do start to make a new game and start shifting their attention somewhere else what happens in my experience is that if the players can get really toxic and they can get really angry and embittered by the loss of attention this next slide is when I forgot to remove so so the moderate path is listen to what players have to say but don't always act allow disagreement and criticism but require that it be constructive so you want to address concerns but try to avoid taking them personally and you're going to want to diffuse emotion by remaining calm so Allison Huffman is right here and she did not know this was going to be one of my slides what Allison she's taking a

picture to thunder her mom that makes me happy so when Allison was growing up her mom would always say honey you know different people are different and she was finally like mom I got it different people are different but then you go out into the world and you meet people who are way different like way different and you're like whoa different people are really really different and it's true different people are really different and gaming is global and that means that we are or will be managing global multicultural communities as part of that will need to manage purchases and related issues for folks all over the world I was surprised a few years back to learn that different cultures have very different norms about things like business and consumer protection players are a part of a global community but they're going to approach purchasing and expectations through the culture through through the

culture in which they grew up right in the end they're gonna expect what they believe to be true about all purchases of course except it's not true worldwide and different expectations lead to broken trust right because one side is gonna be acting in the way that they think is totally normal and reasonable and expected of course this is just how you act and then another side is going to be horrified but they've said they've wanted to do this and then the first patron side is going to go by what's the horrifying about that and you know so I am NOT an expert on cultural differences but I wanted to share a couple of observations and if this is something that seems really meaningful to you you can carry on on your own obviously here's what I've seen players in the EU are accustomed to strong consumer protection laws they expect a lot of transparency and they take it for granted that there will be strong consequences and in particular

strong external consequences from some kind of authority figure if a game doesn't handle things in a way that they think is appropriate in my experience Southeast Asian and particularly Chinese culture is almost opposite as I understand it folks from that culture both businesses and consumers walk into a transaction with the expectation that they are both there to maximize their benefit from that particular transaction that's not my culture but there's a sort of a brisk efficiency to that that that I have to say I kind of admire Americans are more or less in the middle how we're accustomed to some consumer protections but not as many as folks in the EU we expect merchants and customers to be self-interested but we also have a belief that self-interest canons include

the development of a long-term relationship that's going to be mutually beneficial and so and we're we feel sort of insulted when someone else doesn't have that same relationship goal in mind so if the root issue of a crisis is cultural realizing right away that the issue is cultural means that we can identify that all parties are acting in good faith and begin to rebuild trust and come up with some new sort of mutual expectations about what we think is reasonable okay so now the next way I have seen communities fall into holes of conflict and crisis is when they have problems with their support so support really isn't optional so crises are caused by loss of trust

but I have noticed something which is that the real crisis often starts when support is not up to the challenge the vast majority of our players are reasonable people yes there are some who think that your game is worse than Hitler the worst in human history and so on and so forth but they are noisy but not really all that numerous underneath it all most players are actually regular folks who know that the world is flawed that all code has bugs that sooner or later every game if it's deep enough and long-lasting enough is going to have glitches or unintentional loopholes to it so they don't expect your product to be perfect what they do expect is that when they experience a problem and reach out to customer support they'll get prompt competent and helpful responses if they have a problem but can't get the support they need that is when you start

to lose trust it seems like it should be easy but it's not running it customer support is hard you need people who and understand poorly written complaints who are somebody I know who works supported laughing hard you need to be you need to understand technical issues you need to know the game backwards and forwards so it's not easy to assemble a team of people who are good at this but it's really really important so you may have a really small team and you may feel like we're too small to offer customer support nope nope nope every game has to have support players talk to each other and if person well I just bomb with my microphone sorry if one person tries to get support and fails they'll tell the others hey this game is fun and all but don't spend any money in it because they won't help you if you have a problem so you don't want

that I'd encourage you to put a button in your game that spawns a lightbox at least give them an email address where they can send in their problems and then after they've sent in those problems somebody has to answer them you need to it doesn't have to be a super in-depth response a lot of people will write in I love your game here are 25 suggestions to make it even more awesome you don't have to respond to every single one of them you can just go hey thank you so much I am so glad that you love the game takes just a minute if somebody has a bug try to reproduce it most especially if somebody has a problem with purchasing you're gonna want to try and address that and address it promptly as I said I know that in small teams it's so difficult you're trying to balance bug fixing new content all kinds of things but this really is important choose someone to answer support tickets put it in their job description set an internal expectation

maybe you'll answer within two three business days please less than a week but if you just realized really deep down that this is important you'll you'll find a way to make it important so the another problem that happens is sometimes games have sudden and explosive success I remember a few years back I was working with a team I'll call Apple three Studios their game had an explosive success and to say that their support system was overwhelmed would be like saying the Pacific Ocean was a little bit damp I mean they were just swamped for months obviously there's no way of knowing how much money they left on the table when they with their support issues but I would guess based on how profitable the game overall was that it was probably millions of dollars in retrospect I bet they wish that they had chosen a ticketing system ahead of time and that they won that could scale

from small to large from very rapid and easy way and I bet that they wish that they had had an engineer spend a week or two integrating the support system with the game so that the game would pass through basic player information what's your name what server are you on you know a little bit of information about the player and they would just make would have made their customer service so much more efficient and just so much more effective really from the beginning and they would have been so much more prepared for success so you also need to have a plan for VIPs if you're in an industry as the free-to-play gaming world is where the vast majority of your revenue comes from a relatively small number of people you need to make sure that those people get top-notch support every time now I have heard of some games where they purposely don't allow

the customer service reps to know anything about a player spending history and I really admire that I think that is speaks a lot of volumes about their desire to make sure everybody has a top-quality experience at the same time on pragmatist and if unless you're at this wonderful point where you are confident that you can give everybody top-notch service every time it's worth your while to figure out a way to winnow out the VIPs and give them a little something extra one thing Cariad has done is to identify a particular staffer his name is you just started looking around his name is Nikhil he's right there he's our go-to person for VIP support and their frustrations so if a VIP writes in to support the Nikhil takes it and responds to them directly the next time they have a problem they usually contact him directly because he's their guy and congregate and bear in mind our

support is excellent but the personal touch of having somebody that you know and you can just go to is really valuable another thing that I've seen done is I worked with one company where their VIP support approach was that they refused to use camp messages which I thought was just really for their VIP specifically which I thought was just so interesting and it took me a while to see the beauty of it but I mean at first I was like oh well I guess it's just so if two VIPs right in with the exact same problem they won't get the exact same answer which is nice I mean though you know if two VIP is were to compare their answers and see that they weren't the same they'd be like oh well that's classy but it's more than that and the what it is is that in having to write out an individual response for each email what you have to do is think really carefully and thoroughly about what that person specifically has

written to you you stop scanning for keywords and going like oh okay well they have this problem I'll send them this message next you have to pay attention to the whole thing that they've written and make sure that you've addressed at all and that means that you're thinking harder and more carefully about what they're actually saying to you and that's how you get better support okay so another thing that you need to think about with support and is holidays planning for holidays everybody wants to go on holiday of course you do we're people we'd like holidays the thing is that holidays are also a time when your players have taken time off from work and they want to spend time and money playing your game so make sure that you have a way to find out if for example your game goes down this

happened actually to a game that we work with over the Christmas week a couple years sometime recently they the game went down completely gray screen we had a big promotion planned we couldn't reach anybody nobody could play the game we couldn't reach them so we had to pull the promotion and it was quite a few days before we managed to get in touch with anybody there and of course then they got the game back up but by then the promotion window was over the players have been locked out for you know several days and it was financially not a good time for them so make sure that there is somebody around on holidays the way Kongregate does it that's our contact us form isn't it lovely the way congregate does it is that we are not 24 hours but we are seven days a week we closed on Thanksgiving Christmas New Year's Day Easter and July 4th we work half-days on Christmas Eve New

Year's Eve and Mother's Day every other day of the year someone is there to answer your questions and help you now I know that for many of you that schedule would be excessive but you should be without coverage for an entire week at a time and you should always have a way to be notified if the game goes offline completely occasionally you'll run into support issues that seem simply preposterous Nikhil I'm about to tell a story that you are very familiar with imagine that in your game the best gear is the Black Diamond armor and almost nobody gets an entire set of black diamond armor now imagine that somebody writes in to you and says that they had an entire set of Black Diamond armor and it suddenly vanished and you're thinking well no I didn't what wasn't born yesterday my friend but now imagine and this is based on a real story that the player in

question has spent ninety thousand dollars in your game and you go oh of course he had a full set of black diamond armor so the moral of the story is that you should investigate our instincts are worth listening to but they're not the whole story and some players are going to be outliers so make sure you check that something is or is not possible because if someone has spent that much money you don't want to send them an email that goes ha ha ha sure buddy you have big fun with that because that's gonna end real badly so I got real quiet all of a sudden so a lot of the things that I've been talking about they sound really easy to do all this sort of putting yourself out there in the middle of a crisis knowing who you are being willing to talk honestly with players about what they're

experiencing feeling willing to see your faults and apologize for them and that sounds really easy and it's not there are going to be times when you're doing this that you are gonna feel really defeated and you're gonna feel really exposed and it is gonna suck and that's the nature of what we do the people sometimes see the bricks underneath the facade but the more you fall the more you'll learn how to get through it and take care of yourself and get back up again there was a time last spring where I was in a situation where it appeared that we were facing a fraud problem I reacted to quickly learned something new about myself that day in part because someone near me was reacting strongly and I allowed that to affect me it didn't have all the facts and I made a decision that

in retrospect was clearly wrong and I was mortified and the worst thing about it the single thing that was hardest was not that I had failed but that I had failed publicly that every person I worked with had seen this mistake that I had made and so I just sort of hunkered down with my laptop and tried to figure out how to get through this and Emily I remember Emily from the first slide she reached out to me and she said you know what I make mistakes and that's part of being the CEO is that when you make a mistake your mistake is always public and it is always expensive and that's a reality of leadership is that when you're leading people you're exposed and it's not easy but it's worthwhile when you do run into a situation where you're feeling exposed the thing is to learn from it and to

learn from it in a way that is as public and as honest as the way you made the mistake because that will inspire the people around you to also learn and grow in a very public way and it will only increase their respect for you so John Kennedy when he was running for office gave a series of speeches in which he claimed that the Chinese character for crisis was a combination of the characters for opportunity and danger and according to Professor Google that small some sides say is completely wrong some say it's say it's only kind of wrong but the point is it's wrong but it says something to me that 50 years later this is still like a widely held sort of commonly accepted belief in our

culture because and I think that's because it touches something that we all intuitively know that when a when we were starting a crisis that means that the status quo is no longer stable that means that movement is happening and in that movement is an opportunity for positive change it's also an opportunity for negative change but let's not worry about that too much right now the point is there's it once once you've got the rock rolling then you're steering it but often the hardest thing is to get the rock rolling and so once you're in that crisis try to remember that there are going to be opportunities here because you're moving and it's not the same so the human need to connect with others is ancient and it's profound and yet we live in interesting times technology is

transforming the world around us we haven't gone to Mars yet but our world is being transformed and I believe that we here in this room are pioneers we are thinking about and working towards ways for people to connect with each other in a new world in a world that nobody has ever seen or experienced or thought about before we're trying to figure out how to bring humanity to our future and that goal is big and it is beautiful and it's greater than we are and in order for all that to happen you are gonna have to be the best wisest kindest most competent person you can be and the next month you're gonna have to be even better than that and I don't know about you but I can't think of anything else that I would rather do for a living that's all I have further questions

thank you