Manning the Oars or Raising the Sail?

[Music] all right welcome everyone I hope I hope you had a good show so far just a couple of standard reminders remember to fill out the evaluation that gets sent to you after this because I'm going for that high score and also turn down the volume on earphones so but I am sweet Calif you can pronounce that any way you want I come from Reykjavik Iceland born and raised and I've been working for CCP and independent Kami publisher for the last 13 years started in customs report and now I'm a lead community developer so the community business has been around for almost as long as gaming not quite it's of course came along with the internet and it's changed a lot in the in the last few years or so with the advent of of powerful community content

creators in the community and social media obviously community people used to often be back in the days like volunteers used to work from home then they got unported but were often stored behind those boxes of last year's t-shirts and weren't given much thought to but the job has grown and there's still I believe in the business a lot of possibilities for community people to grow professionally so community teams have become a bigger asset and it's very important we be at CC people leave that it's important to allow community people to grow and and take on bigger challenges and to do that you sometimes have to prioritize and look at how you do things rowing is fun and it builds a strong back but it's hard and sales just get you further plus you can do other things along the way like that gentleman with the book so a bit of background just so you understand like some of the things that I'm talking about and why they have worked for us I come from another world a world of 7,500 unique solar systems

that you can explore and conquer a world of boundless freedom self-reliance cooperation commerce conflict it's a very interesting world and it's inhabited by hunting thousands of space experts and this is a world where only the strong survive I am of course talking about EVE Online the infamous space sci-fi MMO that's been around for 13 years and it's been in constant development and just to sum up the three things that I think make Eve unique it's that it has this simple sharp designer there's no shirts it's just a single universe where like no matter where you are in the world you went through one world and the test like time zones and all kinds of nationalities and cultures and stuff like that so it's it's very interesting like that it has player-controlled manufacturing and industry which means that almost everything in the game that you need whether it's weapons modules or ships or ammo it's all made by players

from raw materials harvested by yourself or other players and then all these things are moved around and traded on a very robust market that follows the laws of supply and demand so there's a lot of cool things you can do and of course speaking of cool things you can do there is very much freedom in the game there's few rules no hand-holding and you are thrown into this merciless universe where you have to pant up with other people to survive and two big things if is not an easy game it's a game where something like this happens and where people actually can look at this picture and tell you what's happening in much detail I'm not one of those people but I can tell you some propped context stuff this is from the biggest battle we've ever had on the server it was fought by over 8,000 people over the course of 21 hours destroying something like 300,000 dollars in assets and it was long enough so people could like go to sleep and go to work and then come back and it was still going pretty cool stuff and

there's people like that organized the armies that go into these battles they set up the fleets with our right weapons and write compositions organize logistics reinforcements then you have the generals that planned like longer term campaigns politicians diplomats we're planning conquests and Wars and making peace with these guys than these guys so they can make war on the other guys and it's it's very very very interesting so we have some fairly smart and dedicated people in the community as a result of all this freedom of enterprise so the eve online community it is a relatively mature community it has a wide age span we have like young teenagers up to very old pensioners but the average age is around 31 which is higher than many games and around 40% have some sort of an IT background it's a fairly educated community and a lot of technological backgrounds in the community according to service your brawn so we have a lot of people that like to solve complicated problems and are very good at it so odds

are that the person fixing your computer at work is a neat player so be nice to them we have players from all nations almost colluding or colliding and it's a it's a very interesting environment cause like like I said with the time zones you have to like you have to have friends and every time so to cover your assets and you have to attack your enemy strategically and you get like some nationalities like they play together because they speak a common language and there's all sorts of dynamics that are very interesting when you don't share talk your community and divide them by what they have in common but community teams community teams are you know we know the story being on the community was really hard there's so much to do you have to keep track of so many things it's like you have the world weight on your shoulder I was like six five before I started this job but I mean there's there's a wide focus to take care of you have to know what everyone in the community is doing you have to know what

everybody in the company is doing and you have to make sure that the communication is flawless and effortless and productive between those groups and I mean we can call ourselves like bouncers Gartner's herders of cash reporters shrinks whatever but the the thing is that we have only limited time and we have to take care of how we use it and I believe in sharing the load on doing all the things the things that need to be done with the community and with the rest of the company as possible kind of harnessing the wind if you will so if we take a look at the EVE Online community team we have an in-house team of seven people that take care Phebe online the broad scope is you know communication localization community support that's involves all projects events and all kinds of things that go on so we call ourself community developers and we come from all over the place and I want to start by introducing you to Thomas Mason as you can tell he

staked he takes care of the German community and moved from Germany to work with us and as you can tell from his stern case he he's called the ice and Faust or which means the iron fist in German and that's because it takes care of our army of volunteers so he has a multiplier on himself up essentially we have volunteers that do a lot of cool things for us they call themselves the interstellar service department and it's a team of around 100 people and I'm going to talk a little bit about three top teams star is a team that helps people in game runs in game channels they moderate they make sure everybody's behaving and they health people one thing they do that's really cool is meet and greets we give them actual seeds with the names of players that have joined in the last few weeks or last couple of weeks and they go talk to them and we see that the retention rate for people that are contacted and given resources and help and someone to you

know go to if they if they need help is much higher it's like it's you know dozens of percent on average it's it's a huge increase in retention because he was a complicated game and people need some help and guidance then we have the book hunter team which is loved by our QA people because they help filter out early book report through a lot of testing they are trusted with some limited dev roles and have access to close test servers so they can do testing and early filtering and they do a lot of good good work person have many of them have been around for a long time and are very smart people and we have the forum moderator crew which is my favorite because I don't like moderating forums and I'd like to be away from that if I can and they they have some limited roles they can't ban people but they can do all other moderation and they can escalate difficult issues to us and we you know pack them up as we can but this relieves a awful lot of work and the way this is set up because we only want person managing all these people internally although they do talk

to other developers and stuff it's like one person responsible for the whole thing so we need some structure so the space army has a ranking system you answer as an ensign you become a lieutenant and you can work your way up the ranks and get increasing responsibility and access to all sorts of training and cool stuff we aim to make this team as self-reliant as possible but no more than that there has to be access to developers so like we deal primarily with the top people in the organization and they then filter down knowledge and instructions to the rest of them its Brandt is led by a Vice Admiral which is typically someone who's been with us for many years and is very trusted and very very smart and these the point of the system I mean it has to be self-reliant if it's supposed to work as a team that takes the burden off us so we don't have to mind it continuously the code of contact that they abide by as a modified version of the one that CCP staff have so they're held to a fairly high standard and they live up to

it amazingly they do a lot of stuff for us and we in turn you know we give them opportunities and an outlet for doing cool things that they like to do just to give you an idea of how much work they do for us it's $1,200 volunteered per month this is like a rough number from last year's averages 200 hours of for a motivation alone so you can imagine how much time that just relieves from like a team of salmon that's in-house they can then focus on different things and it relieves yourself like 90% of the daily moderation which is very good so we have we have more time for the professional growth I talked about more impactful projects that have to be done in-house all of this is important but it doesn't have to be done in-house so there's a lot of benefits of this I mean obviously this time saved but also the fact what I believe is that your in-house team that has to work with the community and a lot of positive things building things has

to spend less time you know in an environment where they focus like a lot of on the negative 2% to try to create problems on the foreign pantry rules you know editing passwords on the forum is not the the most entertaining thing you can do so it it gives us you know it puts it in a more positive vibe to work with people on something else and then you got to think like what why do people want to volunteer for EVE Online I mean why do they take time out the third day to do this these are people that are above average interested in EVE Online they're absolutely enthusiastic about it and love it and they are very good at it and they like to help other people the program attracts people that just selflessly help people in real life I mean these are people that would help an old lady across the street or or upload you know one of those mysteriously appearing torrents that none of us have ever downloaded all that stuff people that just do things because it can and they want to do something for other people and of course it's fun to be

close to the company that's making the thing that you love if you've been involved with you online for a long time it's it's fun to be close and see what's happening they sign an NDA they sometimes get advanced information and stuff like that so it's good and we do actually hire quite a lot of people from the pool of ist because we get to know them and see what they can do and they become trusted persons and I mean we don't want people to join because of that because we don't want them to focus on the job at hand but it happens quite a lot and actually for people on the community now our former ist which is amazing there's perks and prestige of course there's free account we play for free obviously they get tickets to official events store credit for every hour put in so if they their hours on track so they earn store credit and then they can redeem that for merchandise from the eve store or if they just hang on to it long enough and put in enough hours will actually just redeem their credits for a flight to Iceland for Fan

Fest or or and I stay in a hotel and everything so they can have a free trip to Iceland if they if they hang on to the credits for long enough and then of course the color text and banners identification which is cool it's not hard to find these people these are people that keep track of what what we say of you know social media all that stuff so we just put the word out that we need people and it's actually very very easy for us to find people which is a great luxury problem to have they're screening that they have to pass both by CCP staff and ISD captains and whites Admirals they must be in good standing of course not a broken the rules too much and they must know a lot about the game and they must have the right attitude which is incredibly important the ISD are especially good themselves when they do their screening of filtering out people that have you know maybe they hunkered too much for the power of moderation and all that stuff so that's important and

some of the current ones have been volunteers for over ten years and are like you know that we see them at fan fest every year and they're they're absolutely great people we love them a lot so here's just an example of how 2015 went we lacked in about 10% of the people that applied so it's a very hard system to get into and fewer people resigned than were accepted so we're dealing with low turn and a big pool of very very competent applicants that we're very happy to have so what are the pitfalls of allowing players to do something like this for you I mean obviously things can go wrong and we've had our problems in the past we had like for example we had a fuller moderation team set up back in the day it was like wasn't terrible it was great they did a lot of good stuff from the early days of EVE Online and it was discontinued in 2008 but back then we didn't have the same amount of experience in dealing with dealing with this we didn't have the proper structures we are given too much power we allowed them to ban people in forums etc that's all a lot of

mistrust and it was drama around it and you know more perceived problems than actual problems but like it ended up that we discontinued it moved moderation in-house and then it was the new system was taken up in 2011 and it's gone on since then so since the olden days it's been you know all earning experience and I mean if it didn't have these volunteers we'd either just need to add a bunch of staff to do all these things or we'd probably just do fewer cool projects than we are currently doing and we'd be focused more on like all kinds of menial tasks and management of them so the bottom line is that they make us better but we in turn I mean we give them opportunities to do something that they love and get more engaged with the game that they love to play then I want to tell you about Bank grouper who moved to Iceland from Australia to work with us and he manages the fansites program lots of companies have a fans fan side

program of some sort or at least list fan sites on their on their on their page but for us they're incredibly important and we had like all kinds of fan sites that we tried to develop tools the players like absolutely need all kinds of guides and things that people couldn't be without because for if they are just an usually important because the the scope of the universe the Deaf the complexity is such that we can never tend to everybody's needs it's just impossible we don't have the resources or even the imagination to fill all these gaps the players just find for themselves so there's a lot of players doing absolutely essential things for us and for the community and so we try to divide them into these categories and there's a certain standard set for each category I mean blocks have to be after it regularly tools have to be functional and up-to-date guides have to be you know taking game changes into account and all that stuff then we do a biannual audit and if you don't get in or if you

if your membership guest guest is continued we contact them and tell them why and how they can get in again try to keep an active active encouragement going there so finding these fan sites is fairly easy again these are people that keep tabs on what we say so social media all that stuff than the benefit is that once we've collected them into and to a pool of fans that we can send off fans heads fans that blasts with information to these people that are experts at getting to our players but to find them we maintain a formal application process there's a form that people fill out and of course we just look for cool sides and we wave that form in their face if we think they should join the program what are the added benefits for someone who just likes to make websites to be in a program like this I mean there's perks there's similar perks to what the ISD get there's free tickets to official events free accounts etc they don't get store credit for hours put in like the like the ISD because that's a lot harder harder to measure but in turn we are pretty

liberal with allowing fan sites to monetize with all kinds of ad programs monetization programs so we encourage that and we want people to make a little extra on it if they if they can of course there's easier access to devs I mean some of our some of our web developers in the community have sat down with with our own web experts and gotten some help on on some projects we do round tables and they can come to us and work with us on all kinds of projects so street cred matters and for access to the community if they're a trusted fansite we know they're good for it and we'll help them you know more than someone else maybe who has an idea so it's it's good good to be close I mean this is most of the time people don't do it for any of this they do it because they have a great idea and they're good at something and they want to do something for the community and they want to you know get their status that comes with it and all that stuff but the recognition from our sis is a nice bonus and I think it's very important to do it even though people don't come to us for that

this of course strengthens our relationship with these past developers these third-party developers in the community we know who they are we you know get a tune to look into and we built this relationship that has a lot of benefits and then of course they having an official list like this that's audited regularly and officially approved with clear guidelines it gives helpful players I see ourselves something to point to that's safe and quick and helps helps players along and very important again this whole program with all these benefits is just part-time work for one man I mean it's not even a maturity thing it's just like a few hours a week to run it basically at this point it takes it takes a lot of work to setup but it's not energy intends to run so I want to give you an example of one of my one of my favorite websites and this is like a good example

of how if the universe and Eve the software don't always see eye to eye see we created a map so people could like see the universe and get some details but like it just didn't really fulfill the needs that players figured out for themselves they needed certain things to plan very granularly all kinds of complex operations explorations Wars fleet movements so along came a German web developer a player who calls himself a Lhari in game and he made at offline maps it's a web based service that is absolutely fantastic and I want to play a little bit of where one of our better video makers called Johnny Pugh tells us what the difference between our map and Rockland Maps this is chaos but if you want to make yourself an easier time of navigating through a particular region and Eve online do not use this eve map tool now I do understand if you just mean use the eve client but you don't have to do that you can use the in-game Eve browser right

here and use a website called Eve maps Lynette a website that players have been using an EVE Online for years this website hasn't been an asset to me for years of play it has given me so much Intel so much insight that I would never been able to cover as a single pilot scouting around in a single ship so it's not all flattering you know he says some things about our math but I forgive him he's done so many good things but this is a really cool part of life a story here because we offer API support to players can build these tools from using using data from our database and player comes along and make something in a game that's all built around traveling around space and he builds a tool that absolutely everyone uses at some point or another and it becomes very valuable in turn he obviously has a lot of server costs so we helped him advertise when he's collecting money from the community for a server cost and that's always gone

really well and we point people in his direction all the time so we built a bigger fan base and and has many manufactures in the community and someone a video maker like Johnny pew comes along starts exploring the universe making regular video about it you know educating people and on this YouTube channel and you know entertains and educates thousands of people every week so that's that's to me an example of of racing the sale pretty firmly with assistance from the community and without you know all these fan sites all these tools are talked about which you know we just have fewer useful tools well as content or we just have to you know hire a bunch of people to make things but realistically we'd probably just be a little bit crippled in some areas because it's very hard to fill all those gaps so recognizing people even when they come not for that it's very important because the person that doesn't comfort the recognition may still leave for the lack of it after a certain amount of time people get tired they burnt that burnout and if they feel

they're not being listened to or appreciate it so we have to we have to contribute and do what we can for them then not everything fits into a mold or an application form and we work with community organizers on a lot of like asymmetrical one-time projects so they come to us with a lot of ideas and we maintain like an open door policy so anyone in the community can approach us with an idea and we just you know we figured up time to talk about a door Skype or through emails or whatever and we just like look at their idea give them feedback on it and help help out sometimes it's about like a real life player gathering there's a lot of those sometimes it's a new website it can be even a short film or documentary we've had people doing things like that in the past and they need access to assets or our internal tech people for some advice or something it can be an in-game charity event we have a lot of charity events and if even though it has its cutthroat reputation people set up large battles give up three ships and they collect donations for charity and we we help them by advertising and making sure

that everybody makes their way to them and my approach to this is that like thinking about it so that you can always do something to help everyone you can keep you can even if it's just some advice or feedback then you know take the time to look over it give some feedback some ideas are too big for for you know now and they need to be either like scope down a little bit or people just need you know a reality check on what they can actually do with the research they have and we can we can help because we built experience with that but sometimes it's also about you know you just you just look at an idea and someone is struggling for with something you need something done and and we we can connect them to someone else in the community maybe because we have a lot of connections so we we do that a lot of people connect to each other so they can work together and we manage a lot of relationships with these high level community organizers that do bigger things for the community so we work as sort of like account managers for for those people and the picture the picture

on the on the left there it's from Eve ster dam which is a which is an event that's held in Amsterdam by a player every year and he runs a crew of volunteers that helps him run like a 300 strong convention so 300 people come to this buy tickets it's all planned very much in advance they have player presentations about d-von line and all kinds of things that players do and again that's interesting we also send developers over to give developer presentations tell them about new things in the game we sent demo so for our latest games like some VR games Valkyrie and contract and laugh so we can give them a glimpse into the future so we kind of let help them boost the attendance with stuff like that and also we just hang out in in the bars of Amsterdam into the night talking about Eve Online and giving people access to our time the one on the on the on the right there's an event in Australia which is called Eve down hunter and that takes place every year as well I mean another high-level convention that's organized only by players and there we only sent one person and then we because it's very far

away and then we Skyped in to do a Q&A three of us and that's that's another very like very cheap and you know non-committal way to do something for a player Catherine which is really awesome because all you need to describe the content and you call in and let the National questions and just takes a bit of time I mean this was at some weird hour because it's in Australia it was like 10:00 p.m. or something on a Saturday night so one of us was calling in from home so we had two webcams going and we conspired to turn both the webcams upside down it's just a joke that no Australian gets tired of then there's tournaments and esports esports in EVE are notoriously difficult I would almost say impossible to run because you need our assistance to do it you need because an EVE online you can't really just set up an arena and go fight you anyone could come and blow you up so there's no way to host like a save tournament so we need to move people to like secluded systems that are cut off

from everything and we need to you know use some dev tools and stuff like that but we've have people run tournaments like that before and we have someone just on there helping one of them is Eve and T collides which is run by a player called Nash cadaver who comes up with Nottingham he's also running amazing events over there like real-life events and he ran a whole winter of tournaments really good stuff but he wanted to grow it and he wanted to top teams and Eamon line to join for his second season so he came to us with a really well-written proposal and wanted us to make him unique schemes to give to every every participant in the in the tournament and there was a bit of a a bit of a wild idea for us because we'd never created an asset for a player created event uniquely so we took a look at it and I managed to convince a couple of producers that it wasn't a bad idea and we went ahead with it and it's gotten some good results he got all the teams he wanted the top teams from her yearly

official Alliance tournament and he has seen a bump in viewership and a lot of interest and he he's gotten sponsors I mean he gets like sponsors like racer and Plantronics and stuff in it it's really really cool stuff so we're trying to push the envelope on that so I think it's a it's a good example of an event that like needed something from us to grow but it's like all the work is done by players you manage a team of 12 people that run this we just help out a little bit and in return we get like so much contact one of my favorite examples that I've been involved in is Eve meat and this is a website that is designed to to primarily three things it shows you upcoming real-life gatherings around the world it notifies you if you sign up for it of events happening near you and you can create your own events that other people can can sign up for we've been rolling the idea of a site like this around for a while and post like a web request internally that suffered at the hands of prioritization for a while we all know that old monster and then I was talking

to the guys that organized the event in Australia that was talking about and we were doing a Skype call about that event and we finished all the logistical planning and all that stuff and then we started talking and I was telling him about this idea that I wanted like to create another one and they were just like the cool idea I explained it to them in detail and then like a couple of months later they told me they were almost finished making it so they went ahead and made the site we didn't have to do anything and then we've been just relentless in pushing it to everyone and letting people know about it and on our live streams on social media and we've seen since this site came up it's become the primary hub for players to find real-life gatherings for E players it's we've seen a marked increase in the number of players gatherings the attendance and like they've been popping up in cities all over the world that have never had calories before so it's awesome and I mean player gatherings they're very important to us but like why why do we want to push people so

hard towards player gatherings I think they are very cool for any gamers but I think they're particularly important for us because like I said Eve is very you know it's a it's an intense Hoppe to people and people get up pretty deep into it so meeting people that love the same thing is you that much is fun it's it's just I mean our brains they haven't changed since forever even though like technology is always updating and our brains are just wired for face-to-face communications we like that and player gatherings do that so we've been pushing player gatherings there's like hundreds of them around the world most of them run exclusively by players we support them by advertising them so people come to them we sent them care packages with swag we Skype in sometimes and sometimes we even send people I mean we've been stubbornly pushing it for you know since forever we just like continuously push the idea of meets specific meets and and just tell people about it and

correcting people that have never taken the leap to go and see people in real life just to try it out and we find that the effects are very good very good we've been going to them this costs money of course we sent developers to these gatherings but we believe that it has great returns and has benefits for both the developers and the players that get to meet the developers and interact with them create a relationship so to speak and then we host our own events and like the official fan fest in Iceland every year and Eve Vegas which takes place in Las Vegas of course every year it is coming becoming almost as big as fan fest as a crazy crazy party so it's a it's a it's a very important thing and I think what we have felt when we come back from fan fest for example where we are kind of like bathed in the passion of youth players for a week is that like we just come out with energy we just come out with more energy we're really tired of course but it's just like we we want to do that thing that we

didn't have time for that we thought about a long time ago and it's like we push harder and do more it increases your engagement to feel other people's passion like that and we believe it has exactly the same effect on players and we know actually and that when they come back if they've never met people before that also play you know they go and have fun and drink some beers and talk and then you know when you get back to the game you just kind of see everything a little differently and it feels it feels more fun the pitfalls of backing player projects are you know there's there's just a few that you really like have to take care of I mean if you back a project super hard and it fails super hard you'll probably take the hit - I mean I've kind of you know run into this once or twice where you're like super enthusiastic about something and don't background check it completely and then it turns out to be a bit of a disaster and you have to like do some cleanup and apologizing or something but it's best to just do to be brutally honest upfront you know friendly but honest and just

give people that feedback early on do the background checks be critical of the plans get the plans laid out in enough detail etcetera and it's I mean it's important to be fair when you're deciding which thing to backhand which thing not to back because like you may be deciding to back this project not a similar one but the way I look at it this like this is something that's happening outside the game this is essentially business this is not you know this is it doesn't have to be 100% fair solo don't let fairness you the world isn't fair just do what you think is right spent your limited resources in the way that you think will have the best impact then with this be we have sort of this is something we sort of fell into as a startup company and we've kind of grown off with it and it works well for us it's having direct free-flowing communication between developers and players we even made a song about this almost which is our in-house band called the perma ban that is called killing it's just a means of communication because you know at the end of the day

even if we're shooting each other in the face it's all about communication and communication is the heart of everything we do so we'd rather have you know too much of it that too little of it the benefits of allowing developers the freedom to speak to players in a none gated fashion is there there's many I mean people people get good at it over time they feel more more like a sense of personal pride and ambition representing their own work than if someone is always doing it for them and they also just know they get to know the players and what they like about the product better so we encourage developers to communicate this players about work but also just about whatever they want to talk about if you know if you're on on reddit or Twitter or the forums and people are talking about something that's you know out of game and fun you know you can you can talk about what you're interested in it's a relationship building is cool all the official you

know the official communication go through the same pathways and processes in any other company of course we just had this extra flow of you know freestyle communication the problems with freestyle communication I mean the biggest thing I would tell you to avoid is not having kite lines it's good to have guidelines just the spirit of what you want to achieve and what we don't want to do and not having like yeah if you have bad guidelines that's bad obvious but guidelines to me are are super rule II really like you know documents with a lot of you know a lot of me thinking and detail doesn't have to be like that it just gets micro lawyers and it's it's not fun it scares people away then not saying something if someone is you know not handling it well if someone is like not handling communication you have to talk to them just you know helpful not be there for people if something isn't working out then clean up if when things have to be cleaned out clean it up and

stuff like that but not all communication is informal and casual we have we have something we call the Council of stellar management which is a democratically elected council of if players elected by other players in an election every year they're flown to Iceland for four days of summits with with the people who make a human line and we have a lot of online meetings with them like every week and and there's a there's a lot of crazy politics that goes into it I mean players are intensely interested in who gets onto this some of them are representing power blocks and I just voted in in an organized fashion by power block some are voted in because they represent a certain play style or or some special interest group or and then some people just voted in on integrity alone like they're great people and people believe will do good and then they come to us and they acted like an early they're like kind of the canary in the coal mine for us they the early warning sign if we're going the

wrong route like I said it's it's sometimes you know II based complicated and it's it's easy to steer features in a direction that that seems great but there's some things we hadn't thought about so we're having like an early sound port this is really good and these people sign an NDA and they're privy to early information this yeah I may be forcing the wind tonality a little hard but it's true it's true we're forcing a lot of feedback from a lot of people through a very narrow tunnel so we can signal out like a lot of noise and these people are very well connected these are expert players who have a lot of connections to the community they have like above-average social skills and Tantallon and so they bring us the feedback of the people that aren't necessarily : forums and everywhere else so they bring us like structured feedback and then the the picture is from the election of this 10 pcs em from last year we now have another election so there's not a lot of campaigning going on and we'll have a new CSM in just over

a month but this is this is a this is a good example I think this project is a good example of two things it's giving you're giving your player some agency in your in your development process so they feel like you know the part of it and also can give you great feedback and for us like career-wise I think it's a very interesting project that you know allows us to do quite high-level stuff I mean we have to plan like summits fly people in internationally deal with visa issues we need to book meetings every week with designers producers you know executives even and we have to do a lot of expectation management and use all our diplomacy skills to a berth drama all the time so you know it's a it's a it's a it's a really fun project to be involved in and I mean you know the ancient Greeks they they had this sort of figured out before us we didn't invent it we're just making it a little better and then sometimes it's time to get your hands dirty and grab the oars and do something create some content of

your own and one example of that is a show that I produce and host with some of my wonderful colleagues it's called oh seven the EVE Online show seven is like a salute that players do in game it's a no 107 so it's a it's a sign to the respect and the if players have for each other and this is a show that makes sense for us to do in-house I mean there's a lot of good meaty and the Eve community podcasts streams even you know like tape shows but we have access to fund so obviously that players don't have so we can do things on a higher production level and we we have access to all that like in-house development information that nobody else has so we we can use that to leverage views and we get like many times the views that any players team can get for that reason but then again even if it's like our show about our stuff it's it's also mostly about the players and we talk to players about things they do we highlight cool projects and events

that are happening indirect people in those direction so we put a big spotlight on what the players are doing but we also commissioned work directly from content creators so for example there's an e player called Hendrick teller dollar that makes us a no silent report every month we read us dive into the politics and Wars of EVE Online and and tells us what's going on there he obviously knows a lot more about it than we do and it's much better at telling that story so it's better for our players I mean it saves us time it gives him a bigger platform for the material that he's making anyway so it's it's a win-win situation one other example something we've been just just commissioned recently is a is prosper market analysis by a player called lockbox and he's an economist by trade I believe and he does like a really technical deep dive into the complicated market systems of EVE Online to help people better speculate and and leverage their their money in the game it's very very interesting stuff again something that would be very time-consuming and difficult for us to do properly and then

we also have a little bit of fun once in a while last April Fool's we had a show hit hit on that day so we called up the mountain from Game of Thrones he lives in Reykjavik too so it's not far away and he fits into our building and everything so we got him to you know fill my spot for the introduction of the show to see if people would notice the difference which they did I even put them in the same shirt but you know any players are smart so if we just round this up we talked about boosting and supporting player projects this is something that I think is very important for a community team to be able to spend time on this they need to have some free time and we have the actually devote time to looking at the players are doing reading up on that and and talking to them having this open toward policy poking meetings with them talking about stuff and I think it brings a lot of benefits and it often has benefits that you don't spot in advance they come to

you with an idea that you wouldn't have thought of and they come to you because they've talked to you before and they kind of you know we have this thing going on so it's it that's good I think companies should be too and it says they get volunteer programs are amazing they're just great there's a lot of things there's a lot of tasks that you have to do but aren't necessarily vital in house functions like I've said so I mean we proven that there is a process you can set up a system that it's self-reliant and efficient to do things that you know most companies have to do to some capacity so I would definitely recommend looking into that plus you'll find some great people in the process and get to know some amazing people encouraging face-to-face meetups is a no-brainer to me it's something that I enjoy being a part of immensely and I know our developers benefit greatly from it one thing you can do that it's very you know cheap and quick and easy is to organize meetup around an event like this lot of

TDC packs something like that where you have a lot of people out there anyway so why not book something in a bar by a few cracks appear just you know advertised on your social media coop talk to people see where you stand see if you like it that I'm sure your developers I really you guys will like it it's everybody will love it and for if there's any managers here it's also a great way to make it people work nights but yeah I definitely do that then you know giving your players some agency some stake in the development of the game is it's great a lot of people are running focus groups we have a democratically-elected focus group that doesn't maybe you know maybe that doesn't work for everybody maybe we'll have like the People's Council of crushed Canty one day or you know if people just want to do you know more casual like focus groups that they hand pay there's still you know things you can probably do like allowing allowing players to vote on certain priorities or final outcomes or stuff like that done on certain things and whatever limited capacity you're comfortable with but it's it's fun to

give your players to say and then maintaining tyreq and gated communication is something that I recommend it's not for everyone I know that and there's a lot of companies that are very big or you know which things have to be more formal and like completely understand that but I would I would definitely recommend checking that one good thing about it is is that we see who's good at communicating and then we can for example decide to send those people to those player calories I talked about so by spending some extra time on engaging with the community and building a relationship there you might end up in Australia when they are talking about these and like I said if you have a chance to go the formal route or the more playful uncatted route of communication I'd recommend the more playful one because we are in the entertainment business and we sometimes forget that but I want to end this with a video that is very dear to me it's a completely it wasn't made for this presentation or anything a player made this for me by chance it's a player called chimera he also plays a

game called arcade and he made this video for me in arcades and it brings a tear to my eye every time it's beautiful very inspiring [Music] I just I just have to squeeze that in there it's like so fitting thank you that's it for me if you have any questions fire away hi that was a great talk thank you I've actually I'm an Eve player and I've been a big fan of your volunteer groups one of my questions though is have you ever had any problems with the like sort of legal gray area of having volunteers who

are doing things that are almost like work that you would normally pay them for in your pain and like non monetarily does that does that cause problems for you and does it change your approach with them like are you are you unable to give them direction in what they're doing or do they have to just come up with whatever they they want to do themselves I know there was a lot of discussion about this like a few years ago but we one of the things we do we don't we don't mandate like any number of hours from people we just you know we just you know want people to be active you know all the time but we don't mandate for example you have to do this much necessarily to you know to be allowed to be in the program we just you know you put in the time you can just stay active and and you're all good and that's one of the things we do obviously we just like we can't give every task to players I mean there has to be some limit to that but and people you know people get into it there are tells they know what they're doing you know they there's a very clear line of what this isn't what everybody single-party that's right we've been good with that can you

describe any positive or negative experiences with user-created content positive and and negative experiences with the user-created content well there's I mean obviously there's there's always a lot of drama around you know some things some people cause you know they could they make content to cause drama we generally just stay out of that you know we just like we don't get involved and we try not to touch things that are likely to cause drama in any official way so like if if for example someone is like a bit of a troll and is making content we probably wouldn't Commission them for doing work for us we deal with people who who we trust to underst and the bigger picture and do the to the right thing so yeah there have been like some things but nothing nothing too terrible and we just take care not to you know when we're linking to stuff to make sure it's it's okay it's not something horrible and I guess having so

many of you with developers directly interfacing with the community which is something that they don't do primarily is there a single piece or of advice or training materials or how do you prepare those those developers talked about with the community yeah so the way we look at it is like it's it's better to have special rules for people that are bad at communicating you know if someone if someone is like continuously causing trouble is better to maybe remove them from that interaction rather than like you know crippling everybody but one of the things we have in our guidelines for example is that we we train people not to talk too much about other people's work I mean we as communication professors we talk about other people's works but you know someone who may be a you know a programmer he's not talking about something that an artist is doing and vice versa in any detail or promising anything that they can't deliver on so we want people to focus on their specialty and rather summon someone else if they need to and then we have some guidelines on just being very professional and friendly and all that

and even if you're doing this like if you're just chatting to people about you know your favorite football team or whatever it's just like always remember like you are an employee first and foremost anytime you're talking to a player it's just it's just something that's you know it's a common-sense thing that people need to need some training on sometimes but not most people can handle it pretty well and I think if you allow people to do it they get better at it hello thank you for the talk great I've got two questions and maybe the answer was a separate presentation yeah but first of all we all know that when we were talking about like games that been around for quite a while players there the players know the game much better than developers yeah and so how do you approach features that community proposes that's the question number one do you have any kind of guidelines to how you like pass stuff to developers or something like that and the second one even if you think that the feature the player proposes is good

enough but there are definitely way more stuff the community brings to you than you can develop and even if you agree that this is good how do you deal with that like whining and stuff that hey you're not doing this I told you to do this like years ago so community proposing features and how we deal with the I guess expectation management of what these features we don't decide to develop well one thing for example that the council of teller management can do is that they can features officially with access to our internal sites so they make like a feature card for our feature proposal and they propose like road map changes stuff like that so that's one formal way then we have you know the regular like forums for people propose ideas and and this active conversation that we have with players so that like developers that are specialized in an area they often have like a group of people that are very good in that area and they talk to them regularly it's like sort of like an unofficial II also so they get feedback and bounce ideas of people so we validate ideas like that and then

when it comes to deciding what not to do I mean that's classic expectation management we have to you know there's sometimes like a lot of noise about something that we can't realistically get into right now or or it's just maybe not a great at the end then we have to discuss it spend some time discussing it or you know at least if it's a good idea that we have to do but we can't do it now we have to tell them to you know we have to like lay down some information and one we can do it or something like that thank you thanks for the I was wondering when you essentially endorse certain player made material websites whatever how do you deal with potential friction that arises because let's say you endorse something that's made by goons one player so other factions in the game might behind that highly unfair and favoritest and we know Pleasant forgiving so how do you deal with that thing is like dealing with

dealing with material made by players that are you know connected to factions or stuff like that it it's we don't have to deal with a lot of fallout from it because I think I hope that's because we picked them well and like I said we you know when I'm aware that I'm for example I'm commissioning a video from a guy who's in pandemic Legion it's one of the one of the like constantly warring factions of EVE Online and they I mean I'm aware of that like their enemies might not like it but we tend to pick people who have a reputation of already cooling doing good things and they do they make material that appeals to a wide group of people so it's like we're not like we don't allow for like any direct propaganda for anyone so we want people to keep that separate you know so we don't toast propaganda unless we advertise for material like that and maybe we ask everyone to sent in the propaganda and we are all of its right we could do that that's but yeah we had we haven't had a lot of follow-up but you know we'll have to see that comes out completely done away with some

formal system to some of these groups for oh there's a lot of formal stuff like I'm not an expert and all of that but the user testing and all that stuff but we do AP tests we've been doing AP tests for a while and you know we do we do research also formally so it's not all just like you know informally chatting with the players now that it's kind of kind of like a bonus on top of everything else but yeah one more yes that players council group that he talked about are they aware of your roadmap the the player advocacy groups or no the Council of telemedicine because yes be like the the best guys we're talking about the iced tea or the csgo those that you fly curious to do

okay so the interstellar service department the volunteers they're not aware of the roadmap much except you know maybe some selected countries if they need to know some things but the democratically elected council they are aware of the roadmap and and they get most information very early they get that they get the most information out of anyone who doesn't work for CCP so they're very interested I do man awesome thank you so thanks for that that was awesome information that I'm gonna try to implement but I'm on a very small team like a team of four so we don't really have a dedicated community team that kind of manage these kinds of projects seriously what would your advice be for somebody who's trying to get some of these off the ground or like places to start or route I should take I'm just kind of curious yeah it's interesting like I for a small team what does it start with I would I would look at doing some volunteer stuff like get

some volunteers on port to help with some things that work for you I mean all the more if you have a small team then you you know you need to help and like like we have one guy managing these teams as a part-time job and it's like they do a lot of good stuff for us and it's also like when you get players involved like like we're talking about there they're the experts they often do things better than we do you know some of the things so I would do that and I would start hunting hunting around for these like what do you want to call them like super users content creators people who want to like do some extra stuff make tools all that stuff like find those guys and do something for them even if it's formal or informal just you're welcome oh we good all right cool I'll be realms if you want to talk