Overcoming Community Negativity: An Exercise in Sanity

[Music] started um my name is Nick vanu and I'm the uh Community lead at yuken games uh today I'm going to be talking to everyone here about overcoming Community negativity um and as the title suggests it can be a bit of an exercise Insanity um I've been asked to let everyone know to please silence your noise makers um that' be fantastic so very quickly to give some backg information yukin games is a toronto-based mobile game studio uh at yuken we currently have 13 titles available available for download which vary across different demographics our oldest games on the top row have been around since 2009 we use the term uars to refer to all of them at once these titles are built in HTML 5 they're text based games that Center heavily around Community interaction and befriending people in the game these are also effectively reskinned versions of the exact same game each with their own theme because of this the audience for

these games are very similar skewing more heavily to the male demographic between the ages of 18 to 49 these players also tend to be some of the more volatile that we deal with in this presentation I'm going to be using a lot of case studies from these games as the majority of the struggles that we've encountered in our day-to-day engagement come from these seven titles uars is also a unique case study because it is 100% controlled and operated by our community team in a live Ops fashion and has been for the past three years so once active development stopped in our games our position within the community team was to continue to engage with our players and bring them new content while running weekly events with no Dev knowledge on our small team this focused on easy to use tools that allowed us to keep players as happy as we could however the lack of development over the past few years have only made player frustrations even more evident we've had a lot of members of our community who have had their accounts for upwards of 8 years and have become discouraged with the state of the game and the lack of updates these are some of our most passionate players who

flock to the forums and to social media to express their concerns about these titles as I mentioned my talk today is going to be about tackling and overcoming Community negativity and as I'm sure everyone read in the course description um as Community managers we assume that we have this topic handled it's easy to think that because you've dealt with negativity and lack of enthusiasm in the past you're going to be able to address these concerns in reality it's never-changing landscape and something that we honestly don't do enough and should always be working on improving as a quick warning I'll be showing some player feedback and comments in this presentation that are a bit colorful to say the least um I hope that no one takes any offense to this but really I wanted everyone to get a better idea of what we deal with on a daily basis I know it's stuff that we all worry about on a day-to-day and keeping this presentation as honest as possible is the only way to get the most out of it that we can also as you can tell I'm using really bad stock images from the from like the internet uh because those are the best maintaining player enthusiasm is a tough job for Community teams as I'm

sure most of you know decisions are frequently made outside your control and the responsibility of interacting with and mitigating the expectations of your community falls on your shoulders it can often be difficult to conduct yourself in a way that's both representative of your gaming studio while also empathizing with the frustrations of your community but these aren't necessarily contradictory positions enthusiasm is also hard to maintain some days are extremely rewarding and you feel as though you've cracked the code on player engagement and other days you feel like you're beating your head against the wall repeatedly over and over and over again and that's why figuring out little tips and tricks on how to overcome these type of things can be very rewarding and helpful most importantly I believe that maintaining enthusiasm is draining on both your staff and The Gaming Community it can be easy to brush off some pointed attacks or player criticisms but often keeping your community happy and engaged in your product can be detrimental to the well-being of your team and the community the biggest problem we face is that giving players what they want isn't necessarily a top priority for your product team it can often come at the cost of long nights spent dealing with

player concerns or dreading going into the forums day after day at the worst these expectations can cause anxiety or depression and the problem with that is that maintaining player enthusiasm is our responsibility because this is our responsibility you have to work with your community on improving player sentiment it can lead to increased sales improved team morale and a better Community to interact with it can just be tough some days to dive in head first understanding the negativity that you may face so to give a bit of context in this presentation as I mentioned uh I took somewhere in the ballpark of maybe over 100 closer to 200 screenshots of extremely negative comments that we've received in my five years at yuken um but in an effort to keep the presentation moving along very smoothly here are just a few of them so here we have a user calling us dumb and lazy saying that we're creating an unfriendly atmosphere and saying that we don't deserve to be in the gaming industry this user has also chosen to use one of my most disliked nicknames in our company hist history

pukin This Charming player has also used the term pukin uh and told us to stop running tournaments that cause lag so for some added context about pukin it became so popular that we actually added it to our language filter Blacklist and this one's super fun as well a user saying that the new feature we implemented was a joke calling us a merry band of morons and telling us to take our heads out of each other asses and wake up he then goes on to say that his 5-year-old could have designed a better system and that we're going to lose players due to this feature for some clarification this comment came following a request to update the feature the player is complaining about asking us to make it more interactive which we did and was met with extreme negativity this player called us dishonest which in itself isn't too bad but he just piles it on afterwards saying that we're a joke that our community laughs in our face and that they fail to believe in us another players saying that we don't

care about our community and that we only care when our players call us names in an effort to exemplify this he then calls us wankers and clowns and here's another fun nickname F yuken which a player renamed themselves to and then said that they were the CEO he then encouraged the community to go to the App Store providing them with a handy link where like I said it's HTML 5 games and then called for a boycott of the game and also a call to Arms to write negative reviews in with a Better Business Bureau which I stayed up writing responses to and this is a good case study too lots of fun this one um here's a case where we tried to do something fun for our users it was the holidays and we wanted to give back to our players by giving them a bunch of free items running cool events um and just giving them stuff just for logging in most of them seemed to revolt saying that the gifts weren't generous enough this player remarked that our two admins were too busy engaging in Intercourse to respond to their concerns and another player mad about the free holiday gift saying that

instead of plowing them in the butt we should have given them something better like I said free gifts just for signing on they didn't like it in our attempts to help players out and create a more engaging product we were met with even more frustration we ran a survey to better understand what players wanted from the direction of the game the intent was to give a voice to all players and to genuinely gauge player sentiment and frustrations the survey received some eloquent and thoughtful abuse which I've highlighted here here's a player saying that our results were dog and insult saying that we're unable to successfully run a game he goes on to tell us that we're inept and unable to do our jobs in the rest of the message he even provided me a copy and paste template for me to send to my CEO about what a bad job I was doing and here's one of the many players many players that agreed with the previous post saying that the survey was a massive waste of time and inferring that we were bribing them into answering it and that it rre of desperation for a dying game so that's funny what can you do

when you you're faced by this this toxicity day in and day out every single day it's just it's awful and you can managing these varying degrees of negativity across a dozen active titles means that you have to learn to and adapt to the different communities that surface in your games treating every case as though they were the same can be catastrophic and detrimental to managing your community and keep in mind that there are no catch-alls when it comes to handling these concerns regardless of the level of negativity prior experience there are underlying principles that every Community manager can do that help Inspire build and maintain player loyalty so here are some tried andrue approaches that we've used at yukin to help mitigate player concerns and to keep players engaged Champion those in your community who are passionate about your gamer product constantly try new things given the tools that you have admit your failures and faults both for the company and personally as a community manager and and finally be honest and

relatable and these are going to be the pillars that I'm going to be discussing in my talk today so let's start with the first point making Champions out of those who are passionate creates players who will fight by your side and who will dilute negativity wherever they see it be it in the forums on social media and even through email forces of war is our real world war themed you Wars title it at its peak it had nearly 400,000 monthly active users one of those players was named Barry Chen although Barry had only ever spent a few dollars in the game and had long since stopped spending he was he was very very close to many influential and high-spending players our community managers arranged a tournament that Barry would run completely by himself we only needed to set up the modifiers and schedule the tournament something our community managers could do without bugging a developer Barry would organize the players calculate the scores for us and encourage players to sign up we on the community team would only need to cross reference those numbers which only took a few minutes and Supply some free items and minimal free currency for the

winning players it was so successful that players still talk about it to this day so here are a few comments that better illustrate this these are happy comments thanks Barry even though I'm not participating it's a lot of work it shows dedication thanks to yukin for chipping in some prizes everyone knows Barry is a boss he's selfless and organized cheers Barry Barry's the god of forces of War he's bringing War back to this Great War Game wars a theme Grandmaster Chen when he walks in the room everyone bows seriously the initiative and selfless Spirit really creates A New Perspective for so many Barry thank you yukin for working with and greenlighting this player run tournament hope you can upgrade your servers to deal with the next one and that's fine I'll take a little bit of you know a little bit of harassing if it is followed by such a positive comment so what did all this praise get us the tournament was a resounding success we had a 200% increase in Revenue over the period of the tournament which was more significant that some of our more successful staff designed tournaments at the time

we created a limited item that players could purchase called the Chen named after Barry it had great stats and was sought after by the community who wanted an advantage over other players we also gave Barry one of his own items for free which kicked off player personalized items within the game we now hold Hall of Fame contests and regularly create and name items after our passionate players to give back to them and to also generate uh excitement and Buzz around participating in events creating these items is both low friction and low cost and it encourages players who are passionate to engage more often in the community and also to generate positive sentiment which can't hurt finally this event was the initiative needed to start player run and organize tournaments which we still support to this day nearly 5 years later in conjunction with these player run tournaments is the idea of trying something new and is a key component in all of our games we always take feedback into consideration for development but actually acting on it shows players that you're willing to listen to them and act on their ideas trying out a new modifier in a tournament or running an event

outside of scheduled rotations can show players that you're willing to work with them instead of against them by listening to the feedback and suggestions of your community you show them that their opinions are valued it's not just about listening though you have to act on it and don't make false promises telling them that you're going to do something that you're unsure of but promise them that you can look into it and make sure that you report back sometimes getting these changes up and running quickly can be difficult but keeping communication channels open with players helps considerably through Community suggestions we've run numerous tournaments and events in our games outside of regulated times and have seen a three or four times increase in sales and a lot of positive sentiment for such a small change as a case study let's take the centaurin event that we held in one of our games age of Legends our fantasy themed war game in addition to battling competing in Clans and completing missions crafting has always been an important mechanic within our games players liked upgrading their items to make them even more powerful but were limited by the number of items that they could carry so this presented a unique opportunity to give players exactly what they wanted

stronger items that they could use in battle along with a more interactive event that had been requested for months admittedly the premise was a bit complicated but ultimately allowed players to focus on focus on acquiring items that they could craft into a stronger item this image was shared on our Facebook and Twitter pages not only to give players a better visual opportunity to understand what needed to be done but also to grow those pages out and again we were met with resistance from the community although they had been asking for something like this numerous times there was a fear that they would miss out on on obtaining these limited items players with low-level accounts were frustrated that they may not get the high level items without having to pay for it and as soon as the event started many called for boycotts and others called us useless and insulted our developers before even trying up the event but following these complaints we still had plenty of positive comments in the forums as well people giving us credit for trying something new one of our players congratulated us for doing something different saying that they

would they' still get great items Just for participating and that the events just uh and that some events are just intended to be difficult and thankfully this player said that with the release of the event we managed to make the game interesting again finally a post by a player who goes out of their way to help the community better understand the benefits of participating in the event even if they aren't entirely happy with it he addressed the concerns of the low-level players and even gave them some stretch goals to shoot for and the Ben to benefit themselves from the tournament this post alone encouraged the vast majority of the community to actually try out the tournament and increase the amount of positive sentiment for trying something new explaining the worth of something like this is very difficult and on the surface knowing that players simply participated isn't quite enough to justify the amount of work that went into it in a worst case scenario we we would have created a tournament that had flooded our economy with really strong weapons and it could have caused a collapse in our game's balance which brings up a more measur able question

what did our metrics look like so we had a few thousand players participate in the weekend event 80% reached the first tier so right away if you just played along and you hit the first tier you'd get some free premium currency 65 65% of participants received free items and those were worth much more than the free premium currency that we gave them and only 1% actually obtained and managed to assemble the ultimate item which isn't necessarily A Bad Thing it promotes The Limited nature of the item and The Prestige of actually being able to to obtain one and our metric showed the company that investing in new ideas like this is actually a good thing month over month our Revenue in the game grew by 47% and even had a tail that extended into April which was usually one of our slower months in the year next is admitting when you're wrong or admitting when something isn't working correctly and it's imperative in combating negativity it's also a trait that all Community managers need to embrace there's a need to protect your integrity or stand strong against accusations but sing players when you know something sucks can help a lot in

our game crime in we have items called under bosses they can be purchased using premium or soft currency and give stat boost to player accounts they have great art and allow players to collect a council of criminals to help attack others following a lengthy investigation we had found that one of our premium under bosses so ones that you actually had to spend real money to obtain uh needed to be rebalanced and the item was initially designed without a long-term plan in mine we had we had to make a really difficult decision we had to reduce the benefit that the item was giving even though players had spent real money on it her name was Merill Nome and with the right items equipped Merill could provide players with nearly unlimited recharges to their health and stats so it effectively let players play for free for as long as they wanted and for a free-to-play title like crime Inc this was very very dangerous and obviously this blew up in the forums with players calling us greedy bastards saying that we're

bending the laws committing fraud and saying that the decision to make the change was highway robbery players were urging others to contact third party services for full payment refunds resetting their accounts and many were contacting us with some of the more belligerent and abusive behavior that we've encountered in the company and this comment isn't even the tip of the iceberg so how do you deal about something deal with something like this without popping a vein in your head in our experience admitting exactly what happened and why it had to happen means that you have to admit that the initial design was Ill informed and that the fault lies in the hands of the company and relieves the players of blame although players are drastically affected in rebalancing cases like this finding loopholes is understandable in order to keep the game fair and balanced for all players it's important for the community to not only understand why the decision was made but then to give them a platform to voice their concerns we spent an exhausting afternoon in the forums responding directly to player concerns and feedback no question was off the table we spent a considerable amount of time doing doing our best to quell the concerns of our community and

honestly it helped we had numerous players praising us for taking the time to talk to them and for trying to find a compromise for their concerns sure there were still plenty of upset users but knowing that we took the time to address the concerns took a lot of the pressure off in summary we found that players are substantially less likely to directly attack you if you put up your hands and you say my bad and that goes for bugs too tell players what's going on are you working on a fix what's the status of the fix it shows players that you're trying to manage their expectations the best that you can and my final point it's important to not come at players from on high representing your company is critical but also being able to talk to your players on their level is necessary in improving communication saying that you understand your player's frustration isn't always helpful it can come across as dismissive if you don't genuinely try to connect it with your players concerns show them that you know why they're frustrated reiterate their concerns and speak to their issues in a way that shows them that you're more than just a talking

head anticipate how players will react to your comments if you can anticipate their response it makes it significantly easier to mitigate your expectations if you write a response and think this will probably make things worse chances are it will show off hands real quick who has written up a response and hit send when they knew that it was going to make the situation worse me too it don't do it you're you're going to keep doing it I'm going to keep doing it but it never makes things easier if you can recognize it before you hit end you have time and bite your tongue seriously you may feel inclined to respond to the contrary and to prove the player wrong but never allow yourself to respond while in this head space in some cases honesty means telling a player that they're incorrect but it never means that you should do so in a way that devalues their contribution to the community as a side note did you know that there's like a million photos of women biting laptops on Google I hate it so

much so being honest and relatable gains you a lot of credit in the community and players are always thrilled that you took the time to talk to them on their level in one of the threads I mentioned earlier where we conducted the community survey we received a considerable number of complaints from players who felt as though regardless of the intention of the survey it was too late for us to redeem ourselves our response was as follows and I'm paraphrasing as you can see a very long admin post it's difficult to help a community that's so negative the purpose of the survey was to give a voice to players who feel uncomfortable posting in the forums because of the negativity and being mean doesn't open dialogue for proactive Solutions even following that initial post players continued to harass us saying that we didn't care about our community and that the requests for new features had gone unnoticed for quite some time aha this provided an opportunity for us to be more transparent to our user base we went on to to describe a bit more about the way new features are worked on and how they

get through a suggestion Pipeline and eventually deployed by our devs it also gave us a chance to explain to players that the voice of so few in the Forum doesn't always represent the best interest of the entire Community I think that was noted in the first talk this morning for the community Summit which it's roughly 1% one in 1,000 that actually respond in the forums so it's such a small small number of players but they can also be some of the worst players and after a bit of explanation players received the response very positively this player is Thanking us for taking the time to address their concerns and admitted that they had lost faith in our ability to provide customer service simply because we weren't being as honest as we should have been this player's feedback was actually very wellp put saying that despite their comments they were only interested in engaging in a dialogue and didn't realize that they we would have taken it as seriously as we did another player saying that our intent interactions in the forums turned them from the grumpy player to the most

content and a player telling us that we just provided them with the best in-game customer service and feedback that they've ever received this player is noting that baby steps helped the situation and actually provided useful information encouraging us to be as honest as possible and probably the most relevant comment and the one we we received the most often Thanking us for taking the time to listen and to get abused and this screenshot goes a long way in and illustrating just how frustrating it can be to be a community manager players assault you and with abuse and harassment and expect you to wait around for praise once you've managed to push through to a breakthrough it's exhausting and draining and yet we encounter it every single day so what does this adoration mean in this first graph the bump that you see here in August is a 67% increase in Revenue week over week following our interactions we had with our villains players in the forums in regards to the community survey the long draining afternoon of abuse actually provided

worthwhile results the second graph I have here is following the meril Nome incident in crime Inc getting into the forums and spending an afternoon quelling player concerns resulted in a 54% increase in week-over-week Revenue it seems hard to believe and trust me it was but we weren't running any new sales or interesting events or anything like that during these spikes the conclusion to tie of this is that spending the time to actually connect to your players means that you might be making your company more money if there was ever a reason to bring to your company how important having a community team is this is it so let's recap what can you do to maintain player enthusiasm and help mitigate frustrations Champion those who are passionate so have players on your side to fight for you and to rally the troops try something new once in a while get players out of their routine and keep them engag with your product and your company's Direction admit your failures and faults do your best to explain expl to your players why things happen the way that

they did and finally be honest and relatable be a spokesperson for your community and give them a reason to root for you so what does the future bring well first and foremost the company is moving towards casual titles like kings of pool Bingo pop and coming soon Jeopardy World Tour these present their own challenges with different demographics But ultimately the themes I've talked about today remain the same and will help carry our community team into these releases and it's important to always remember your vocal Community is only a small representation of the people who enjoy and play your games don't let it get you down and just remember that it's something that we're all learning with how to cope in the interest of time I'll just take some questions at the wrapup area uh thanks for having me and please remember to fill out your survey thank you