Some misc links

 Posted by (Visited 6009 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 072008
 
  • Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
  • EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
  • Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?

(Tuesday) Mailbag: forum posters, churn, betas

 Posted by (Visited 16662 times)  Game talk, Mailbag  Tagged with:
May 272008
 

Mr Koster, I am wondering if you can help me with a bit of online Mythbusting? I have an interest in statistics with relation to gamers and beta testers. This quote: “Something like 90% of the people playing an MMO never post in the forums.” was recently made here and attributed to you and Rich Vogel here. (please read the thread to see why I am interested) So, I was wondering if you could confirm this? How did you collect this data? And if so, what other data can you share? Do you know of any other sources of this sort of data? And, yes. I would be very happy to see this email posted and commented on in your blog. Thank you for your time and effort.

Regards, Guy Russon

Well, as far as how that stat comes about (and it does vary game to game — don’t take 10% as gospel, becaus eyou are right it’s a “whisper stat” at this point), you simply measure your subscribers, measure your active forum posters, and derive a ratio. 🙂 In the case of forums where they require a game registration in order to register for the forum, this is pretty easy.

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Community relations, management, design, and governance

 Posted by (Visited 15892 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 292006
 

These four words mean different things, and frequently call for different talents and skillsets used by different people. And yet, they seem to get used interchangeably, and lumped into one person’s job. We should stop that.

“Management” means control. Yes, there’s degrees and degrees of control, there’s soft touches, and so on. But management, fundamentally, is about directing a group of people towards a stated goal. In the case of online services of all sorts, it means “keep them as customers.”

“Relations” means conversation. It’s about the relationship. Yes, there are “relationships” when you manage someone, and the enlightened manager knows her people. But the stated goal of a relationship is the other person — it’s about getting to know them for their own sake. It’s not about getting them to do what you want.

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World Con

 Posted by (Visited 11183 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Sep 021999
 

I’ll be a guest at the first official VR Worldcon (yes, as in the World SF convention–the non-VR part is in Australia this year) being held this weekend, along with my friends Dr Cat and Jeff Dee, the Fat Man, and Harvey “Witchboy” Smith. Harvey and I worked together extremely briefly at Origin for a while… We’ll be at the portion that is hosted by Furcadia. A Q&A session has yet to be scheduled, but I am signed up to participate in a panel called Building A Better World: Managing Online Gaming Communities Effectively that will be on Friday, 8PM-PST 4AM-GMT 11PM-EST.

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