 | Online Community Relations |
| Comments from Kerowyn | Nov 14 2002 1:59PM |
| After all the Team Comments that I've scheduled for other team members, it's finally time for me to write one myself. Since I stay tucked behind the scenes most of the time, I thought I’d take a moment to explain who I am, and tell you a little bit about what I do. Who are you, Kerowyn, and what in the world do you do? Great question! I am the Online Content Editor for UO.com, which basically means that I work with the web team to update and add content to the UO.com website. Most of the web content that I work with involves the Playguide. You may have noticed that some of the sections have changed, and a lot of the areas have been (and continue to be!) fleshed out and re-worked -- and if you haven't had a chance to see the changes yet, what are you doing reading this? Head over to http://guide.uo.com and take a peek. ;) It's an ongoing process, and with all the changes that are added to UO on a regular basis, it'll probably never be 100 percent complete at any one time, but we're certainly going to try to get as close to that as possible. If you should happen to find any errors in the Playguide, feel free to submit them via our Game Wizard or by emailing me at kerowyn@uo.com. We’re always appreciative of the extra sets of eyes out there in our community that help us keep UO.com as up-to-date as possible. Is that all you do? Update UO.com and the Playguide? Well, no, not exactly. I do have a few other responsibilities that keep me busy on a daily basis. In fact, you might recognize a few of them:
Kerowyn Online Content Editor Origin Systems | |
| Cynthe on Wearing Three Hats | Oct 18 2002 8:13AM |
| In massively multiplayer games, “OCR,” or “Online Community Relations,” sometimes seems to experience an identity crisis. What exactly is the job of an OCR group? My initial thoughts when I was asked to present this kind of info a few times here at the company was that it wasn’t exactly sensationalistic front-page reading, but as I tried to put together some notes about the functions of my group, it occurred to me that there really is a misconception about the role of OCR in many circles. It’s said that our job is to “talk to the players.” Granted, that’s a really big part of our job, but putting it that way doesn’t really encapsulate what the point of “talking to the players” is actually supposed to be. I’d say that, for the most part, community ends up wearing three main hats: we’re part Marketing, part Development, and part Support. The basic idea behind marketing, in a nutshell, is to get people to think about your product as much as possible. For a single-player game, this could be completely served by things like TV commercials, magazine ads, online ads, etc. But an online game isn’t just a single product – it’s a service. We want people to buy the box, sure, but that’s only the beginning of our relationship with that player. We want them to visit our website and boards, to stay informed, to log in to the game frequently, to attend fan events, start their own fansites, and just generally get involved in the world and community that is Ultima Online. In order to provide something that can engender this kind of interest and loyalty, you need a more one-on-one approach wherever possible – if not always directly from us, then from other players in the community. So that’s where OCR comes in. We try to get to know the players, and to help them get to know each other, through various things like the official boards, fansite boards, email lists, IRC chats, etc. Through continuing to provide content that’s interesting, we hope to create incentives for people to keep coming back – both to us, and to the community that they’ve created. But we’re not just about building community – we’re also about looking out for the best interests of the game, which makes us part Development too. To this end, we try to keep the dev team informed as to what the players are saying, and which issues we feel will elicit the most passionate reactions from the players. Most of the time, our job is to simply make sure that the development team makes decisions with full awareness of the current preferences and needs of the playerbase, but every once in a while, there’s an issue that we feel strongly enough about to try and influence development more directly. Of course, we also help to report new issues that we learn about through talking with players (although our QA group and the uobugs@uo.com mailbox is usually much more effective in that area). And then there’s the third major role of the OCR team, which is Support. We don’t necessarily go into the game and address player problems directly, but if my group does our job well, then we can eliminate many of the support calls before they need to be made! This involves keeping the Playguide up-to-date, adding new information about new systems once they’re in the game, posting FYI notices about current issues and publish updates, and updating the patch message with some of the more prevalent known issues. This is probably the most visible role we have, and it’s also probably the most difficult one to keep up with. Our Playguide is well over 300 pages, and we’re always trying to keep up with the ever-growing tide of design documents as we work to announce all the new changes that are going into UO. We also have a limited amount of resources dedicated to major web updates (and we’re in the process of a full redesign for UO.com), so we have to be fairly frugal about how many new Playguide projects we attempt to embark on at once. And of course, I’ve been banging the drum for months now to get a bigger and better HTML-enabled patch message that will enable my group to get info more noticeably to players as they log in, ideally reaching all those players who don’t visit the website regularly… but as with everything else in the game, our programmers’ schedules aren’t exactly full of free time. I’m making progress towards that front, though! So the end result of what we do? I’d say that if you boiled everything down to a few points, our biggest goals are to keep the game and the team visible in the online community, get people involved in what the community offers, make sure the players feel that they’re heard, and get them the info they need to feel informed. In a game that caters to as many different interests as UO, it’s not easy to try and be all that for all people! But we do have a lot of experience, and there’s never a dull day… Till next time, Amy “Cynthe” Sage Community Manager ORIGIN Systems | |
| A Typical Sannio Day | Sep 25 2002 11:37AM |
| Take us through a typical Sannio day. What's the first thing you do when you get to work? What's the last thing you do before you leave? First thing I do is visit www.reallifecomics.com, www.pvponline.com, www.smallstoriesonline.com, and www.bobandgeorge.com. There are a few other online comic sites I go to at the start of some days, but I make sure to visit the four I mentioned everyday—these are my favorite ones. (I only hope that they can forgive me for whatever traffic I just burdened them with by mentioning them. :] ) While the comics are loading, I’m already reading work-related e-mails (internal messages, e-mails from Ultima Online players, UO-based e-mail lists, etc.), and soon I’ve finished loading up another few dozen pages (broken up into several smaller sets of about 8 – 12 pages per set—thanks NetCaptor!). These new pages are all related to UO and online gaming in general, and they include UO fansites as well as our official message boards. This start-up phase of my morning routine also includes replying to any e-mails & PMs that need immediate attention. I’m not always able to get back to people in a timely manner, and every once in a while I miss replying back to some correspondence, but I try to answer as many as I can as soon as I am able. All this starting up & catching up can take quite a while, but afterwards things get kind of loose and are less predictable as a daily schedule. I’m kind of a multi-tasking, non-linear thinker, and I think that comes out in my daily activities. Although I don’t do all the following every day, here’s a bunch of events that could happen throughout my day (or week), in no particular order:
So that’s basically my day. Well, most of the time. :] Sannio Online Content Coordinator Origin Systems | |
| A Week in the Life of Cynthe | Jun 13 2002 3:58PM |
| As I read the boards, I notice that it's not always clear what the differences in peoples' job descriptions are here at OSI, so I figured a good topic for a Comments from the Team would be something that gave people a better idea of what I actually do during a standard week. So without further ado - A week in the life of Cynthe Drafted notes on ideas for a redesign of the UO.com website It's been quite a while since UO.com really had its last major redesign, and it's definitely needed! Our site has thousands of pages, not including the extensive MyUO system and other applications, such as boards, calendar, Game Wizard, etc., so a full redesign could likely be a 6 month task (at the minimum!) when combined with all our other daily tasks. We've already completed some shifting around of the actual navigation, and we're looking now at moving into new board software, which we hope to have complete fairly soon (I don't have an exact date yet, so "soon" is all I can give for now). Keeping tabs on the redesign of the site is probably my top priority. Consulted with Tajima/Marketing/Vex/Evocare/Greywolfe/Calandryll and several other folks on Vet Rewards My main task concerning Vet Rewards at this point is to make sure that we have answers for all reward-related questions that will come up from players once they're announced. Sannio is actually writing up the communication regarding the Rewards choices available, but since we're in the realm of five year accounts now, we can't announce anything until everything is set for both 4th and 5th year rewards (if we announced 4th year without having information on 5th year rewards, the silence on 5th year rewards would be deafening). But we are very much looking forward to getting that information out once it's settled upon internally. Worked on Visitor's Center text and shots Kerowyn has done some writing and screenshot-taking lately for a renovation of the Visitor's Center at UO.com, and I've been spending some time lately reviewing the changes and laying out the organization for those sections and screenshots. It'll be great to have a fully updated Visitor's Center that no longer focuses on UO: Renaissance. :) Meetings, Meetings, Meetings I have weekly one-on-ones with my manager, as well as with each of my team members (mostly on Tuesdays), as well as the weekly UO Live team meeting, the weekly OCR and Web team meeting, a weekly OSI Leads meeting, and countless impromptu meetings and discussions on everything from housing change reactions to board moderation concerns. Entertainment Committee To maintain sanity, it's important to have fun, right? I'm on the Entertainment Committee here at work, which meets once a month or so to plan out company meetings, Christmas parties, company picnics, etc. This year I've been tasked with face painting for kids at the company picnic, as well as somehow finding a copy of the "Limbo Song." Comments from the Team Kerowyn reminded me last week that it was my turn for a Comments from the Team blurb, and I'm just getting around to it... well... now! Document Feedback At any point in time, there are usually several design docs on various topics that I've been asked to read and give feedback on, as well as contribute to post-mortems on publish processes, etc. I usually think it's pretty important to try and make sure that there's at least one girl's viewpoint heard on a team of mostly guys. :) Update Player Lunch and Community Training Guidelines We have a couple documents here that are used as guidelines regarding employee behavior on the boards and at Player Events. From time to time, I go through these documents to make sure they're up to date and cover all the bases. Work on getting Kerowyn access to update the Codex in-game There's an interface that's in the works to aid in translation that, according to the dev team, can also be used to give Kerowyn access to update the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom (the in-game help menus). Currently it's still in testing, and there will most likely need to be some more work done on it before she can begin to use it, but I'm working to get this in place. Since she updates the Playguide and communicates closely with those who update the Game Wizard, it makes sense that she should be the one updating the in-game help menus as well. Check up on tech training for Greywolfe Grey is interested in learning more in the way of technical support in order to be able to answer more of the difficult tech-related questions on the boards, and I'm all for expanding skill sets! So I've been checking up with our tech support dept to see if I can arrange for folks from my team to go through their training courses as well. Boards I do try and read the boards, but when threads get to be more than 10 pages or so, even one thread can take an hour to get through - especially if there are any warnings or locks that need to occur. Most of my casual board reading time actually comes at night, because my daily schedules don't leave much time for it. I do get frequent heads-up from Greywolfe and Sannio, though, when things need attention. Newsletter text I contribute articles to the monthly UO Newsletter, along with Kerowyn and our Marketing group. This month, Designer Ignatz had a hand in it as well. Email, Email, Email Lots of email - on average, I receive anywhere from 150-200 mails a day. Yikes! Reviewing posts and interviews Much of what my team does I don't necessarily see, but I do usually read through interviews, scenario fiction and posts from dev members before they go public. Boardhelp requests Not too long ago, I worked with the RightNow web group to get the Board Help mailbox redirected into the RightNow web system, where we can actually track help requests, and enter common problems into the database for people to find on their own. It's made an amazing difference in the response time! There are still a few error pages, though, that point to the old address, so I'm working to find those and get the info to our web group so they can change them to reflect the new address. Brainstorming with Marketing on 5th year anniversary plans I can't tell you anything yet, since nothing's nailed down, but we're definitely looking to do something fun for UO's 5 year anniversary this September! --- So this obviously isn't what I do every day, because there are always new projects, and sudden fires that need attention, but most of these items came straight off my dailies from the last week. I'm sure if I did this again the next time my turn rolled around for Comments from the Team, it'd be quite different. But this job changes every day based on what the other teams and the players need, and that's one of the reasons I love it! Cynthe Community Manager ORIGIN Systems | |
| More Event Tips from Sannio | May 2 2002 4:56PM |
| Creating an Event: Aftermath This is the fourth of my Team Comments that comprised suggestions for the creation of player-events. Here’s an index to help bring you up to date: And so your event’s over. The audience has dispersed, and your participants have begun splitting off into small groups to share their “war stories.” It’s time to kick off your sandals and relax. …Well, not just yet. Advertise: Immediately after the event is actually a great time to promote your next event. Those people lingering around after today’s event? It’s a pretty good bet they’ll like your next event as much or more than today’s. Take the opportunity, especially if your house was the location of the event, to invite whoever lingers to stick around for just a bit longer. Talk about your next event. Mention the time and day, especially if the event isn’t reoccurring on the same day every week or month. If today’s event was a quest, consider dropping hints for next week’s storyline. If you just finished running a contest, auction, or tournament, talk about what the prizes or big ticket items will be next time. Don’t bash the competition: This may seem like a small thing, but it’s always classy and admirable to not talk down about other events and event staff. It’s much better to recognize the strengths of the competition instead of their flaws, but if you really don’t have anything nice to say about them try not to say anything at all. Give away leftovers: You might even have prepared some food & drink to share with everyone at this time. If you have any promotional gifts remaining, consider giving one or two away for free to some of these devoted stragglers—they’ll be more inclined to show up for your next event, thanks to your kindness. If your event will reoccur in the same place with any frequency, one of the best things you can do is to give away runestones that are pre-marked with your event location. Fish for a critique: One of the best ways to learn how to improve from your successes and mistakes is by simply asking the people who were involved, be they staff, participants, or even audience. While chatting with those who stuck around, find out what worked well with your event and what maybe weren’t such good ideas. When you’re asking questions, try not to ask ones like “Did you like the event?” You want “essay” responses, not “yes” or “no.” If you instead ask questions like “What did you think of the villain?” or “How do you think we could have made the tournament progress faster?” you might get better, more helpful answers. Don’t feel insulted if someone talks about what they didn’t like or even complains. These people could end up giving you some of the most important tips on how to improve your event, so try to grin & bear it, take good notes, and try to interpret what they were complaining about as productive suggestions. Reward your helpers: They may not have asked for any special compensation, but doing something special for your helpers is always a nice gesture, nonetheless. Rewards don’t necessarily have to be gold or gifts. The simplest and, perhaps, most important reward is praise, and you should dole that out with heaping tablespoons. Even if you think you might not have needed as many helpers as you had, always keep in mind that you shouldn’t take for granted any time and resources your assistants were able to give. You can also consider throwing a little staff-only shindig, something to help your assistants maintain close relationships that can serve double-duty by also introducing any new helpers or new rules/guidelines. If your event staff is large enough, you might think about “promoting” one or more of them. If you have ten people helping you, for example, consider asking one of them to be your second-in-command; and if they accept, announce this change at a staff gathering and at the start of each of the next few events. Keep an eye out for new helpers: Some of the stragglers may be receptive to helping out with future events. You may find that one or two would enjoy being recruited to help with whatever you have planned for next time. Maybe these potential assistants are looking to help with something small like marking runestones or scribing books, or if they’ve been a part of something like this before maybe they could role-play a part in your plot or help with crowd control. Perhaps they have a house that can host the whole event or part of it, or even the offer of customizing their barkeep’s dialogue can be a valuable asset to your future events. Write up the post-event news article: When everyone has truly gone from the event scene (or you’ve kicked them out of your house ;) you can write up the post-event article. Sure, others may wait until the next day, but not you! You know how much everyone likes to read about such things right after they happen, and you might have even prepared the article beforehand to speed things up, and just need to fill in the blanks. Try to name the pivotal characters of the event in such an article, such as the bride & groom of a wedding, the slayer of the arch-villain, the winner of a race, the assassin of the town leader, or the one who ate the most pies. Everyone loves to have their “names in lights.” Hopefully you, or one of your helpers, were prepared and took a few screenshots during the event. Sort through them to find some particularly dramatic or picturesque images, and include one or two with your article. People like seeing their pictures attached to enjoyable events as much or more than seeing their name attached to them. As with your initial event announcement article, make sure you include where and when the event happened, as well as all relevant contact information. In addition, don’t forget to mention any details you might already have about your next event. Do it all again: If you like, it can be exactly the same. If you had 10 people show up for your poetry reading and realized that this is the perfect number, don’t feel compelled to try to grow the event beyond “perfection.” Maybe you’ll let word-of-mouth be your only advertising, and only post notes about your event on your guild message board, and that’s perfectly fine. Your performance, contest, or ceremony doesn’t need to have half the shard in attendance for it to be considered a complete success. But, it doesn’t have to be exactly the same. You can take the suggestions or critiques/complaints that your participants shared and use them to your advantage. Perhaps you had 300 people show up for your first monthly “field day” sporting contests, but found it a little taxing and almost unmanageable, and there’s nothing wrong with adjusting your plans to inspire 100 or less people to participate next time. It’s a pretty good bet that you’ll want to make at least some changes, and you’ve probably been taking mental notes during your whole event creation process. You could put those into effect for the next creation cycle, but if things didn’t go the way you would have hoped this time, don’t give up. Maybe you inadvertently invited the wrong audience and need to consider how you’re promoting your event, or the rules & scheduling may have been two vague or confusing and you just need to tweak some wording or timing. Whatever the audience/participant reaction, your event was important if only because you brought people together and tried your best to entertain them. And they will appreciate it, and you’ll know they do by their actions or their praise. To be fair, some players will complain or gripe the whole time, but keep an eye on them—most of them may say one thing, but they will stick around and try their best to participate appropriately throughout the whole event . They’ll say things like “this tournament sucks!” or “things are moving too slow!” but they’ll stay with your group to slay every monster, congratulate the newlyweds, or defend the kidnapped princess, and their actions will speak to you much louder than their words. Other players will be more insightful and recognize all that you’re trying to do, and they’ll appreciate it more openly. You and your helpers may be toasted in front of a crowd of dozens, or someone may e-mail or quietly come up to you after everyone else has gone and share with you some of the greatest words of praise that ever existed: “Thanks for everything. I had fun.” Keith “Sannio” Quinn Online Community Coordinator Ultima Online Origin Systems | |
