Pladas made a kind and honest comment on Sunday the 19th today on how he likes the game and how bad the community is.
This is a point I have to agree on and something I want to strive to change. My question is this though, how do you improve a community?
Do you add swear filters?
Constantly punish people for being an ass?
Or will something as simple as an ignore command fix things?
Questions I find myself asking while trying to come up with a way to fix the broken community building within S19.
Jan 21 2011, 11:36 am
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Kozuma3
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Make the game Require working togeother more effective.
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Design the game in such a way people are better off working together than they are working alone or betraying others. Basically what Kozuma3 said.
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Well swear filters can prevent a curse word from being seen in the first place whereas with an ignore command, whatever is said will be seen and someone can get offended or someone who shouldn't be seeing what is typed will see it since they didn't have that particular person on their "ignore list".
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If you want to improve a community you just have to have strict but fair rules in place, and be willing to enforce them.
For example in 2002-03 the Proelium community was given free reign to run rampant because Silkwizard and I figured that since it had player hosts it should be administrated by the individual hosts. But then when hosts turned out to be racist jackasses themselves, the community began to become incredibly unfriendly to new users and it began to self-destruct. The worst was when somebody told me he loved the game but felt like he needed to quit because he was gay and everyone running around calling each other "fags" was offensive to him. At that point it was like "enough is enough." We then issued a code of conduct for the game, and enforced it with a very very heavy hand. A lot of people got mad and "rage quit" on us, but it completely worked out in our favor. Not only did Proelium become a manageable and friendly community, but after a year or so prior of not generating much subscription income, it once again became incredibly profitable. Also it was able to breathe enough life into an "ancient" (by BYOND standards) game that it was relatively popular and played often for many more years. | |
Jared pretty well echos my thoughts on the matter, if your game contains an obvious team or social element.
Although a little unrelated to gaming, we employed a similar strategy on BYOND Anime. It was rather well accepted that BYOND Anime was a home of kids scrapping it out in some of the most childish ways conceivable. As communities go, it was a joke basically, and not one I as an Anime fan would've ordinarily bothered sticking around in. A few months and some heavy handed moderation on obviously unacceptable behaviour, and the community on the site had been stripped of it's angry drama, leaving us with the kind of community atmosphere you'd rightly expect from an official guild. Bit of a shame we didn't have the developers (and released games) to back that up though, eh? =P | |
