Supreme Commander Talk

Consider this an open letter, if you will, to Gas Powered Games. Hopefully they will listen to my advice so we won’t have a repeat of the previous incident.

Most computer games these days launch with official forums. It’s just something you do. A lot of prospective game buyers will search out information on the game before buying it, and if the game doesn’t even have any official forums put up by its publisher or developer, it’s a huge negative. It seems to imply lack of any support; if the makers of the game can’t even be arsed to put up a forum, who’s to say the other support isn’t going to be terrible as well, like troubleshooting and game updates?

So it’s important for games to have official online communities alongside them at launch. But at the same time, they need to be done right. There are a set of unspoken qualities that the typical gamer expects to find in an official online community. If they are absent, the gamer will be displeased, and may leave the official community for more fertile grounds (like, say, unofficial forums and fansites).

One thing gamers want is moderation. They don’t want the forum to be overrun with spam, nonsense, or trolling. GPG has forum moderators on staff and, for the most part, the forum is moderated well. One minor criticism I and many others have, though, is that there are certain well-known forum trolls who never contribute productively to conversations and, indeed, are actively derided wherever they do show up (or wondered about in other threads where they are curiously absent). These trolls need to be dealt with. I wouldn’t suggest an outright banning, but they definitely need to be talked to.

Gamers also expect some sort of an official presence. This is the major benefit of the official forums versus any of the fan-made alternatives, after all. Forum moderators don’t count as an official presence. Gamers aren’t interested in asking questions about forum moderation; they merely want it to happen. But they do want to be able to speak with employees who can speak for the company. Blizzard has them in the form of Community Managers: employees who actually venture forth within the company to talk with the developers and can respond with official, authorized replies to community inquiries.

GPG has this … sort of. There is a bit of a presence. At GPG, the same people who handle forum moderation also act as the official presence on occasion. But these two roles should not be confused. Every now and again we do see a developer, or a forum moderator acting in a different role, speaking on behalf of the company, confirming exploits (such as the mass dupe exploit), providing information on upcoming features, answering tech support questions, and more. But these official responses don’t come often enough. GPG needs to take a more proactive role in establishing their presence in their own forum. It’s a great way to keep players enthused about the game and quickly handle issues that crop up; use it!

Gamers have one final expectation of an online community, and this is the one that GPG has had the most trouble with. Gamers expect a free and open exchange of ideas. Yes, it is true that first amendment rights only apply to censorship by the government, and no gamer has any right to free speech on the official forums. But just because it isn’t guaranteed doesn’t make it a bad idea. Free speech is a good idea in online communities for the same reason it is a good idea in governance, first amendment or not. The people posting a lot in the official forums are often the most hardcore players of the game. They love the game and want it to succeed, perhaps even more than the developers themselves. They’ve played the game a lot and have intimate knowledge of all of the ins and outs of it, often better than even the official play-testers.

So it is inevitable that these gamers will discover flaws in the game. And because they love the game so much, they want to report these flaws in the hope that they will be rectified. Supreme Commander has many flaws, but then again, it is a very ambitious game, so it is to be expected; and overall, it’s still a great game. But there are issues to report, and the best thing GPG can do is really listen to its fans who are reporting problems. Sometimes these posts will seem overly critical. Get over it. You can’t quash legitimate criticism; if you try, it will just be driven elsewhere, and it will upset a lot of people in the process.

Having an official forum is a great asset to the company, and it is one that needs protecting. However, being overly strict on the forum will quickly drive the players off to third-party fansites where the speech is more unfettered. If players cannot honestly debate and criticize the game in the official forums, that is a very bad thing. In the official forum there exists the possibility of official response. The community managers should take these opportunities to assure the players that they are listening to the complaints, that the issues are being addressed, or if the complaint is wrong, the community manager should take the time to explain why it is wrong, thus convincing a lot of other readers in the process. The best way to tackle criticism is to address it head-on.

It is very important for the company to draw a huge distinction between forum moderation, which is a necessary evil, and forum censorship, which should never occur. The best way to do this is to never delete threads, but rather, lock them. Thus, moderation is done in a transparent process, and forumgoers can look on and confirm that the threads being shut down are indeed being done so for reasons of moderation rather than censorship. If there is a thread closure they do not agree with, they will stick around and talk about it, and the moderation criteria can be fine-tuned. But if threads start disappearing, they will be driven elsewhere to talk about it, because they will no longer feel that their opinions are respected; and really, who wants to spend any time typing out a long, thoughtful response when it could easily disappear the very next minute?

So GPG needs to be very wary about how they manage their official forum. They’ve already spooked many people, me included, by deleting three perfectly legitimate threads that offered constructive criticism. I managed to find a mirror of one of the threads and another one was reposted on Supcom-Live. The third is lost. I hope we never have to mirror any deleted content from the official forum ever again. GPG needs to stop deleting valid threads and start responding to them instead. They need to make a concrete promise about how the forum will be moderated from here on out. This will help to bring back many of the people who were driven away by the ill-advised censorship.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 11:22 am by Cyde Weys and is filed under Ideas. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.