Ecliptic Rift

Get on board with the Cluetrain.

CCP Games rides the Cluetrain. Not perfectly, and sometimes they take a wrong step, but they’ve gotten onboard.

They talk to us, and not just with a flat corporate voice. We don’t get too much MBA-speak from them. I don’t want it, and I don’t think you do, either. They’ve got some cool people in there, and not all of them work in community management. If they locked away their devs and only worked through the community team, we’d lose a lot. Right now, we can bat around ideas, talk about problems, get insight on various decisions, and get confirmation that they love games, science fiction, net culture, and (of course) Internet spaceships as much as we do.

Some devs could use a little coaching, of course, as we’ve seen in recent months. Sometimes the Loving Mallet of Correction gets deployed a little strong, or they lock their designers and programmers up in their Viking mead halls and we don’t get to understand what happens. But more communication will always make the players happy.

I have great respect for Kaarback, but I could not possibly disagree more strongly with the suggestion that we should keep the devs from talking to us. In a communication vacuum, players get angry, developers misunderstand, and problems crop up. When we can short-circuit that process and get passionate people – players and devs – talking to each other, much better things happen.

Using Yahoo! Pipes, I keep a CCP Devs feed. Basically, I take the EVE Devs feed from EVE Search and filter out the moderators and whatnot. I don’t care about locked threads or edited flames, but I do care about seeing them engage on awesome player-created content, talk about championing feature requests, and sometimes even show us their warts.

Much love to the community folks, but they do something even better than just act like a mouthpiece. They keep us engaged, talk to us about community-specific stuff, and hopefully teach the other devs how to interact with us.

Let’s keep riding the Cluetrain.

UPDATE: Kaarbaak posted a well-thought-out rejoinder, to which I commented that we more or less agree. I want CCP to humanize themselves, solicit general ideas, and fix the CSM process. I don’t want them taking forum polls on whether a certain stat should have a 5% or 6% bonus (though dealing with dedicated playtesters on Sisi is another matter entirely).

One of these things is not like the others

Not that I pay much attention to null-sec politics, but I do pay attention to community management, particularly when I belong to the community in question. So the recent controversy over CCP’s renaming of Band of Brothers Reloaded struck a chord with me. In the past, CCP has had problems with developer favoritism related to BoB, and that perception remains to this day, deservedly or not. I don’t believe that “perception is reality”, but perception is indistinguishable from it.

CCP claims they have done this for others in the past, but they haven’t presented any evidence to support that. On the contrary, a lot of folks have presented evidence to show that they have denied similar claims in the past.

I don’t really care about the specifics of this case, except that CCP has done an incredibly poor job of community management here. They should have stuck to the “sandbox” defense, as they have in the past, and that EVE is a harsh and unforgiving universe. When the original disbanding occurred, they stated publicly that, since it occurred via an acceptable game mechanic, they’d let it stand.

No exception should be made now.

For a different take on the situation, you might look at Kirith Kodachi’s post What’s In A Name?.