Elli:
Hi, my name is Al'Ellisande and you are listening to the latest episode of Towertalk. Today's topic has been widely discussed by everybody: where is community management heading at ArenaNet. Our guest today is the person who started it all, community manager Martin Kerstein. Welcome to Towertalk, Martin.

Martin:
Hi

Elli;
You caused quite the stir with your blog post.

Martin:
I am not entirely sure, where all the excitement is coming from, which is why we are here today. What I tried to lay out, was something which is very beneficial for the community, all things considered. So ok, you ask me about which topics you would like to have more clarity and I try to answer as best I can.

Elli:
I think a lot of the discussions focused on the official forums. But reading your blog, I am getting the impression of that not being all of it. What can you tell us about the grand strategy of yours, of which official forums are only a part, if I understand the blog post right.

Martin:
Exactly, forums are only one piece of the puzzle. Where do I start? Our global goal is to support as many people interested in Guild Wars as possible. I tried to explain in the blog that community management in general is not the same it was in 2006, when I started this. Back then, there were no social networks, forums were the central meeting place for fans, especially the hardcore fans. Because we do more than reading forums, we make analysis of media-patterns and where communities can be encountered and we have seen it happening over the years that there is no single one community. If people say something was bad for a community, they always mean their small portion of the community, or special interest community. There are communities in forums such as Wartower. There are fansites, there are lots of bloggers, which is a development of recent years that people playing being interested in blogs. People who do not communicate in forums, because blogs offer more space to lay out their ideas. Facebook, which I know is controversial topic, particularly in Germany. But there is no denying the fact of millions of people being on Facebook and a lot of them play games and are interested in games. We have almost half a million people on our Facebook page and a lot of them would never describe themselves as gamers in the traditional sense, but they are interested in the Guild Wars franchise, they are interested in games in general and they are very interested in communicating. This is a community of its own. Then there is Twitter, which is another set of people. A lot of these communities do not use the other channels. A lot of these people will never visit a forum. The rule of thumb is that 10% of all players visit forums. Which is only a small part, but usually very dedicated people and hardcore fans. But the fact of the matter remains that there are many many communities outside that [forums]. Due to our decision of not making a traditional fansite program, our plan is to be open to all those communities and provide them with an environment in which they can grow and flourish. Another goal for us is to get different types of communities to work with each other and release things which are very positive for the entire global community of Guild Wars 2.

Elli:
So your intention is to reconnect the different networks?

Martin:
We want to enable people to cooperate, if they are interested in it. For example, you have a blogger, who is very good at writing and one person who is interested in doing machinimas, or movies about the game, but has no idea where to start. If we were able to bring these groups together, the person with the storytelling expertise and the person with the ability to craft the video, you can end up with a collaboration between two different groups which, all of a sudden, is enjoyed by all people, making them say “this is great”. We do not want to force people to cooperate, but we want to give them the chance to work together.

Elli:
How exactly do you plan on achieving that?


Martin:
One of our approaches is to have official forums, a central meeting place. To make one thing clear, from our perspective, we do not compete with fansites, because fansites are so much more than a forum. Fansites offer far more services, guides, databases, completely different communication structures. Fansites allow people to talk about things, which could never be discussed in official forums [German alludes to offtopic discussions rather than critizism]. We are not competition, we are complementary. It is important for us to have that one central place, which did not exist during GW1 and we got criticized a lot for it. We posted here, we posted there, which made it hard for people to find a place where they can see all of the things developers said. Which is a reason why we wanted to have official forums, because we can then have one unified dev-tracker. We are going to have a news & announcements subforum. We will have forums where players can help other players and lend newbies a hand, we will have subforums where people can announce their projects, or look for people to cooperate with. Another central element... ...a reason why I did not talk about those tools in the blogpost was the simple reason that I do not know yet which tools will release with the game. I could very well be that some of the tools will be finished after release, which was a reason for me to be vague on some of the tools. One thing we will definitely have is a community blog in every language we support and we will use that blog to showcase highlights from the community for other people to see. For example Wartower works on a project such as TowerTalk, or convention videos, or [deep breath] series of articles about the game's contents, then we would say “heeeey everybody speaking German, Wartower just released this cool project”. We will use our blog to highlight community projects and bring more attention to them.

Elli:
and that is your reasoning for you to... ...people who do not visit forums, you said it yourself that the people on Facebook are not your typical forum visitors, they use different channels to express their opinion. Something needs to be done to attract them and your theory is that with the help of the blog highlighting community works it can be done to bring people from Facebook or Google+ to your page.

Martin:
No, that is the wrong way to look at it. We do not want to herd people in our forum, the whole point is not trying to force communities into a different environment. Instead we will go where communities already exist. That means, the people who are already on Facebook, sure, if we, for example do something on our blog, we will use all other channels such as Twitter, Facebook to bring people [in English not German]... people, I am loosing my German again, ...to get people's attention about what is happening. For example, we are permanently tracking Twitter for hashtags such as #gw2 to see what people are writing about the game. We see things such as, Guild Wars in Brazil just released a new database, or are working on this great project, then we will share that with others. We do not want to force people to use certain channels, we want to offer as many channels as possible, so it becomes feasible for those people to work together in a very organic way.

Elli:
Sounds more like a meta-database

Martin:
Yes, that is why I called it an eco-system, because it is made to be organic. One of the most important things for us, is for the community to be active. There is a limited amount of community managers, but millions of players. Millions of eyes tend to be more aware, which means part of the concept depends on, and I hope we will have a database entry field on our website before launch, which people can use to tell us what is going on in the community. If they do not want to go to the forums, if they do not want to use Twitter or Facebook, we will give people an opportunity on our website, to put forth ideas and inform us about cool community projects. Because we cannot comb through every community for that one cool thing. We rely on people communicating with each other and communicate with us. We are the... .*sigh* what's the German word for facilitator? ...we are, … it is our job to empower people working together in a friendly, helpful and cooperative environment.

Elli:
You already mentioned languages. Isn't it a problem to coordinate between all the languages. Is there a plan for that.

Martin:
English is going to be the fallback language for people whose native language we do not support. Nobody here can read Greek, or speaks Slovenian, or Portuguese, those are language we do not have. We have community managers for English, French, Spanish and German on location [Seattle]. Those languages we can read directly. We are not so naive to believe everything is going to work itself out. We put a lot of work into finding out how processes work in the Internet. We talked to other community managers, we analyzed data. People seem to think we have an idea and then just do that. My blogpost was the essence of two years of work. I cannot talk about it, but we have some ideas on how to handle languages we are not supporting directly.

Elli:
Am I right in saying that your focus is on the blog as a collection of highlights, introducing projects from different communities; the mechanism of bringing different things together and less on the official forums.

Martin:
Do you mean me personally, or in general.

Elli:
Yes, personally, where do you see the main focus.

Martin:
As the German community might noticed since I started leading the entire community team, meaning being the boss for all the community managers here in Seattle and in Europe, my focus shifted to organization, business planning, and a lot of behind the curtain stuff. I became a person responsible for the global strategies, which means I will not be as active, for which I am sorry, but hopefully we will soon have a new community manager in Brighton who will be more active than I am currently for a lack of time. Which does not mean... ...our job is to be everywhere. But as I said, much depends on people working with us, which was one of the central points in the blog post overlooked by many people who focused on the official forum aspect. Our goal is for all different communities, all the sub-communities to be friendly and respect each other and to be cooperative. We will, and I say that now, cooperate with people based on the standards they hold themselves to and we will be very strict to people who think they can behave like assholes towards other people. We won't stand for that. There is plenty of room to disagree and I am the last person to suppress a good argument, but being able to have a discussion respecting the other side is not asked too much. Interestingly enough, we had our internal forums up and running for the closed beta event and curiously enough, the atmosphere was very good. We did not have to ban a single person.

Elli:
oh my

Martin:
This is rather unusual

Elli:
Yes. Banning was a large concern when the blog was discussed on Wartower. What are you going to do to all the flamerz, haterz and GW-is-dead poster? Those are the people who will be subject to the strict rules enforcement you mentioned.

Martin:
Yes, frankly speaking, do you need those posts? Do other people in the community posts which are purely destructive and do in no way benefit the common welfare of the community? Posts which scare off other people from the forums, because the atmosphere is not to their liking? Nobody needs that, which is why we will hold people to certain standards, that they treat each other with courtesy and respect.

Elli:
But you say well laid out criticism, or fervent discussions going on for pages, is not something you are opposed to?

Martin:
If the discussion belongs to the game, if it does not go offtopic and if players exchange opinions, then that is healthy, that is something a game needs, no publisher in the game requires people to just tell him how great he is. People only telling you how great you are is no feedback. It is nice to hear. People can discuss things as long as they relate to the game. If they go too off topic, we will try to steer them back. I know, there is always the concern that these are official forums and “the man” is going to suppress any criticism. That will not be the case.

Elli:
Who is going to moderate the forums, which is not going to be a small task.

Martin:
Yes, we have plans for that completely in the bag, but we are not going to talk about it for now. But it will not be volunteers from the community.

Elli:
Yes, that was what the question was all about anyway. Can forum misconduct have repercussions on the GW2 account itself?

Martin:
What do you mean?

Elli:
Are you making connections between the GW2 account and the forum account?

Martin:
That is always the case in games, yes. But you are alluding to....

Elli:
when somebody is a hater or flamer and gets banned in the forum, will that impact the GW2 account?

Martin:
You mean, if we ban somebody in the forums, will he then be banned from the game as well?

Elli:
for example, or maybe you destroy all his ectos.

Martin:
that would mean there were ectos in the game, nice try. NO, I do not think it would even be legally possible. But from experience we know that once persons behave like that in forums, they will undo themselves in the game as well. Because we will also maintain certain standards inside the game.

Elli:

A lot of people had concerns in the discussion because, correct me if I am wrong, they had a lot of bad experiences with official forums. You just said, you researched this for two years and analyzed other forums, you might have experienced other official forums being low on traffic or just not working right, what have you learned from that.

Martin:

One thing, my core lesson which I learned from a lot of things happening, that out of fear of people clamoring there were too many rules, too few rules are put into place in official forums. As a result, things go out of control, because nobody intervened in time to change the tone. Then things get out of control, which is not something any community really needs. I personally do not know a single person who thinks it is great that forums are filled with trolls, or that people are nasty to each other because they can and this is the Internet and feel they were cool doing it. I do not know anybody who needs that and thinks it is OK. My guess is the majority of people agrees with me. It is like that with anything in life, at some point you have to tell people “those are the rules”. This applies to everything in life, not just the Internet and computer games. Damn, I sound old. [laughter]

Elli

[laughter] I know what you mean. Happens to me as well, sometimes.

Martin:

and it sounds far tougher than it is intended to sound. It is like.. … ..the Internet is not an anarchy sphere, because even there people have to get along and live with each other and communicate with each other and the same rules how to treat each other in real life should apply there as well.

Elli:

We were just talking about various things traditionally done by the community, for example trading, databases, guild organization, guides. You integrated a few things which traditionally were fan projects into your own pages, the Wiki for example, or HOM achievements. Do you intent to integrate more of those resorts, or do you really stick to highlighting and linking

Martin:

We do have some plans about which I cannot say anything at the moment, since I do not know when we will have access to those tools, but we intend everything to be beneficial to the community and we do not try to take something away from people.

Elli:

…

Martin:

The reaction I got on Twitter was “why are you destroying fansites?”, which totally is not the case. As I said, sure if a fansite is nothing but a forum, then it could be possible for people to migrate to the official forums, but from experience we know that a lot of people will stay with their community. The people posting on fansites now consider it their home, they will stay there. They might additionally look around the official forums, but they will stay in their community. They have their friends there, or their enemies, an environment where they feel at home and nobody wants to take that away. Just because we start an additional service, we are not telling people to stop using the existing ones. It is important for people to know that we are not doing this to steal users away. We offer something in addition.

Elli:

Do you think people will use this as an additional news resource, you said earlier that the information ArenaNet releases is very splintered across sites. That yours is something where the player can inform himself about all you said.

Matrin:

Yes

Elli:

Yes and that the player in the environment he is accustomed to, where you feel at home, the communities what to distinguish themselves, there are the PvP players for example and those are not the roleplayers and it is always important for people to define themselves.

Martin:

Yes and that is totally OK, we do not want to intrude on that and say “hey you are no longer allowed to go to this page or that page”. We want the exact opposite of that. We want different communities to work with each other. There is no interest in draining users from fansite, we want the exact opposite. The idea was that fansites are enabled to create cooler stuff for their community. Fansites do have the same problem right now. You have to look around “where did Martin post something?, “were did Regina post something?”, “or Eric”. Currently, it means a lot of searching for you, so once this gets centralized, it gets easier for fansites to find information and refine it for their own community. Which sounds like win-win for me.

Elli:

Hmm, I get that. I thought it to be interesting to follow that discussion and all its proclamations of loyalty, such as “I shall remain on Wartower”. I though it to be very sweet of our users and it confirms what you said. You hinted at the types of forums you will offer, does that include forums for individual servers, or do you not have any plans regarding that.

Martin:

We have some ideas about the structure of our forums.... ...aaaa.... ...those are our first official forums and we looked what was and wasn't working in the past and we have seen from our last test that we need to change some of our categories and once we head into more beta weekends, we will see if the structure we though up, works the way we wanted and readjust it for launch. Right now it is a period of testing for the forums to see if they work the way we predicted. Which is why I do not want to go into details, since they are subject to change until release.

Elli:

Alright, so, Martin I think a lot of what you were trying to say before is much clearer now. And I hope you could convince people that your new strategy is more than just “official forums”.

Martin:

It is so much more, the official forums are just one piece of the puzzle. We will continue to work with all fansites just the way we do now. We will give interviews, help if you got questions, or with prices for competitions. Everything we did before we will do and then some, blogs, Facebook, all those other communities which would have no place in a traditional fansite program. If things had not evolved from GW1, there would not have been room for that. We would not have been flexible enough, fast enough, which is why we attempt to have you tell us about cool things, so there is more flow of information between us and the communities and between communities themselves. Which helps all players, in the end. We are here to support communities, not restrict them. We want to have as many communities as possible and we do not want to force anybody be part of a community where they do not feel good. We want to give people channels, so they can be part of the community they like and still communicate with others.

Elli:

Sounds very interesting. I can hardly wait how it all turns out and in the future, we will pin you down to those those interviews.

Martin:

Why did I knew this was going to happen [laughter]

Elli:

[laughter]

Don't worry, there will be more Elli questions.

Martin:

That is OK, I still will not answer any questions relating to changeable underwear, that's not my resort.

Elli:

but I will have to discuss this with somebody who can answer this.

Martin:

poor Ree [Soesbee]

[laughter, goodbyes, the end]