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《激战2》社区管理经验对主流发行商的启示

发布时间:2012-08-30 11:44:23 Tags:,,

作者:Mike Rose

有时候,网络也是个恐怖的地方。只是一个人在抱怨自己面临的问题,突然之间引得成千上万人的强烈抗议;众人的呼声像滚雪球似地越滚越大,却没有人拿出一点儿证据。

ArenaNet公司的社区管理团队对此颇为熟悉。这周初,它的旗舰之作《激战2》一发行,网上就到处是玩家的抗议,称自己并没有做什么错事,却被无故封号,矛头直指ArenaNet的管理团队。

Guild_Wars_2(from softsupplier.com)

Guild_Wars_2(from softsupplier.com)

ArenaNet的社区经理Regina Buenaobra指出:“ArenaNet网站上的社区管理团队一直在监视社交媒体网络。我们注意到一些人在不断地抗议自己的帐号被封一事,指责我们‘无故’封号。这些帖子出现在粉丝论坛和Reddit等网站上,但大家没有看到的是真相的另一部分。”

Buenaobra觉得受够了,她的团队在Reddit上发贴,拿出证据,向玩家们澄清封号一事。看到开发商和玩家之间的积极交流互动,ArenaNet意识到在Reddit上发一张完整的帖子,可能是解决此事的最好办法。

在帖子中,社区团队向愤怒的玩家们解释为何封号。这些玩家坚信管理团队封自己的号是没有充分理由的。ArenaNet代表一字不差地贴出粗鲁的聊天记录,一位Reddit用户看到那段聊天记录中尽是关于粗话、种族歧视和性的内容。这位玩家表示:“我就是希望知道我为什么被封号。”

翻阅Reddit帖子的评论真是让人大开眼界。以下只是从游戏内聊天中摘录的一段攻击性的评论:“这东西他妈的难搞,如果你是他妈的精神病,我们打赌你交不到5个朋友,如果你不是他妈的蠢货。”

Buenaobra表示:“我们希望把记录以更显眼的方式公布出来。对于《激战》,我们之前也小规模地做过一次这种事。然而,这是头一次在Reddit上做得这么公开。这是也头一次我们广泛地从玩家那里获取信息,引用导致封号的真实聊天记录。”

独立开发者看到这里,应该会说:“我做这种社区互动都好几年了。”确实,每天你都能在网上论坛和信息板上看到玩家评论能够与独立游戏开发者直接对话,你绝对不可能从大工作室和发行商那儿看到这种回应。

你必须质疑,为什么所有AAA公司不跟着做呢?——不见得存在什么技术难题。想象一下,如果下一次网上疯传关于EA的谣言,踏实的EA发言人出现在Reddit之类的网上,开始辟谣,一对一地与它的玩家们对话,就像ArenaNet那样,而不是躲藏在‘无评论’和官方新闻稿的后面。

这么多人在Twitter和Facebook上发表了关于Reddit的事,这显示了当大公司做出这么“亲民”的举动时,我们有多么“受宠若惊”。我自己的Twitter就此事收到了超过100条回复,有人困惑有人高兴。

这一举动不仅驱逐了那些骂游戏的无良网民,也让游戏和开发工作室收获了大量人品。我没有数到底有多少人在Twitter上说他们经历过这场论战之后现在考虑购买这款游戏,特别是看到工作室的承诺和它的立场——对憎恶同性恋、种族歧视和性骚扰的零容忍态度。

Buenaobra提出:“那种消极行为会使积极致力于营造健康社区氛围的人离开游戏。人们现在对我们的游戏感兴趣了,因为他们看到我们正在努力维持健康的游戏环境,这太好了。我们欢迎希望为建设良好在线游戏社区的玩家加入。”

经过这次成功的经历后,ArenaNet现在正在考虑类似的一对一社区互动。其他AAA工作室也应该有所启发。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Guild Wars 2: This is how you do community management

By Mike Rose

The internet can be a scary place at times. It can take just one person to moan about an issue they’ve had, and suddenly thousands of voices pile on top, allowing the entire outcry to snowball without a single shred of evidence ever offered.

The community team at ArenaNet knows this all too well. Earlier this week as its flagship title Guild Wars 2 launched, reports began appearing all over the internet from users saying they had been banned from the game unfairly, usually claiming that they had done absolutely nothing wrong and pointing the finger at ArenaNet’s trigger-happy admins.

“The community team at ArenaNet monitors social media networks constantly,” notes Regina Buenaobra, ArenaNet’s community manager. “We noticed that a few people were increasingly vocal about their account suspensions, accusing us for suspending them for ‘no reason.’ These posts surfaced on fan forums and sites like Reddit, but readers were only seeing one side of the story.”

Buenaobra decided enough was enough, and her community team took to Reddit to provide an example to the community of how these supposed unfair bans were far from the truth. It was after seeing the positive reaction to this interactions between developer and community that ArenaNet realized that a full post on Reddit may be the best way to deal with the issue.

As part of the full post, the team responded to angry players who believed they had been banned for no good reason. “I would love to know what I was banned for,” says one Redditor, after which the ArenaNet representative pastes the exact crude chat which led to the ban, complete with vulgar, racist and sexist terms.

Having a scroll through the comments of the Reddit post is quite the eye-opener. Here’s just one example of an offending comment from the game’s in-game chat: “the worm IS fucking hard if you’re a fucking mentalpatient no we fucking dont you can take a keep with 5 people if you’re not a fucking dickhead.”

“We wanted to set the record straight in a more visible way,” notes Buenaobra. “We’ve done this before on a small-scale, one-off basis on fansite forums for the original Guild Wars. However, this is the first time we’ve done this in a more visible space such as Reddit. It’s also the first time we’ve broadly solicited information from players and quoted the actual chat that caused those account suspensions.”

Any indie developer will read this and simply reply “I’ve been doing this sort of community interaction for years.” Indeed, you can catch multitudes of gamers commenting daily on internet forums and message boards about how brilliant it is being able to talk directly to an indie game developer, and how you’d never get that kind of reaction from a bigger name studio or publisher.

You have to question why all the triple-A companies don’t typically follow suit — it’s not like there aren’t the tools in place to allow them to do so. Imagine if, next time some awful rumor began circulating around the internet about Electronic Arts, instead of hiding behind “no comments” and official press releases, a down-to-earth EA spokesperson jumped on Reddit or the like and began dispelling the rumor, talking to its community on a one-to-one basis as ArenaNet has done. It’s a lot harder to call someone evil when they aren’t such a faceless corporation.

The fact that so many people were posting about the Reddit thread on Twitter and Facebook yesterday shows just how surprised we are when a bigger brand does make a move like this — a simple tweet from myself received over 100 retweets, with people bemused and delighted in equal measures.

The move didn’t just dispell the rubbish people were talking about the game either — it also appears to have brought both the game and the development studio a great deal of good PR. I lost count of how many people said on Twitter that they are now considering purchasing the game following this debacle, especially after seeing the level of commitment from the studio and its stance of having a zero tolerance attitude to homophobia, racial slurs and sexual harassment.

“That kind of negative behavior pushes away players who contribute positively to the health of our community — players that we want in our game,” notes Buenaobra. “It’s awesome that people are now interested in our game because they see that we’re trying to keep the environment friendly. We welcome players who want to help us build a great online game community.”

ArenaNet is now definitely considering similar one-on-one community interactions in the future following the success of this — other triple-A studios should be taking note. (source:gamasutra)


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