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开发者谈如何通过游戏社区更好地理解玩家

发布时间:2018-09-14 09:08:41 Tags:,

开发者谈如何通过游戏社区更好地理解玩家

原作者:Artemiy Kozlov 译者:Willow Wu

游戏社区总是能带给人们意外,主要是惊喜。

跟玩家对话总是能获得收获——不仅是对于你的项目(从交流中获得的品牌信任以及产品见解),还有你个人。《战争机器人》(War Robots)的两年社区管理经验让我学到了很多。

举个例子,你思考一下,那些在游戏论坛上骂得很难听的人是真的恨这个游戏吗?有没有可能是完全相反的意思?先把这个问题放一边,我们等下再回来说。

跟人在网上交流有时候是一件很艰难的事,这是无法改变的事实。如果你处理不当就会被活活生吞。

一般人在逛已发行游戏的社区时,一般吸引你点进去看的首先就是那些抱怨帖。新手社区管理员通常会因为种帖子而崩溃,我曾经就是。你当时的下意识反应就是尽快解决这种情况。最好的办法似乎就是让开发团队按照这些人的要求对游戏做出更改。就好像游戏的生死大权完全掌握在这些人手里……是这样的吗?

我一开始就是这样想的,然后很快我就得面对现实了。

现实总是一样的:让这些新功能上线,然后明天又有其他人提出另外的要求。你要满足所有人是不可能的,因为这千千万万个“我想要”和“我需要”中有很多是互相矛盾的。

所以,社区管理员(community manager,简称CM)应该如何处理才能让开发者和玩家双方都受益,提供一个合理的解决方案?

一种方法是限制CMs的工作范围,为社交媒体或者是论坛制定严格死板的规则,比如“在____情况下你要回复____”。这是个好主意吗?这要取决于你想要什么了。这基本上就是把CMs变成了另一种客服,事情当然会简单很多,但是这也让开发者与玩家之间的互动变得无聊、机械化,排除了一切意外的发生。

我们不太喜欢这种方法。《战争机器人》的社区管理者都是自主独立的。我们也是决策者,要兼顾玩家和产品的利益。我们知道很多其他人不了解的事,我们知道产品的关键指标,能够依靠自己的能力获得大量数据。

要让这一切发挥作用,我们必须坚持某些原则。在这篇文章中,我会勾勒出一个通用框架,它不仅可以帮助你与数百万玩家和谐相处,而且还能让原本低效率的交流变成一个人人都能从中受益的健康过程。

1.不要以为恨与爱的分界线很清楚

负面言论是很难避免的。即使是被冠上“史上最佳游戏”的产品也会在社交媒体上因为一些不值一提的小问题引发仇恨言论。而且产品发展得越好,你要忍受的仇恨言论就越多。

从多年来我跟不同社区合作的经验来看,我认为最有效的方法就是改变看待仇恨本身的方式。让我们回到文章开头的那个问题。那些喷子真的是恨这个游戏吗?

有一个矛盾而颠覆性的解释是:那些指责开发者的玩家实际上比任何人都在意你的游戏。 他们太在乎这个游戏了,甚至无法控制自己。尝试着站在他们的角度想想:一个耗费了你大好时光的游戏却往另外一个你难以苟同的方向发展,这样你高兴吗?我肯定是不高兴的。因此他们不应该受到责备。

让我们用一个老套但能说明问题的人际关系例子来做类比。人们是会改变的,你和你的伴侣是否能够接受彼此的一切,这就决定了你们是否还会继续在一起。不同的地方在于如果两个人之间进展不顺利是可以选择分开的。这决定会让人痛苦,但是没有人会死(大多数情况下)。但如果你跟你的游戏社区分道扬镳,你的游戏通常就等于完了,因为没人在乎了。

好消息是什么呢?你不用再费劲满足不同玩家的各种要求了。所以接受这些玩家吧,听从他们的意见。

Game-of-War-Fire-Age(from 99vips.net)

Game-of-War-Fire-Age(from 99vips.net)

2.不要停止提问

作为一名CM,你必须培养韧性。思考下我上面所说的:网上这些人不高兴是因为他们喜欢你的游戏,不是要让你的工作变成一种折磨。

他们的评论有时候不堪入目,你可能会想把他们赶出去,或者是证明他们错了,让他们后悔自己所说的话,让他们甘拜下风……

先等等!在行动之前,先静下心来站在玩家的角度想想。

有个规则会让事情产生不一样的效果:说理而不强辩。或许你之前已经听过很多次了,但我还是要再强调一遍。人后捣鬼也不能解决问题,无论是哪种形式的的反击也不会让情况变得好起来。就算你赢了,证明某个人的观点是错的,那也不会让任何人更好过。

取而代之的应该是提问。要明白人们不高兴的原因究竟是什么。

难过的时候,我们总是会想弄清事情的缘由。深入到问题的核心部分,挖掘玩家的真实心声,抓住它就能帮助你将谈话引入正轨。

最重要的是在跟玩家交流时询问他们的感受和理由,不要只想着解决方案。解决方案是开发人员和策划的任务,因为掌握全局的人只有他们。而你的工作就是站在玩家的角度获得新的见解,帮助游戏团队继续扩大游戏规模。Rob Fitzpatrick写的The Mom’s Test可能是最好的相关书籍了:清楚明了,语言精练,能够帮助你提出适合的问题。我强烈建议阅读此书。

3.如有疑问,查看数据

同理心有助于你在适合的时间解决适合的问题,然而有数据的支持效果将会更好。

数据能让我们将玩家的语言转移成产品语言。我们不会对游戏制作人说“额,有些人不喜欢这样所以你把游戏改改吧”。首先你要弄清楚这些人是什么样的人。

-有多少,5个还是上千个?

-他们是什么时候开始玩的?一个月前?三年前?

-他们的活跃度如何?他们是每周随性地玩几局还是每天都会投入其中?

还有其它很多问题。很多人都在潜意识中把所有玩家看成是一样的。从人数不多但是发声最响亮的小团体中收集到虚假数据是一件再平常不过的事。

我经常会拿《荒野星球》(Wildstar)举例说明这个问题。这游戏的设计理念非常吸引人:MMORPG风格会让hardcore玩家回想起玩《魔兽世界》的美好时光。游戏团队认为市场需求规模非常可观,他们花了九年开发这个游戏,足足九年啊!

和当初预想的成果一致吗?差挺远的。《荒野星球》依然还活跃与市场,然而游戏规模始终发展不起来。事实证明,这些愿意花上数周等待突袭地牢机会的怀旧玩家只是《魔兽世界》社区中的一个小团体,只是他们比较热衷于发言,但他们的想法绝对不能代表大多数人的意见。

那么要如何区别“响亮”和“数量多”呢?你知道答案了吧?就是数据!

当本地分析提供的数据还不够时,我们就会使用替三方服务提供的社交平台统计数据来加以补充。在收集人们对新机制的看法和整体反馈情况时,社交媒体数据挖掘工具可以让我们轻松很多。

社区能提供的数据可能远比你最初以为的多。像FeverBee这样的地方可能是搜寻灵感的首选之一。

4.跟关注你的人面对面交流

你的游戏社区越大,你就越想远观全局,从纯数据的角度来观察。但是你永远都不应该停止跟玩家进行近距离交流,这种真情实感的互动可能会给游戏带来非常长远的影响。

你是和人打交道,有很多意想不到的事情你是无法从图表中得到解释的。

跟玩家近距离交流可以帮助我们在指标出现问题(比如不合理metagame转折、可破坏游戏体验的漏洞)之前及时发现、修复。但是这些接触不仅仅是为了收集信息。还有另外一个重要原因是让你时刻记得你的玩家们是人。虽说这是显而易见的,但当你在运营一个月玩家数量达到上百万的游戏时,你很容易就会把他们视为指标图上的一个个数字。当数量占据主导地位时,你可能会对人们的感觉完全麻木。这个情况一旦发生了,我上面所说的内容对你来说也就无所谓了。

跟玩家面对面接触能让你获得“重启”,让你重回正轨,你可能都没有意识到你多需要这个机会。

今年四月,我们邀请了一群玩家来工作室参观。这次活动比四年的小很多(之前我们邀请了最强派系的首领玩家们加入我们首次举办的正式锦标赛),但氛围也很友好、没有任何拘束感。知名《战争机器人》播主Adrian Chong就游戏的现状给我们做了个长篇演讲,但这就是活动中唯一比较正式的环节了。在这之后,大家就一起逛逛、聊聊天,什么话题都说。

这次活动真的非常棒,大家都很有想法,而且在某种程度上发人深省。玩家来参观我们的工作室就提醒了开发团队《战争机器人》的粉丝并不仅仅是游戏的反馈来源,他们是真实、真诚的人,玩(我们的)游戏是他们生活中的重要事情之一。无论我们对游戏做出了怎样的更改,对他们的影响都远比我们所想的要大。

5.不要让别人为你的业务烦恼

那些铁杆玩家想要深入了解我们的内部工作。这群人愿意捡起那些被抛弃的项目,让它们起死回生——就像是《星球大战:星系》(Star Wars Galaxies)或者《阿瑟龙的召唤》(Asheron’s Call),帮助人们在Kickstarter实现梦想中的游戏项目。但这些人绝对跟你在Facebook或者Reddit上接触到的不一样。大多数人都喜欢在虚拟世界里过上更轻松的生活。这没有问题,这也是为什么我坚信人们没有必要把玩家的注意力吸引到游戏的业务方面。大家在日常中遇到的麻烦已经够多了,为什么还要用我们自己的事情去烦他们呢?

少给承诺总是比言而无信要好得多。即使计划实施出现意外的潜在概率很低也不要轻易放话。

但是如果糟糕的事情发生了,就用一个简单的方法。

6.诚实待人

诚实是一张王牌。如果你把事情搞砸了,那就承认吧。玩家的信任就是你最重要的资产。如果他们信任你,很多事情都可以被原谅。他们明白没有人是完美的。

当你们加入另一个盈利机制时,有时候告诉他们“我们这么做是为了提升销量”并没有什么关系。人们有时候会比较情绪化,但是他们不是无脑。他们可以理解你。但前提是你们之间真的互相信任。

找回信任其实比从零开始建立信任关系更难。想清楚你想跟玩家发展出什么样的关系,然后就立即行动。设定界线、思考要投入多少精力,然后严格按照计划执行。每一次你偏离轨道,你的可信任值就会下降。

做好社区工作对你会有很大的帮助。但是要记住:你的目的不是帮助所有人梦想成真。你首先要明白这个“梦想”到底是什么。

你也可以决定继续为每个人提供有趣的娱乐体验,同时让他们远离幕后工作的种种问题。挑些好的故事讲给他们听、组织有趣的活动,或者就是告诉玩家他们应该如何对待不喜欢的内容,这样才不会影响到其它喜欢的部分。

不管你要做什么,不要停止交流。

把游戏体验延伸到外面的世界,以你的能力绝对能做得到。把大家聚集到一起,帮助他们创造更好的娱乐体验。如果你做到了,那你的游戏就不仅仅是一个成功的商业产品,而是真正的奇迹。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Gaming communities are full of surprises. Pleasant ones, mostly.

Speaking to your players is always rewarding — rewarding both to your project (in terms of brand trust and product insights you get from communication with actual people) and to yourself as a person. 2 years of community management for War Robots taught me thousands of things I never realized before.

For example, think about this: do people raging on game X’s forum actually hate the said game? Or it is, in fact, completely opposite? Let this question breathe for a bit — we’ll get back to it in a minute.

Nothing changes the fact, that speaking to people on the internet can be rather strenuous at times. And it will eat you alive if you don’t approach it properly.

When you take a quick glance at the community page of any established game, the first thing you’ll likely see is people being very upset over something. New community managers are often hit by that really hard (well, I certainly was). The knee-jerk response to that is to try fixing the situation as promptly as possible. Asking development team to implement features X and Z people are asking of right now sounds like the best bet. It clearly seems like project’s life and death depends on those… Or does it?

That’s how I thought at first, and soon I had to face reality.

Reality is always the same: let these Xs and Zs go live today, and tomorrow something entirely new will take their place. Fulfilling everyone’s expectations is impossible, as there are literally thousands of contradicting “wants” and “needs” flying around.

So what a person handling dev-to-player communications (let’s call this person a community manager, CM for simplicity) should do to remain sane and helpful to all parties?

One way to handle this is to restrict CMs working field to simply showing care. On social media or forums, steered by strict guidelines with inflexible directions like ‘in case of [this] say [that]“. Is it a good idea? Depending on what you’re looking for. This approach basically turns CMs into another line of customer support service, surely simplifying things a great deal… but also making developer-player interactions boring and mechanistic, throwing away all chances of something special emerging.

We aren’t huge fans that approach. Here in War Robots team community managers are all on their own. We, too, are decision makers, working both in players’ and product’s interests. We know many things others don’t. We have key product metrics on our hands while providing tons of data by ourselves.

For all of it to work, we have to stick to certain principles. In this article, I’ll attempt to outline a general framework that will help you not only finding common ground with a multi-million player base but actually turning your back-and-forth communication into a healthy process from which everyone can benefit.

Never underestimate how close hate and love are to each other

Negativity is hard to avoid. Even the abstract Best Game Ever would have to face hateful speech in social media over, supposedly, pettiest things. And the further the project goes, the more you’ll have to withstand.

After years working with different communities, I didn’t find anything better than to change the way I look at the hate itself. Let’s get back to the question from the beginning. Do haters actually hate?

There’s one paradoxical, yet game-changing insight:

Those berating you, care about your game more than anyone else.

They care so much, they just cannot contain themselves — and they aren’t to blame. Try putting yourself in their shoes. Would you be happy if the game where you spent your best years was going in a direction you don’t agree with? I definitely wouldn’t.

Let’s use a trite-yet-illustrative human relationships parallel. People change, and whether or not you and your partner will accept each other exactly as you became — on that depends if you will stay together. The difference is, with human-human relationships you can break up if things don’t work out. It will be painful, it will be hard, but nobody will die (most likely). But if you break up with your community, your game is usually doomed as there is no one else to bother.

Good news? You will never please every single side of your multifaceted player base anyway. So just accept this and go with the flow.

Go with the flow… but don’t stop questioning

Resiliency is the trait you have to develop as a CM. Take into account what I said above: people on the internet are unhappy, but only because they love your game, not because they want to make your life at work miserable.

Sometimes this will make them say horrible things. False things. You might want to call them out for that. To prove them wrong, to make them feel bad for what they’re saying, to literally demolish them…

Hush now, hold your horses. Before acting, take a moment and observe the situation through player’s eyes.

One general rule that will make a difference: never argue. You’ve been told this many times perhaps, but I’ll still emphasize it. Passive aggressiveness doesn’t cut it either — you won’t make the situation better if you try to fight back in any form. Even if you win, if you prove someone wrong — it won’t make anyone feel better.

Instead, listen. Ask questions. Understand what is the actual driver of people’s unhappiness.

When we are upset, we all struggle to find out what makes us feel this way. By getting to the core of the issue you can find that precious tiny straw in players rationale, pulling which will help you steer the conversation onto the constructive course.

Most importantly: when talking to players, ask for feels and causes, not the solutions. The solution is up for developers and designers to figure out, as only they have the whole picture on their hands. Your job is to expand this picture with your insights into players’ minds. The Mom’s Test (http://momtestbook.com) by Rob Fitzpatrick is probably the best book on that matter: clear, concise and helps to ask the right questions. I strongly suggest you read it.

When in doubt, check what data says

Empathy helps you to address the right things at the right time. But it works even better if it is supported by data.

Data allows us to translate everything from the language of a player to the language of a product. We don’t just come to the producer all like “uhh some people don’t like it so you have to change it”. Such claims only worth something when we can support them with a clear idea of who these people are.

How many of them there is — five or five thousands?
How long ago they started playing — a month or maybe three years ago?
How active are they? Are they casually running a couple matches per week or diving deep for many hours daily

…and so on. It is a huge mistake to believe that all players are the same — which, however, is widely spread. There’s nothing easier than to catch false positives from some small yet vocal group.

To illustrate that I often refer to the game called Wildstar. This game has an incredibly captivating concept: an MMORPG for hardcore players remembering the old World of Warcraft days. Believing that this is the huge market to cater to, its developers spent nine years making it. Nine freaking years!

Did it pay off? Hardly. Wildstar is still around and is pretty good… however it never got as big as it could’ve been (which is unfortunate). As it turned out, nostalgic players ready to grind away weeks straight just to get an access to the raid dungeon weren’t the biggest part of WoW community. They were the loudest.

And now, how do you pinpoint the difference between “loud” and “numerous”? You know the answer. Data.

We use stats provided by social platforms augmenting them by third-party services when native analytics are not enough. Social media mining tools free our hands when it comes to collecting general sentiment on new features and the situation as a whole.

Your community can provide with much more numbers you might initially think. Places like FeverBee blog might be a good place to start digging for inspiration.

Talk to your followers. Face to face

The bigger your community grows, the more you want to zoom out and observe it from the level of pure stats. But you should never stop approaching people personally: every show of humanity can go a long way.

With that in mind metrics must support your actions, not command them. You are working with people, and there’s a lot of weird stuff happening behind the scenes that you cannot explain just by looking at graphs.

Personal contacts with our players helped us catch and fix any issues before they started to show up on any metrics — like drastic metagame shifts or potentially game-breaking exploits. But these contacts aren’t just about building the intelligence network. It might be convenient to think about them this way, but there’s another huge reason to keep up with your pilots/summoners/tenno (however you prefer to call your lads and gents).

Here is that reason: you should always realize that your players are people. It sounds obvious, but when you’re operating the game with millions of monthly players it is easy to start seeing them merely as numbers in your dashboards. When quantity takes over, you might become completely desensitized to people’s feelings, and once it happens nothing I said above matters anymore.

Seeing players in person gives you a so much needed reboot and sets you back on track.

This April we invited a bunch of players to our office. It was a much less ambitious event than the one from two years ago (back them we invited top clan leaders to join the first ever official tournament), but scaling it down allowed us to keep things as informal as possible. High profile War Robots youtuber Adrian Chong came to us with a long lecture on the state of the game from player’s perspective, but that was the only “official” part of that event. After that, we were just hanging out and chatting. About everything. Literally.

And heck, that was incredible — insightful and… sobering in a way. Bringing players to our place allowed us to remind the development team that War Robots pilots are much more than suppliers of feedback and requests — but real genuine people for whom our game plays a huge role in their lives and whatever we do affects them a lot more than it might seem from our side.

Don’t bother anyone with your business

There are players who want to dig into inner workings. The most hardcore followers. They save entire worlds by bringing closed projects back to life (like it happened with Star Wars Galaxies or Asheron’s Call), help funding passion projects of immense scale on Kickstarter and so on. But they definitely aren’t the most people you meet on your Facebook or Reddit page. Most people prefer having a much simpler time in their virtual worlds. And that’s okay!

But that is also why I am strongly convinced that there’s no need to ever draw players’ attention on video games being a business. People have enough “business” in their lives already — why should we also bother them with ours?

It is always better to underpromise than underdeliver. If there’s even the slightest chance something won’t go according to plan, don’t make the announcement.

But if something goes wrong, resort to one simple trick.

Be honest

Honesty is your trump card. If you screwed up, admit it. Own it. Players’ trust is the most important asset of yours — if your audience trusts you, they will forgive many things. They know nobody is perfect.

It’s okay sometimes to say that “we did that to drive sales” when you push another monetized feature. People might get emotional at times, but they aren’t dumb. They will understand. But only if there’s a real trust between you and them.

Getting the trust back is much harder than building it from scratch. Figure out what kind of relationships you want to have with your players — and start cultivating them right away. Set the boundaries, the amount of attention you’re going to commit, then stick to the plan. Firmly. Every time you deviate, you lose your trust points.

Working with the community can go a long way. Remember though: if you are speaking to the community, you aren’t here to turn every dream real. First and foremost, you are here to understand what the dream actually is.

It is also up to you to keep providing everyone with great entertainment while protecting them from the nitty-gritty of making this entertainment tick. Find stories to tell. Build engaging activities. Or just give people ideas on how to deal with things they don’t like so they don’t hinder their enjoyment.

Whatever you do, just keep the communication going.

Help the game experience to extend to the outside world. This is something that is absolutely in your power. Bring people together. Help them create. If you manage to do it, it will bring absolutely beautiful results, transcending all the business-related discourse and turning your game into something truly magical.(source:gamasutra.com


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