Community Relations no longer needed?

I'm sorry but that just isn't the case.

Community realations staff are hired because they are the best people to communicate with the player base. They will turn programmer speak into understandable english, or a wall of text design thesis into a concise paragraph. Most importantly they understand the needs of a community through involvement, and are willing to advocate those needs internally.

Community staff are not hired to be spin-doctors. They are hired for their communication and people skills. They are absolutely crucial to the development of an MMO community, and I would challenge you to find examples that prove otherwise.

"we are currently working on gw2 and have no time for gw"
"I dont know the answer to that"


uhm.....do we really need someone to reiterate this to us every time we ask a question????

I think that we know the answer and if you have ever contacted support you know what you answer you get----a canned one, so our CR will probably just be a bunch of canned remarks until such time (if any) gw2 comes out ------

Yeah, I would agree. Some CR jobs have a HUGE PR slant, and the CR starts constantly arguing with people how great a patch is, how great the game is, etc... and it replaces objective discussion about the game. Do not want. Headaches for everyone.

I don't know whether it was part of her job description, but what irked me about GG was that she often was stepping over this boundry into spin doctor land, trying to rebut epic QQ threads at every point. Yeah half the stuff people complained about is stupid, but why should we listen to someone who isn't allowed to admit that Anet has flaws and must sing their praises every time?

Communication between players and devs is awesome, as is some level of explaining designer intention that isn't obvious to everyone else. But arguing on these boards as "viral advertising" is BS we don't need.

If you work for a company and don't protect their image you won't have a job for long.

Because spin doctoring and damage control is what "community relations" and "public relations" IS.

Damage control maybe, not spin-doctoring.

Nah it's about being able to tell 2/3rds of ya that you're an idiot in a nice way.

This week is for saying goodbye to the present team. Next week is about welcoming the new one. And it pretty clearly states that neither Andrew nor Gaile are leaving because they are being fired or kicked out, but because their lives have changed and they need a less intensive schedule. I never really heard from Andrew because I wasn't into PvP, but almost all the times I saw Gaile ingame talking to players was at about midnight her time. If I was working at 12:00am I might seek another position as well.

Of all the roles in any company, none is more vital than customer relations. There is no way any company would get rid of their CR department because of budget set backs. And we definitely need to have a CR team, otherwise there will be players and developers, and no communication and feedback in between.
Think of how much less knowledge we would have about GW2 if it weren't for the Gaile chats. It might not be a lot, but she addressed the issues players wanted to know instead of just general information.

I also believe communication is really important for a professional company. I've been loyal to Blizzard for many many years and a reason for it was their direct communication on their forums, next to their great games ofcourse.

Since the beginning of Anet and Guild Wars I always felt they had a low budget because of their rather limited number of communication employees.

I have to admit though, Anet reads the forums and listens to the community if it's reasonable. But they are so out of reach is the feeling I have somehow. Prolly me.

You’re kidding me JR. Do you even go to any other official game developer forum websites to see how they work? Obsidian, Bioware, and Lionhead studios (just as an example) do have direct with their fans. They have no middleman dealing with their fans. However, your right about some of the CR and PR position is sometimes needed to break down the language barrier. Nevertheless, these PR and CR people are professionals, and know how to deal with people in a very different manner then the developers. You might as well call them a publicist, because that is what they are in some ways.

Bioware, Obsidian and Lionhead also have excellent and well experienced community management staff.

Don't get me wrong, I am not arguing for Anet's system of gagging all of the developers at all. I think developers posting on forums is great ,provided they remain professional. That extra level of interaction can often increase loyalty and make community staff seem like less of a smokescreen measure.

However, community management is still entirely neccessary to both oversee that and perform the many other tasks involved in the job.

I am looking forward to meeting whoever takes over if this is the case. . Hopefully they will make an appearance on the forums next week to say Hi.