Best Community Relations Award - Game Developers Choice

How's that anything to do with "community relations"? Support and CRs are two different things. Community Relations are doing exactly what they're supposed to: communicate with the community when they have something to communicate. That is, pretty much nothing nowadays. So, I have to quote this:

Anet's CR is not really the best out there, but yeah, most of the times I believe the situation could have been so much better had the community been in turn a little better. That is, not so tragically delusional, more rational without absurdly disproportioned expectations - time schedules for in-development stuff? how's that any of your business? - , not to mention the embarassing ammount of lousy trashtalk toward CR and aggressive behaviour.

So basically, both the Community and the Community Relations have ample margins of improvement. None of them is doing any steps toward the other.

Exactly , couldn't have say it better ...I would add also some things they say that will be done and that suddenly disappear ( i.e polymock , HA map , codex arena content , ...)

Maybe you should read up on the reward they are nominated for before you jump to false conclusions?

Why are you apologising? If anything it should be ANET who should apologise for the state of CR which for an online game is appalling by any standard.

Silver

Ok, sorry.

There seems to be some confusion in this thread though, comments jumping from CR to Support as if these are interchangeable, cumulatively referred as "Anet". CRs have been admitedly rather weak in the last few years - again, tough, what are they supposed to do, when they have nothing to communicate? - , but I can't really agree with the fierce reactions about Support.

Most of the people I've seen complaining about "Support" during the years are those with little to no contact with reality whatsoever, expecting replies to their tickets and solutions in a matter of a couple of hours, egotic players that don't realize that Support cannot be entirely devoted to their own little problem.

Incidents happen, otherwise Support wouldn't even have a reason to exist. It's entirely possible to have glitches in a system - like the "payment fraud" mass ban last year - or false positives - like those farmers banned for botting.

Users involved in the "payment fraud" mass-ban were reinstated in 4-5 days - I know well, since I'm among those - and so were the farmers banned for "botting" we know about. With apologies and clear admission of their fault.

So, how do these incidents detract from the quality of Support in any way? People have been taken care of, their problems solved. Seems adequate to me. Sure, had these incidents never happened, the game experience of these customers would have been surely better. Support is not there to prevent problems, but rather to... support customers when issues arise.

Don't misstake quality of Support for quality of Service. Support is pretty much OK by any Internet standards, CRs could use some big improvements - but most likely they have less freedom of action than they'd like, and that's not their fault - , it's really the Service that doesn't work well nowadays, with too many issues and glitches that could have been prevented, leading customers to contact Support to have them solved.

There are ways of mitigating frustration that could prevent us from becoming enraged at Anet.

Granted, Anet has messed up a lot the last year or two, but the CR team could have done a better job of helping us understand why.

You know? Rather than lying to us or just ignoring us....they could have....explained things to us. Probably would have had a better outcome.

I completely agree, but they're probably not allowed to. Honesty and clarity hardly have a place in business, so they can tell us only what they're instructed to.

That's the management's fault, not directly Regina's or Martin's...

It is, they took the job.

Having been a mod on a different game forum there are certain things covered by NDA for legal reasons which cannot be communicated in forums.

Just my meager $0.02 FWIW

Well the Official Guild Wars Wiki was as good a place as any to post items that have approval of anet management. But again, they were told to no longer post there. Twitter apparently became the preferred method of fanbase communication and I doubt I'm the only one that thinks Twitter sucks.

Twitter is amazing. You get updates of all sorts of information and get to connect with many people you wouldn't know existed. The site is easy to use and has many applications for sites, browsers, phones, and on your desktop.

I figured this would come sooner or later.

Call me old fashioned but I like to read an actual newspaper now and then too...

I think this shows our age...To me Twitter=12-14yr old girls gossiping, not a relavent news outlet.

I am in-between on the matter, I think it's an ok outlet for person-to-person relations, but, as an actual corperate outlet it just seems unproffessional.

i agree with "person-to-person". izzy should have a (gw-related) twitter, lindsey should have a twitter, regina should have a twitter, but i don't think anet/gw should.

i personally dont see twitter being like "the source for guildwars news". they should use the official site ,that they kinda made, to post stuff(and everyone has acess to).

I see twitter as being the "omg guess what i jsut saw this cute guy/girl and they were SOOOO fablous OMG" thats my general opinion of twitter(that and its a site designed to help predators but thats a matter of debate). I really dont think they should post GW info on there. Keep it to the wiki and they should be ok...

Everyone has access to Twitter, just subscribe to their Twitter RSS feed. No account needed.

I never get any of those kiddy or retarded tweets, as I mostly follow respected anime bloggers and other people or organizations of interest.

Do not underestimate the power of the twitter. It may not sound professional for a company to use it but it is one of the better of ways getting GW2 exposure amongst the masses. Twitter doesn't "belong" to just tweens, Justin Bieber fans can suck it.

When were they told not to post on the wiki? I know Murdock stopped because her page became a spam fest and was no longer helpful, but I wasn't aware of a command from above (or anywhere) for their staff to stop posting there. It is my understanding that many ArenaNet staff, from Live Team members, Gaile Gray, Q&A members and occasionally community relations managers continue to use the wiki in some form or another (some more than others).

It's a myth that there is nothing for them to do to relate with the community; most of the work Gaile did when she had the role involved answering questions and discussing things with the community, regardless of whether they were being worked on or not. I recognise 100% of the 4th year anniversary content update to be attributed to FAQs from community talks with Gaile (something the current team chose not to do).

I'd say more but my last post was removed (without an explanation I can find) and I would probably just repeat things I said in the removed post so I'll stop on the final note that it's an insult to the gaming industry (or the people who decide the nominees for this category) that ArenaNet was nominated for Guild Wars 1. When you take away the GW2 content, you're left with the WiK campaign (which was very much player driven but also, I suspect, the reason for this nomination) and a massive failure to respond to community concerns, which should be their primary role.

I can't remember where I saw it but it was around the time of the WiK releases. I could be wrong so someone correct me if I am. Regina's last blog update (which was her way of saying what they were working on) was in May (the August updates on outages don't count.)

Apart from Gaile none of the other Anet employees still post on the wiki, unless it's an extremely rare update on some outage or something.

I think the French guy still posts notes on his Wiki page. Regina quit responding a few months ago and John never even started using the wiki.

If you are referring to the kind of communication Murdock used to participate in then I agree they don't use the wiki much these days. I do see Q&A members using the wiki to work around bug fixes and translation problems, I know Regina uses it to post comments on specific things like outages and the like.

John did use the wiki although it was before he was on the Live Team and mostly for conversation or trivial purposes (mostly anime discussions). There are other people on the Live Team and I know at least one person on the Live Team has been posting on the wiki as recently as the 27th of September
and that person's posts are game related. Nothing about the direction of the Live Team's future projects, but it's still wiki communication. It's not a formal feedback system or an organised discussion or discourse on the state of the game and it's community, but with the exception of the feedback name space, nothing on the wiki was ever organised.

^This^

...Not only have they abandoned Gw1 & the Wiki, but if you go look at Gw2's "Dev Tracker" (which NEVER ever has 1 single actual Developer like Flannum, Izzy, or even Collin amidst the names) ... you'll see quite possibly the most trivial responses anywhere in any game. It's all small talk. And the the few times there's serious answers, it's usually just them Quoting a fan who crafted a better statement FOR THEM. What DO they DO all day long???

These ppl have all the appearances of overpaid Twitter Bloggers acting as the completely-unnecessary insulation for a very hardy group of Heavy-Combat Brain-Surgeons. ...with the exception of Izzy, all the other Devs who do the actual work of designing the game and it's art... seem to elate in running at the mouth about new details & taking on real challenges. Eric especially... No one does community relations better than Eric b/c he has that enthusiasm level that no one else, not even Emily can seem to match. And Colin always looks so focused and hardcore so he gets big expertise Cred too. O'Brien gets cred for Authenticity and the fact he's not afraid to name his pain and rant about a self-desctructive industry. ..and anyone else I missed. It's really hard NOT to be fanboys for so many of these people, while at the same time being totally turned off and ridiculously jaded by the actual P.R. & Marketing lackeys underneath them. ...oh and some of the Fan Sites also get points for getting real interviews with these folks and asking the tough questions.

...SOOOoooo My theory here is that it's actually the Designers & the Community itself getting this nomination, not the CR & Marketing guys. ...So pat yourselves on the back! Ya'll earned it!

Linsey kinda got a raw deal when she came in b/c she kept getting complained at for so many of the things Izzy was responsible for. So by the time her own investments came full circle, she seemed too worn down by all the negativity preceding that big moment. ...She mighta been ill-prepared too. She admitted she was an artist originally, and let's be honest here, Artists have fragile egos nomatter how good they are at visualizing & Associative + Proportional "balancing" . Some of them never develop a thicker skin and are even a little bipolar at times (Any art-history minor could tell ya that much). And by the time she finally felt like coming back into the fray, the work schedule prohibited it... both times.

But I'm still optimistic and not ready to write it off as a tragedy yet...

The support was amazing for the first couple of years. It's still better than what you'll get with just about any free to play five and a half year old game, but it really shouldn't be in consideration for this award this year.

Just ask Aion players if it should be NCSOON Answer = NO!

lol @ Blizzard's nomination. ANet hasn't done well this year. We got WiK but the rest of GW:B is behind schedule and there hasn't been any notion as to why. Oh I get that the majority of the GW team is working on GW2 and its like they don't think we'll remember the absolute fail thats gone on this year when GW2 is released. >.< Ah well, I've all but switched to Atlantica Online and will remain there until more GW:B content is released.

SOE, I had two awful experiences with them where they forced on us completely game changing crap updates...I suppose anet has been less worse than them so far

This is some kinda of sick joke, right?

Or maybe its just a testament to the fact that CR sucks no matter where you are and Anet happens to suck less than most.