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I thought this may be of interest to some of our readers. I hope you enjoy! You can find the original article here.
Thanks to GW2 Romania and ArenaNet!We recently got a chance to sit down and have a chat with the ArenaNet Community Managers (Regina Buenaobra, Martin Kerstein and Stephane Lo Presti), and we’ve had an amazing while time doing it!
Please note that this discussion is not necessarily about the game itself or specific game mechanics, it’s more of an insight into their day-to-day activity as well as some of the high-level decisions regarding the game both before and after launch. You can check out the interview below:
GuildWars2.ro: No matter how you put it, Community Manager is still a very “open” job description. Can you describe what would be an ordinary day at work in the life of a Community Manager here at ArenaNet?
Stephane: That’s actually a tough question. We deal with a lot of different things, a lot of tasks. A typical day will probably start the same for all of us: checking emails for mostly urgent issues, sometimes when we don’t have a meeting straight from the beginning of a day we check the boards/forums and try to keep up with the activities from the last few days, and then – depending on our roles – there’s usually a lot of meetings. In my case, I also deal with the Wiki articles – so there’s always a lot of stuff to do.
Regina: Like Stephan said, we generally start by checking our emails. For me, I also check the social media accounts – Facebook, Twitter – to see if there’s anything that needs to be moderated. Now that Ruby’s on board, she’s taken a lot of the Facebook moderation so we have help on the social media side. Then throughout the day I’ll be working on ongoing projects, so I’ll be meeting with other people in the company about… things we can’t talk about right nowAs Community Managers, we also serve as “producers” for internal community/marketing projects – so there are a lot of moving pieces which means we’re meeting with lots of different people.
Martin: I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that whenever people think of Community Managers they always think we either play the game or hang out on forums all the time which is actually not true. We do a lot of stuff behind the scenes, as Regina mentioned: internal projects, we plan conventions, and so on. You have probably seen our Closed Beta site – we were involved with setting it up, and once it went live we were supporting it via social media. I’m leading the community team, so I spend a lot of time to actually meet with other departments, and come up with developing overall community strategies, so let’s say at least 50% of our workday we are doing things that players don’t see, sometimes they would never see it and sometimes they would just see the result of our work online. All in all it’s really hard to describe the regular day of a Community Manager, but that just makes it so cool, because every day has something new to offer.
GuildWars2.ro: You mentioned the recent Beta Registration. Martin, I know you were recently on GamebreakerTV talking about this as well and back then you said you were waiting on the feedback from the Press Beta event before you announced the registration. Now that this is over – 1 million people registered, wow! Was that number something you expected, was it higher or lower than your initial goals?
Martin: Well, numbers is something game companies don’t really like to talk about, but let’s put it this way: I can’t think of any other game that did 1 million registrations within a little bit more than 48 hours. You probably saw the video when we reached the 1 million – the whole studio was proud, I think it’s fair to say that those numbers blew us away.
GuildWars2.ro: How has the role of a Community Manager changed here at ArenaNet since the launch of the first Guild Wars game? For instance, back then Twitter, Facebook or Reddit weren’t even available, and now these are tools you use on a daily basis. Anything else that comes to mind starting from that when it comes to changes in your roles?
Martin: I started working on Guild Wars back in Europe in 2006, I came on board before the launch of Factions. I then used to work in Brighton until 2009 and then I came over here. It’s like you said: when you look back at 2006 it was very much the traditional way, where you have a fansite program and fan sites and you mostly talk to your player base through those “traditional” channels.
Facebook did hardly exist; Twitter was not really public, so all of this stuff just came up. Reddit was always kind of around in some form, but I think now Reddit became more of a popular source for gaming as well, not just for tech stuff, making it a nice crossover for tech-savvy people – all these channels did not exist. There is no “THE Community” because you have a community over there, another one here, people on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, on forums, people that just go to the guild website, people that like to make movies about your game, so there’s a whole bunch of different communities out there and we need to reach them all. There are so many more channels nowadays than there were 5 years ago to actually reach all those communities. So it’s a challenge but it’s also very rewarding because it gives you the opportunity not only to basically take a community and drag it to your channel but to also go out and talk to the communities wherever they are located.
Regina: On the social media front, I think Martin is exactly right about trying to go where the fans are. Obviously we can’t spread ourselves too thin and go to every single site, so with a small community team like this we have to go where this makes sense so Facebook makes sense, and Twitter makes sense, because there is just a huge amount of people there, there are both very mainstream. A lot of people who go to those channels would never go to fansite forums, they want to get the news from official source, so that’s why they participate there. Over the past year and the half we’ve seen that the Facebook community for Guild Wars 2 has grown a lot, and there is a group of really hard core fans on Facebook that only participate there: they don’t go to post on fan forums or blogs, but they are still very engaged with Guild Wars 2, answering questions to new community members on Facebook, and getting involved. It’s a really exciting thing to see because we are reaching out to new fans that don’t go to traditional channels.
GuildWars2.ro: What is it that you believe sets Guild Wars 2 apart from its competition, and how successful are you in relaying that info to the player base out there? Going a bit further on this – with Guild Wars 2 being so different in so many regards, do you find it more difficult to get your message across to the people showing interest in the game?
Regina: I think that people who are familiar with traditional MMO games might be more informed about Guild Wars 2 than people who only play console games for example. There is definitely a lot of education going on because Guild Wars 2 is so different from the original Guild Wars, and Guild Wars 2 is doing now things in the MMO space in general. I think what helps a lot is that many people in the community are very well informed, so with any information that we release – they are out there helping us just get that information across.
Martin: It’s definitely a challenge. I think Regina has a really good point in saying that the hard core MMO audience is probably aware of Guild Wars 2, but even then, when we go outside of our own “ecosystem” (things such as GW2Guru, German and French Guild Wars 2 fansites and the like), we see a lot of people misunderstanding certain concepts of what the game is supposed to be because this stuff is really different. Sometimes it is kind of tricky to explain it to people who have been brought up with a certain concept of how an MMO is supposed to be, because MMOs usually copy each other over and over again – and we’re not doing this. They try to deal with some classic MMO concepts and in most cases that just doesn’t work. The one thing I noticed (and I hope to keep noticing the further we get into having Beta tests) is that most of the time when somebody actually plays the game, it takes them just 5-10 minutes to “get it” – they play, and then they naturally play with all the systems which are in place. So once people start playing the game they go like: ”Oh! This is what you meant, it makes total sense!”
Just look at the press coverage we had back in February when press were allowed to take videos and talk about their experience and show it at the same time – I hope that reaches out to more and more people, and they actually get to see what we mean when we talk about the game.
GuildWars2.ro: Are there any plans for regular meetings/interactions between ArenaNet staff and game fans? We know you had AMA sessions on Reddit and IRC chats on Guild Wars 2Guru – do you plan to expand on that or even have anything ingame similar to “The Frog” in Guild Wars? How about periodic offline events in Europe and/or the US?
Martin: We know that people like talking to our Devs, but having said that our Devs are currently extremely busy working on the game and taking them away even for just a 15-minutes-interview means interrupting their workday. So we need to find a balance between the need of the community where they want a direct connection with the developer and actually getting that time from the developer.
It’s not like we as Community Managers want be the only face for Guild Wars 2, it’s more that we are there to protect our developers – they have a game to make and we want to make sure that they can do it. Now, about in-game interactions like we had in the past – we are a small team and we hope that Guild Wars 2 will be even more successful than the original Guild Wars. So we have to see where we can reach the most players.
Having something like an in-game gathering is hard to do – it’s always very chaotic, the chat is spammed and crowded which means it interrupts the gameplay of some other people and it really hard to see questions and answer them because they are so fast and furious, so while it might be nice to actually see a game developer or Community Manager in game, the actual information you get out from something like this is probably not that much, especially when you compare the information you get out of it to the time you invest in something like that. The bottom line here is that there are probably smarter ways to do this, for example a moderated IRC chat, or having a Skype call – there are ways to get more out of our time, so we need to maximize the exposure we get because of time restrains.
We would probably attend more conventions like we did in the past, and maybe one day we can have our own convention.
GuildWars2.ro: Do you know what the top 5 national gaming communities in Guild Wars are when it comes to player base numbers? Do you think these will remain somewhat the same in Guild Wars 2? Are you seeing any other languages/nationalities growing in fan base numbers at this time?
Regina: We’ve always had really strong European – especially German and French – player base.
Stephane: We don’t really look at these numbers. It is really difficult to say how it’s going to be in the future because, as you said in the beginning, Guild Wars 2 is a different game and we certainly hope that the original GW community will be there with us as well. There will of course be more people on top of that original player base, so this is probably something we’ll see more clearly when the game is launched.
Martin: If you look at population spread and our big gaming markets in Europe, you clearly see Germany and France out there, also there are a couple of Eastern European markets as well, Poland is a growing gaming market (we have a pretty strong Polish community), Russian is also a growing market. Hopefully, we will be very strong in all of these markets… and the Romanian market as well
GuildWars2.ro: Any plans to create more localized versions for the game (even if they are not fully voiced, but only subtitled)? Will that decision be based on community sizes? How about putting together a platform which would allow the community to contribute to those translations?
Martin: This is a question which goes into a territory that is not really our level of expertise, because we’re talking about business decisions – decisions like which languages games will be translated into are based on market analysis, size of predicted sales and things like that. The community-driven effort you mentioned to translate the text and just have localized subtitles for several other languages is definitely a nice idea, but once again, it’s not something that we would be able to tell you whether it will happen or not.
GuildWars2.ro: With Guild Wars 2 having a declared e-sport approach when it comes to PvP, what kind of events/tournaments are you planning? Will you get involved in existing circuits (i.e. Intel Extreme Masters) or will these tournaments be internal-only, like you had done with Guild Wars in the past?
Martin: I can’t give you any definite statement on this. We will definitely have automated tournaments in-game, just like we used to have in Guild Wars 1. I will be looking into existing e-sports circuits, but this is something that might sound so easy yet there are always business decisions and long negotiations behind it, and we have to make sure we have the appropriate tools to give to a third party; also, if they need something else it would most likely be something which needs additional development time. So, while it sounds like a very straight forward question, I can’t answer this right now – the only thing I can say is that we take the e-sport aspect very seriously.
GuildWars2.ro: How will cross-server account transfers work? What are the limitations/restrictions you’re currently considering for this? Also, will guilds be transferable between servers or will they be cross-server by design?
Martin: We’re not ready to talk about this yet.
GuildWars2.ro: Are you planning to split servers by certain server types (e.g. casual, harcore PvP, role-playing, etc) to allow players to join a community of “like-minded people”, or do you want to avoid such labeling in order to keep the player base as homogenous as possible?
Regina: I don’t think we’ve talked about splitting servers by community type.
Martin: If you look at the way that our game works it doesn’t really make sense because we have no need for PvP servers, because there is no PvP apart from the one in The Mists, which is outside of the actual game server. Nobody is ever forced to play PvP if they don’t want to, so there’s no need for PvP servers in the traditional sense.
Moving on, I’m really not a big fan of dedicated role-play servers because enforcing roleplaying rules – based on experience (not just from me but from other community managers as well), it’s something that is really hard to do and creates a lot a customer support overhead. For instance, there can be very heated debates about what is a suitable name or not, a little thing which is then taken into the customer support. Having said that, I think what happened in the past, and I’ve seen this in the past with other games I played, is that at some point people just decide that “hey, Server X is what will be the unofficial role-play server!” and then all the role-players just gather there and make sure that they have a place to share their experience. I think that’s actually the way that it should be: communities organizing themselves.
GuildWars2.ro: Since similar approaches have been very well received in the industry, do you intend to offer players the option to create their guilds and choose their preferred servers *prior* to the game launch, and have them ready to go on launch day? This is *Guild* Wars, after all.
Martin: That’s something we haven’t talked about yet.
GuildWars2.ro: With the recently announced Closed Beta Events, are there any plans for a “real” Open Beta (or Open Beta Weekend) event prior to the game launch?
Martin: We will not have an Open Beta, what we will do is Beta weekend event. It’s a good opportunity to define what Open Beta is, because I actually have a different definition for it: the real definition of an Open Beta is one where you put your client out there and everybody in the world can download it and play all content, non-restricted in any given timeframe. That’s not what we will do. We will do specific Beta weekend events where there will be invites sent out in one form or another, but we will never have a Beta where everybody on the planet will be able to just grab the client and go play the game. It’s certainly a question that shows up a lot, and there’s a definite misunderstanding regarding the terminology.
GuildWars2.ro: Are there any new developments concerning the official Community/Fansite program?
Martin: My recent blog post [link] about our Community philosophy should cover this topic in more detail.
GuildWars2.ro: In the end, do you have any words you’d like to send out to the Romanian community out there?
Regina: I’d like to thank the Romanian fans for all their support over the last few years, first with Guild Wars and now with Guild Wars 2!
Stephane: Thanks to all the fans in Romania! Even if we don’t talk with you directly, we really like you being a part of the larger community like everyone else, and we’re looking forward to seeing you ingame!
Martin: It’s kind of tricky to talk to you guys directly since none of us speaks Romanian.Daniel could probably draft us a sentence or two but unfortunately he’s really busy, so – thanks for all the support we get from you guys! We’re always glad to see people running up-to-date fansites, so keep up the good spirit out there!
