GW2 Announces Official GW2 Forums!!

[Bella]

New ArenaNet blog post by Martin Kerstein talks about community building and plans for the creation of official GW2 forums!

You can find the post here: http://www.arena.net/blog/building-community

For those that prefer to stay on-page:

Building Community

By Martin Kerstein March 15th, 2012

more on: community

Community is an essential part of every online game. As our Global Brand Manager Chris Lye likes to say, “We’re not a video game company, we’re a community building company. We just happen to have one of the coolest ways to build a community, which is through a video game.” Community is at the heart of all of us here at ArenaNet; it was at the core of the philosophy of Guild Wars from the beginning. And, like ArenaNet is innovating and changing the genre by thinking boldly (and going boldly where no game development studio has gone before), we’re always coming up with new ways to work together with all of our passionate fans out there.

Let me point out the two biggest changes in the ways we interact with our communities between the original Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 right up front: we will have official forums, and we will not have a traditional fansite program.
This does NOT mean we will no longer support all our dedicated fansites out there! We will continue to work with fansites as we have done in the past, but in addition to “traditional” fansites, we will also provide a platform to support smaller, specialized communities/projects that would never have had a place in a traditional program, like blogs, machinima, etc.

Let’s take a step back and look at how community, gaming and community management have evolved over the last 6 years. When I started working on Guild Wars back in 2006, traditional fansites and forums were the main hub for fans to gather. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter were in their infancy.
A lot has changed since then.

One thing that is very important to keep in mind: there is no single “community.” It’s not a monolithic, unified demographic, but a many-faceted, living, breathing ecosystem. You will find communities on Fansites, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, guild sites, and lots of other places.

The vast majority of these communities will never visit fansites or official forums, and may not even resemble the traditional notion of a gaming community. As an example: you will find a lot of people on Facebook who play games, both console and PC, but would not necessarily consider themselves “gamers” in the traditional way. However, they are still passionate and can be valuable contributors to the overarching community.

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The challenge for modern community management is to be able to reach out to all those different communities and help them with their specific characteristics and needs. So our goal is to use a scalable, inclusive ecosystem instead of a rigid fansite program that doesn’t scale well and excludes large parts of the overall fanbase.​

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To achieve our goal, we also need our fans in all the different communities to be proactive. By working together, with you bringing amazing and great community projects to our attention and us highlighting them for the broader community, we will be able to build something great and lasting that will benefit each and every one of you. To help facilitate this, we will give you tools like our wiki and specialized forums that allow our passionate players to freely collaborate and share assets and ideas.

This brings me to the second point I want to address in this article – our community philosophy.
Our ultimate goal is to create an environment that is respectful, welcoming, inclusive and friendly. We want to create a global community where people will feel at home, and an environment that will foster both creativity and collaboration.

The main goal is to be inclusive, not exclusive, to encourage collaboration between communities, and to generate an atmosphere that is helpful, friendly, and above all, respectful. There is an unfortunate tendency in some online communities to encourage behavior that is detrimental to the fun of a lot of players by allowing a rather toxic and unwelcoming atmosphere. We want to set a new standard and make the Guild Wars 2 community a mature, friendly, helpful and inclusive one that is recognized throughout the industry as being so. With that goal, we will ensure that both our game and our forums reflect our standards, and we will evaluate our support for communities based on the standards they enforce upon themselves.Hopefully with this article we could shed light on some of the questions we have seen popping up here and there in the past. This is an exciting time, and all of us here at ArenaNet can’t wait to build an awesome community with you.

We’ll see you in-game!

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I really liked this part "The main goal is to be inclusive, not exclusive, to encourage collaboration between communities, and to generate an atmosphere that is helpful, friendly, and above all, respectful. There is an unfortunate tendency in some online communities to encourage behavior that is detrimental to the fun of a lot of players by allowing a rather toxic and unwelcoming atmosphere. We want to set a new standard and make the Guild Wars 2 community a mature, friendly, helpful and inclusive one that is recognized throughout the industry as being so."

There they (ArenaNet) go again, setting high standards and being leaders of the mmo community! I just love how these guys think!!

We here at Guild Wars 2 Stratics completely agree that community is a most important part of the mmo experience and look forward to the debut of the official Guild Wars 2 forums!!

We would like to thank ArenaNet and Martin Kerstein for this informative article!

Bella