On the Subject of Community Relations

Kelly Brook

The former Guild Wars "Community Relations Manager" Gaile Gray recently moved on to another position at A-Net after several years service. She was (and, I suppose, still is) regarded with some affection by the majority of GW players who had encountered her either in-game, or on one or another of the major fansite forums.
Although not by me. I always found her to be really quite condescending and always giving "I can't talk about that" answers whenever a subject of any importance arose. She didn't seem to really contribute anything of value, other than simply being a human face to the company. But as such some people regarded her as some sort of celebrity and were forever name-checking her in forum thread titles, "Gaile: please read my self-important thread and then reply to make me feel special and popular". "Gaile: I'm going to address this thread to you personally so that other people will be impressed and think I know you". "Gaile: I have some dumb suggestion, but if I address it to you personally then you'll ignore all the other thousands of dumb suggestions and pay special attention to mine and then you'll be impressed and we'll become friends and then A-Net will employ me as lead designer on GW2".
Community relations in games is a strange thing, especially in MMOs where there really is a community of players that are brought together within a single virtual game world. When I started playing Vanguard towards the end of the final beta I was actually quite impressed by the amount of open dialogue between the developers and the players. Of course the game was a piece of shit, but that's not the point. I even posted on a Vanguard fansite forum expressing my high opinions of these free and open discussions and my hopes that they might continue beyond the release of the game.
Funnily enough they didn't, and these impressive lines of communication were almost entirely severed, seemingly intentionally. As if some corporate arse-hat had decided that the developers are not supposed to mix with the lowly players. Maybe it was intended to protect the company for some sort of legal issues or some other tedious shit.
Of course Sigil had plenty of other things to worry about at the time, like an absentee lead designer, a game that had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and was a piece of shit that no one wanted to play, and the Sony vultures circling overhead.
But the lack of communication with the community is by no means unique to Vanguard. Sometimes it feels like the developers are smugly assuming that it is proper and correct and clever to take a hands-off approach where they leave the community to look after itself, as if their intervention would somehow compromise the natural order. Like when nature documentary film-makers don't interfere with wild animals killing each other.
They're wrong of course. What you end up with is a lot of people acting like smug, spoilt little cunts and making the game world a lot less pleasant place to spend time for reasonable, decent players. I know developers and publishers are terrified of upsetting their darling paying customers, but they really ought to think beyond the individuals to the game world as a whole. While devs often report having banned X-number of botting gold farming accounts, it's much more rare for them to address more personal issues of scamming, abuse or people simply acting like dicks. And even when individuals are targeted for more "serious" offenses such as hacking or duping they often get a slap on the wrist like a 24 hour account suspension.
I think developers should take a lot more responsibility for policing the behaviour of players and should be a lot more draconian when it comes to dishing out punishments. Players have long since reached the stage where they know nothing bad will happen if they scam someone, or abuse them. You only have to browse a typical MMO forum to see what smug, self-important fucks a lot of them are and the sneering, holier-than-thou, self-centered attitude they often have when it comes to other players. I've previously suggested that some players seem to be incapable of feeling like they've advanced unless they've been personally responsible for someone else failing. MMOs become an endless game of one-upmanship and competition, even in PvE when really someone else's progress has absolutely no impact on your own. Unfortunately those more balanced and higher-functioning players who are content to play their own game often find their progress interrupted or otherwise hindered by people kill-stealing or finding pleasure in some other activity that only serves to spoil the game for others.
And that's the problem - by leaving these little fucks to play their own "fuck up the game for everyone else"-game, hands-off developers are allowing the whole game to suffer. For every one player acting like a dick, many others might get sick of the developer's lack of intervention and start looking for something more fun to do. For every shit-head the developers ban, many more might be attracted to the game knowing that the increasingly common antisocial behaviour is being kept in check.
But it seams many developers are much too self-righteous and smug to worry about the little people who pay their subs and fund the developers' salaries. They continue to pretend that the hands-off approach is clever and intentional rather than simply lazy and stupid. The closest they come to mingling with the commoners is to hire someone like Gaile Gray to patronise people while refusing to tell them anything or do anything at all of any value. And the players lap it up, smugly boasting to each other about "that time Gaile answered my question in-game" or "I was right behind Gaile in the conga". If only they realised how worthless that was in the bigger picture.