2002-10-18: Cynthe on Wearing Three Hats

Cynthe on Wearing Three Hats

Oct 18 2002 8:13AM

This was originally posted to Online Community Relations at uo.com.

In massively multiplayer games, “OCR,” or “Online Community Relations,” sometimes seems to experience an identity crisis. What exactly is the job of an OCR group?

My initial thoughts when I was asked to present this kind of info a few times here at the company was that it wasn’t exactly sensationalistic front-page reading, but as I tried to put together some notes about the functions of my group, it occurred to me that there really is a misconception about the role of OCR in many circles. It’s said that our job is to “talk to the players.” Granted, that’s a really big part of our job, but putting it that way doesn’t really encapsulate what the point of “talking to the players” is actually supposed to be. I’d say that, for the most part, community ends up wearing three main hats: we’re part Marketing, part Development, and part Support.

The basic idea behind marketing, in a nutshell, is to get people to think about your product as much as possible. For a single-player game, this could be completely served by things like TV commercials, magazine ads, online ads, etc. But an online game isn’t just a single product – it’s a service.

We want people to buy the box, sure, but that’s only the beginning of our relationship with that player. We want them to visit our website and boards, to stay informed, to log in to the game frequently, to attend fan events, start their own fansites, and just generally get involved in the world and community that is Ultima Online. In order to provide something that can engender this kind of interest and loyalty, you need a more one-on-one approach wherever possible – if not always directly from us, then from other players in the community.

So that’s where OCR comes in. We try to get to know the players, and to help them get to know each other, through various things like the official boards, fansite boards, email lists, IRC chats, etc. Through continuing to provide content that’s interesting, we hope to create incentives for people to keep coming back – both to us, and to the community that they’ve created.

But we’re not just about building community – we’re also about looking out for the best interests of the game, which makes us part Development too. To this end, we try to keep the dev team informed as to what the players are saying, and which issues we feel will elicit the most passionate reactions from the players. Most of the time, our job is to simply make sure that the development team makes decisions with full awareness of the current preferences and needs of the playerbase, but every once in a while, there’s an issue that we feel strongly enough about to try and influence development more directly. Of course, we also help to report new issues that we learn about through talking with players (although our QA group and the [email protected] mailbox is usually much more effective in that area).

And then there’s the third major role of the OCR team, which is Support. We don’t necessarily go into the game and address player problems directly, but if my group does our job well, then we can eliminate many of the support calls before they need to be made! This involves keeping the Playguide up-to-date, adding new information about new systems once they’re in the game, posting FYI notices about current issues and publish updates, and updating the patch message with some of the more prevalent known issues. This is probably the most visible role we have, and it’s also probably the most difficult one to keep up with. Our Playguide is well over 300 pages, and we’re always trying to keep up with the ever-growing tide of design documents as we work to announce all the new changes that are going into UO. We also have a limited amount of resources dedicated to major web updates (and we’re in the process of a full redesign for UO.com), so we have to be fairly frugal about how many new Playguide projects we attempt to embark on at once. And of course, I’ve been banging the drum for months now to get a bigger and better HTML-enabled patch message that will enable my group to get info more noticeably to players as they log in, ideally reaching all those players who don’t visit the website regularly… but as with everything else in the game, our programmers’ schedules aren’t exactly full of free time. I’m making progress towards that front, though!

So the end result of what we do? I’d say that if you boiled everything down to a few points, our biggest goals are to keep the game and the team visible in the online community, get people involved in what the community offers, make sure the players feel that they’re heard, and get them the info they need to feel informed. In a game that caters to as many different interests as UO, it’s not easy to try and be all that for all people! But we do have a lot of experience, and there’s never a dull day…

Till next time,

Amy “Cynthe” Sage Community Manager ORIGIN Systems

References: