I think another theory is that Blizzard doesn’t really understand community although they pay the notion of community lip service at their various Blizzcons. The official WoW forums seem like just an extension of the cacophony of the Bnet forums.

As a WoW subscriber I find little to no benefit by reading the official forums due to the low signal to noise ratio where the idiot trolls drown out the good posters. The forums seem only exist to be a mosh pit where players can blow off steam and indulge in anonymous bad behavior.

Blizzard could easily clean up their forums which would have the effect of creating an added value to their MMO but they don’t seem to care. They’d rather focus on important things like erecting that bronze orc statue out in the courtyard of their shiny new HQ in Irvine.

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

My favorite company for CS was City of Heroes. It was very light on the snark.

Blizzard is like the Wal-Mart SuperStore of MMOs. They distribute a product for the masses at a cheap price. However, it doesn’t stop other grocery stores from capturing their portion of the market share. Publix, a grocery store chain who prides themselves on customer service, does fine competing with Wal-Mart because they’re catering to a different market share of customers.

Community managers will be needed for the “Publix” MMO type game, where they cater to a market share of customers that want more interaction with the company/developer or customer service. I think that type of interaction counts for something, and has value. As long there is an MMO company that agrees, the community manager position will still exist.

In some strange way, I think there is a level of impartiality with a CM. Maybe it is more appropriate to say they do not have a partiality to the mechanics, but rather to the players. It isn’t just their people skills, but the very fact that they are not the one personally responsible for nerfing the crap out of your class and then telling you exactly why they did it and why they will probably do it again. A CM is concerned with you as an individual, and as a community. They want you to be happy and enjoy the game; and they will do their best to make your stay as comfortable as possible, even when telling you things you probably aren’t going to like. A developer is not concerned so much with the individual happiness of any given player, or even with the mood of a community, but more with the overall designer vision of the game world. Does it work? Where is it broken? They deal with the system and the mechanics, and deal with the people only in so much as they relate to that system and those mechanics. They’re not cold people, by nature, but their goal is not really about people and community. I have a feeling talking to God might be just as infuriating on some level, because there is no one else to blame if you disagree with His decisions. They are what they are, and they need to be that way because I see the bigger picture and that is what is needed. (Yeah, I guess I just implied that the CM is the “Son” in the MMO trinity, but I don’t care to carry the analogy far enough to figure out who the Holy Spirit is. It is a silly enough analogy already.)

In my cousin’s case, he would probably have not taken it personally if it had come through a CM channel. That is just a musing, and I could be way off beat. For what it’s worth, the guy has made me rather angry with some of his posts too, so yeah…

I’d argue that Community Management didn’t evolve as its own entity, but rather it has its roots in all of the areas you describe. At various times it has attempted to poach from the other fields (all of which were simultaneously evolving) to establish itself.

Which on an organizational level is problematic… if all of the Community Management functions can be defined as something that already exists in another area, can it truly evolve on its own, especially if the desired results and metrics are often achieved and usually already are provided elsewhere?

It’s not to say there isn’t a need for the functions, or that an overall thinking about behind-the-scenes structure isn’t needed, but it’s a zero sum game organizationally. The inherent limitations of the current iteration of CM positions and possibility for better solutions (i.e. EpicSquirt’s idea for a feedback/bug tracking mechanism) might preclude it from the very evolution you’re talking about.

(Yes I understand this part of the discourse is nerdy HR talk that only Rich and I like and is behind-the-scenes stuff that probably isn’t interesting to others. )

People have outrageous expectations of balance in WoW. I’d go so far to say that WoW is so balanced that the classes are no longer very interesting. I’d much rather have a game where the classes were not completely balanced, but each class got it’s chance to shine in specific situations. Balance is overrated.

Jeff :I’m just surprised, with all the dev response begging in WoW and other forums, that someone hasn’t come up with the idea for a 1-900 number to have the dev of the day answer your questions for 5.99 a minute.

Since I’d probably get a 70 year old pensioner in Florida telling me that X is ‘working as intended’ I won’t pay more than 2.99 a minute.