Monday, July 14, 2008

Time management and community presence

Right now MMO communities and social structures fascinate me. It's already pretty much a goal of mine to make a name for myself in Warhammer Online.
A question I have though is, how?

Sure there are the various feats, blagging rights and so on one can do. However from what I've seen, the most renown comes from a presence on the forums. Any kid can button mash, catch a break and kill the big bad monster. The boards however are where the vocal minority and really, the cream (or to steal a joke from Discworld, the stuff that floats to the top) of the crop is.

Where though does everyone find the time?

Brendan Perry (Munky) is a chap I know from way way back in Earth and Beyond. I got a bit vocal on those boards and made friends through the irc service run. It was all rather nice really. I never understood where Munky managed to find the time however to a) run the site, b) read everything, c) play the game and d) still have time for anything else.

Take the recent "Black Friday" for Warhammer. By the time Massively reported the thread on the Warhammer Alliance forum, and by the time I read it, the thread had become some 105 pages long. I missed a day on a hot topic and fell behind by 100's of posts.

Things like Eves Stellar Council and fansite boards represent, to me at least, an awfully large investment of time, one well worth making when you love a game. But I don't know where all that time comes from and still leaves some for the games we play.

As a result I look at the boards there at WHA and my own current City of Heroes. To all you board Gods, I salute you.
You have achieved presence and status. You have opinions and voices that can sway many. You post, you read, you help, you link and at the end of it all, you still find some time to play the game that was the reason you posted in the first place.

I want to be one of those guys, but I don't think I have the time skills for it.
That or I need a job doing it...

Hey Mythic, want another Community Manager?

4 comments:

arbitrary said...

I think they are looking for community team people - I considered it but not sure I can up and move to Ireland at the moment

Ardua said...

Oh they're certainly looking for GM's and billing people and now that I look at the page, QA testers.

http://www.manpower.ie/goa_jobs/default.asp

As it stands, I still admire bloggers like yourself and the others who find the time to bring the news to the community and form communities. I'm just wondering if in the end I want to give Physics a miss and move properly and actually into MMO community management.

Oh and bugger, they don't need any english CMs. Ah well

arbitrary said...

We could work at creating so much work for them that they need some more ;p

I'm sure a concerted effort would do it!

It's weird for me, the whole blogging thing. I didn't even read other WAR blogs until a week or two before I started Book of Grudges. I just always knew I wanted to share my in-game experiences, and in the end anticipation got me so het up I had to start it waaaay early. Plus the name came to me after Spinks suggested something similar. And once we had a name then we were totally going to start it up.

Perhaps naively I thought it would have an audience of 30-50 until the game went live..

Ardua said...

Blogosphere unite!

Get Arbitrary and Ardy jobs in GoA for later springboarding to Mythic!


...Hey it sounds like a plan to me.

With regards blogging I know how you feel. I've had this thing forever but rarely update mostly because I tend to be playing City of Heroes or doing other things, but since getting into reading Massively and from it the various WAR blogs I have been trying a leeeeetle bit.

I'm looking forward to watching the community there is now turn into the community that plays the game. It will be interesting to say the least.

Though a personal question if I may. EU or NA servers?

I'm going NA, but a little note, all employees of GOA get their accounts to EU servers paid for, a collectors edition box and any and all update boxes free.

(I did interview for the GM position, but you know, bastards haven't gotten back to me yet :P)