Some thoughts on the Respawn thing

This is a very long thread, which breaks twitter clients. I wanted it to be a thread because that’s how I think, but for accessibility reasons, I’ve cross posted this on medium. You’re currently reading that version.

Please note I wrote this for Twitter, and have done 0 editing to make it better for Medium, because I wasn’t interested in writing a blog post. I’m all for accessibility, so copy pasting my document in here is easy enough. I’ve also added an image description for an image of text. If I’m missing any accessibility affordances, please let me know and I’ll edit!

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Alright, let’s talk about this!

First up, some juicy *CONTEXT*: Respawn made a poor monetization decision that locked highly desirable skins behind unreasonable amounts of spending. Playerbase calls them out, Respawn issue an apology and announce changes.

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Everyone goes home peacefully and happily. JUST KIDDING.

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Let’s have a quick side bar and identify the villain in this story (next to toxic masculinity and systemic entitlement in the gaming community): it is capitalism! Yay, everyone’s favorite villain.

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Apelegs is “free to play”, meaning they gotta get their money from voluntary, optional spending. I will show how this sets up an adversarial relationship.

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In a perfect world it would go like this: players REALLY dig the game, love the time they spend with it, pay Respawn proportionally: not just out of the goodness of their hearts, but as a sort of tip with cosmetic benefits.

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This is the story Riot told in the beginning of League, and from what I can tell it wasn’t a lie. Here’s the thing: capitalism will fuck that up.

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You gotta have business charts that go up and to the right. So you invest and you gotta earn more as well. That’s cool as long as your player are multiplying like particularly horny rabbits.

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Eventually you run out of people. Or people move on. Add to that that a maturing f2p game naturally brings in less money. People move on to the new hotness or just spend less.

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You *could* keep releasing new titles and hoping they’re all super successful. But that goes directly against the greatest strength of gaming as a service: loyalty.

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“I feel good about my purchases in THIS f2p game because I’ll have them foreeeeeever” (they’ve never shut down an f2p game you know). So actively rotating through titles: not a solution.

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Growing your audience is out. You could try to convert non-paying players into paying players (this generally does not work), or you could try to get more money from paying players. Ding ding ding!

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The ways to do this are varied, but the method that most f2p games settle on involves some combination of dark design patterns that we know create compulsive behavior.

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They introduce incentives to buy, make you feel like you’re constantly missing out on value, and remind you of what you don’t have. They also show you how everyone else is buying stuff.

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Quick aside-inside-this-aside (remember this is going to be a thread about community management): Apelegs uses the most benign version of this: They only sell cosmetics, not functionality, comfort, or power.

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So you could start from a place of no empathy: what the fuck is wrong with these gamers? After all, they’re getting a game they can play FOR FREE. As long as they like.

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A game that’s updated free of charge. A game that maintains its servers for online play, free of charge. If the skin’s too expensive, just don’t buy it?

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But that’s not a good place to start. People (and I use that term loosely) who rage about this kinda thing feel compelled to purchase cosmetics by design:

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Through peer pressure, the aforementioned compulsion loops, and because their identity is wrapped up in being all about this game and having the latest stuff. Remember, we designed it that way.

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Side-note: you could just not make an f2p game, as a dev. You could make a boxed product, charge $60, and make your player happy.

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But you sure as fuck can’t make a game of the breadth and depth and sheer amount of content as, say, League or Fortnite as a pay-once boxed product. And that’s who you’re up against.

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Yeah it’s predatory as fuck to design monetization that hooks into the reptile brain compulsion loops we all have, but it can feel like your only chance of going up against the giants. Anyway.

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The players who are susceptible to this tomfoolery don’t feel the skin is optional. They must have it.

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That is a problem in their heads, yes, but it’s a problem we created and designed and nurtured because it pays our wages.

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What does it feel like for a lifestyle Apelegs player to not be able to afford the latest set of robot hats? (They don’t actually sell robot hats, the fools! Instead they sell disappointingly named robot skins like “war machine”.)

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It feels frustrating and painful and annoying. Because it’s designed to feel that way. You also come at it from a place of justified entitlement: I want to give you money in exchange for the thing. Just give me the thing. Don’t make me roll dice.

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Alright, so: capitalism and the lack of regulation around some of the most egregiously bad manipulation is the villain behind the scenes, the “root cause” if you will.

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We all live in this shitty system, and as much as it sucks for players, it sucks so much worse for devs. Don’t get me started (he said 27 tweets into the thread). Actually do, because I’m going to talk about it now.

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When you’re a dev for a game-as-a-service, much like the game, you’re Always On. But you’re paid for 8 hours. You also get paid to write code, put skeletons into shouty mens, or do whatever it is that narrative designers do (jk I love you all).

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You do not get paid to get yelled at. Fun fact: not even community managers get paid to be yelled at, because that’s a fucking dehumanizing notion.

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But in effect, we all have to get yelled at for the crime of being A Dev In Public. And yes many companies do treat community managers like they get paid to be yelled at, but that’s a different rant.

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Working on an f2p game can feel like being on a never-ending grind in a race against obsolescence. You have to make changes for Engagement but also Change Is Bad so you’re fucked either way.

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I’m gonna say a few bad things about community management now and I just want all my community managers out there know that I love them and that they are valued and they deserve so much better and none of this is to badmouth them.

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That said: Community management. What even the fuck is it?

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We don’t know how to measure successful community management. We don’t know what works, what doesn’t.

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We have a few Holy Scripture level anecdotes (ever hear about Harley Davidson in the 90s? If you just rolled your eyes, congratulations, you work in community management) but other than that it’s all pissing about in the dark.

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(And I should hasten to add I last worked in community management in 2012, so maybe we’ve figured it all out since then? But probably not.)

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What is the community manager’s job, theoretically? Well, it is to be the liaison between the people who play the game and the people who make the game: inform players about what’s coming and why, and carry the most pertinent feedback back to the developers.

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The developers, who live far from civilization in their log cabins with no internet access, unaware of this alien notion of a “video game player”. Why yes, they must have the community manager read to them out loud the most upvoted post on a forum.

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Turns out what players really want is to talk directly to the people making their games. A community manager inserting themselves in that process is a value negative proposition. It makes it less engaging.

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And have you heard of this Riot Games place? They were *really* successful, and they had devs shitpost in the forums before the game was even out! (Anyone remember Jesse Perring? Pepperidge Farm remembers.)

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Here’s where I’d dive into a sidebar on cargo cults if this thread wasn’t already approximately 41 tweets too long.

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And yes of course there’s lots of incredibly valuable and important things community management does, when done well. It sets a tone and puts player sentiment into context (“yeah 6000 people upvoted this but that’s like 0.00004% of our player base”)

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Like legit the best thing Riot’s community / player comms team puts out are the patch notes. Still best in class in contextualizing change, getting player buy-in, and creating community advocates.

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But League would probably be fine with shitty patch notes, right? Maybe slightly less fine, but surely not *measurably* less fine.

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Legitimately great community work isn’t going to make or break a game. At best I guess it can accelerate the trajectory a game was already on. And I’m basing this on all of zero science, because that’s how much there is.

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So: f2p is the de facto standard for lots of types of games. Direct player to dev contact is the golden standard for eNgAgEmEnT.

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Engagement, positive sentiment, player trust, whatever you wanna call it, translates into $$$. Therefore you must speak to the community and, worse, listen to the community.

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(I feel the need to go into a rant on the positive sides of all this here, and fuck it it’s not like this thread could get any more meandering, so here we go.)

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At the risk of engaging in toxic positivity, I fucking loved interacting directly with players when they weren’t, you know, asshats and dicks. Or manbabies. I still get thoughtful messages I love replying to.

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To be clear: no one at Riot ever told me as a designer that I must go out there and speak to reddit or the forums (lol).

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There was some positive reinforcement when you did it well or a lot (or sometimes both), and there was definitely some amount of peer pressure when you see your colleagues shitposting with the best of them.

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In my case, sure, I came from community, and the expectation was that I would continue to engage. And boy howdy did I engage.

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There were leaderboards for most forum posts. I was usually near the top. I even once won a Reddit award for Favourite Rioter on the Subreddit. (Wonder if that’s still good).

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And let me tell you, when things go right? Holy fuck does it feel good. It is the greatest privilege in the world to do something you love and then have that love reflected back onto you from thousands of human beings.

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Really, when I tell people what I do for a living their eyes light up. How many people can say that?

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The reason I loved doing it is because I myself was a Very Online Gamer before that was even a thing. I reached out to lots of devs of games I loved and barely ever got anything back.

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(In 2007 I wrote a gushing fan email to Phil Steinmeyer, one of the designers on the original Tropico, and he got back to me and was very sweet. Tropico 1 is still the gold standard for city builders. Don’t @ me.)

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I came to League directly from War3, where I’d seen Tom “Zileas” Cadwell post about design thinking on the Blizzard forums until Blizzard told him to stop, having never met a foot they didn’t immediately want to put a bullet into.

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The pitch of “do this, but the entire company has your back and everyone around you is doing it too” sounded too good to believe. It was true.

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But it was also easy for Riot anno 2010 or so: no one else had been doing it, and the game was doing gangbusters. Other than the EU servers constantly going down, I guess.

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Fast forward to this our hell-year of 2019 and it’s now expected from devs to be out there mingling with their players directly fielding questions and absorbing anger. I worry about how much we contributed to this.

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But why is there so much anger? There’s a bunch of reasons. Let’s start with the benign ones.

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So in 2003 when I was super into Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (the original TFT), I could go to the forums and yell at Blizzard how stupid OP militia rush was, but no one would talk back to me (so I yelled at other players).

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Today, you can talk directly to the person who made the latest skin for your fuckable robot, but so can a million other folks with Opinions.

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(Look, Pathfinder FUCKS. This is canon. They confirmed it in an interview with RPS: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/04/apex-legends-preview-titanfall-battle-royale/)

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How do you stand out? By being louder. But why is it that important to you to stand out in the first place? (Narcissism aside)

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Well these games, the LoLs, DotAs, Plunkbats, and Apelegs aren’t “play this over a leisurely weekend and move on” games. They’re ~*~LIFESTYLE~*~ games. You’re encouraged to identify as a LoLer, an ape leg, a plunk bat.

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That’s great for loyalty and makes the value proposition we talked about earlier feel more compelling — after all I’m spending $20 to play dress up, but I’ll use the costume in 2000+ hours of gameplay. Value!

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It also means if something about your lifestyle game sucks, it hurts a lot more. You can’t move on. The sunk cost fallacy and the infuriating loyalty of your friends keep you stuck.

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So you really need the devs to listen to you and undo this THRICE DAMNED CHANGE that will stop you from ever feeling joy again. No, seriously, I get it.

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How do you achieve that with a million other players also vying for attention? By being the loudest, rudest, most unignorable asshat in the room.

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And what happens next? Does the community kick you out and say, we don’t use that kind of language in here? Naaah. You get attention and people joining in your chorus.

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That’s the other way you can be heard: by all singing from the same sheet music. The repetition in these angry threads isn’t (just) people refusing to read comments before posting. It’s ritual. It’s ceremony.

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Before we go into the other reasons why gamers can be so horribly toxic and hostile, let’s look for a second at the other end of that megaphone of shit: how is it received dev-side?

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Well it’s listened to because EnGaGeMeNt! We had a thing we said a lot at Riot: I’d rather have an angry playerbase than an apathetic one. Again, that came from a genuinely good place:

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If they’re angry, it’s because they CARE. It’s GOOD that they care. We can fix the thing they’re angry about and they’ll go back to being good friendly players.

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(Spoiler warning: you already know they won’t)

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It also feeds into the fallacy of quantifiability. Oh boy, this one’s a doozy.

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At Riot we used to joke about our PO being Reddit. A PO is a product owner, the person responsible for setting direction and prioritization for a product.

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We joked, but it came from a very real place. The reason reddit had such an outsize impact on what we decided to work on was the very same Reddit feature that helped kill the original League forums: the upvote button.

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If there’s one thing a game dev loves more than unattainable beauty standards in suspiciously young female protagonists (I KID I KID DON’T KILL ME) it’s qUaNtIfIaBLE dAtA.

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Sure the playerbase is upset, but are they 13 upset? Or are they 7 upset? Give me NUMBERS damnit. Quantify the unquantifiable!

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Have you ever heard of “sentiment analysis”? It’s one of those newfangled things that sic an AI on a forum post and then the AI shits out a number describing how angry/happy/horny/constipated the poster is.

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They come from the same place. “Man, there sure are lots of voices. I’d much prefer numbers I could add up.”

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(Btw, it’s really easy to make a racist sentiment analysis algorithm without really trying: http://blog.conceptnet.io/posts/2017/how-to-make-a-racist-ai-without-really-trying/)

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So Reddit feeds that addiction with its upvote system. It gives devs a false sense of certainty; no matter how often we repeated how small a fraction of the player base reddit is, their voice was the loudest in the room.

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(It amuses me to no end when players accuse Riot of not listening. The exact opposite is the case: they listen too much. Or did! I haven’t worked there for nearly a year now.)

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Anyway, the strategies players gravitate to to be heard work because devs love numbers. And if you give a hamster a food pellet every time it presses the “I WILL MURDER YOUR CHILDREN” button, it will keep mashing away on that button.

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Additionally, a thing like the Apelegs controversy is what my former colleague and shitposter supreme Ryan “The_Cactopus” Rigney calls the 48 hours of gamer hell: https://medium.com/@RKRigney/the-3-phases-of-any-online-reaction-to-a-video-game-company-screwup-ed41082a5d10

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It is An Event. Like a disaster. It’s compelling to watch! And here’s a very fucked up confession: whenever there’s a real world disaster and its impact is still unclear, there’s a voice in my head that hopes it’ll get bigger.

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It’s a very fucked up voice and I tell it to fuck off, but I gotta assume that’s a very human impulse. Bigger is more exciting, which is more entertaining.

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And look, here’s a disaster of your own making which you can actively make worse! Fuck, you think maybe we can get someone fired?

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I’m not saying that’s the active thought process in everyone, but I do think those tendencies exist.

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So those are the benign reasons why people are so loud and angry and pile on and send you lovely pictures of your head photoshopped onto execution victims. (This one happened to me!) (it was a poor Photoshop effort).

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The less benign ones are our friends toxic masculinity, entitlement, and other hell reasons why Steve Bannon and co. saw gamergate as the most promising trial run for their online radicalization campaign. They weren’t wrong. It worked.

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“You’re special. You deserve the best treatment. Saying extremely rude things is not just cool and badass, it’s also a really fun contest you can win by being the most edgy, the most outrageous.”

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Those are the brain imps tons of Online Gamers™ have. They go some way towards explaining, but do not excuse, their behavior.

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And on the other side? You have devs who will think of being available and eNgAgInG online at the very least as a positive move for their careers. Again, I came to it from a place of genuine love, and so do many others…

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… but it is made clear that being available online is good for you, or worse, that not being available online is bad for your career. And the stuff Reddit hates on? Often the devs disagree with it themselves.

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If there was a non-harmful way I could let gamers just sit in on arbitrary meetings of unwitting gamedevs I’d do it just to show you all how much DISAGREEMENT there is in gamedev.

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Any given feature you hate? I guarantee you there was someone on the dev team who hated it worse, and fought against it and lost.

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And that’s fine! Compromise is how ridiculously labor intensive work such as videogames gets done. But once the call has been made, it becomes very hard to voice that disagreement with nuance.

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(Nuance requires at least a hundred tweets.)

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You don’t wanna throw your team under the bus. They either convinced you to get on board with the feature or you accepted that you were outvoted. Once it’s done, there’s a party line.

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And again that’s not malicious or evil or being a shill, that’s just the reality of collaborative work.

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So that monetization scheme? Having ZERO insight into Respawn (I have a friend who works there but we rarely speak and haven’t spoken about this at all) I guarantee you someone HATED it and fought it.

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But for whatever reason it was decided that it had to be done, and now you’re on reddit and someone is throwing obscenities at you for defending this feature you didn’t want. And you can’t throw your team under the bus by saying “I didn’t like it either”.

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(I’m not saying that’s the case in this one specific case! For all I know the two Respawn employees who did post on that thread might have been 100% on board or else they might have been toeing the party line in frustration. I just don’t know.)

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So we have gamers who have been catered to by companies looking for the ever elusive engagement, whose bad opinions have been amplified by upvoting systems that feed on outrage…

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… up against devs who feel they have to be there, defending features they may not necessarily believe in, and who, oh have I mentioned this yet, are up against an ever-present psychic maelstrom of online abuse?

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Because that’s what being a public dev is: a sort of background noise of “fuck you” and “you are bad at your job”. It may happen once a month if you’re lucky, it may be a daily thing, but it’s always there.

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It’s death by a thousand cuts, and the only fix is to not be public with your thoughts about the videogame.

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Okay, so much for the preamble. Let’s get to what happened in the world of ape legs.

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So: Respawn kind of screwed the pooch in making extremely cool skins very expensive to get. Bad loot box design (or good loot box design, depending on your goals!) was employed. People yelled.

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Respawn said fine, we’ll fix it, and offered what I thought was an okay fix and a good apology. The apology was good because it started with “we fucked up. We broke a promise.” That’s good!

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Then they said they’d put the skins into rotation, letting you buy them directly, for extremely short windows of time. I don’t know, that’s an okayish solution? It probably protects the main goal, which is loot box monetization.

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Anyway, Gamers had a normal one and lobbed all kinds of abuse at the devs. Two Respawn employees who were active on the thread committed the crime of having human emotions and called people “asshats” and “dicks”.

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This is one of the main things I wanted to talk about, next to the other 400 main things. This expectation of “professionalism” put on people whose job it very much isn’t to be there.

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Gamers get to be angry and rude and all those things, because Genuine Emotion and They Care So Much (that they threaten your families), but devs must be these perfect robots of Polite Customer Service.

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You know what that is? That’s emotional labor. No, really. It’s damn fucking hard to be “the bigger person” and to be polite and apologetic to people calling you dog shit. It’s hard and no one’s paying you for this.

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But not only does calling toxic gamers asshats (or, you know, manbabies) feel good and cathartic in the moment, it’s emotional honesty, and emotional honesty is important.

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Because these devs are real human beings who are hurting and pissed off in that moment, and it’s good to remind The Gamers of this. Or if not the gamers, then the bystanders reading along.

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Toxic positivity is the notion that, no matter what, you’ve got to smile and be positive. GOOD VIBES ONLY! And it fucking destroys your mind. It makes you feel like a freak for having negative emotions…

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… because you never see negative emotions modelled as a normal thing that happens to normal people. Listen, we’re all sad and angry and pissed off and in despair sometimes. It’s called being alive.

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Under the guise of “professional behavior” we force devs (who, again, are not getting paid for this) to grin and bear it and respond to “I WILL DRIVE A KNIFE UP YOUR BUTT” with “your feedback is a gift”.

(IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Viren from The Dragon Prince bowing and saying “thank you, your feedback is a gift”)

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(Knife butt has yet to happen to me. The really awful things I’ve been told are much less funny, which goes to show that gamergaters are not only immoral monsters but also BAD AT COMEDY.)

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Some people can do this for some time. There are mental filters you can apply to your perception of the world. There are coping mechanisms. (I hear some of them aren’t alcohol)

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But it’s fucking miserable and dehumanizing and reason #718 why the average game dev burns out of the industry before they turn 35.

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What should happen when a 48 hours of Gamer Hell type event takes place is the employer jumping in front of their employees and protecting them from the asshat gamers.

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What does happen is sometimes weird contradictory apologies and negative consequences up to and including firing for the employees. I may be biased here, but I don’t think this is good. It may even be bad.

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Let’s return to the original apology post! I don’t know Vince Zampella and like I said I have very little to no insight into Respawn. From all I’ve heard it’s one of the better AAA studios to work for.

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They seem to treat their employees very well when it comes to industry bugbears like crunch and I’m not aware of any sexual misconduct accusations against them, so they’re Actual Saints.

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(I’ve also had a very very positive interaction with an EA recruiter for a different role that didn’t pan out at another EA studio in LA that I *also* heard good things about. The EA hate is silly.)

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But this apology? This isn’t it. I’ve taken the liberty of annotating it.

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Original post from Vince Zampella reads as follows:

On Friday, we gave Apex fans an update on how we were changing the Iron Crown event. Some of the team then joined a discussion with our community on Reddit, and things got to a pretty bad place. Some of our folks crossed a line with their comments, and that’s not how we want Respawn to be represented. I apologize to any of our fans that were offended. I will always stand behind the team here at Respawn and support them on speaking out against some of the toxic and nasty comments being directed at them, including everything from death threats to comments aimed at their family and loved ones. But we shouldn’t contribute to it when we do comment, and add to the very thing we want to prevent. We need to lead by example. Last week we didn’t do that, and going forward we will be better. Having an open, healthy relationship with our community is incredibly important to all of us at Respawn.

My annotations:

On Friday, we gave Apex fans an update on how we were changing the Iron Crown event.

I wrote: Anodyne phrasing that dismisses the emotional impact of the change, but ok.

things got to a pretty bad place.

I wrote: A truck was driven into protesters level of weasel passive

Some of our folks crossed a line

I wrote: Out of nowhere they crossed a line in a perfectly civil conversation they were paid to be in.

I will always stand behind the team here at Respawn

I wrote: You just demonstrated that’s not true.

But we shouldn’t contribute to it when we do comment

I wrote: You shouldn’t contribute to rape by wearing a short skirt

Having an open, healthy relationship with our community is incredibly important

I wrote: Treating my chronic abuser with professionalism and respect is very important to me.

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Look, again, I heard only good things about Respawn. The fact that they stuck to a “slow” content delivery schedule so as not to overwork their staff is Very Good, Actually.

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The fact that their CEO even mentions their workers gets death threats and threats against their families? AMAZING. I would have loved that. That part is unironically a good thing.

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The entire apology comes from a good place, but intention isn’t magic, and the impact of the apology is to absolve the community of blame even while mentioning death threats.

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.@patrickklepek has a great thread on this, but it’s only 7 tweets long. THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS, Patrick.

https://twitter.com/patrickklepek/status/1163622698158886912

(h/t @Chef_Lu_Bu)

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What to do? I have thoughts. First, if you’re expecting your employees to be available online, explicitly limit this to office hours or pay them overtime for being on call. I’m not joking.

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Sure if they really love it, chances are they’ll post on their own time too. But make it very clear this is not expected.

(140/180)

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Next, arm and prepare them. Don’t just throw them to the wolves. Have serious training in de-escalation with a bottom line of “if in doubt, you don’t owe anyone a reply.”

(141/180)

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This training by the way? This would come from community management. They should be your devs’ allies and defenders. When a yikes occurs, the number 1 priority is to protect your employees.

(142/180)

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This means a Social Media Policy that explicitly goes into disasters; guidelines that set out clearly which kind of behavior can be penalized and what is safe.

(143/180)

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Make sure you cover therapy and offer crisis counseling. Collaborate with local law enforcement and educate them on swatting.

(144/180)

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Actively step in and remove players who require that level of response from your community and from your game, and speak about it. Set the tone.

(145/180)

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I hope the employees who posted in that thread are safe. But even if they are, why write an apology like that? What are you hoping to achieve?

(146/180)

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Is it about the bottom line? Are you worried that angry players on reddit will lead to collapsing CCU or monetization? Is appeasing them likely to work? Let’s consult the BOOK OF COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SCIENCE!

(147/180)

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*flips through a 300 page tome of just empty pages*

(148/180)

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Says here “fuck knows.” But it’s one of those things that feels right, right? Like these are your players. Of course you have to keep them happy.

(149/180)

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At Riot there is this concept of player trust. Again it comes from a good place. There is this whole Player Experience First thing, and player trust is supposed to measure how well players think Riot are doing at that.

(150/180)

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It’s obsessively tracked, talked about, catered to, used as justification for prioritization or outright pivots. “Gotta earn back player trust” might as well have been the motto of 2017 (and I think they did!)

(151/180)

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But what do we know about that translating to actual player numbers? We had data suggesting it had little to no impact. Riot ran surveys to try and figure out why players stopped playing League.

(152/180)

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And I obv don’t have the data or don’t remember the phrasing, but “I don’t trust Riot to have my best interests at heart” or “I don’t agree with the direction of the game” were absolute also rans.

(153/180)

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Dominating the survey were things like “games take too long” or “my friends stopped playing”. So we had data showing that keeping Reddit happy… does very little, actually. And still we did!

(154/180)

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The most charitable explanation is that it comes from a place of extreme empathy. The devs see themselves in the angry gamers on reddit and have empathy for their grievances.

(155/180)

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A less charitable explanation is that it’s just plain stupid. If you want your game to flourish in five years’ time, you know who you gotta keep happy and healthy? Your employees.

(156/180)

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Because the people who call for the death of your entire damn family are also the most likely to continue giving you money. It fucking sucks, but they lash out *because* they’re addicted. You’ve got ‘em!

(157/180)

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No amount of rage is going to make them actually change their behavior. They’ll perform behavior change (“I’m done with this fucking game”), but we know it’s an act.

(158/180)

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I’m sorry this is so cynical, but the louder a player complains the less likely they are to stop playing the game. Again, I’m not saying this as a SUPER BRAIN POWER MOVE.

(159/180)

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I’m trying to drive home the point that we’re all suffering under a system of god awful incentivization that drives half of us to get the other half miserably addicted to a money sink.

(160/180)

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Fuck capitalism.

(161/180)

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What to do?

*pulls full size Ikea guillotine kit out from under bed*

I mean what realistically achievable thing should we do?

*sadly pushes guillotine back under bed*

(162/180)

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Well to start, we could do actual community management. When the league subreddit started taking off there was a mass exodus of devs no longer posting on the official forums in favor of reddit.

(163/180)

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And sure, upvotes and a much more active community had something to do with that, but it was also because Reddit was *LESS TOXIC* than the official forums. Reddit mods did a better job of keeping the place civil.

(164/180)

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Not because Riot’s community team didn’t give a fuck. They were pretty much told not to do their job, not to ban shitheads on sight. The only metric we really cared about was posts. eNgAgEmEnT.

(165/180)

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There were proposals to let community volunteers mod more aggressively, but it never really happened.

(166/180)

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If you want to make a healthy community, you have to actively work towards one and continue to enforce standards. You have to have actionable standards of behavior and show detractors the door.

(167/180)

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Like, if you write down what is and isn’t okay, Very Funny Trolls will find ways to go all the way up to the line and push and push. Just ban them on sight. Make it clear that some shit won’t fly.

(168/180)

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Would that actually work in creating a kinder, gentler, more engaged community? Let me consult the science!

(169/180)

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*flips through giant book full of pages of emoticons, each with the caption “possibly racist”*

*looks straight into camera*

Fuck knows.

(170/180)

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But it would create a community I’d like to be part of, for a while at least, until the duelling rots of the corrupting influence of power and strong community identity leading to exclusionary cliques ruined it all.

(171/180)

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And of course even if Respawn wanted to, they couldn’t moderate the subreddit because it’s not theirs. That’s also by design: it gives them deniability and it’s cheaper than hiring moderators.

(172/180)

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“This is your community, we’re just guests here” is the biggest community management lie. Sure, just guests who dominate the conversation in each room and often get in fights. Normal guest stuff.

(173/180)

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Anyway, it’s too late and I need to go be a damage Moira in Overwatch. Here’s the EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (over 35 year old speech for TLDR):

(174/180)

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Actually protect your employees and equip them to deal with Online Gamers™.

(175/180)

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Show toxic fucks the door and actively manage your community.

(176/180)

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Gamers: you get to do the door showing too. Aggressively moderate your own spaces.

(177/180)

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Angela Davis said that in a racist society, it was not enough to be non-racist; we have to be anti-racist. Same goes for toxic communities. Simply not being part of the problem is not enough.

(178/180)

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And also maybe don’t be a predator and monetize addictive behavior? JUST THINKING OUT LOUD HERE.

(179/180)

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PS eat the rich

(180/180)