Havelock
12-18-2005, 10:47 PM
59
The future of the Vanguard community has been a hot topic since Nick "Glip" Parkinson reminded everyone that the official Vanguard forums are going to largely disappear at launch and all substantive Vanguard forums will be created and controlled by players, with the devs staying in touch with the community by participating on affiliated site forums and other Vanguard-related boards. Here's a look at some of the challenges and opportunities such an arrangement might produce.
Let's Take It Back to the Start
When I first started at Silky Venom, I was recruited just a week or two after discovering Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and my first assignment was to give a noob's perspective on the community. I've always wanted to follow-up on this article with where the community is now and where it's going, and it seemed fitting that I finally get around to that as a way of wrapping up our look at the site in light of the registration of our 1,000th member.
My noob post is here (http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=405&highlight=noob) - it ended with this:
With E3 on the way, we can expect the flow of new members to the community to become a torrent. That’s great news for the game, but it will require some adjustment. The small, tight-knit community will become a subcommunity, part of a greater whole. The OVF will move ever more quickly, making it tougher to get to know individual posters and tougher to maintain the strong sense of community that pervades the boards now. That feeling may survive on the established fansites, where long-time community members could recapture the intimacy of the pre-zerg forums. . . .
3Sigil appears to have predicted similar growth and community dissolution and decided that it did not want the Vanguard community to be located in such an anti-community setting. Vanguard fans have come out vocally on both sides of Sigil's decision, with some believing that the decision spells doom for the Vanguard community while others think it will be vastly better for that community to exist in dispersed enclaves.
I side with the latter camp; while there are some downsides and some problems we as a player community will have to overcome, I think that on the whole eliminating the centralized forums will be better for the players.
What Might Have Been: The WoW Boards
Like many Vanbois, and a great many people in general, I play World of Warcraft. The game has its high points and its low points, for sure, but one of its most obvious failings is its forums. With millions of people and just a few dozen forums, there is little chance for any meaningful conversation. A post will be knocked back five pages before anybody gets a chance to respond. At best you can hope for a little bit of a back-and-forth with someone in the midst of the swirling chaos of any given thread. The very nature of the forums makes them largely useless for anything but (1) devs providing information to the players and (2) venting about what you don't like.
The sheer size of the WoW community compounds this problem immensely, but other games have felt it, too. In SWG, for instance, the more popular boards - particularly the jedi board, as I recall, flew by, and only a few threads managed to thrive at any given time. The smaller boards produced better conversations and tighter communities. On these boards people knew each other and developed some idea of where the other posters were coming from. By learning to respectfully disagree, these smaller communities produced constructive dialogues that gave them an enjoyable experience and gave the developers meaningful feedback on the aspects of the game those boards addressed.
The ugly specter of an unmanageable and internally incoherent community has been increasingly evident on the official Vanguard forums, especially the Game Play and Off-Topic forums. Meaningful communication is on the decline, and the forces of reason and cameraderie appear to be in retreat. Much of the fault lies not so much with the quality of posters as the sheer number; a lot of people are excited about Vanguard and want to express that excitement (along with, unfortunately, their unhappiness with other games they've played) repeatedly and at great length. The structure of the boards, rather than the people using them or the people running them, is to blame.
1107By fracturing the community, the close relationships and quality conversations can be preserved, and the accountability and intrapersonal relationships a smaller board population brings will be available again to all members of the Vanguard community. This is why, while I can see potential problems with decentralized forums, I am optimistic that Sigil's decision will prove to be the better choice.
Here are some thoughts on the sites that will fill the void and provide an out-of-game home for the Vanguard community.
Server Forums: Easy, Right?
In SWG, the first MMO in which I was really active in the broader community, we had an extremely busy Bloodfin server forum on the official game forums that contributed immensely to the life of the community. As time went on, though, the moderation became more heavy-handed than many of us liked and a lot of us looked to the forum of one of the top guilds on the server as our new out-of-game home. Most of us would not have found that forum if the official forum hadn't tried our patience one too many times, but once we got to the guild site and made it our unofficial server forum, it was a home much better suited to us. Honest and uninterrupted discussion of the game's deficiencies, unmitigated smack talk, and the ability to use a broader vocabulary all contributed to making the guild board a whole lot more fun and useful.
By eliminating the "use the official boards until you get so frustrated by them you make your own" step of the process, Sigil is giving players a chance up front to shape the sort of community they want. This is a good thing.
Here's how I see it playing out: a few players, probably from some pretty sophisticated guilds or alliances of guilds, will create a board and announce that it is the place for people from their server to go. Most of that announcing will take place in-game, and that's where server forums have an advantage over other types of forums: the forum community is theoretically identical to the in-game community, so there's no cost in terms of finding members of the community and communicating with them. The community is whoever you run into in game. They'll start visiting the boards they know about, and they'll find out about other boards in game and probably through mentions on the boards they visit, and over time a few boards will emerge as the centers of discussion, maybe specializing (a PvP-oriented server forum, a crafter-oriented server forum, etc.). Different tastes will help dictate who goes where; some may be drawn to coarse language and links to pornography, while others may prefer an environment entirely bereft of such things. And over time, the tides may shift, and new or lesser boards may rise to prominence, and prominent boards may fall, but any given member of the community will always have at least one place to call home.
736At first I thought that there would be no real challenges as far as server boards went, at least beyond the challenge for individual sites in gaining a critical mass of users. But then I remembered that the server communities will begin the game fractured and will stay that way, or so we're told, for awhile: there are three starting continents, and a player will not be able to brave the fearsome oceans that separate them his journey is well under way. That means there are three natural communities, with no immediate in-game connection between them. In the long run this is not a big issue: when people come together, some sites may dissolve, while others may merge to reflect the coming together of diverse user bases. There are things that can be done to mitigate this initial split - getting the server name as a domain name can help draw in-game strangers to the site, and advertising on general community sites like Silky Venom could do so too. But it is a twist that will keep the competition for server-board supremacy interesting as players progress through Telon.
There will also be numerous guild sites, some set up through Guild Portal, some set up independently. No doubt many of these will serve as feeders to server forums, and advocates for server forums will visit different guildsites trying to attract users. It will be interesting to see how that dynamic develops. And some guild sites, such as Fires of Heaven, will provide robust communities in their own right and serve as the primary forum home for some members of the Vanguard community who are not even members of the guild.
Class Sites, Sphere Sites, and Other Sites Focused on Discrete Game Elements
These sites are much different than server forums and have a lot of advantages. For starters, they can develop well before launch. In fact, we already have a slew of specialized Vanguard sites - Vanguard Crafters, Diplomatters, Vanguard Fighters, Vanguard Casters, Vanbard, Vanguard Rangers, etc. - laying the foundations for future success. The people who get into these sites from the get-go are generally very committed to whatever portion of the game the site covers, and generally these enthusiastic early-adopters will be able to push out a lot of useful content for the sites. Newcomers will then turn to the sites for the distilled wisdom of those who devote themselves to a given class, sphere, whatever. In EQ, I was an extremely unsophisticated player, completely detached from the game community beyond people I talked to in game, but I still managed to find my way to The Druid's Grove to learn the basics of the class.
135Players flock to these sites because they give them immediately useful information. No matter what quest you're working on, no matter what level you're at, no matter what continent or server you're on, you have certain skills and abilities that determine how you interact with the game world. These sites give players critical information that helps them interact better with the game world and gives them an advantage over the uninformed players, or, from a different perspective, puts them on a level playing field with other players who have visited the site.
The challenge for existing sites of this nature is a lack of information. Some get exclusive nuggets of information about their focus - Genda's crafting articles, for instance, or The Safehouse's interview with Talisker about rogues - but for the time being information is very limited and there's not much hard content these sites can produce. Fortunately, there is a prospective player base rabid for whatever info they can get, and savvy enough to know that down the road there will be enjoyable intangible benefits that come from being a known and respected member of their class site with an early registration date, so these sites are building community despite not yet being able to provide the comprehensive information for which they will someday be renowned.
Another interesting wrinkle for this genre of fansites is the inherent lack of competition. Once a site becomes the druid site, or the rogue site, or the disciple site, everyone will flock to it, and competing sites will have a difficult time providing anything that the existing site does not already offer, and thus have a difficult time drawing members of that class (or sphere, or what have you) community away from the established site.
The forums for these sites will be very active, and I suspect will draw a high percentage of the developer posts. But because of the intentionally-narrow perspective that will dominate these sites, I'm not sure players will consider them their primary community forum - though of course I may be entirely wrong about that. And in the case of broader-based sites - especially sphere-centric sites like Diplomatters and Vanguard Crafters - the community may be as broad as players like, involving many more points-of-view than may be meaningfully represented on a class-specific forum. I am curious to see how this works out.
General Sites
This is where the fiercest competition, and the highest risk, will be. Google will be littered with the burned-out husks of hundreds of would-be Vanguard fansites that didn't make it. The successful sites are going to be those that give players something they can't find anywhere else, that look good, that are easy to use, and that get enough attention initially to attract a critical mass of users.
65This space will be complicated further by Vanguard sites on the various networks, which have a ready-made audience and which can afford to be a bit more laid back about adding content and advertising in a way that independent sites cannot because of the guaranteed visits from players familiar with the network. Unfortunately for potential entrants to the general site scene, those network sites are not sitting around resting on their laurels - they are working as hard as the other fansites, trying to leverage their initial advantage into an ever-larger share of the Vanguard audience. There are very limited opportunities for scrappy upstarts to enter this fray and survive, and as time goes on the odds are even longer against sites that attempt to provide one-stop shopping for Vanguard information.
Another problem for new entrants is the number of general sites already in existence. Many such sites, including Silky Venom, are members of the Sigil affiliate program, meaning they get links on the Vanguard homepage and exclusive content from Sigil such as developer interviews and beta screenshots. In addition, members of the Vanguard community have been repeatedly pointed toward the existing general sites by other community members on the official forums. This gives the current general sites name recognition and familiarity that future competitors will not enjoy. It's going to be very tough for new non-network sites to established a foothold in the hearts and minds of Vanbois and Vangrrls, especially once the official forums shut down. Some will do it, no doubt, but they will have to work very hard and provide unique services that players cannot find elsewhere.
To tie this back to the talk of forums and where people go, I expect a lot of the current Vanguard community will look to the general fansites to provide a new home. This strikes me as probably holding especially true prior to launch, where the players who make the preemptive jump to fansite forums will not have server attachments and have not had the chance to bond in-game with their chosen class (assuming they've even settled on a class yet).
Where Do We Go From Here?
We have lots of plans, but since this article started off talking about the community and the forums, that's what I'll focus on in this conclusion. Right now our forums are pretty healthy - they're growing quickly both in terms of registered members and in terms of members posting. In the couple weeks since we hit 1,000 members (thus the Silky Venomillenium celebration), our list of registered users has already grown by over 15%.
We're working to meet community needs by offering some more specialized forums than are available on the official site. For instance, our Other Vanguard Guilds (http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=31) forum (remember, Silky Venom is a guild and this is, among other things, a guild site) provides a place for guilds and prospective members to advertise and communicate, without worrying about their posts being lost in a fast-moving forum covering many diverse topics.
With the introduction of The Volcano, we hope to preserve the quality of conversation without resorting to censorship. When a post gets too stupid, it gets relegated to The Volcano. When a poster gets too stupid, he gets relegated to The Volcano. (The boss might want me to couch this a little more diplomatically, but that's the gist of it). People who want to sling ad hominems and spout rants entirely disconnected from things like "fact" and "logic" can happily do so - in The Volcano. And those who want to avoid such nonsense need only avoid that particular forum.
Those players looking to provide information to their fellow Vanbois and Vangrrls can also help in a non-forum context by contributing to the Wiki (http://wiki.silkyvenom.com/), a great infromational resource for the Vanguard community. The Wiki is pretty comprehensive for the time being given what we know, and as more information comes it will become ever-more detailed and helpful, particularly after launch.
625We hope that by providing quality forums, alternative means of expression for community members, up-to-the-minute news and comprehensive information about the game, and additional features that make the site useful for visitors and registered members alike, we can provide a good home for that segment of the Vanguard community that is here now and for those who will come this way when the official forums shut down.
So to everyone reading this, relax, make yourself comfortable, and, should you choose to heed the invitation, welcome home!
The future of the Vanguard community has been a hot topic since Nick "Glip" Parkinson reminded everyone that the official Vanguard forums are going to largely disappear at launch and all substantive Vanguard forums will be created and controlled by players, with the devs staying in touch with the community by participating on affiliated site forums and other Vanguard-related boards. Here's a look at some of the challenges and opportunities such an arrangement might produce.
Let's Take It Back to the Start
When I first started at Silky Venom, I was recruited just a week or two after discovering Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and my first assignment was to give a noob's perspective on the community. I've always wanted to follow-up on this article with where the community is now and where it's going, and it seemed fitting that I finally get around to that as a way of wrapping up our look at the site in light of the registration of our 1,000th member.
My noob post is here (http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=405&highlight=noob) - it ended with this:
With E3 on the way, we can expect the flow of new members to the community to become a torrent. That’s great news for the game, but it will require some adjustment. The small, tight-knit community will become a subcommunity, part of a greater whole. The OVF will move ever more quickly, making it tougher to get to know individual posters and tougher to maintain the strong sense of community that pervades the boards now. That feeling may survive on the established fansites, where long-time community members could recapture the intimacy of the pre-zerg forums. . . .
3Sigil appears to have predicted similar growth and community dissolution and decided that it did not want the Vanguard community to be located in such an anti-community setting. Vanguard fans have come out vocally on both sides of Sigil's decision, with some believing that the decision spells doom for the Vanguard community while others think it will be vastly better for that community to exist in dispersed enclaves.
I side with the latter camp; while there are some downsides and some problems we as a player community will have to overcome, I think that on the whole eliminating the centralized forums will be better for the players.
What Might Have Been: The WoW Boards
Like many Vanbois, and a great many people in general, I play World of Warcraft. The game has its high points and its low points, for sure, but one of its most obvious failings is its forums. With millions of people and just a few dozen forums, there is little chance for any meaningful conversation. A post will be knocked back five pages before anybody gets a chance to respond. At best you can hope for a little bit of a back-and-forth with someone in the midst of the swirling chaos of any given thread. The very nature of the forums makes them largely useless for anything but (1) devs providing information to the players and (2) venting about what you don't like.
The sheer size of the WoW community compounds this problem immensely, but other games have felt it, too. In SWG, for instance, the more popular boards - particularly the jedi board, as I recall, flew by, and only a few threads managed to thrive at any given time. The smaller boards produced better conversations and tighter communities. On these boards people knew each other and developed some idea of where the other posters were coming from. By learning to respectfully disagree, these smaller communities produced constructive dialogues that gave them an enjoyable experience and gave the developers meaningful feedback on the aspects of the game those boards addressed.
The ugly specter of an unmanageable and internally incoherent community has been increasingly evident on the official Vanguard forums, especially the Game Play and Off-Topic forums. Meaningful communication is on the decline, and the forces of reason and cameraderie appear to be in retreat. Much of the fault lies not so much with the quality of posters as the sheer number; a lot of people are excited about Vanguard and want to express that excitement (along with, unfortunately, their unhappiness with other games they've played) repeatedly and at great length. The structure of the boards, rather than the people using them or the people running them, is to blame.
1107By fracturing the community, the close relationships and quality conversations can be preserved, and the accountability and intrapersonal relationships a smaller board population brings will be available again to all members of the Vanguard community. This is why, while I can see potential problems with decentralized forums, I am optimistic that Sigil's decision will prove to be the better choice.
Here are some thoughts on the sites that will fill the void and provide an out-of-game home for the Vanguard community.
Server Forums: Easy, Right?
In SWG, the first MMO in which I was really active in the broader community, we had an extremely busy Bloodfin server forum on the official game forums that contributed immensely to the life of the community. As time went on, though, the moderation became more heavy-handed than many of us liked and a lot of us looked to the forum of one of the top guilds on the server as our new out-of-game home. Most of us would not have found that forum if the official forum hadn't tried our patience one too many times, but once we got to the guild site and made it our unofficial server forum, it was a home much better suited to us. Honest and uninterrupted discussion of the game's deficiencies, unmitigated smack talk, and the ability to use a broader vocabulary all contributed to making the guild board a whole lot more fun and useful.
By eliminating the "use the official boards until you get so frustrated by them you make your own" step of the process, Sigil is giving players a chance up front to shape the sort of community they want. This is a good thing.
Here's how I see it playing out: a few players, probably from some pretty sophisticated guilds or alliances of guilds, will create a board and announce that it is the place for people from their server to go. Most of that announcing will take place in-game, and that's where server forums have an advantage over other types of forums: the forum community is theoretically identical to the in-game community, so there's no cost in terms of finding members of the community and communicating with them. The community is whoever you run into in game. They'll start visiting the boards they know about, and they'll find out about other boards in game and probably through mentions on the boards they visit, and over time a few boards will emerge as the centers of discussion, maybe specializing (a PvP-oriented server forum, a crafter-oriented server forum, etc.). Different tastes will help dictate who goes where; some may be drawn to coarse language and links to pornography, while others may prefer an environment entirely bereft of such things. And over time, the tides may shift, and new or lesser boards may rise to prominence, and prominent boards may fall, but any given member of the community will always have at least one place to call home.
736At first I thought that there would be no real challenges as far as server boards went, at least beyond the challenge for individual sites in gaining a critical mass of users. But then I remembered that the server communities will begin the game fractured and will stay that way, or so we're told, for awhile: there are three starting continents, and a player will not be able to brave the fearsome oceans that separate them his journey is well under way. That means there are three natural communities, with no immediate in-game connection between them. In the long run this is not a big issue: when people come together, some sites may dissolve, while others may merge to reflect the coming together of diverse user bases. There are things that can be done to mitigate this initial split - getting the server name as a domain name can help draw in-game strangers to the site, and advertising on general community sites like Silky Venom could do so too. But it is a twist that will keep the competition for server-board supremacy interesting as players progress through Telon.
There will also be numerous guild sites, some set up through Guild Portal, some set up independently. No doubt many of these will serve as feeders to server forums, and advocates for server forums will visit different guildsites trying to attract users. It will be interesting to see how that dynamic develops. And some guild sites, such as Fires of Heaven, will provide robust communities in their own right and serve as the primary forum home for some members of the Vanguard community who are not even members of the guild.
Class Sites, Sphere Sites, and Other Sites Focused on Discrete Game Elements
These sites are much different than server forums and have a lot of advantages. For starters, they can develop well before launch. In fact, we already have a slew of specialized Vanguard sites - Vanguard Crafters, Diplomatters, Vanguard Fighters, Vanguard Casters, Vanbard, Vanguard Rangers, etc. - laying the foundations for future success. The people who get into these sites from the get-go are generally very committed to whatever portion of the game the site covers, and generally these enthusiastic early-adopters will be able to push out a lot of useful content for the sites. Newcomers will then turn to the sites for the distilled wisdom of those who devote themselves to a given class, sphere, whatever. In EQ, I was an extremely unsophisticated player, completely detached from the game community beyond people I talked to in game, but I still managed to find my way to The Druid's Grove to learn the basics of the class.
135Players flock to these sites because they give them immediately useful information. No matter what quest you're working on, no matter what level you're at, no matter what continent or server you're on, you have certain skills and abilities that determine how you interact with the game world. These sites give players critical information that helps them interact better with the game world and gives them an advantage over the uninformed players, or, from a different perspective, puts them on a level playing field with other players who have visited the site.
The challenge for existing sites of this nature is a lack of information. Some get exclusive nuggets of information about their focus - Genda's crafting articles, for instance, or The Safehouse's interview with Talisker about rogues - but for the time being information is very limited and there's not much hard content these sites can produce. Fortunately, there is a prospective player base rabid for whatever info they can get, and savvy enough to know that down the road there will be enjoyable intangible benefits that come from being a known and respected member of their class site with an early registration date, so these sites are building community despite not yet being able to provide the comprehensive information for which they will someday be renowned.
Another interesting wrinkle for this genre of fansites is the inherent lack of competition. Once a site becomes the druid site, or the rogue site, or the disciple site, everyone will flock to it, and competing sites will have a difficult time providing anything that the existing site does not already offer, and thus have a difficult time drawing members of that class (or sphere, or what have you) community away from the established site.
The forums for these sites will be very active, and I suspect will draw a high percentage of the developer posts. But because of the intentionally-narrow perspective that will dominate these sites, I'm not sure players will consider them their primary community forum - though of course I may be entirely wrong about that. And in the case of broader-based sites - especially sphere-centric sites like Diplomatters and Vanguard Crafters - the community may be as broad as players like, involving many more points-of-view than may be meaningfully represented on a class-specific forum. I am curious to see how this works out.
General Sites
This is where the fiercest competition, and the highest risk, will be. Google will be littered with the burned-out husks of hundreds of would-be Vanguard fansites that didn't make it. The successful sites are going to be those that give players something they can't find anywhere else, that look good, that are easy to use, and that get enough attention initially to attract a critical mass of users.
65This space will be complicated further by Vanguard sites on the various networks, which have a ready-made audience and which can afford to be a bit more laid back about adding content and advertising in a way that independent sites cannot because of the guaranteed visits from players familiar with the network. Unfortunately for potential entrants to the general site scene, those network sites are not sitting around resting on their laurels - they are working as hard as the other fansites, trying to leverage their initial advantage into an ever-larger share of the Vanguard audience. There are very limited opportunities for scrappy upstarts to enter this fray and survive, and as time goes on the odds are even longer against sites that attempt to provide one-stop shopping for Vanguard information.
Another problem for new entrants is the number of general sites already in existence. Many such sites, including Silky Venom, are members of the Sigil affiliate program, meaning they get links on the Vanguard homepage and exclusive content from Sigil such as developer interviews and beta screenshots. In addition, members of the Vanguard community have been repeatedly pointed toward the existing general sites by other community members on the official forums. This gives the current general sites name recognition and familiarity that future competitors will not enjoy. It's going to be very tough for new non-network sites to established a foothold in the hearts and minds of Vanbois and Vangrrls, especially once the official forums shut down. Some will do it, no doubt, but they will have to work very hard and provide unique services that players cannot find elsewhere.
To tie this back to the talk of forums and where people go, I expect a lot of the current Vanguard community will look to the general fansites to provide a new home. This strikes me as probably holding especially true prior to launch, where the players who make the preemptive jump to fansite forums will not have server attachments and have not had the chance to bond in-game with their chosen class (assuming they've even settled on a class yet).
Where Do We Go From Here?
We have lots of plans, but since this article started off talking about the community and the forums, that's what I'll focus on in this conclusion. Right now our forums are pretty healthy - they're growing quickly both in terms of registered members and in terms of members posting. In the couple weeks since we hit 1,000 members (thus the Silky Venomillenium celebration), our list of registered users has already grown by over 15%.
We're working to meet community needs by offering some more specialized forums than are available on the official site. For instance, our Other Vanguard Guilds (http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=31) forum (remember, Silky Venom is a guild and this is, among other things, a guild site) provides a place for guilds and prospective members to advertise and communicate, without worrying about their posts being lost in a fast-moving forum covering many diverse topics.
With the introduction of The Volcano, we hope to preserve the quality of conversation without resorting to censorship. When a post gets too stupid, it gets relegated to The Volcano. When a poster gets too stupid, he gets relegated to The Volcano. (The boss might want me to couch this a little more diplomatically, but that's the gist of it). People who want to sling ad hominems and spout rants entirely disconnected from things like "fact" and "logic" can happily do so - in The Volcano. And those who want to avoid such nonsense need only avoid that particular forum.
Those players looking to provide information to their fellow Vanbois and Vangrrls can also help in a non-forum context by contributing to the Wiki (http://wiki.silkyvenom.com/), a great infromational resource for the Vanguard community. The Wiki is pretty comprehensive for the time being given what we know, and as more information comes it will become ever-more detailed and helpful, particularly after launch.
625We hope that by providing quality forums, alternative means of expression for community members, up-to-the-minute news and comprehensive information about the game, and additional features that make the site useful for visitors and registered members alike, we can provide a good home for that segment of the Vanguard community that is here now and for those who will come this way when the official forums shut down.
So to everyone reading this, relax, make yourself comfortable, and, should you choose to heed the invitation, welcome home!