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How Community Managers can fit into Riot's culture

Daen·9/8/2014, 5:44:45 PM·20 votes·8,347 views

Hi everyone,

This is going to be pretty long. Sorry. There's a TLDR at the bottom though, so...yay?

Riot's concept of "Killing the Community Manager" has been on my mind a lot lately, especially after this panel at PAX:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbcS_h9kgPw

Everything that's discussed and the entire mentality behind the idea is awesome, but I can't help feeling like something is...missing.

#"Standard" Community Manager duties:

  • Act as an intermediary between players and developers
  • Facilitate player-to-player interaction
  • Ensure mutual trust between players and developers
  • Manage forums and other avenues of communication
  • Create initiatives with and for the playerbase

#Riot's perspective on the idea of Community Management

The goal is to remove Community Managers from the equation and empower Rioters to have direct conversation with the players. There are three central pillars that help facilitate this:

Engage - Hold two-way dialogue with players

  • Everyone at Riot is empowered to speak directly with players
  • Ideally, the reasoning behind decisions is explained and discussed
  • Host Q&As, AMAs, Dev Blogs, etc.
  • Help foster trust with the playerbase
  • Ensure that Rioters have authentic passion and meaningful dialogue
  • Understand the player perspective
  • Don't break news
  • Speak within your expertise and craft
  • If unsure of what to say, find someone who can help

Connect - Facilitate player-to-player interaction

  • Prize Events, such as tournaments
  • Viewing Parties
  • Player Behavior & Justice (Team Builder, Honor System, etc.)
  • Collegiate Program

Support - Support the playerbase in the awesome things they do

  • Noticing & promoting fan content through social media
  • Cospitality Lounge to allow cosplayers to deal with difficulties
  • The Riot API - Supporting developers and facilitating creation
  • Developer forums, for discussions about API creations
  • Q&A with Riot to help players level up their apps
  • Guidelines & Documentation for efficient learning

The Community Manager has been killed in order to empower Rioters to build a direct relationship with the playerbase, help players meet each other, and to support all the cool things the community does.

#What I feel is missing

Let's reiterate the 5 "standard" Community Manager duties:

  • Act as an intermediary between players and developers

This is not something Riot wants. The idea of having someone (or a group of people) be the face of Riot is totally against the culture, and I absolutely agree with that. Empowering everyone at the company to interact in their own way is immensely powerful and shouldn't be tampered with.

What if, instead of CMs functioning as the face of Riot, their role is to condense and relay information to and/or from developers? Instead of CMs handling a thread themselves, what if the goal is to find threads with value and try to find someone to discuss it meaningfully with the players? As an example, let's say someone makes a thread suggesting a really insightful and completely unique improvement to the Honor system but it gets buried. Is it ideal for developers to spend time digging through countless threads looking for a topic on which they can confidently speak?

In this situation, Community Managers would not eclipse other developers or act as a barrier of communication between players and Riot. They would merely be streamlining the process and enhancing interaction between players and Rioters, as discussion could become more focused on what really matters. Rioters would still be empowered to individually connect with players exactly as before, but the process would be easier and more efficient.

  • Facilitate player-to-player interaction

This is something Riot does through the Connect pillar above. I do, however, feel this can (and needs to) be expanded. A lot of the work that the Community team does tends to encourage new or fragmented communities rather than solidifying the playerbase as a whole, but there is so much potential in wider scope/lower impact projects.

Examples like viewing parties, college LoL clubs, prize events, cospitality, etc. all support this claim. These initiatives are fantastic and make the experience so much better for those players, but they don't necessarily affect the playerbase as a whole. Honor and Team Builder affect a significantly larger audience, but they don't really enhance players' ability to connect in meaningful ways.

  • Ensure mutual trust between players and developers

This has gotten better recently, but there is definitely room for improvement. It can be difficult for developers to have time to speak deeply on what they are working on, and certain information is hard to present effectively while continuing to work on projects.

An example of this could be a perpetually updated Change Log and/or Known Bugs list for the Boards. These are fantastic resources for the benefit of the community, but realistically speaking developers might not have time to write and maintain them while simultaneously creating the content that would be shown.

  • Manage forums and other avenues of communication

This duty is still present, and as far as I'm aware it's done by the Community department as a whole. The Boards is a great example of this, and there is clearly active work being done on the platform.

  • Create initiatives with and for the playerbase

This, in my opinion, is the most significant thing that's missing. What I'm referring to with this role is essentially things like Ionia vs Noxus, the Iron Solari forum event stuff, helping players create and advertise custom game modes, supporting and encouraging player volunteer groups, etc.

I'm not sure if this is a cultural no-no at Riot, but as far as I can tell it's kind of avoided. The reasoning for not participating in this kind of interaction at Riot is, in my opinion, thus: if Riot creates something cool for the community, it could take away from things the community creates for itself. This is a valid concern, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

#How Community Managers can be awesome at Riot

Community Managers, as they are currently thought of in the industry, can't work at Riot. The idea of having a divide between players and developers with CMs bridging the gap is definitely unacceptable, but a tailored Community Manager position could fit perfectly into Riot's culture. Here are the duties I see Riot Community Managers having:

  • Streamline communication between players and Rioters
  • Seek out important discussions and make sure they are addressed when appropriate
  • Bring content that is specifically relevant to specific Rioters or teams to them
  • Facilitate wide-scope player-to-player interaction
  • Work on projects meant to focus on the entire community's communication
    • Leagues as a social tool
    • Robust chat rooms to allow players to create meaningful relationships
    • Guide and focus discussion within threads
  • Produce and maintain resources to assist developers with communication
  • Relieve developers of the task of maintaining official correspondence
    • Known Bugs (Boards)
    • Change Logs (Boards)
  • Keep track of & record players' suggestions and concerns
  • Create and support player initiatives in the community as a whole
  • Organize "official" events for players to participate in
    • Ionia vs Noxus
    • Forum events & competitions
    • Amateur publicly-announced tournaments
  • Set up a framework for players' contributions outside of art to shine
    • Volunteer Groups
    • Showing off cool articles and community website content
    • Publicly supporting custom game modes such as Catch the Teemo

#TL:DR

The idea of re-envisioning the Community Manager is awesome; having that barrier between the players and the developers doesn't really make sense, especially for a company like Riot. That being said, I think that trying to move all the duties a CM would normally have to every Rioter loses something in the transition.

Many of the duties listed above are difficult to successfully accomplish while having a separate job to do (e.g. Ghostcrawler & Game Design), especially creating content for players to interact with and organizing events. In order for these things to happen in a meaningful way, it's important that there is a dedicated position to allow Rioters to really focus on the community as a whole.

So many Rioters are all about communication, which is fantastic, but without people whose job is entirely "here is a community, do awesome things with it", there is a lot of lost potential.

EDIT: Would those that are saying Community Managers are bad mind elaborating upon that opinion? I would love to know why you feel that way and discuss whether I was unclear or incorrect about my assumptions!

37 Comments

RiotPWYFF9/9/2014, 1:32:48 AM9 votes

Since Sargonas didn't talk much about the philosophies presented here, I'll do some deeper tackling:

At the end of the day, your point seems to be we need more people who can interact with - and organize - the community to effectively build it from the ground up.

Roughly speaking, I agree but I'll toss in some thoughts so you can see what's behind the curtain. Since I work primarily in communications management and how we can improve the way we talk to players, most of my points will be on that.

--- What is good engagement?

Up front: I believe there's a lot of tribal knowledge when it comes to 'good' community management / engagement, and I'm unsure how much of what's done is actually the best thing. That's my personal opinion though!

One of the biggest concepts we deal with on the day to day is the idea of scale and how to build meaningful interactions in a way that scales effectively. If you've ever chatted with me at a convention, I spend a lot of time musing on this concept, so sorry if you've heard this: we have so many passionate players who are passionate about so many things they can create self-perpetuating reality bubbles around what's really fraction of a fraction of the community.

To me, personal and engaging conversations are fantastic but I'm always wondering exactly how to scale them effectively. I was just a player at the time, but during League's alpha / beta days, I remember we could hop into a regularly scheduled ventrilo chatroom to talk about how what things were frustrating or broken at the time. That left me with a fantastic impression of both Riot and their player-focused design philosophy but, reasonably speaking, how scalable is that system?

Going off what I said earlier about self-perpetuating bubbles, it's tough to prioritize work on specific player needs when conversations hit such a critical mass that gauging concepts by passionate conversations means everything is a priority. In other words, once a conversation reaches more than a few hundred participants, it becomes A Very Big Deal to those players, and League has enough passionate players that this means every issue is now A Very Big Deal.

I hope that made sense.

Is there a more effective way to distill feedback? Are there more effective ways to create engaging conversations where developers and players can actually come to an agreement without getting derailed into a hyperbole competition? It's really tough, especially given that many discussions turn into who can shout the loudest or bring the most people to the table.

We do have piles of Rioters who engage / read the forums on a daily basis, but the conversation itself needs to come from the individual and having someone deliver "conversations" to a doorstep might just transform into 20+ hours of work a week just talking. Maybe that's not a bad thing and we just need to double our workforce, but maintaining an engaging conversation is a very difficult task. A conversation isn't a "HERE'S A RESPONSE AND I'M OUT" kind of deal - it requires empathy and nuance, even if the answer is clear (which, honestly speaking, can be the case a lot of times).

That's what our core focus is on right now: what's a scalable, healthy way to build awesome communication channels that don't burn out our communicators while also letting players feel heard? Maybe that means limiting the communication expectation but ensuring that it's constant. Something like twitter where you can't go in-depth but quick answers can be constantly fired out at all times. Maybe it's long-form like the forums. It's a big consideration point.

Second consideration point: international scale. We have many, many, many, players who don't speak english as a primary or secondary language, and we want to build those communities just as much as we do in english. Most of Riot's central development just happens to speak english (although a few speak german / chinese / korean / etc).

I just ran out of space, so I'm going to reply to myself with that one.

RiotSargonas9/8/2014, 11:16:39 PM8 votes

Hey there! I'm the snazzily dressed gentleman at the end there, J. Eckert aka Riot Sargonas. I got a lot of feedback about our Panel at PAX after we had it, almost entirely positive. This by far, however, is some of the most detailed and constructive I've seen yet! (Far beyond the typical "dude your panel was cool.")

First off, it's probably a good idea to stress that what we covered in our panel were choice excerpts that we wanted to present in the short 20 minutes we wanted to take up, being that our goal was to give as much of the 1 hour over to a Q&A as possible. Because of that, we only lightly touched on a few small things, there is so much more that the community team at Riot does that we never got time to expand upon. Some of which are actually things that you highlighted. Others, are good ideas and feedback for us.

Case in point, on the topic of the community team finding choice threads and feedback and bringing them to the attention of the proper Rioters: Not only is that something that teams do already, but actually we encourage all Rioters to do this. Great example: this thread was brought to my attention by someone not of our community team who happened to see it before I did. We definitely encourage Rioters to reach out to each other when they see something a fellow Rioter can positively weigh in on.

Some of your other points are really good ones, and some of them are things we are already tackling. To be honest though I can't speak eloquently to them since I focus primarily on 3rd Party Developer Relations and would be speaking out of my element if I tried to. Hopefully though others from those teams can weigh in.

I'm really glad that our panel actually struck a chord with you though, and generated this discussion!

Sir ArmaMalum9/8/2014, 6:29:44 PM4 votes

Dangit Daen you beat me to it! :P

I just saw this panel vid on S@20 and wasn't able to finish watching it yet. I was planning on talking about this exact same thing, this however is better than what I would have set up so, awesome!

I need to run to class real quick, give me a bit more than an hour and I'll happily converse on this!

Ziln00bas9/8/2014, 7:46:46 PM4 votes

Very well-written, comprehensive and well-formatted. PAX 2011 I went to a community panel about moving beyond forums and had a great, unexpected surprise with a Rioter coming up to me after I asked a question, appreciated the answer, then asked the panel if it was cool if I did the inverse of their advice, haha.

I think the one of the only thing missing from this pretty extensive post is a new and more appropriate job title: Community Facilitator. Or Community Ambassadors.(Maybe something even better will come to me later.)

It's subtle but critically important why a job title be as spot-on as possible.

Thanks for creating an informative piece and giving us some constructive ideas to consider and discuss!

Trinityunicorn9/8/2014, 8:32:57 PM3 votes

You need more than one or even two people to do all the things you listed <if you want them to do it well>. The audio on that was very hard for me to really hear a lot of what was being said and follow it well. I mostly heard that Riot was interested in things that would grow their player base more than interest in what their players thought or felt. I do agree that them supporting those organizing and trying to get community things together is a good idea, it will be fruitful for them. Mostly business I guess you could say.

Tbh though, the thing that stood out to me the most was the soldier that was told that it was too bad they could do nothing about his decaying rank while he was deployed coming home to find that someone went out of there way to honor his situation and preserve his rank. Made me almost cry. I guess its what we'd all like to encounter from other fellow humans, and it does happen in this world, but all too often it is rules that bar the way, policy and red tape.

That does require someone with their finger on the individual players. No way every player can get that kind of attention, but when you have a player base as large as league's you have some unique situations and somehow unique situations have a way of surfacing.

You have some great ideas here and some I wish Riot would adopt!

The focus seems to be on grouping in the world, around a large number of computers, yet most of us are at home and group via computers. Playing on the NA server I get to meet people from coast to coast in the states and in Canada and I have two people I met through league that live in Hong Kong and Turkey.

So as far as trust goes, I suppose I put my vote in with that example of that soldier, it gives me more trust in Riot as a company than things I can see that return monetary gain or player base growth, it also offsets some of the things that I see that make me lose trust. Things that community managers would be very helpful to them in keeping aware of what is going on.

Experts, are great in their area, however, they aren't always great in every area <none of us are>. And they sometimes are SO SMART that they can't see the common view, We used to have an ortho doc here that was horrid at getting along with his patients but he was super in surgery. <happens alot> I saw an Emergency Room physician totally miss that the man's wife didn't have a clue that he was in cardiac arrest. He knew his facts though and he knew what to do to save his life, he just really couldn't <or didn't have the time> to pick up on the awareness of the wife and wasn't really prepared to deal with her shock. So yes, community managers could be helpful to pointing certain things out that might get overlooked.

I hope someone from Riot reads your post and prints it out and runs to someone that could do something with your ideas!