Former Meridian 59 dev pens essay on community management
Have you ever been curious what, exactly, a community manager does from an insider perspective? Here to help you with that is Brian Green, who's developed for both Meridian 59 and Storybricks. Green wrote an essay on how community management is often misunderstood and how it can be both effectively and ineffectively handled.
Green went through the daily process of a CM's job to provide information for both developers and players, citing the difficult balance in handling that two-way street. He said it's important to keep PR as divorced from community management as possible, otherwise it damages the communication "loop" between CMs, players, and developers.
He finishes by examining the recent instance of ArenaNet's CM team using Reddit to discuss players' behavior and names. "The problem is that this was quite obviously a PR exercise and not really proper community management," he noted, going on to say that this might have set the wrong tone for the community's in-game behavior and caused a "toxic allowance" to build up for later on down the road.
