guild-wars-2-is-scaly
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Flameseeker Chronicles: Setting up for success
Community Team Lead Martin Kerstein updated the ArenaNet blog a few days ago with some information about his team's plans for the Guild Wars 2 community. The two big bits of news were that there will be official forums (to the evident skepticism of the Guild Wars 2 Guru mods) and there will not be a typical fan site program. The most interesting bit, to me, is this: "Our goal is to use a scalable, inclusive ecosystem instead of a rigid fan site program that doesn't scale well and excludes large parts of the fan base." What I'm hoping this means is that the team members are opening themselves up to a lot more flexibility in which fan sites they support. This is great if it means that small blogs and niche communities can be more easily promoted; we already see this happening, as the Guild Wars 2 twitter feed is usually full of retweets pointing out various fan creations and posts. The flip side of this is equally true. In his article, Kerstein talks about wanting to promote a mature and helpful community, so hopefully the lack of a rigid structure in fan site support means the team members don't feel pressured to include and support toxic communities just because they've hit standardized milestones. I have high hopes for this scalable community engagement style, and I hope to see it pay off for a lot of smaller fan sites and projects. If the folks at ArenaNet want to demand more of the quality of their community, more power to 'em.
