Developers and operators: Speak for yourselves!

The development and operation of MMOGs and virtual environments isn't easy. Complex software systems, networks, game balancing and user-generated content are subtle and difficult to wrangle, and if you think that's hard, have a go at customer support, public-relations, community management or forum moderation sometime. None of these are easy things, they take expertise, time and money to get right — and each one of them is easy to get wrong, even with all that expertise, time and money.

When you add all of that to the subjective opinions of the customers, it isn't hard to see why critics and criticism abounds around every game and every virtual environment. Some of that criticism is well-warranted, and some of it is completely baseless (and all points in between). Everyone's got an opinion.

Critics, however, are not your main problem when you, as a developer or operator are trying to manage your message and your public relations. Your big problem is apologists in particular, and more generally, people who choose to speak for you. Because if you're not going to speak for yourselves, by golly, others are going to speak up in your place.

Fundamentally, you have a relatively straightforward choice in front of you. You can speak up openly and honestly, take responsibility, respond to criticism and deliver your message — or let others decide what to say about your plans, goals, and policies. The latter skews your customers' perceptions of you beyond all recognition. It distorts otherwise useful feedback beyond all usability. It feeds baseless criticism, but also fosters substantiated negativity.

Substantiated negativity sees likely negative outcomes based on a pragmatic assessment of documented performance so far. Sure, you're probably trying to make this feature, patch, alteration or class-rebalancing/nerf work better than the last ones did — but unless you tell your customers how, why shouldn't they expect more of the same? After all, there's no available evidence to substantiate a more positive outlook, other than unmanaged and unfounded hopes from your apologists.

This is a long, and difficult road to start, if you are already established and operating a product or service. Take a look at your forums, and at your customers' own blogs. In the absence of information from you, there is truly vast and daunting breeding ground of people telling others what you are, have done and are going to do — much of it wrong or distorted or occasionally just plain loco, because it has none of your own speech to reference.

Your PR message, the fundamental communication of your actions and your ideals to your customers and would-be customers is being Chinese-whispered into bizarre scenarios and wild, misleading constructs, for no other reason than that you don't speak up clearly and publicly for yourselves. Does that seem frightening? It should. It is.

The good news, is that the process is accretive. The more of your words you put out there in highly visible places and into conversations, the more can be pointed back to, and the easier the road becomes, and the clearer and more transparent you become.

Some of that baseless criticism is never going to go away, because people are people after all. You have the opportunity, however, to control it by simply speaking up. Though, you had better be honest, because attempts at deception or evasion will get you torn to bitter and bloody shreds by your customers.