"The Vocal Minority"
This phrase is heard pretty often when talking about community management, particularly when discussing forums. It's not untrue - statistically, active posters on forums are generally a small subset of the playerbase. They also tend to represent the powergamers and the social butterflies - not necessarily your average player. So calling them a "vocal minority" is fairly accurate.
posted by Jeremy @ 3:17 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I don't think you can actually draw any absolute conclusions regarding the forum posters. They don't even agree with each other on many issues, so how do you determine which subset of the player subset is representing the majority. What if the majority on some issues has a 3rd opinion on specific issues, and thus no one on the forum is representing the majority.
Like everything thing else in life each issue has to be handled individually, with common sense and good insight for the greater good.
Bughunter does have a point about players disagreeing with each other. What's the saying? You could tell the players you are going to mail them all a gold brick for being good customers and there are players that would complain that they had to carry something that heavy in from the mailbox.
You can't please all of the community. Ever.
However, if you focus on the fact no one ever agrees, you miss the value in the forums as a whole.
No one will let you know your servers are down faster than the players on the boards. No one will tell you about a highly abuseable exploit faster than your community. And no one QA team can possibly replicate the millions of different ways a player base can break, exploit, and powerlevel your game.
You can also take the temperature of the community via boards. While not everyone will agree on anything, you will see trends and averages. This is one of the things that seperates an average community manager from a good community manager.
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