Interview von der GamesCom Teil II

Nachdem ich gestern bereits den ersten Teil meines Interviews mit Carrie Gouskos und Andy Belford veröffentlicht habe, folgt heute nun die Fortsetzung. Diesmal antworten die beiden vor allem auf Fragen bezüglich der Community.

Erdknuffel: The transition from GOA to Mythic brought a whole new community with many new players and language regions with it. What impact does this have on your daily work and how do you deal with the new challenges?

Andy: So actually the community and the development part go hand in hand in a lot of ways. On a daily basis it actually adds a lot to what we do because every bit of communication that we put out there, we have to localize it. Obviously there are times, where we have emergency or immediate messaging, where we need to get out there very quickly and where we are not able to translate it immediately. When it comes to regular messaging, important messaging and things like dev diaries and starting with this version 1.4, in development posts, we’re localizing all of that. We’re working on ways to make the game experience not feel like an utter separation and disconnection for the European players. We want the European community to feel like this is their community and Warhammer is their community and their game.

Carrie: I was going to comment as we have in house French and German CSRs, but we don’t want to take away from their time, that they could be answering tickets. So we work elsewhere to get that. It definitely adds a layer of additional kind of preparation, because way before we could throw something up and say: OK, here it is! Now we have to be more careful about what we’re going to do with enough time in advance to do this and that. So getting all those communications translated it is, you know…

Erdknuffel: If you read the news as a native speaker in nearly every news you find some typos or small mistakes. Are you planning on improving this?

Carrie: There are a couple of things we’re doing. One is we’re working with a localization partner. Some of the French stuff we want to fix some bugs, that cropped up and there is a little bit of a problem with the transition. We are working with the group to fix a lot of that stuff. You’ll see improvement to localization over time. If there is specific stuff in the news some of it is, because the first batch of communication was happening so fast, there’s so much coming and we hadn’t set everything up yet. But they were firing off. They were turning those things around in a few hours. That’s probably the account for that, because we were just doing everything really quickly. I think as we settle into communications and we have more planning, because the transition happened in a really kind of accelerated pace, we are going to see an improvement.

Andy: And not only that. We are actually investigating options to improve our capability of gathering feedback from our European communities. We have things that we’re looking into right now that are going to make it easier for us and make us more efficient at gathering that feedback. Not only gathering the feedback, but communicating that as a development team. The volunteer moderators, you guys actually are doing an excellent job of being out there and interacting with the community, we have a language barrier with. Right now it’s an area that we recognize, it’s something that we do improve upon and that’s something we’re looking into. I can’t discuss something that we’re doing right yet. It’s something that is in legal right now so I can’t discuss that.

Erdknuffel: Previously, the French and the German language regions had their own community management representatives. How do you try to compensate the loss of these persons?

Carrie: That thing that he’s talking about? That’s what it is! We’ve been looking to hire someone that speaks French and German to be kind of Andy’s sidekick or his equivalent if you will but otherwise we’re working on the thing that he’s talking about.

Andy: Do you anyone that wants to come to the United States to be a community manager and speaks French and German?

Erdknuffel: French and German, both?

Carrie: Yes, we demand both. We have high standards.

Erdknuffel: If a player does not speak English, what would you recommend for him if he wants to bring his own thoughts and ideas into the development of WAR?

Carrie: Well if he’s German, he should just talk to you!

Andy: Honestly right now yeah. The volunteer moderators for each language are doing a great job of helping to pass along feedback, I believe. I’ve got PMs from you about feedback from the German community. Kaelgar was on holiday for a while, but he’s passing along feedback to me as well.

Erdknuffel: Do you read the discussions in the German and the French subsections of the official forums?

Andy: I read what I can. You probably saw, when the GOA forums were still up I tried going in there and I tried to read it and at least get an understanding and use Google Translate for it. It’s not ideal, it’s not perfect but I do go in there and I try to read it, but obviously like we’ve said, it’s not an ideal situation and we are working to improve it.

Erdknuffel: So I think, there are some plans to improve these subsections into fully fledged forums, right?

Andy: Not necessarily fully fledged but to give a more complete forum experience.

Erdknuffel: Speaking of the official forums, are there any plans to improve the BioWare Social Network? For example by putting in a way to mark unread posts?

Andy: So actually, we share the same frustrations as the community shares with the new forum software. Lithium was not ideal, it wasn’t the perfect solution but what they did, they offered a very complete service that had a lot of things that you expect when it comes to a complete forum software suite. We actually have been in constant communication with the Adminton forum team regarding the forums and they already are planning on moving to a new forum software suite. That’s in the works; they recognized that as an area for improvement. I can’t give you a lot more information on that right now, I can just say that there is new forum software that’s coming. We don’t have a prospective time; it’s all about priorities for them.

Carrie: And we’ve been constantly feeding them like: Here’s feature we need and they’re aware of that and they’re moving forward to things like that.

Erdknuffel: Customized avatars for example?

Andy: As a person, who is a forum troll, I kind of like the customized avatars, but on the other hand as a community manager I see the value in offering things that are very specific to the setting of the game and the lore of the game because we want for the forums to be another form of emergent. For a lot of people the forums are just another extension of the game and a complaint that a lot of the people, when they came over had about the official forums was, that they said: “These forums don’t feel like Warhammer.” The old Lithium forums felt like Warhammer and so we recognized that if you have a lot of customizable avatars or personalized avatars, you actually start to loose that Warhammer feel and you just become another gaming site, which talks about all games. That’s not the purpose of the Warhammer forums. The purpose of the Warhammer forums is to talk about Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer Online. That’s what we are here to talk about.

[O-Ton: Andy spricht hier von anpassbaren Avataren, nicht von Charakterverknüpfungen!]

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