Creators Should Never Read Their Forums | Hacker News Reader

Creators Should Never Read Their Forums

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

54 pointsab922 comments

Umm. I completely disagree. I was part of a 2 man team that started up 4 years ago, (a game) and I made the forums and built that community up to nearly 1,000,000 users.

Sure, you might get angry, or you mightn't like what people say - but it's the Internet. If people are saying bad things, you're doing something wrong. More times than not, we got people saying "Thanks", and this was worth more than 100+ people complaining.

It also helps build the community. A developer comes swooping down on a thread talking about "how cool would it be to have water in game?!" and goes, "Well, you seem to know what you're talking about... how about I make you moderator and you can sort out anything there is to do with water in game". Works wonders. The users love the fact that you interact with them. I.e. you're not too busy to stoop down to them.

Which game, if I may ask?

I'd rather not post that in public, too many bad memories. Founder turned out to be a bit of a crazy in the end.

Would you mind sending me an email (see profile)? You've got me really curious now.

> If people are saying bad things, you're doing something wrong.

I disagree with this part. You can't always please everyone, and the fact that some people say bad things doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something wrong. Of course, if half of your forum is filled with hate posts, yes, you might be a little off-beat.

Now, I totally agree with the fact that it helps building a community. Two-way communication is what users are more and more looking for.

If people are saying bad things, you're doing something wrong.

In my experience, for things like games, people on forums moan about almost anything, often irrationally.

I find that criticism is best when filtered; for example through a bug tracker. Most people just want to rant for attention (a silly number of people in my experience :(). Having a bug tracker next to your forum can do wonders for filtering out the trolls.

> If people are saying bad things, you're doing something wrong.

Did you mean "If people aren't saying bad things"?

See my comment to see why his situation is a little different.

Well, I'll be, Spiderweb Software on HN.

Just so you guys know, this is a lifestyle business he's been running for, like, 15 years. You should definitely check out his games if you like retro RPGs.

Just some more background. His situation is really a little different than most game makers with respect to the forums, and I'll tell you why:

A long time ago (like '90s long ago) he released a game creation system called Blades of Exile, based on the IP of a commercially successful trilogy he had released. A small but very active and very vocal community built up around this specific product. They had a lot of demands for bugfixes and feature enhancements in this product, to which Jeff was not particularly receptive (especially the latter), since he preferred to focus on writing and selling new games rather than extending a game creation system for free.

This created some ill will with the Blades of Exile community (but not the larger Spiderweb Software community) and it was also true that a lot of the Blades of Exile luminaries considered themselves _better game makers than Jeff himself_ and did not hesitate to insult, not only Jeff's games, but _fans_ of Jeff's games on the Spiderweb forums.

The Blades folks all hung out in the Spiderweb forums, and they _stayed_ there, loudly insulting Jeff and complaining bitterly that he wasn't interested in maintaining Blades, and loudly asserting that their creations surpassed anything Jeff had ever done, for _years_. Eventually he just open-sourced the damn thing, but it kind of poisoned the forum dynamics for a long time. He's actually sworn off of creating another game creation system ever again, because dealing with the communities surrounding them and their maintenance requests is more trouble for less money than cranking out a good RPG every year.

So, in his case, he really is right: he had a small group of vocal customers who were basically attacking him to

1. Get him to put in free work on Blades

2. Establish their own artistic credibility

and this bunch wasn't representative of most of his paying customers.

> He's actually sworn off of creating another game creation system ever again, because dealing with the communities surrounding them and their maintenance requests is more trouble for less money than cranking out a good RPG every year.

Not entirely accurate. Vogel did end up releasing a second game creation system based on his isometric RPG engine -- Blades of Avernum (http://www.avernum.com/blades/). It was even less profitable for him than BoE had been, which was already a loss.

The source code to BoE was released a few years ago. Unfortunately, the code was old and messy enough that little progress has been made in modernizing it.

Yeah, it was after BoA that he said this (I think he feels he allowed the BoE community to badger him into making it).

The other half of the equation is that Vogel's better at writing than programming. He was able to put together perfectly adequate engines for his games, but the real value of his RPGs was in the game content.

I'm going to agree with this because I've seen the comments on Notch's (Minecraft dev) blog. Commenting has been turned off now but they ranged from praise to demands for features and fixes to outright rage that they're not being listened to. Charge (a cut-price amount) for your product and you're somehow indebted to your users forever.

Charge (a cut-price amount) for your product and you're somehow indebted to your users forever.

So my parsing of this sentence is that you think that charging the money is what brings in the crazies. That is not the case: people frequently have entitlement issues with regards to things that are free. Oh, the stories I can't tell...

Charging cut-price amounts, on the other hand, attracts pathological customers like crazy. It is amazing how much increasing my price has cut down on pathological customers, and I have heard this over and over and over again from my shareware buddies.

It was more a jab at the state of the comments than anything else, I have nothing against charging for products. It's interesting to note that increasing your price has increased the sensibility of your customers though, I had always put it down to MC being a game generally attracts a younger audience that is more used to getting things for free after growing up with torrents and the like.

The author is slightly confusing cause with effect here. Not reading your forums makes them toxic since there is no effective moderation. Too many people still have this misguided notion that the Internet should be some massive free speech zone where nothing can be censored except maybe spam. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Clear, effective moderation backed up by sensible but stringent policy can remove many of the pathologies that the article is talking about and transform a forum into a genuinely useful resource.

Good point, but moderation takes time, as he pointed out at the beginning of the article. People don't become indie game developers so they can spend time moderating forums.

Moderation can be an art, but it's also a chore. I.e. you can't moderate 10 times as hard / smart and be done with it. There will always be more.

As a thinker / creator one has to be very careful about allowing recurring non-automatable, never-finished tasks into one's head.

I disagree. I was part of the three-person team that created Libranet 3 (a commercial Linux distribution) years ago. Every member of the company kept active contact with the community via the forums and mailing list. This created a sense of community, and gave good insights into what our customers expected.

Of course, every now and then a troll or disgruntled customer would appear. They can be truly poisonous to you and the community. And the tricky part is distinguishing 'disgruntled, but insightful' people from 'sour, and unproductive' people. If necessary we sometimes had to apply force and ban the user.

But if you make an good product, the group of happy and contributing community members is at least two orders of magnitude larger than poisonous people.

Of course, it is very well possible that game forums attract a whole different class of people those of a commercial Linux distribution.

Not just game forums, but forums for isometric 2D non-realtime indie RPGs. It's cliché but probably fair to assume that his customer base is likely selected from the rather more socially awkward end of the spectrum.

Politicians have the same problem.

The last people you should listen to are the ones that are the most vocal, yet the only information you get comes from those very people.

Same with the forums - if you listen to the suggestions there you are listening only to the most vocal, but those are not necessarily the ones with the best advice/suggestions.

The problem with the most vocal is that usually those are also the ones who care the most - but they care about themself. And they care about themself a lot - that's why they are so vocal.

I ask for feedback sometimes in my forum, and over the years the responses have gotten worse and worse.

There are a few core responders who have great ideas and are a big help. The rest (who are becoming the majority) don't read anything at all and just scream out that I need to add X, Y and Z.

At first, I tried to debate them, but that's a complete waste of time. Instead, just engage with the ones who are useful and do your best to ignore the buzzing of the rest.

This is the general problem of listening to a million people. Maybe a HN-like or a Slashdot-like software solution would let one delegate the filtering to the community itself?

There's also UserVoice who claim that they solve this problem, but I am not sure how well they perform.

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