#15 - Aug. 1, 2013, 4:03 p.m.
There are several things to note overall:
- We have dozens of developers actively reading and posting on the official forums. Some developers choose to participate in the official forums and they do so because they want to talk to you and moreover, they are taking time away from working on the game to do so. Any time that they take to read and post on the forums is time that they are not spending working on the game. If you don’t see certain people posting on the forums, please understand that they’re working on the game and they would rather focus their efforts on the game itself. There will always be more fan posts than can anyone can ever respond to. The fact is, there are more of you than there are of us. A developer can easily spend their entire day not working on the game and just reading and posting on the forums, so if they choose to spend time working on the game, please respect their choice rather than berate them for that choice. By berating staff for their decision not to post on the forums, you might actually discourage them from posting in the future, and they may just decide to continue to lurk.
- Our developers do not post on our official Facebook or Twitter channels. You have probably noticed that they aren’t signing any of their initials on the posts on Facebook and Twitter—at least if you followed any of those social media channels.
- Different channels require different tactics in terms of engagement, which is why you will see posts that are different in tone and style to match the strengths of each channel. Forums are great for discussion, for example—which is why you will see a lot of developers like Colin and Devon and others directly communicating with you here. Social media is not as great for in-depth discussions, but great for other types of engagement, which is why you will see us posting videos of goings-on at the studio, pictures, and so on. Twitch is great for showing game play and game update previews, and Facebook, Twitter, and the forums are not as great for doing that sort of thing.
- Our official social media channels are just as important to our overall community strategy as our official forums. The use of one communication channel does not preclude the use of the other. In other words, the use of social media and forums are not mutually exclusive.
- People who actively read the forums are just a fraction of the overall user base. A lot of people who do not read forums will read social media, and we’d like to reach those people. The feedback from our fans on Facebook and Twitter has long been very positive with regard to our presence and engagement on these social media channels—way before the official forums even opened. You personally may not like social media, but that doesn’t mean that hundreds of thousands of other people have the same likes/dislikes as you. Something interesting to note is, as much as a handful of forum members complain about us using social media, we have never seen the opposite: we have never seen any members of our social communities complain that we use forums.
Some clarifications about specific items:
- The Guild Wars 2 sub-Reddit is its own independent, third-party fansite community and it is not run by anyone at ArenaNet. To equate a few Reddit AMAs and a handful of Reddit posts with our official Facebook page is very misleading.
- The official wiki is written entirely by fans for fans. We have a community manager that helps liaise with the wiki community, but the wiki is actually run by fans just like you.
- Rubi was never involved as a staff member of Guild Wars 2 Guru.
- Regarding hotfixes: they are posted as a reply to the Game Update notes, right here on the official forums. Example: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-July-23rd-2013/ We do not post about hotfixes on Facebook (and this is something you would notice if you followed our Facebook page), however we will link to hotfix notes on Twitter. Please see the note above about playing to the strengths of each social media channel and the blog post itself about the usage of each type of social channel.
- You can find out about upcoming events on the official Guild Wars 2 website, under Game Releases: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/
If you don’t like social media and you prefer traditional, old school forums, that is totally cool. We’ve got that for you. If social media is not for you, then it’s not for you. We’ve also got social media for fans who like that sort of thing.
Thanks for your attention.
