Valve prefers to stay away from what is happening on the Steam forums, and sometimes this leads to sad results. Grace Carroll, who is responsible for SMM at Creative Assembly, told how the Total War community became toxic without moderation and how it was fixed.
Carroll emphasizes that maintaining a healthy community today is a task on which the success of the game ultimately depends.:
“If people are interested in your game, they will Google it and find pages on Facebook and Twitter, your sub on Reddit. And if they see that your sub is completely silent or that your forum is full of hostile comments, they won’t want to buy your game, they won’t want to get involved in all this.”
Total War series games are dedicated to history and wars, so political topics were often raised on Steam forums, Grace says. Often the discussions were conflicting, the situation was getting worse, the forums just became unpleasant to read.
“If you have a toxic audience, it will remain that way, because nice people will just leave. They won’t want to communicate in a toxic environment.”
The solution that Creative Assembly came up with turned out to be simple and very effective. Carroll assigned one of her employees the task of monitoring what is happening on the forums and from time to time to intervene and moderate the discussion.
“Just the presence of a moderator, the understanding that someone deletes threads and bans rude people, changed the situation in about a week,” says Grace.
Now people themselves began to moderate communication – they pointed out to each other how not to discuss, reported violations.
“This forum, honestly, was a disgusting place. But the minute people started getting bans, they realized that A) their behavior entails consequences, they can’t just say whatever they want; and B) they don’t complain about violations in vain, the moderator hears them.”
Moreover, bans, according to Grace, are an extreme measure that the moderator applies only in case of direct insults. And, for example, this does not apply to trolls, because trolls produce a discussion.
Another useful solution is the presence of a “lightning rod”, where users can pour out negativity as much as they want. If you just delete negative threads, they will definitely reappear.
The presence of a company representative in the discussion should be noticeable. This is important for users. Therefore, Grace recommends maintaining as many public pages as the company’s resource is sufficient. It’s better to have two well-moderated sites than a dozen where the devil knows what is going on.
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