Don't listen to your community

I'm not advocating for ignoring them, but I'm advocating for considering the issue a bit more in depth first. What I mean by listen is really the listening part as in "what is said".

Communities have a very special dynamic and it's a though decision when you try to implement changes or try to decide what to do next. Getting priorities from your community is about as pleasant as having your teeth pulled by a 500 pound gorilla on a unicycle during an earth quake.

Now I apply this with such general terms because it's true for many things, be it websites or video games. I came across this topic though for a game, so let's just run with that. The discussion was about a feature, should it be put in or not. One voice was to look at the community, what are they saying. Instantly alarm bells went up in my head and I didn't distinctly know why. I knew it was a bad idea, but why exactly?


So the decision is to either implement or never implement a said feature. Now you look into your community and see that there are about 80% of the people talking are against said feature. Your decision is to not implement the feature. Suddenly your player base plummets. Wait, what did we do wrong? It could go either way, but that's really the root of the problem. There are multiple ways to look at it, I just grab two extreme ones here to give you a good example of how flipping a coin is almost as effective in most situations.

First view: The tip of the iceberg

Now you have 100'000 players, but only 1'000 are actually participating in the forums, have blogs and so on. So your information is based on 1% of the player base. You assume that everyone who speaks out, speaks out for 100 other players. So if 80% say this sucks, you translate it with 80'000 say it sucks. You just made out each person to be 100 times more important than they actually are.

Second view: Outspoken minority

Just because you hear 1'000 people doesn't mean that's the 1'000 people that make up your games core audience. Maybe the mass of your players are just quiet people, enjoying the game without any interest whatsoever in registering, reading or participating in any forum or blog. Many active forums, have about 4 times as many people registered than posting in the past 3 months. And if there is a "main page"  attached, you have usually 3 times as many visitor s to that than to the forums. So the ones you hear are maybe just really the outspoken ones, but they still make up only one percent of your true demographic.

Now the truth lies somewhere in between, which is the premise of this post: Don't listen to the community. Instead, observe.

Games (and MMOs in particular) are perfect for this. In Half-Life there as a feature that allowed the people from Valve to see where most people died, took damage or simply stood around a lot. They could identify hotspots where the difficulty was too high and adjust accordingly. In other words: Metrics.

Find out what people do, where they fail and what they try to do.

Another example is from a forum community. Everyone who was in that community was making their own blog, mostly on blogspot. So everyone had their own little blog linked from their signature. The feature everyone wanted? Link list. But no, they didn't want link lists, they wanted integrated blogs. They just found a work around for the blogs at the moment. I made a bet with the owner, telling him that blogs was what people wanted, while he was convinced link list is what they want. I would code the link list for him, first, for a price we agreed on. Then I would code, for free, the blogs, install it and let it run. If thanks to the blog, the page saw double the traffic within a month, he would pay me double the money I estimated for the blogs, otherwise nothing. Traffic actually dropped after the link list came in. A total of 9 links were suggested, two of which were rejected. Two weeks later, the blogs were setup. People abandoned their blogspot accounts so they could have their stuff integrated with the forums. Traffic almost tripled in one week alone. In the second week, I got my payment and another project to add a blogspot importer.

Users will tell you through the money they pay, through the features they use (and don't use), through the workarounds they come up with and also very important, the things they are looking for in your help files, what it is, they want to do.

Observe your community. If it matches to what you hear, that's good. Otherwise, you have to explain it to them. Don't worry, they'll understand.