Community Manager Q&A

Deribus

@ftxcommando said in Community Manager Q&A:

Both candidates talk about using the Discord as some sort of feedback tool

I did not, all of the feedback sources in my post were from the forum.

So how is data going to be massaged to actually be a decent metric for player preferences?

This is a good question. Ultimately the problem is the vast majority of the community is uninterested in giving feedback and never will be. While I can work with the promo team to advertise and encourage opportunities for feedback, I must also keep track of what subgroups of the community are actually responding. The Naval Balance poll I did a while back (which was a great learning experience) at the very least asked for the ratings of players.

At this point my ideal solution would be cooperation with the dev team to allow polls in the website, so it can automatically pull information like rating and game preferences that I can use to interpret the feedback but also reach out to groups that I feel are under-represented.

@phong said in Community Manager Q&A:

I'd like to hear each candidate's opinions and suggestions, if they have any, on new player experience, retention and training. Is FaF doing better now than it was before on this front? Is there something that you think could be improved further? If there are issues, who is in a position to address them?

It's very difficult to get an accurate impression because it's been so long since I've gone through that myself. I've trained a handful of complete newbies over the past year so I do hear their troubles, but that represents the tiny subgroup of new people that come out seek training.

To my knowledge new players have the following problems:

Getting kicked from custom lobbies
Long queue times in matchmaking, and very imbalanced matches for the first 10 or so
Very steep learning curve
Few similarly ranked players willing to play anything but dual gap and astro

One idea I have is to put AI into low rated matchmaking games, to bulk up the player count while also providing a "smoother" learning experience for these new players. As with everything, not committing to this just yet.

@ftxcommando said in Community Manager Q&A:

I mean I hate to beat a dead horse but seriously the 1 new thing you proposed you'd do, a rehash of This Week in Slack, you then immediately walked back and said you might not do it because it could be a lot of reading.

I understand your concern, and it comes from my desire to remain flexible, especially this is a brand-new position. We're all familiar with politicians' willingness to make promises that they never end up keeping, and I'm trying to avoid putting myself in that position.

My plan for the position is generally:

Collect feedback
Discuss with community and team leads how to address said feedback
Execute improvements after discussion phase

We're pre-step 1 right now, so skipping to what step 3 would be seems premature.

That said, I agree that my stance is too nebulous at the moment, and I'll add an appendix to my application of ideas I'd like to implement.

Jip

I'd like to hear both candidates view on how they intend to deal with 'no' from the contributors side.

The presence of significant feedback that supports a given feature doesn't mean that it will happen. Other work may take priority - even if that can take up to months to finish. Or the feature in question may not be technically possible. Or - we're volunteers after all - the contributors in question are just not interested in helping to create, finalize and maintain the feature in question.

Deribus

@jip said in Community Manager Q&A:

I'd like to hear both candidates view on how they intend to deal with 'no' from the contributors side.

I'd like to get a reason for why they aren't interested in implementing this feature, and depending on the reason I'll see if I can get someone else to. Other than that I don't see it as an issue. You, Shiekah, and Brutus can all attest that I've made many feature requests in the past and I'm fairly used to getting a "no".

Rowey

It tends to be more related to what the developer is interested in working on, if they're not interested their not going to spend their free time working on it. at the end of the day, the developers for faf are spending their time at home working on faf because they enjoy it. one example of this is the FAF client we have gone from Python to Java not just because python is bad but the developer we have now is more used to java than python so the jave client gets more development time and the python client got deprecated it just the cycle on how thing goes and people come and go.

Giebmasse

I am also interested in the approach when the tables are turned. Say the community indicates via some polls or other ways that they would want thing X. Now it might be that this thing X would actually be bad for the community, just because it gains popularity doesn't mean it should be implemented for the overall good and success of the community.

Can you say no and filter out bad apples like that, instead of just straight piping all good and bad ideas forwards just because they get popular?

Anachronism_

@jip said in Community Manager Q&A:

I'd like to hear both candidates view on how they intend to deal with 'no' from the contributors side.

It depends on the details of the situation. If it's just that a particular contributor does not want to make it, I'd accept that. However, I might ask a different contributor to make it, or I might even make it myself, depending on what it is. However, if the desired feature is technically impossible, I would of course accept that. Depending on the details of the situation, I might explore alternative ideas that would be technically possible, or I might just move on to other ideas.

Anachronism_

@giebmasse said in Community Manager Q&A:

I am also interested in the approach when the tables are turned. Say the community indicates via some polls or other ways that they would want thing X. Now it might be that this thing X would actually be bad for the community, just because it gains popularity doesn't mean it should be implemented for the overall good and success of the community.

Can you say no and filter out bad apples like that, instead of just straight piping all good and bad ideas forwards just because they get popular?

Yes; I want to avoid things that would be bad for the community. I certainly can say 'no' and filter out bad apples.

FtXCommando

@penguin_ said in Community Manager Q&A:

Yes; I want to avoid things that would be bad for the community. I certainly can say 'no' and filter out bad apples.

Examples applicable to FAF?

Anachronism_

Here are some examples of ideas that would be bad for the community that I would reject:

Removing global rating without a sufficient replacement
Removing the most recent section on the vault
Removing all adjacency bonuses from the game
Disallowing all icon mods
Unrating Dual Gap
etc

Anachronism_

@phong said in Community Manager Q&A:

I'd like to hear each candidate's opinions and suggestions, if they have any, on new player experience, retention and training. Is FaF doing better now than it was before on this front?

Yes, FAF has made many changes that have helped to improve the new player experience, such as adding TMM, adding and improving mapgen, making significant performance improvements (and consequently decreasing lag), adding cool new maps to play on, adding UI improvements, adding in-lobby autobalancing and team rating display, etc.

Is there something that you think could be improved further? If there are issues, who is in a position to address them?

There are many things that could further improve the new player experience. To give some examples:

Experienced/skilled players could create additional guides that make it easier for new players to learn how to play FAF well
People who know how to make scripted maps could help create more FAF-mission type tutorial content
The promo team could add something to the news page as an obvious 'New Player's Guide' and or a 'Learn How To Play Better' link that links to something like this that provides helpful resources for learning how to play and improve at FAF
The matchmaker team could add a mapgen-only TMM queue/option - (not knowing BO's and not knowing the details of individual maps is a large perceived negative hurdle for many new players)
Developers can continue to make performance improvements, add desirable new features, and add UI improvements
Someone with the relevant permissions on the FAF Discord could create 'Looking For Games' voice and text channels, and an 'All Welcome Games' role/channel
FAF players can make an effort to be more welcoming/helpful to noobs - (I believe phong has personally gotten many more new players to keep playing FAF by hosting actual 'all welcome' games and being friendly and helpful to new players )

maudlin27

There are often discussions on the balance section of the forum where there's no visibility on what the balance team's conclusion is on the topic (although there might be a hint if one of the team posts on the topic). Meanwhile, balance patch notes mostly seem to feature changes that have had no discussion on the forums (i.e. no indication they're being considered). Would you improve communication/visibility of balance decisions for the wider community, and if so how?

Anachronism_

I would talk with the balance team about what could be done that they'd be okay with. Some potential improvements might be things like creating more explanatory resources (such as balancing explanations that could be linked to/cited when relevant), creating a public balance discussion channel on the FAF Discord, and adding brief explanations for why particular balance changes are being made.

Deribus

I know voting has already begun, but @FtXCommando requested to hear what ideas I'd like to look into if elected:

Collect data on matchmaking queue times
- Investigate what improvements can be made for the highest and lowest rating pools, which tend to experience the longest queue times
Create a document outlining the current members of the FAF organization and their self-described responsibilities
- There are a ton of different roles and it can be difficult to determine who to talk to about what, especially given the recent reorganization
Monthly/quarterly check-ins with each team
- Let the community know what each team has been up to
Weekly/Monthly discussion topics on the forum
- Encourage discussion and gather feedback on topics varying from balance to client features to whatever else might be fun
Suggestions topics
FAF Data posts
- Various stats like account creations, faction popularity, and anything else that suits my fancy