My first few weeks at Acclaim were mostly meetings around the launch of 2Moons. Daily conference calls with the CEO and the Marketing Manager. These meetings covered everything from the pricing of the cash shop items to finding voice talent to rework the in-game audio. The game had been rewritten specifically to bring in a more adult feel. They specifically modeled the dialog and in-game text after the then popular HBO series “Deadwood”. It was riddled with so much profanity that the gamers actually pushed back and wanted it to be softened. A great deal of the original text is still there but has been softened and filtered with standard comic book profanity. No %#@!.
Externally, I was already pretty integrated with the 2Moons community and I started to reach out to the moderators in the other games. Most were pretty accepting and I did my best to try and keep things as they were, not making many changes to the rules or how they ran things.
With 9 communities to manage there was really no way for me to do it all myself so I began to structure them in a hierarchy that consisted of a “Lead” or “Head” that reported to me, a “Second” or “Assistant” that reported to the Lead and filled in when they could not be available and a team of moderators for them. I tried to give them enough autonomy to select moderators themselves but always attempted to checkout anyone they wished to bring on. On a few occasions I would add those who I felt would benefit the community, but tried to respect the wishes of the Lead Moderators.
I did have a particularly hard time with one community; one that I never really got control over. It was based around a game that appealed to a young male, “tween” demographic and the moderators of the community were quite young as well. They greatly resented me coming into the community and setting down rules that were a little more stringent than they were used to. Though I didn’t remove any of the moderators they were all younger than the base limit I wanted set of sixteen years old. For the most part I left them this community alone, only entering it when things got out of hand. This unfortunately gave them the impression that I was only an enforcer and bit of a tyrant. I think that if I had just stepped in and set a new team in place the initial disruption to the community would have saved me a fair bit of grief in the long run.
That probably would have been the less popular thing to do. I did think you introduced yourself in some communities wrong. After all the community your referring to that you had the most problems out of, had a pretty unique community, which had a lot more traffic then the other communities.
Actually it didn’t have more traffic. To be specific it was 3rd in traffic at best and it didn’t generate much revenue. I probably should have geared my intro to the age of the users. They were, for the most part, children and I actually went out of my way to treat them as if they were more mature.
And since you are here Ant, I want to thank you personally for what you did there. I know you must have felt underappreciated for handling all the grief they liked to dish out. I know you wanted things to be better but unfortunately other priorities on my plate ranked much higher and when the developer went out of business it put us in a very difficult position.
very interesting historian =)) i hope u remember me love hehe .. i cant wait for the next parts. n i hope all is well in the world of historian=)
~shooter88
Yeah, to be fair we (the mods) were a wee bit childish at time. Then again, that’s what happens when you give 16 year olds a shiny badge that allows power. You have to admit, though, the chaos was fun at times.
You still owe me a damn pony, Histo.
-Plaything
(PS: We all liked the profanity in-game, I mean, c’mon- “Free f’kin slippers!” is pretty badass for NPC chatter.)