Community Management
Having effective community management is vital for any game’s success and yet countless developers overlook this key area. If a game’s community becomes toxic, word will spread and reputations will falter. If a game is plagued with issues and complaints are falling on seemingly deaf ears, gamers will simply turn their backs on developers. You know what can’t be drowned out by pretty graphics, dynamic gameplay or even a great story? The outrage of thousands of players who feel like their money hasn’t been well spent.
For Honor is a game that is technically impressive and even presents something rather unique to the current gaming landscape. Those who have never played the game probably have no idea that the game actually has an impressive combat system that blends the best of a hack and slasher with fighting game mechanics all while drizzling delicious RPG elements on top. Yum. But there has hardly been any time to praise these elements of the game because Ubisoft has been struggling so much with its community management that players even organized a boycott against the game. While Ubisoft has recently responded to players’ complaints of connectivity issues, poor matchmaking, problems with in-game currency and incredibly long loading screens, it took quite a bit of outrage to get an official response from their team. By then, For Honor’s reviews on Steam had already tipped to being mostly negative and the community’s cries of being ignored had already discouraged those who were once curious about the game from actually dipping their toe in the water.
It’s all in stark contrast to the likes of Blizzard’s community management with Overwatch. Overwatch developers are actively engaging with their player base to make tweaks and receive feedback on the experience the game is providing. Blizzard was even so concerned about keeping a positive community within the game that they banned PC gamers from using the phrase “gg ez” and automatically replaced the term with more positive remarks in the game chat. So while Ubisoft needed threats of a boycott to become serious about engaging the For Honor community, Blizzard has been eagerly engaging with their players every time so much as a single pixel seems out of place.
