Future of Entropia's Community Management

Information Dev's Corner
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Greetings all,

As you should all be aware now, our wonderful Community Relations Manager @My|MindArk is moving on from Entropia to new adventures. With this, I imagine many of you will be wondering what will happen next in regards to communication to and from MindArk.

How we will proceed moving forward will be a combination of two different things, one, a revived and expanded program, and two, a new position appointment.

Entropia Advisors
As was discussed in the LAN, from the ashes of the Calypso Advisor Program which was started a very long time ago, a new initiative will be taking place in an expanded form. This will encompass Calypso, Next Island and Rocktropia.

Like with the original program, these advisors will be players who posses strong knowledge of the game and planet specifics, and also players who care for the community and conduct themselves in a good manner. As advisors, they will be involved in the following:

  • Directly helping and guiding new players who join Entropia. Available to answer questions, support them on their journey in exploring the game.
  • Acting as ā€œeyes and earsā€ within the game, able to quickly asses issues that need attention, whether with servers, bugs, etc
  • Supporting the community at large by being a helpful presence that is able to engage with players

We expect that you will start to see these advisors popping up in the world over the next couple of weeks.

Player Community Liaison
With the departure of My, we have thought very hard about how we wish to operate in regards to community management moving forward. With this, we have created an entirely new role, which will see a player take on the position of Player Community Liaison with the following description of their role:

  • To support MindArk by gathering, filtering bugs and issues reported by the players to MindArk developers
  • To foster and support the game community through engagement and discussion
  • To highlight and raise key concerns and issues that players feel strongly about to MindArk, to allow us to best target and improve player sentiment
  • To enable streamlined communication and transparency between MindArk and the community
  • To work with the Support Department to raise important support related concerns, tickets and issues to help support prioritise issues that players feel strongly about, or significantly impact the game

Why have we taken this approach?

Entropia is a complex and incredibly expansive game with content spanning over 20 years. Having a strong knowledge of the game, the content, and the history makes many aspects of this role much easier in properly understanding bugs, issues, pain points and more within the game.

In addition to this, we believe it is important for the community to have better advocacy for the playerbase with MindArk. The Player Community Liaison will be talking with you all, observing discussions and bringing that all to us at MindArk as your advocate.

Naturally, it is of utmost importance that a player, regardless of position, does not gain advantage as a product of their position. To this end, the Player Community Liaison will not have access to any internal ā€œahead of timeā€ information, that isnā€™t shareable to the playerbase - they will just be here to be your advocate and improve the flow of communication back and forth between players and developers and champion key issues. Even despite this, we will still conduct regular account audits.

We believe this is an important step forward for the health of the game and community, so that we can go forward in building a strong Entropia community. With this, Iā€™d invite our new Player Community Liaison - @Nanashana to add something from his side!

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Hey all Entropians!

I appreciate itā€™s been a pretty hectic week, with a number of questions that the community wants answers to around how Mindark is going to continue to engage with their players.

With My(Morax)ā€™s departure to new opportunities, Iā€™ll be taking over a role within the community helping to bridge the gap thatā€™s widened between Mindark and the community over the years.

Over the years that Iā€™ve played alongside all of you, I hope Iā€™ve built up a relationship with many of you based on respect and trust. Iā€™ve spent years investing time in mining, crafting and hunting and more within the universe, and hopefully by now I have my finger on the pulse on what works and what doesnā€™t. I also generally prioritize knowledge sharing, and helping the community wherever I can, and know that itā€™s all the small positive interactions we all have on a daily basis with our friends, soc-mates and strangers within the community that have kept the game alive all these years.

As a Player Community Liaison, Iā€™ll be responsible for acting as that bridge between the community and Mindark. Iā€™ll be leveraging my in-depth player knowledge of the games systems, previous game-development background, and reach within the community to help in a few different ways:

[ul]
[li]Bug Prioritization and Triage: Lets not beat around the bush, stuff breaks, stuff works in QA and not in production, and some things go missed. Iā€™ll work closely with the Mindark development teams to ensure that bug boards are actionable, prioritised and reflect the impact to player experience. [/li][li]Community Engagement and being Present: Another big area which Iā€™ll be focusing on is ensuring that everyoneā€™s voice is heard. While itā€™s a common theme that a loud minority gets the most attention, Iā€™m committed to ensuring that voices are heard across the board. [/li][li]Increase Transparency: Iā€™ll be working to help enable more streamlined communication and transparency between Mindark and all of you. [/li][/ul]

This is going to be a new way Mindark is looking to engage with the community, with someone with close ties spanning both the player community and Mindark, while still remaining an active player of the game. With that in mind, Mindark is committing to ensure fair use of their platform by running regular audits of my usage of Entropia Universe, and continuing to monitor for misuse and abuse of their Terms of Use and contracts within the community.

Iā€™m looking forward to spending time diving more into helping Entropia grow into a thriving community as Mindark continues to invest in refining the game.

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This whole paragraph just screams ā€˜We donā€™t want to do support ourselves, you guys figure it out for us.ā€™
Creates a bigger gap between players and devs
You can use fancy words like streamline and transparency all you want, itā€™s blatantly obvious Devs are tired of hearing about all the bugs and donā€™t want to troubleshoot it themselves

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You are doing an important job communicating and engaging with the community.

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So is this like free labor? Player Moderators very rarely work in MMORPGs seeing time and time again, no matter the MMO that they turn corrupt, think they have more power than they do, sell their account to someone else, feel their word is the word of god etc.

So another question is, how do you plan on preventing these things from happening in a real cash economy mmorpg, when it happens on subscription and free to play mmorpgs, mobas, fps, etc?

Will this person be getting paid? Or is this free labor also?

EDIT : THIS IS A PAID JOB CONFIRMED.

No disrespect to Nana, they made a decent tracker, generally shares information they find out with the playerbase etc. Further more, do you not feel that someone with a big stake in the game and a presence does not have advantage with their shops now being more ā€œvaluableā€ than others because people will feel they need to be on the good side of the Liaison? Iā€™ve seen this cause issues multiple times in other games, and in this game could be something like ā€œOh Ill charge 130% of this resource instead of 110% cause people will feel they need to buy from meā€

Once again, Iā€™m not saying thatā€™s something that will be done, BUT this is Liaison IS a Position of power. This person IS considered the ā€œmost importantā€ player in the game now. Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm to even run for President in the United States for example.

But this is for the most part, the first time ANY of us have heard about this. Why did Nana get to get picked and not someone else? What was the process like? How much of a due process was done?

What does this also mean for Ludvig? If the better of the community people between him and My was canned, is Ludvig going to be gone soon too? Would that leave only you and an unpaid intern as the voice of the community?

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What about Virtuaverse, then?

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Roth ira 4 da win!~

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To have close ties with Mindark and direct access to them, potentially even to internal informationā€¦ and yet remain an active player?

I have nothing against Nana but I do not agree to this in any way, no matter how you spin it. Remember what happened when certain player was caught using official items? This is worse.

Play with an official avatar if you must, your regular one should be locked the moment you enter mindarkā€™s team in an official manner.

Call me crazyā€¦

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I completely missed that, link?

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Will you remain in a society?

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It doesnā€™t make sense.

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Thatā€™s huge. Game really needed this role and I cannot see a better fit for it. Good luck @Nanashana

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Nanashana will not be ā€œpart of MindArkā€™s Teamā€ to use your words. They will be raising issues, bugs, feedback etc from the community directly with us, but not have access to internal information that is not known to the playerbase, as I outlined in the post. They are a representative on behalf of players.

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i agree w Eve, its huge step forward, personally Iā€™m very glad Nana was chosen as is person with competency and analytical mind that we need from position like this.
Congratz n best of luck @Nanashana

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Not crazy, weā€™ve seen this song and dance before. Maybe Nana is insanely Rich irl and they wonā€™t be corrupted by this power in a virtual game. Thatā€™s the best this game can hope for. But not a fan of them or anyone who would be in this position to be a part of a society, or have shops/stores/deeds etc. in the game.

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Do as you please, it seems a bit fishy to me. By his own admission to have close ties to MA and remain an active playerā€¦ rightā€¦

I honestly think you guys are falling into the same traps you always do. Ahemā€¦ Darkaruki.. ahemā€¦ DannyOā€¦ you guys love your grey areas donā€™t you?

But whatever, call me old and grumpy. Iā€™ve only been like 20 years around this place, no hard feelings from my side I wish you all the best.

Good luck on this new phase, I think youā€™ll need it

:slight_smile:

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This all seems very positive, good timing and lovley to see proper communication.

Nana is a great choice, easy to talk to and greatly experienced in the game. Gz on the new role!

I hope this will be a new dawn of a greater connection between the player base and game, with our ideas, problems and feedback taken more seriously and addressed properly.

I have hope once again!

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WTF this is insane. How can a regular player be allowed to have insider relations with MindArk and still be permitted to have their normal avatar. @Socrates|Mindark - what type of information will they be granted access to?

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Well this is the most exciting news ive heard for a long time - Knowing Nana personally for many years this comes as a very pleasant surprise to me - So for those who may not the know the man behind the avatar ive got full faith in him as a both a fantastic high level player and all round top bloke.

Its certainly going be to a hard role to fill - but history tells us again and again that MA suck at this - Maybe just maybe putting one of " our own" in the role is the best way forward !

Bring on the better communication :smiley:

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What ? you all thought ā€œhardcoreā€ meant ā€œingameā€ play only ā€¦ their mostly ambitious ā€¦ nothing wrong with that ^^