Community managers
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:57 amThere is one single change that would dramatically improve Nost, especially right at the moment: Establish a team of community managers who actively participate in the forums. You would remember these from retail as 'blue posts.'
The single biggest problem that Nost has is a lack of communication with the player base. There are forum moderators, who mainly just remove offensive content. Sometimes one of the admins comes on and makes an appearance. There is however no active community management, and the staff is earning a reputation as capricious and arbitrary as a result.
A community manager is a liaison between the admins and the player base. They interpret the ToU for players, answer posts asking for information, carry player concerns to the admin team with the task to get something resolved, and explain what is going on and why. They need to be extremely tactful with insight as to how their public responses will be perceived by a wide audience. They are marketers whose job it is to make sure that the Nost brand is viewed positively by managing its perception, and make players feel like they are partners in this journey (and not subjects of a tyrant). They provide that critical 2-way communication between the Nost admins, developers, and the players.
The lack of this is really showing at the moment. You (Nost) can't just publicly post in response to a "why am i banned" thread with "You are a liar, you were hacking." (Cringe!) And locking threads with no explanation because you're trying to shut down dissent is exactly the WRONG thing to do. You certainly have heard the criticism of "lack of transparency." It's the lack of community management that is causing this problem.
The single biggest problem that Nost has is a lack of communication with the player base. There are forum moderators, who mainly just remove offensive content. Sometimes one of the admins comes on and makes an appearance. There is however no active community management, and the staff is earning a reputation as capricious and arbitrary as a result.
A community manager is a liaison between the admins and the player base. They interpret the ToU for players, answer posts asking for information, carry player concerns to the admin team with the task to get something resolved, and explain what is going on and why. They need to be extremely tactful with insight as to how their public responses will be perceived by a wide audience. They are marketers whose job it is to make sure that the Nost brand is viewed positively by managing its perception, and make players feel like they are partners in this journey (and not subjects of a tyrant). They provide that critical 2-way communication between the Nost admins, developers, and the players.
The lack of this is really showing at the moment. You (Nost) can't just publicly post in response to a "why am i banned" thread with "You are a liar, you were hacking." (Cringe!) And locking threads with no explanation because you're trying to shut down dissent is exactly the WRONG thing to do. You certainly have heard the criticism of "lack of transparency." It's the lack of community management that is causing this problem.
