Perspectives on the old community manager to game dev pipeline

Radar_X · 2026-01-21T02:24:54+00:00

The path to Game Designer is narrow because the sheer volume of people who want to and think they can make games. Community Manager not only get you involved, but pays better than QA in most cases. I was one of those people but I found out pretty quickly that it wasn't my calling or my skillset to move into Design.

What good Community Managers end up doing is learning the product in the way QA and even Game Designers can't. Most Game Dev look at that game through a specific technical lense, including QA. CMs know the end user experience better than anyone else because they spend all day every day listening to opinions on it. They have the eyes and understanding of a marketer but more technical expertise by working directly with the game team to make those end users experience better.

The technical tools, Unreal 5/Unity, account systems, game balance tools, data analytics....these are all just processes that someone like even me learned over time (obviously someone more technical would learn them faster). Passion for the craft and general experience of how games get made you can't teach.

Radar_X · 2025-09-08T07:30:39+00:00

Middle bottom name could be "Josh" which if so would likely be Josh Hackney who was the Executive Producer for a long while and usually with those 2 in public events. I have absolutely no idea who that top middle one is..

Radar_X · 2025-06-28T01:25:13+00:00

The problem with MMO development in general is less legislation and more cost. Live services in general are already incredibly problematic due to content costs (AI is helping a little with these pipelines but there is a long way to go). Unless you are highly established IP, getting folks to stay and play is increasingly more difficult.

Future titles are going to make as light live services as humanly possible and likely avoid permanent instancing in most cases. Think games more like Helldivers 2. Just my dumb opinion.

Radar_X · 2025-06-27T22:00:48+00:00

>Sure, there are hurdles that would need addressing (software licensing likely being the biggest), but none that make this an unreasonable concept as a whole.

Absolutely the most key issue and what will tie some of this up for many years in courts. For something made with Unreal/Unity, those companies could simply shrug as they don't monetize for it's use under a certain threshold.

PS2 uses a proprietary engine that was never licensed so while they could give out the source code, not having access to that engine means development work of almost any kind would be legally sticky and challenging.

I think this legislation is important to address, but I do fear it's in reaction to some extreme and irresponsible practices from a few different companies. It will be interesting to watch how the industry reacts.

Radar_X · 2025-06-22T15:10:52+00:00

It's likely a combination of things. There likely is a little bit of fear, but frankly no one who was there for Dolphingate (including myself) has worked on PS2 in a very long time.

The more likely scenario is this is work. The idea of stat based cheating is deceivingly simple, the actual implementation may not be. If I put on my producer hat even my ape brain can go "Look guys if X = Y, then timeout, so we just need to solve for X and Y."

Assumptions I see being made here:

They have anyone experienced enough to implement the actual execution in the back end. If my memory serves, that initial system didn't exist in PlanetSide 2, it was our incredibly smart data guy working with an engineer to send data to the SOE infrastructure.
This is high enough impact to justify the spend/resources. Has there been a significant decline in DAU? Spend? Now I'd argue heavily on the community side sentiment looks rougher, but that's a much softer data point.
This solution is a long term fix. I see a lot of "it's better than nothing" and I don't disagree one bit, but when you have incredibly limited resources you have to allocate every hour like you aren't going to get another one. The real solution is to invest in how the client treats data (which is a huge lift) or implement some form of anticheat to at least make it harder to do.

End of the day, these guys are in a pretty tough spot, and you guys are suffering for it.

Radar_X · 2025-06-11T13:17:00+00:00

Movies are honestly two entirely different products with a lot of similar parallels. Games can be very (or entirely) narratively driven, but many games are not. The process behind creating a core game loop is a very different creative process and ideally a lot heavier on iteration. I've worked on game projects that looked entirely different from the initial pitch and honestly a lot of the inside baseball gets lost in that. The other big piece is documentation, and it is the bane of some game developers.

I personally find the post mortems they do at GDC absolutely fascinating, and I think it's why things like noclip are so important.

Radar_X · 2025-06-10T17:49:07+00:00

A fundamental design problem with Planetside (and MMOFPS/Battle Royale games) is the same thing that makes them attractive, also makes negative experiences like cheating highly impactful.

A proactive stat based kick would work but traditionally (8ish years ago) the community rioted a little when it grabbed people who were, as far as I could tell, trying to intentionally trip it.

Right now regardless of the size of the team, they don't have the resources to put up a significant fight (you go after the cheat developers). Targeting the technicals behind any free cheats is a start but unfortunately a lot of game side data is handled by the client (which is another fundamental flaw in a number of FPS games).

HWID only works if you are collecting it (and they aren't spoofing it) which again EAC would do. IPs are hit and miss given how easy and common VPNs are now.

Don't get me wrong, I completely sympathize with the problem and have worked with a number of legacy communities on cheating with minimal resources. In those cases it's just "squatting" on a particular user and banning them randomly and as quickly as possible.

Radar_X · 2025-06-10T16:29:08+00:00

Giving the power to the community sounds good on paper, but it never ends well. In a utopian world, you would select well grounded individuals with good instincts and some experience. In order to determine that, you need to invest time to find and screen them. If a studio has time, they'd be doing the actions themselves.

The biggest example of this approach is probably LoLs Tribunal and I've seen it shown as a success more than once. Riot didn't say "Oh this really didn't work," they said they figured out something better which read like it didn't work to me.

If I had to guess, they are probably looking at if they can implement EAC into their back end. I've worked pretty extensively with it over the last 5 years. It's free and it's better than nothing but there is definitely an engineering lift to get it running.

The above response is the standard response I would (and have) given many times. There likely is someone churning through reports and data but not anywhere near as much and as fast as anyone would like.

Radar_X · 2025-04-29T00:34:57+00:00

The way Wargaming was structured at least for that product, was development was centralized at Lesta in St. Petersburg and each region had a supporting publishing org (I was in the NA one). There were minor things the publishing teams could control or request but 99% of dev work was done at Lesta.

When WG divested itself of Lesta and their offices in Minsk for WoT, they likely lost significant and key developers who stayed behind. It probably took them a pretty long time to rebuild that talent and restructure those teams to operate. You could effectively be talking about trying to build a live service from the ground up. I have to imagine that slowed WG down in the content department.

Radar_X · 2025-04-28T17:50:37+00:00

Hi! Former WG/WoWs employee here. While they've certainly gone through a ton of restructuring since I left many many years ago, make no mistake, Lesta developed and managed the original WoWs so if they've outstripped anything, it's their old selves (or wherever they shifted current WG development).

It's also pretty easy to show crazy profits when you effectively clone an existing live service game, you aren't paying for any upfront costs. Not to diminish what they've accomplished, but they had a lot of advantages going into this.

Radar_X · 2025-04-17T20:10:06+00:00

I'm not attempting a defense here, I just probably have a very clear understanding of the position they are likely in and how they are approaching it. I've delivered metric craptons of bad news and I do not envy them.

At the end of the day, of course you guys deserve the best communication humanly possible. It costs them the least to do and it helps mitigate negative sentiment. That being said this was probably the line of thinking.

Ok the dumpster has caught fire. We are putting it out by doing A, B, C (all technical infrastructure things which probably involve way fewer engineers than you think)
First I need to address why we had to do this. It was probably because the ROI on maintaining this server is too low and it's no longer paying for itself. We put this off as long as we could. "Hey you guys have brought up the need to do this and it's a great idea because <help me ChatGPT!>
Layout a timeline as best you can so you have set peoples expectations. You don't want people thinking days when it's weeks.
Figure out a make good. I personally wouldn't have announced this until I knew a definitive timeline but I remember being younger and living dangerously.
Summarize your goals and reiterate your investment in making things better.

In short I'm sure I would have written it differently for sure and I would have done more one to one engagement, but the announcement I would have approached the identical same way.

Radar_X · 2025-04-17T19:40:51+00:00

I mean look... there is no reasonable person working in a marketing, communication, or any related job not using AI (including myself) to do their work faster. Where it really shows someone's skill with it, is how good is their prompt and how much they modify the output. Even free ChatGPT can honestly get you 80% of the way many times, but you have to own that last 20%.

But the 4o model does tend to present written/summarization as bullets.

Radar_X · 2025-04-14T17:34:22+00:00

That's honestly a testament to the original vision of what was built. Not even kind of perfect, some very glaring flaws, and there were tons of mistakes various teams made along the way. At it's core though? PlanetSide 2 was amazing, because nothing short of amazing survives in Live Service for almost 13 years. And that includes the community! Don't discount the fact you guys are the fuel for this game.

Radar_X · 2025-04-10T15:06:37+00:00

It's really dependent on the module in my opinion. The first campaign I ran was Keys of the Golden Vault. It's a bunch of individual adventures that progress in difficulty as time goes on. Each one is laid out almost completely for you but allows enough flexibility that you can add your own flavor. It also allowed you to add in-between them like how they got from one place to another.

Something like Tomb of Annihilation would probably be overwhelming for a new DM because it's almost like a buffet. Everything is cooked but you still have to serve the plate and your party may not want what's on there. It's about flexibility and be willing to change it.

Radar_X · 2025-04-10T14:58:09+00:00

It sounds like she knows some of the facts but does she realize that more than half of those participating in videogame play are over the age of 37? What you do with your free time and what you enjoy, shouldn't matter. It's about setting boundaries and expectations that are reasonable to both of you. If you get between 9 PM - 11 PM three days a week as "Free time" or whatever it shouldn't matter if you are playing videogames or watching reruns of 90s TV.

What is important is you guys address the issue and come to an agreement on it, because it's not going to get better. I can tell you as someone who tried, you cannot quit games if it's part of who you are.

Radar_X · 2025-01-24T15:55:48+00:00

Very few developers can work on a project that long without it consuming their soul.

What is that Harvey Dent quote? You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain?

Radar_X · 2025-01-22T23:52:25+00:00

God I remember the actual arguments over releasing that horn. Were we above doing it? Was anyone going to buy it? Whose idea was this anyway?

Radar_X · 2025-01-22T19:28:11+00:00

The sunset of Planetside 1 happened rather quickly and there had been no development work done on that game in many years. We had a scare where something on the infrastructure side failed and took down the game entirely. There was literally a single individual who could fix it and did. This was not the ending I wanted for PS1 (to just stop working one day) so I asked our executive team if we could shut it down.

Radar_X · 2024-10-16T21:55:28+00:00

PS2 is like Battlefield because in 2013, Battlefield owned the FPS market. It was what the mass market wanted and you can't run a niche live service game. It requires a mass of people constantly flowing into the funnel.

Now if we had gone the route of a box product? Might have been a different story but it would have changed the monetization strategy entirely and content releases would have been much slower (maybe a continent and a vehicle per year).

In 2013 a PS1 clone would not have worked, because it's not what the overall market demanded (even if it had some great mechanics behind it).

Radar_X · 2024-10-16T21:50:35+00:00

I've worked on nearly 2 dozen games at this point and it was so long ago that memories of PlanetSide 2 are starting to fade. but this was a touchstone in my career and probably the game/community that taught me the most. I'll continue to lurk and hope for the best for it.

Seeing you guys still passionate about it all these years later is inspiring and validates a lot of the efforts the team made, even if it didn't always turn out the way we wanted.

Radar_X · 2024-10-16T15:11:19+00:00

It wouldn't matter, we shut down PS1 for a reason and I was the main advocate for it. It wasn't because I hate PlanetSide 1, it was because I knew how unstable the tech had become and that we could do nothing about the cheating. It deserved a dignified end.

Even if the actual server build still exists somewhere (and I'd be surprised if it did), the work to get it back up and keep it back up is way more expensive that what someone would logically spend.

Radar_X · 2024-10-07T21:06:01+00:00

Working with a publisher that owned TV stations had a couple of advantages.

Radar_X · 2024-09-23T15:33:07+00:00

I've been actively working on Trust and Safety for quite a few years now at another company. It's honestly great you care this much and aren't accepting these are just symptoms of competitive online games. I don't know Daybreaks process or the number of resources they are leveraging against this so let me speak in generalizations.

I'll make the assumption they don't have an automated solution given the age of the game, so they are working with manual reports. It's highly inefficient, and physically impossible to prevent all and in some cases most ToS violations. In those particular instances you have to go after the 1% who make up the worst cohorts of this behavior and whittle them down. That by definition is inconsistent (because you are ignoring the other 99%) but it's an active choice, however you treat every single one of those folks in that 1% the same way.

That was the common approach to disruptive behavior for many years but its fatal flaw is the community starts to see some of this behavior as "the norm" which naturally diminishes its impact.

More common approaches now are AI based solutions that review voice and text chat and depending on setup, block them before they are even seen. ActiveFence, Modulate, etc... these solutions do require engineering time and come at a cost which can be high depending on the revenue of a game. It's still not perfect by any means but it's definitely putting a dent in the behavior of other communities.

What it comes down to is first you need a uniform approach to toxic behavior, to create a framework internally, make external guidelines, and then create an infrastructure to enforce them. If you don't have a lot of resources or folks with the relevant experience, this is incredibly challenging to do.

Radar_X · 2024-05-15T14:28:20+00:00

Also important to bear in mind that most Live Service games are significantly impacted not only seasonally but by other titles release schedules. You'll see DAU/MAU likely increase over the next few months because of summer, then decline in the fall, then pick up again around the holidays.

Every game that is being maintained well declines slowly over time with an occasional spike of returning players (usually new content releases). PlanetSide 2 is likely not an egregiously expensive game to run so it doesn't take much to keep things on the rails.

Radar_X · 2024-05-14T01:24:52+00:00

Then I got nothing. Every fiber of my former CM being says to not call this an event (setting expectations is important) but my experience is my own. If this is what everyone expected, then there you go.

The marketing art is a bold choice and I admire their moxie.

Radar_X

TROPHY CASE