Design

Your design, is your identity. Your users will feel how much work you put into your site’s branding and identity. If your forum uses a common forum skin, or worse, a default forum skin. Users will pick up on it. You’ll get out as much as you put in. If your forum skin, for example, fits with your color scheme, content and logo, then we have a real masterpiece, and users will notice. It will show that you care.

That being said, if you use any mash-ups or purchased software, be sure to heavily customize it and tailor it to your site’s identity.

Usability

Usability is great for every website. One thing you’ll notice about online communities, is if you’re constantly adding content or features to please your community, you might soon find yourself with a myriad of applications and processes. Here are some tips:

• Make sure your stylesheets are similar across the board. This includes link colors, hover styles, buttons, etc.
• Consider revising your navigation if you see that you have more than 7 navigation items.
• Try to keep the same header and footer across all applications and additions.

That’s all for now, hope that helps.

• Address the community about the website’s financial situation – Be upfront about the website’s financial situation. As for suggestions. If your website’s advertising already covers for hosting, you need to live to! Explain how the website might be your only source of income.
• Be selective in your advertising – Make sure that you cater to your audience when you select your advertisers. If your community consists of teenage members, advertisements with scantily clad college women might be a little intimidating. Unrelated advertising is a no-no.
• Consider related affiliate programs – Affiliate programs give the illusion you’re trying to help the reader, and have an opportunity to pocket a little something for yourself. The more relevant, the better.
• Ask for suggestions – Your community may want to help or get involved. This might include ad placement or marketing techniques. Be very receptive.
• Think about a subscription service – The subscription would allow for perks THAT ARE NOT ALREADY ACCESSIBLE to users. I’ve seen many community leaders offer increased avatar/signature/mailbox size on forums at a cost of $5/month.

Hope that helps.

• Listen to what it is that the community wants and cater to them. These are your customers these are the people you are to looking to please.
• Remain active in your own community. If it doesn’t seem like someone’s there for them for their own peace of mind, they may begin to feel helpless.
• Expand to similar niches using your existing community to leverage your second community. It never fails to have a back-up plan.
• Add Small Features – Where would Facebook be without applications? Things wouldn’t be as interesting as they are now. (I’m discounting the fact that there are a few people like me who minimize every application they see).
• Avoid Large Scale Changes – Users will learn to love their forum theme or ad placements, large scale changes, although you may think they will please new users, will dissatisfy your bread and butter members.

That’s all for now, hope that helps.

In my past, I’ve jumpstarted online communities for online games. How were they successful? They contained news, tips, updates, posts from game masters, etc. This was incentive for users to participate in the community. Since I’m kind of a number guy, I produced content such as guides, tutorials and statistics that would be used by viewers. Some of it was controversial which also sparked discussions. Discussions meant members.

After that initial jumpstart, building a community can be easy. It’s always toughest to get the first few people involved, but once the “I don’t want to be the only one in the community” barrier is broken, you could experience exponential growth.

Good luck.

Building an online community is a lot like building a business (in real-life and virtually). You should be interested with the subject matter you’re dealing with and the audience you’re dealing with. If it’s an online game, I’d try to make sure that you actively play the game and you are actively involved with the community. If it’s about parrots, I’d imagine you should own a parent and are ready to converse with those that own a parrot.

Online communities, like blogs, will grow exponentially, if you don’t have the interest in having a long-term share in your new community, you should decide on a different idea or perhaps scrap the online community idea all together.

Relating to myself, I can write about the internet and web-related content until the cows come home, and you can be sure I’ll be sticking around.

Let’s go ahead and follow the same format as the Building an Online Game Community – The Wrong Way article.

What They Can’t Change

Here’s a general list of what Guild Wars has had to deal with.

• Game Developer and Publisher not well-known – ArenaNet, the developers behind Guild Wars had some key Blizzard ex-employees in it, but ArenaNet was far from a gamer’s household name. NCSoft, although a popular publisher in Asia because of its Lineage series, also didn’t have the popularity in the United States. Although Guild Wars did have edge over Fury in this department, Guild Wars did end up doing quite a bit to offset this possible drawback.
• Basic Game Concept – Guild Wars is a hybrid player versus player (PvP) and player versus environment (PvE) game. Although you may assume that targeting two different demographics is a strategic move, it also meant an attempt at being a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. The game risked disappointing either player type.
• Natural Appeal to the RPG Player – Like Fury, Guild Wars has role-playing element. Role-playing often encourages long-term play. Like I mention in the Fury article, player types don’t just change overnight and the players you’re bound to attract to your community are ones that already play RPG’s.

How Online Communities Work

I talked about this in the older article, but as a short recap:

• Word of mouth spreads good information and bad information like wildfire
• Word of mouth is what gets you a community
• An online community needs to be listened to and nursed

What Guild Wars Did Right

• Lower then Average Required Specifications (at the time) – It’s amazing how simple this is and how much this can affect everything. It’s great if I just bought a computer, I can run any game on the market I want, but if 2 out of 3 of my gamer friends can’t run it, it’s definitely a negative point that’s brought up when deciding on what game to buy as a group to play together.
• Great Beta Experiences – Guild Wars put out great betas and spread them out so they weren’t repetitive and kept people interested. They OPTIMIZED their game from the start so that lots of people can play. Although they didn’t have the max amount of content, the content they did have was fairly complete. And since the betas were kept to weekend events, it wasn’t often people would finish everything and get the illusion Guild Wars would be boring. Also, since the betas were monthly, there was always fresh content at each event.
• No Monthly Fees – Guild Wars made it their goal to pimp out the fact that there would never be a monthly fee. By using an optional campaign system (which recently announced was difficult to work with, but that’s aside the point), they were able to get enough revenue to offset the server costs. This works great, not everyone has parents willing to give their kids a credit card number. It’s also much harder to get a group of friends to all get their parents to participate.

Conclusion

There you have it, Guild Wars went out of their way and did three relatively simple things. Although ArenaNet never confirmed this, I’m fairly sure that those factors contributed highly to the fact that they have over three million copies sold. These factors kept people interested in the game and kept people’s friends interested in the game and speaking positive about it. Although there are many comments on how ArenaNet mistreats their community now and doesn’t listen to them, this article was about building an online game community, not maintaining one.

Cheers.

Online communities come in all forms, shapes and sizes. It can be anything from a discussion board population built around discussing viable East Coast wedding planners, to websites built ground-up based on user participation ala Youtube.

In this specific case, we’re talking about a company’s attempt to build an online community following for their upcoming game, a game which almost establishes a new genre. We can show you that it’s not how great of a concept you have, but how you approach it.

The game I’m talking about is Fury. Fury is an online role-playing game revolving uniquely around player-versus-player online combat. If I had to break it down real quick, it would be the result if the player-versus-player action of Counter-Strike was combined with sword-shield-spell and character development aspect of Dungeons and Dragons.

This game was announced some time ago and is due for release in the fourth quarter this year. This game is supposed to be THE game that competitive role-playing-gamers are going to buy and play with their friends. I am in their target demographic, of all people, this is THE game concept that I’ve been looking around for. I mentioned that to let you know, I’m writing this blog because it’s almost a shame to see this happen to a game I really want to play, not because I hate the game.

What They Can’t Change

It’s all well and dandy to critique them on every single aspect of their approach, but why critique them on things they can’t fix. Here’s a list of things Fury can’t change:

• Game Developer and Publisher not well-known – Believe it or not, how well people know you is a strong factor that can subconsciously affect whether you’re going to be interested in the game in the first place. The developers and publishers, can’t change this, they can’t change their previous work experience. People are naturally going to be attracted by games put out by Blizzard and NCSoft then My-Portfolio-Is-On-MiniClip. Being nothing from nowhere means you need to try extra hard for exposure. I’ve got to hand it to Fury, they have a great concept going for them.
• Basic Game Concept – Fury has a great game concept, bring competitive, teamwork oriented PvP play to those that enjoy some sort of character development.
• Natural Appeal to the RPG Player – RPG players are likely to follow the development of and buy RPG games. The games that have completely pulled in a different type of player are few and far between. You don’t normally see hordes of First-Person shooters lining up to buy the newest Real-Time Strategy. I’m sure it happens, but typically, RPG games means an attraction by RPG players.
• Natural Appeal to the Competitive PvP Player – Competitiveness, just like someone’s game-type preference, doesn’t grow overnight. You don’t suddenly froth at the mouth for the death of other internet gamers after playing The Sims.

If you think I’m making things up, the Fury website even states: If you don’t like PvP in a role playing game, you won’t like Fury.

Now, based on this, you have to admit, they are targeting a relatively small demographic. Not only do you have to be a competitive gamer, but you have to have some sort of interest in character development. If you didn’t, you’d be playing Counter-Strike. As an unknown game developer, this is going to be a tough obstacle to overcome. Because unlike player-versus-environment games, a game based entirely on player participation needs to have alot of participants. Sounds redundant, but it’s true.

How Online Communities Work

On an online community for a game works has communication happening between participants both online (on forums and voicechat) and offline (in real life, in the school hallway, at lunch time). Here are some points to consider:

• Negative word gets around quick, online and offline
  
• Viral marketing is the strongest tool that can make or break a community based on its number of participants
• An online community needs to be nursed or it will feel neglected

Now let’s move onto the fun bit.

What Fury Did Wrong

The unchangeable setbacks mentioned above should cause them to push other aspects of the game. Instead, relatively simple to avoid problems are repelling potential community members.

• High Computer Requirements – Not only does having high computer requirements drive away people that don’t actually meet the computer specs, but even if I had an incredible computer and my best friend can’t run the game, I’m less likely to purchase the game. It’s not uncommon to have a group of friends (or clan or guild) swarm to a game to play it together, but having some people able to play, and some people can’t, creates a problem, and drives away potential players and your community. The High Computer Requirements are the result of the game developers of Fury choosing to go with a recent release of the Unreal Engine. Poor idea.
• Early Public Exposure to a Very Incomplete Product – You may think that releasing betas allows the community to play together and build a relationship with the game. And you’re right. But first impressions matter most. Joe Video-Gamer probably doesn’t even know the definition of a game in pre-alpha. He may think it’s a game that didn’t go through meticulous testing, instead of the reality: an incomplete game.
  Examples of what happens when Joe Video-Gamer plays a pre-pre-alphas:
  - Joe plays Fury and notices that the spell and character animations are incomplete. Not only does Joe THINKS this is a poor game, but tells all his friends that it’s a poor game.
  - Joe plays Fury with a computer meeting the specifications, but his experience is very laggy. Same as the above. He THINKS it’s a poor game, and doesn’t forget to tell his friends.
  - Joe plays Fury and gets bored and doesn’t know that all the content wasn’t implemented. Same scenario.
  After any of the events listed above, Joe feels less motivation to spend the hours downloading the newest alpha version to play. Hence, Joe slowly and silently finds something else to do. Note that this isn’t always the case. People do stick around, but you should think about your losses, not your unconditional followers.
• Monthly Payments – Just when you think it couldn’t be worse. Monthly payments are added to the list. I can understand that the developers need to feed their family, but this is the wrong way to go about it. If Monthly Payments are required to be competitive, the people that just don’t have the cash to hand it over to the company are excluded from your community. If you argue that the Monthly Payments are NOT required to be competitive, then for what reasons did you expect people to give you money for?

Conclusion

There are too many bottlenecks so far that prevent a large community from evolving around Fury. Your customer almost NEEDS to:

• Have a liking RPG’s
• Be a competitive PvP Player
• Have a good computer
• Not be bothered that monthly fees can be present, and that those that pay them, will have more content (or whatever) then he has
• Have a strong wanting to play the game enough to overlook the quality of the pre-alphas
• Have friends or guildmates that share his same traits, if not, be very comfortable playing a competitive game without knowing anyone playing it

That is a SMALL TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC for newer genre developed by a newer company. Without any changes from the developers, I don’t see Fury going very far. Fury has the potential to be an amazing game, but they’ve just done some things that have hindered their success so far. It is not too late, and the best thing that can happen is that the developers realize their mistakes and rectify them before it’s too late.Just thought I’d mention again that I did this because I care. I do not have a personal vendetta against the company, I’m not anti-Fury. I actually have a deep wanting to see this game thrive so I can buy and participate in a successful product.

Visit the Fury website.

*Edit* A more recent article discusses how Guild Wars built an online game community, the right way.