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Greetings from Community Management!
This is the first CM blog - if you've not come across me before on the forums, I'm Mod Kelvin, Head of Community Management here in Player Support.
In the coming months, J-Mods from CM will be posting blogs to give you insight into what we do and how we do it (starting with a blog from Mod Hohbein about volunteer moderators, but, for starters, we thought it'd be a good idea to introduce ourselves:
The RuneScape Community Management team is headed up by Mod Paul M and covers quite a lot - volunteer recruitment and communication, forum moderation, events, game update support, competitions, community building, clan support, fansite communication and support, emergent gameplay, player suggestions - all in multiple languages (English, German, French and, more recently, Portuguese, Dutch and Finnish). We're looking to do more all of the time.
Fundamentally, Community Management is here to help build communities, recognise community and in-game pioneers and endeavours, channel communication from various teams to players, to listen to players, and to pass their feedback on to the rest of the business.
We have a great team, we're all focused on doing the best we can for players, and we have a giggle while we're doing it!
I took the role of Head of Community Management back in February, after working for Jagex in Player Support for over four years, and genuinely enjoy it more and more as time goes on. As luck would have it, my appointment came immediately after Mark Gerhard's as CEO, and he has placed the importance of community management higher than ever before - that's great for me, the Community Management team and, most importantly, you, the player.
As a company, we wanted (and still want!) to be more open and honest with our players. We want to recognise the true community pioneers such as high-level players, events organisers, volunteer moderators and fansites who put a great deal into our community. We want to increase the amount of volunteer moderators, run more competitions and events, and spend more time in game and on the forums.
Much of this has really just started. Quite quickly, we changed the way we were moderating the forums to be much more friendly and less punitive. We've asked our Player and Forum Moderators to do the same; we've opened up communication with fansites; we've been attending player and fansite created events on the weekends; we've increased the amount of language community support we provide; we've tightened the link between the Community Management and RuneScape Content teams; we've run the Clan Cup; we've improved the level of technical support on the forums; we've increased the amount of time we spend posting on the forums; and we're constantly reviewing not only what we have done, but also what we can do in the future.
Of course, nobody's perfect, and there's always more to be done; however, we've made a start, and will continue in the same vein doing our best for you, the players. With the community being what it is, we're also constantly learning. Learning from our own mistakes, from player feedback, from RuneScape Content, from Mark Gerhard and from within the Community Management team itself.
That's it from me for now. Look out for future Community Management blogs and initiatives and let me know your thoughts on this forum thread.
Have fun!