02.04.07

The Next-Generation For Community Features… IS RIGHT NOW

Posted in MMO at 6:28 pm by Rob

So, after about a year and a half, someone left a comment on our ‘About Us’ post, which means that at least one person other than Mori or myself has read this site. Also keeping in mind that pkurflax.org has cost me about $200 in hosting fees since it was opened, and that I haven’t actually posted on it since then, I figure it’s high time we made an effort to get some content up here. Yeehaw!

Since she actually asked for input from community management types on a recent blog post, I don’t mind mentioning a few things here about the official public Wiki we maintain for Puzzle Pirates, the YPPedia.

First off, since its release, the YPPedia has made customer support a lot easier. Previously we would have to keep a .txt file or something similiar filled with personal canned responses to FAQs sent in via the support petition system, but now a lot of the easier lobs from the playerbase can be knocked out of the park by freeforming a quick one-line overview of the solution or answer to their question, followed by a link to the corresponding YPPedia page. So, a newbie question on what swords do can be easily responded to with something like…

Swords, mugs and bludgeons are all special items which are bought and wielded to increase your pirate’s effectiveness in the Swordfighting, Drinking and Rumble puzzles. For more information on the different types of swords in the game, please check out this page on the YPPedia.

As far as the player involvement in the Wiki, most of the original content was migrated over from a now-defunct unofficial Wiki, and pretty much all of the current content, save the numerous protected ‘Official’ pages that we mirror off the YPPedia onto our website as the game’s documentation, is written and updated by players. The YPPedia itself only has one employee, a customer support rep (an ‘OceanMaster’), assigned to oversee it at a time, and the position is theoretically supposed to rotate (though it generally only does so through several OMs). We don’t have a major problem with vandalism on the YPPedia site, as most of the really important pages are protected, and any small-scale edit wars or graffiti are generally picked up very quickly by a cadre of dedicated player volunteers. In fact, the YPPedia is mostly a labor of love for a portion of our playerbase, who probably equate documenting the game’s history and features to a sort of ‘high-level game’. Many players also follow YPPedia pages regarding game ’secrets’ and the like with some fervor. A good example of this is the Trophy page, which is fairly frequently edited as the triggers for various displayable in-game Trophies (which we as a company have sworn never to publically reveal) are discovered.

The only major issue we’ve had with the official Wiki is on the topic of player pages. Originally, the loose policy was that pages regarding individual players would be reserved for those players who were sufficiently interesting or ‘important’. Since this is a pretty subjective criterion for whether or not a player deserves a page, it was eventually overturned in favor of the current policy that anyone can have a YPPedia page for their character, provided they can actually fill it with more than stub level content. Though this has led to inactive morons like this guy getting their own Wiki page, it seems to be working fairly well so far, and indeed, may even be giving some players incentive to learn how to edit the Wiki and write with the proper NPOV just so they can get their own page in the history books. This problem could probably be avoided with other official MMOG wikis, of course, simply by enforcing the rule that every player/character’s Wiki page is simply their ‘User:’ page, giving players a free hand in detailing their characters’ history therein, and swiftly deleting or migrating any external pages in contravention to that rule.

That all said, Puzzle Pirates is not a massive WoW-like conglomerate. What has so far worked for us may not work for a larger AAA title without significant support time being sunk to keep things running smoothly. I definitely commend Turbine for making the effort, however, and will anxiously await seeing how it goes for them. Hell, if the ‘personal blogs’ thing goes over well, it could perhaps spell doom for the official forum as we know it. If that’s the case, I’ll buy the beer and pretzels for the wake.

Hope that helped and/or was entertaining, Sara!

Permalink