A Day in the Life of Allods’ Community Manager
By PioPico, gPotato Representative
Greetings! I’m PioPico, a community manager for Allods Online, and I’m the one that creates these cool blog entries for your viewing pleasure. Past blog entries we have shared with you have revolved around going in depth on new in-game features. I wanted to add some variety to this week’s blog entry by providing you with something more personal and light-hearted. I’m going to share what a typical day is like for your Allods community manager. Also throughout this blog I’ll share some fun pictures taken from past events I’ve done with the Allods community.
A player challenged me to listen to a Pikachu song loop for 10 hours on YouTube. I completed the challenge and in the end, I did not receive the hand-drawn picture of Pikachu in a tuxedo that I was promised. However, I did experience bleeding ears and a cool story that I could share.
I start off my morning by checking emails from my fellow Allods teammates – Condulus and Shockpix – for any important announcements or tasks they need me to do. From there, I check the forums to see what new discussions the community has created throughout the previous night. It’s great to see how helpful the community is with answering each other’s questions about the game and just generally being active with feedback. And no gaming community would be complete without its fair share of troll posts so those get sent to the garbage bin 😉
As publishers, one of our main responsibilities is to review community feedback regarding the game and share the feedback with the developers. While some people email their suggestions to our team, most of the feedback is posted on our forums. Besides reading discussions on the forums and replying back with our thoughts on the topic, we compile the feedback and bug reports to bring to the developer’s attention.
I also check and reply back to all private messages sent to me on the forums, although 50% of them are requests for help with issues in the game where I refer them to submit a support ticket. We want to be consistent and make sure we don’t miss everyone who needs help. While I understand it may be easier to send a forum message to a GM requesting help, there is no tracking system with our forums so resolving issues through an official support ticket is the way to go!
One of the most memorable events is we had players record themselves copying dance moves from characters in Allods Online. Condulus and I showed our Allods pride where we created a video that showed our dance moves to promote the event. You can check out the dance video below.
One thing we pride ourselves with is a quick turnaround for the customer support tickets sent in. It’s a responsibility that is shared amongst our entire team. I’ll start off by checking how many new tickets we currently have in our inbox as well as tickets that I am currently in communication with for some players. I’ll always make sure I respond back to players I’ve already been in contact with first since their inquiry was reported at an earlier time. Responding back to customer support tickets isn’t a one-time deal and neglected for the rest of the day either. It’s something that we check throughout the day, so if there are not too many tickets sent in and we’re in effective beast mode, it’s possible you may get a response within the hour!
During my lunch break is also when I’ll check out my Facebook account that I created for my GM alias – PioPico. Facebook is a great way to reach out to people so I created the account earlier this year as another method to get to know the Allods community on a more personal level. You’ll often see me posting random pictures from IRL and random informal shenanigans. It’s a place for me to goof around and be sillier.
This is a picture from one of our many maintenance games that we host every week. This picture was an example for a scavenger hunt where we told players a letter and they needed to take a picture of an object in real life that starts with that letter.
Something that doesn’t happen on a daily basis but is one of my main roles is planning events. I try to come up with a diverse amount of events for the forums, Facebook, or in the game. The amount of events we plan often depends on the workload of other projects that take priority, such as getting ready for a patch update with new content. Fortunately, our other community manager Shockpix is a champ at handling the game’s localization, the bulk of our workload for new patch updates.
Going back to events, I’ll create a schedule a month in advance of the events we’ll run for the community. Most of the contests I plan for the forums or Facebook reward winners with Premium Crystals, a form of Item Shop currency that players use to purchase items from our Item Shop. Events in the game offer more variety though, giving anything from in-game items, global bonuses (increased experience, increased monster drops), or even just a chance to hang out with the GMs with blinding fireworks and snowball-in-your-face fun! These types of events are important for a happy community since it brings added entertainment to the game. It makes the community’s ingame experience that much more special while allowing me to express my creativity in a virtual space.
However, bigger events that require more coordination such as login events or real life prize giveaways is something the whole Allods team brainstorms together. Those types of events will always have set-in-stone dates for the best execution and positive feedback from the community.
Since event planning requires a creative mindset, I prefer to plan future events outside of the office. I like to plan events over a drink or snack at a coffee, boba, or smoothie place.
The day continues until about 6:30 PM when I typically leave the office for personal activities. There are some issues that can only be resolved by meeting players while they are logged in the game, so I’ll plan to stay later in order to meet up with some players who may be living in time zones that are outside of our active hours of operation. I just wish there were more hours in a day to respond back to everyone in the community before the day comes to an end.
The tasks I covered are the bread-and-butter that define my role as a community manager. There are other projects I work on that may not occur on a daily basis, such as writing these blog entries, but the variety of tasks available are one of the wonders of being in this position. It’s all about customer service and keeping the community cool. Being a community manager is never dull as each day brings in new challenges and situations, often bringing a smile to my face in the form of a “thank you” from a member of our community. From my time spent as a community manager, I understand that the more you give, the more you get.
