Crisis and Community
The following article is based on Janet Ebsen's "Crisis and Opportunity" GDC talk. Shortly after I became Kongregate's community manager, Kongregate had one of the biggest community crises in our history. One of our games had a cascading series of problems involving last-minute changes to events, insufficiently described odds of winning a very rare item, and some support missteps. By the time players came to us, their community was in chaos. None of us had any real idea about how to handle the situation, and so we made a lot of mistakes. Quite a few of those mistakes made things worse instead of better. Nonetheless (this is key), not everything we did was a mistake. We figured out what worked and then kept doing more of that. It was expensive and took a lot of effort, but at the end of two weeks or so we had learned a lot; in fact, the things we learned at that time have formed the basis for how we have handled every game crisis since then. Moreover, many of the players