Community Management ~ Notes from Legends On Tour 2019

After our notes on Customer Service, it’s time to report what we discussed about Community Management!

Travian Academy

In our Legends on Tour 2019 Summit, we presented the training project we set up for our Community Management Team during the beginning of 2019.

Goal

We want to empower our Community Managers by providing them additional knowledge on best practices for the management of communities. We are constantly adding training courses to improve general knowledge and improve the way we communicate with the communities.

How does it look like?

Here you can have an overview of the training modules that are currently set up. More modules will come soon to support our Community Managers in their work.

Conclusion

We want to improve communication with our players and get as close as possible to the community. That’s why we are trying to provide our Community Managers with as much knowledge as possible to support us in this objective.

Ambassador Program

Goal

In our Legends on Tour 2019 Summit, we discussed how to stay in touch with the community representatives after the event. The creation of an Ambassador Program will allow the TL game-center to exchange ideas and get/receive feedback faster.

Platform

To keep in touch with the ambassadors a Slack Workspace will be set up. In our opinion, this is the best platform to facilitate focused conversations about specific topics.

Access

The Ambassador Program is accessible only by invitation. During the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit we agreed with the community representatives that, in the long run, the best way to add people to the group is a referral program. The potential candidates will be referred by the group members or by the Travian: Legends team and shall be reviewed by the group of Ambassadors and the Travian: Legends team before an invitation is sent out.

Every Ambassador will sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement document so that the Travian: Legends Dev team will be able to engage them in discussions under the assumption that they will remain private unless there is mutual agreement to share the contents of the discussion publicly.

Transparency

The group commits to creating Official Ambassadors Notes to be shared with the entire Travian: Legends community. These notes will be approved by the Travian: Legends Team to assure that the Non-Disclosure Agreement is respected. The notes will contain a summary of the different topics tackled within the group and they will be published at least every quarter.

Conclusion

The Ambassador Program has already started. The first goal of the group will be to work on a detailed description of the program, to set goals for the program and to create guidelines. The Ambassador Program starts with the 8 participants of the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit. In the long run, we aim to add at least one representative for each domain.

Change Logs

In our Legends on Tour 2019 Summit, some community representatives reported that not getting proper information about bugfixes, releases, etc. on time is problematic.

Feedback

In the near past, we changed some aspects of the internal team set up and now we are able to update the game more often than usual. This is great, since we can for example release bugfixes faster but on the other hand, it is stressful for our localization team which cannot keep up with the release schedule.

Changes

We discussed with the Summit participants and we agreed that the changelog will be published as soon as it is available in English. This way everyone will have received the same amount of information. A translation will be added as soon as the localization department provides it.

Communications Platform

In our Legends on Tour 2019 Summit, we discussed the type of communication platforms that are used by different countries and their scope.

Findings

As expected, most of the community members get information from the Forum and the info-boxes in game. The blog is used more often compared to the past, as well as YouTube.

To coordinate activities within the alliance/confederacy, most of the communities use WhatsApp and Skype. Discord is rising in popularity as a platform.

Type of content

It appears that a lot of community members are interested in the “making of” and in having more detailed information about why certain changes are being implemented. In the next months, we will try to publish more content related to this topic and probably start some sort of “dev diary”.

Info-boxes

Info-boxes are the primary tool used by the community to get information. We will work on some technical solution that will allow Community Managers to use them in an easier way. We hope this will increase the amount of information we are able to spread via info-boxes.

Discord

We are planning to open an Official Discord server in the next 6 to 12 months.

Before doing this, we need to create a full concept and design the purpose and structure of this new communication platform. In general, we see a lot of benefits on having such a platform available officially for the community.

The current idea is using the official Discord channel to spread news faster and more often and giving the possibility to the community and the Community Manager to have a more personal interaction.

To make sure the Discord channel won’t turn into a spam mess, we will set certain limitation such as a 2-minute anti-spam cooldown between messages.

Conclusion

With the above-mentioned changes and improvements, we want to make sure the community is always up to date regarding changes, upcoming features, events, and everything that is connected to Travian: Legends.

Tutorials

One of the most discussed topics during the Legends on Tour 2019 Summit was “New players”.

One of the aspects that were raised is the lack of easy tutorials for this target group.

Goal

We want to give players the opportunity to get easy access to basic information about the game. In addition, we want to provide Alliance leaders with a certain amount of material which will spare them time by explaining basic things to those players who are approaching the game for the first time.

Changes

Together with the members of the Ambassador Program, we will first select a list of topics on which new players have the biggest number of questions. The next step will be creating a selection of videos (max length of 30 to 40 seconds) where those topics are explained step by step.

Conclusion

We hope to have the first series of videos ready by the end of the year. Ideally, they will be published on the Travian: Legends YouTube Channel and streamed on the forum in a static page available for all domains.

DOWNLOAD THE PDF VERSION HERE: Ambassador Program, Change Logs, Communication Platforms, Travian Academy & Tutorials.

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