Community Management in Games From Crowfall and Eve Online Veteran Valerie Massey

April 2, 2024

Community Management in Games From Crowfall and Eve Online Veteran Valerie Massey

Valerie Massey is a gaming veteran and community management expert. With more than two decades developing and fostering multiplayer online games, Valerie Massey has worked extensively in public relations, community building, and customer care. She has experience with businesses such as Consortium9, ArtCraft Entertainment, CCP Games, and Leap Motion.

Valerie helped build and establish the Eve Online community from pre-beta through its launch and managed community relations for Crowfall. Her competencies include stellar written and verbal communication skills, crisis strategy, talent management, social media, technical writing, and community building.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Valerie Massey’s community management for EVE Online
Building relationships on trust in communities
Dissecting the troublesome PR of Wendy’s surge pricing
Pre-launch tips to ensure a positive community
How to deal with toxic actors around your game
Lessons learned from the early days of Ultima Online
Knowing when and how to ban players
The keys to establishing, maintaining, and modifying rules
Incredible stories from digital communities

In this episode…

Creating a great game with an engaged fanbase is the goal of any developer. However, that is only the beginning. With multiplayer online games, fostering a community can be just as difficult. The constant fluctuation of players and attitudes creates a volatile environment, potentially leading to a starving game.

This is why community management is a vital element of any online game. Valerie Massey is one of the most renowned figures in this field, working with games such as Crowfall and EVE Online. Reflecting on her experiences in building gaming communities, Valerie emphasizes the importance of prioritizing members’ needs and desires in game development. Her approach to community management is still worth studying today with valuable insights for anyone in the games industry.

Join Lizzie Mintus on today’s episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast as she interviews Valerie Massey, gaming veteran and community management expert, about fostering an incredible community. Valerie discusses building healthy relationships within video games, pre-launch strategy, dealing with problematic players, and knowing when to ban. They also draw directly from Valerie’s experience with EVE Online and Ultima Online.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not.

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. And every episode we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Jess Mulligan for introducing us. Thanks, Jess. And check out the episode that I did with Jess.

Valerie Massey: Today we have, and we're recording this on Jess's birthday by the way. So happy birthday.

Lizzie Mintus: Happy birthday. February 29th, a leap day. Mine was yesterday.

Valerie Massey: Oh, happy birthday to you.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. Today we have Valerie Massey with us. For more than 20 years, her career has largely focused on developing and fostering communities for massively multiplayer online games. Thank you for being here and what a humble intro, but you told me before the show, people can just Google you.

Valerie Massey: They can just Google me. And like I said, it's the good, the bad and the ugly. You'll see good things and bad things. Oh, she's cool or maybe not. I don't know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as it may be.

Lizzie Mintus: Do some Googling and interpret as you will. I want to dive right in and talk about community management for anybody that hasn't Googled you. Could you share a little bit more about your background and how you got into it?

Valerie Massey: It was a big accident. Bob Ross would say, there's no mistakes. There's just happy accidents. So I had spent half my life up to that point, just taking care of other people. I had children. I took care of my father and my grandmother. And then as I was taking care of my grandmother, when you take care of someone who's bed bound, there's like laws against leaving them. So you are pretty much house bound too. And that's when I discovered Ultima Online.

It was in Ultima Online that I met Mike Wallace. We became friends and he was a game producer. I didn't know that when I first met him, he was just a champion. And we went around and killed things together. We built the player city.

But he was a game producer and then later he contacted me and said, Hey, I'm working for Simon and Schuster Interactive and we're going to produce this online game. And I had written for Stratix, which was one of the big Ultima online fan sites and wrote some stuff for some other game sites. So he knew that I knew how to do that. I was a player volunteer. And in Ultima Online.

I knew how to do like that kind of customer support. And he's that's the stuff that we need for a community manager. So that was my big break. And I've often said since then, I don't know if I should thank Mike or punch him for getting me into this mess, but that was my journey.

It started out with Eve Online. I was the original community manager there. Worked on some other games that have sadly passed away. In fact, I think Eve Online is the only game I ever worked on that's still standing. I think Ultima Online is still standing, but I didn't technically work for them.

Although, I did work for the guys who created Ultima Online, Richard Garriott and Star Long. And that was interesting to be able to work with them as colleagues. when that game literally changed my life and probably saved my life too because at that point, when I met Mike and we were playing UO, like I said, I didn't leave the house.

So UO was my connection to the world and that's why I have a soft spot in my heart for other people who are in that position, whether they are caregivers for somebody that they love, or they've got some kind of physical or mental issue that makes it impossible for them to be part of the world out in the wild, to be free ranging, as I call it. I can really identify with that. So yeah, that's how it all started.

Lizzie Mintus: So sweet. I like that story. Personal connection and a healthy accident. So you worked on EVE Online in the early 2000s. Can you talk about the state of community management? What even was it at the time?

Valerie Massey: It was still very new. We didn't have these fancy things that kids got now with all the social media channels.

All you had was your website and a message board, a forum. And that was the only way that you could communicate with your players, really. Now you have Twitter, X, whichever thing you want to call it, Facebook, TikTok, all of the accoutrement. We didn't have those tools. So it's been interesting to see those kind of come and go, because there've been some that came in like wildfire. Does anybody even remember Vine? But there was a day when Vine was the new hotness. So it's like, what's the new hotness? Is it worth my time to invest in that or is it going to be like Vine that kind of died on the Vine, and then nobody expected Twi TikTok, Twi Tok, TikTok to take off like it did, but it has. Instagram, but they all have their place in the world. None of them are the catch all be all, best way to communicate.

Back when those things first started, I was very resistant to them because I felt like your community, your customers should not have to do an egg search on the internet to get information from you. So it's, which one do we use as our primary point of contact? And is it even worth wasting time on this platform or that platform when we should be paying more attention to this one or that one? Instagram is cool for what it is for those communities, but I feel like for gang communities, it's not really our thing.

It's not a place to share information. You can't just put a link and say, Hey, we made an announcement link and bio is not giving someone a quick way to just click on a URL and get to that page. So that's why I never was a fan of Instagram for my purposes of trying to get information out there as quickly as possible to people who needed it.

Yeah. That makes sense.

Lizzie Mintus: One of your LinkedIn recommendations says, thanks to your efforts, CCP and Eve Online has such an open relationship and unheard of degree of trust with the community. What a recommendation. Can you talk more about how you would be able to build this open relationship built on trust with the communities?

Valerie Massey: I think some of the most valuable lessons that we can learn, regardless of what industry you're in or what your role is in that company, look at people who didn't do it right. Not to have some schadenfreude about their mishaps and missteps. But to learn from them, we don't need to make the same mistakes over and over, especially not when someone else has beautifully made that mistake on our behalf.

And as a player of MMOs, I had seen enough of these mishaps and mistakes. I knew to learn from those and not repeat them. One of the things that we commonly had as players in the games that I have played. was when something bad happened. If they have to do a rollback for a game and it happened quite often in the early days of UO. And in some other games that I've played where there was a programming mistake or some glitch along the line and they have to revert to an earlier copy of the build.

So all of the progress that players had made from that point until they found this mistake, that all got erased. And it very rarely worked in your favor. So I learned valuable lessons from seeing how the companies responded to that and what they said. And most of them didn't do a good job of it. It was a lot of deflecting and trying to downplay what happened and trying to cover up as much as possible.

And so when some of the EVE devs made mistakes, and trust me, they did. I got some horror stories. I learned through trial by fire, but we didn't shy away from that. We owned up to it, and I think that's the important and the responsible thing.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I want to hear your horror stories now.

Valerie Massey: Oh, do you? Okay, let's see. There's so many. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. This is relevant, I think, to what's happening now with Wendy. And I haven't done a deep dive into the whole Wendy's surge pricing thing because they're not paying me to, but just being who I am and what my experience lies in with crisis management and communication, I was like, Oh, somebody did a messed up.

What happened here? What is this story? Because what I first started seeing was people were talking about Wendy's is going to introduce a surge pricing. So they're going to adjust their prices Based on when they're gonna have more customers, which is similar to what Uber and Lyft have done since the beginning.

So what I found in my little cursory research wasn't, and of course this could be somebody trying to backpedal now, or as we say in the south, crawfishin' cause crawfish, they back up to get back in their little holes. So when somebody's backing up and trying to bury themselves again, they're crawfishing. I'm from Texas.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm going to use that.

Valerie Massey: You're welcome to, it wasn't mine, but you can use it. So what I read, and this may have been them trying to recover from the debacle as no, it's not surge pricing. What Wendy's is trying to do is to actually give better value pricing during the periods when they aren't as busy, to encourage people to come to Wendy's. during the slow time.

Lizzie Mintus: Like a happy hour,

Valerie Massey: exactly. That was the term I was thinking in my head. If this was a happy hour, which the food industry has done forever, call it a happy hour. You're done. You're not going to have all this. So I wasn't in there for those original meetings. I don't know what the original plans were. This could just be crawfishing language that we're seeing now. But that was my first thought too, is if I was in charge of digging them out of this hole, I would start leaning into the term happy hour. I would have people that worked at Wendy's use the term happy hour. We see that here all the time.

There's a Sonic, I don't know if you have Sonic where you live, but it's another hamburger place. They have a happy hour where between three to five o'clock. You can go and get 2 drinks . I know McDonald's does that call it a happy hour, but Wendy's mistake wasn't saying, yeah, now that we have these cool new menu boards where we can change the pricing anytime we want to, we can adjust this pricing.

People don't like that. People like consistency. That's the lesson that we learned here from Wendy's and it's true of anything. Like I said, any industry, any product that you have, people want consistency.

When you screw up, which we did with Eve. So with Eve, there was a big one. If you're a marketing person, you're going to hate me. I'll tell you that right now. And that's okay. You can do what you do and I'll do what I do. And we can agree to disagree. Marketing people, there have been some good ones. But historically my perception of their job was, hey, I'm going to go sit in my office down the hall and just spit ball, whatever crazy crap I can think of. And then I'm going to tell the community team to go do those things. And we had no input. We weren't part of the creative process. It's just, here's just crazy idea.

So that happened at CCP where they hired a new marketing guy. And this was when micro transactions we're first starting to show up. He had some brilliant ideas and by brilliant, batshit crazy, that had the community team and the customer support teams been brought into those conversations earlier, we could have helped to refine the ideas, especially the messaging around them, but we didn't get invited to those tables.

So all of a sudden, this guy has this idea. We're going to introduce this monocle. We're going to make it so that you can buy for 60 real world dollars, a monocle for your in game avatar. And mind you, the Eve avatars at that point couldn't walk around. So it was just a picture of your avatar. And you can have this monocle that you spent $60 on. And let's see if people will buy that.

Of course it blew up. And again, instead of going to customer support and community to say, Hey, how should we message this? The marketing guy tells the dev team, the guy who's got to write this blog to respond to the angry people, let's compare it to shopping like a really high end Japanese boutique. Like you would go in and buy 2,000 jeans at this exclusive boutique. Okay. Number one, that's a real world product. So if you're papaying 2,000 or these Japanese jeans, you're walking around in the real world with those. We're not talking about a virtual item that has real money value. It just, it was just a bad idea from start to finish.

It got really ugly. And here, my team is just going, please just stop talking. You're only making it worse. That would be the number one lesson. If I worked at Wendy's, if I was one of the people in that room who came up with this really stupid idea of calling it dynamic pricing, instead of hey, let's call it happy hour because other people are doing it. Then that would have been my advice. I think sometimes people just don't think things through to their logical conclusion. And that's where the problems start. And marketing people that I've worked with, most of them don't think things through to the logical conclusion.

Lizzie Mintus: I think I had Jen Donahoe on, who is a strategic marketing consultant, but she talked about how marketing can work with a deaf team.

She didn't talk about community management, but

Valerie Massey: She didn't talk to him. She didn't talk to him.

Lizzie Mintus: Jen's great. But the point is everything I think these days is encouraged. There are some studios that are doing it really right, where you think about all of these things, and you think about hiring, and who you want to hire.

You put thought into what you want to do, and have everybody on the same page at the beginning. I think it's occurring, maybe more, maybe not. There's a lot of difference.

Valerie Massey: It's not. But I love your optimism and your positivity, Lizzie. You're like a little breath of sunshine.

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I don't get that feedback often, so thank you.

Valerie Massey: We just met. Maybe I'll feel different by the time this is over.

Lizzie Mintus: No, I have some sunshine, I have some darkness.

So what can people do when they're working on the game pre launch to ensure that they're going to create a positive community when it launches?

Valerie Massey: Don't over promise. That happens all the time, and it's not contrived. I think that these big lofty ideas that game development teams have, I believe that the largest percentage of the time, they really do believe that they're going to launch by the projected date. That they will have all these things done and they will have all of these features at launch. I've never felt like any of the teams I've worked on were padding that. They were all sincere and I believe that, but at the same time, you need to be very careful about saying those things publicly.

Another thing that everybody, again, this is not just game industry. This is any industry, any job, if you are in a position where you are speak... I started to say, if you're in a position where you're speaking publicly, But these days, again, because of social media, that anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion. Even if you put that little disclaimer on your profile that says, my opinions are my own and do not reflect on my company.

Yes, sunshine, they do. You don't get to just say that. That's not a blank check to just say whatever you want. And it doesn't even matter if you don't identify yourself in your bio as working for that company because somebody's going to find out where you work and they can and will use that against you. So whether you're the CEO or the janitor of a company, you don't get to have a private, personal opinion. You just don't. Those days are over. So yeah, I think that devs do truly have the best intentions. There are just so many unknown factors when you're making a game, whether it's going to be technology that didn't work the way that you wanted it to, or you had a great idea for a specific game system design, and when you got in there and you tried to do it, it was clunky. It didn't feel good. You had to make adjustments.

One game that I worked on, Pro Fall, we just kept having to go in and just rip up all the carpet. We built the framework for this house, got all the walls up. It came time to put in the flooring and we just have to get ripping up the flooring, put new flooring in. No, that flooring doesn't work. It made a series of really long delays and it hurts the game part company ran out of money and the game released with what it had and it wasn't enough and it wasn't good by profile.

Lizzie Mintus: And that wasn't the fault.

Valerie Massey: Yeah, that wasn't the fault of the president or the CEO. There might be some people that I won't name that I would hold responsible for the bad decisions that they made that cost it. I'll tell stories. I'm just not here.

Lizzie Mintus: People tell me that now. They're like, Lizzie, you can't put this on your podcast. As if I'm just doing a bunch of stuff. People tell me all the time on my podcast.

Valerie Massey: I don't even mean you, I'm not hard to find. You can find me and say, hey, I want the scoop on that. And I'll tell you. I'll tell you not to hire.

Lizzie Mintus: I was going to make the analogy, like building a house. If you've ever done any remodel project, it's always yes, it will be three months, the budget will be X, but the budget is not X,.

Valerie Massey: It's not three months. That will test a relationship. So yeah, if you're engaged, you're like, you know what, I don't know if we should really get married, remodel something, go on a trip abroad. Go overseas together. You'll know.

Lizzie Mintus: When I started my business, I was pregnant during COVID and we were doing a full house remodel, complete renovation, moved out triple the time. Really good test.

Valerie Massey: You didn't need marriage counseling or anything. Good for you. Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's helpful. Okay, so if you have feedback from the community, but you have conflicting feedback from the community, how do you figure out the right path to take? And what stories do you have about a time when this happened? All the times, but a particular story that stands out.

Valerie Massey: In the beginning, it's a little bit difficult. The way that we used to do it is that you announced, even sometimes before you were in alpha testing, because you were trying to attract investors. So you needed to say, Hey, we're making this game. Here's what it's going to look like. Here's what's going to be in it. And then you attract people like potential community members with those ideas.

I think Eve was a really good example of that. Because by the time I joined the crow fall team, it had already been announced, they had started a Kickstarter. So that was a whole different animal. I sound like, that one time at band camp, it was one time at Eve online, but I was there for almost 10 years. That's where most of my stories come from. So when I joined the Eve team, they did have a website. They did have a message board, but they, I, like I said, I was the first community manager.

So you had these people who were on the forum and they were talking about what the game was going to be. Just based on what little tiny information they have. This is very common. Again, any game is going to see this. When you announce, and you've got those early community members, and they haven't actually seen the game yet, they start designing it for you.

And somewhere along the line, they will start to see more about what the game really is. And a lot of them will be like, hey, that's not the game I designed. I wasn't promised that. I was promised this, even though you never promised anything. But to them, anything you say is a promise. And so those people go away. But that's all right, because as more and more information comes out, you get this influx of new people. And that's where your core community really starts building. It's not those very early people. They're important because like I said, they're the ones that help you get investors.

So it's not , F those people. I don't care if they go away because it is painful to see some of them leave. But now you start building your core community, and from that, you can start to identify who are the negative Nancy's, the ones who are just gonna complain about everything, because to them, that's the game, right?

They will pay you whatever your subscription price is just to be able to go on the forum and shit talk. Sorry, if you got to bleep that.

Lizzie Mintus: No, you're good.

Valerie Massey: Smack talk yourour team, your product. That's the game for them. So that's fine. The beauty of those people is that then the ones who are just really dedicated, they are in love with the idea and the dev team. Your yes men or yes people, they're going to stand up to the negatives. And so those two start duking it out. So God bless the little happy children who are just with you all the way, but at the same time, there's this other group. Your canaries in the coal mine. These are the ones who are usually pretty quiet. They only poke their heads out when they have something important to say. They don't immediately spit on everything. I'll have to compare it to when the MacGuffey brothers flew the first hot air balloon. And they landed in the middle of this field, and the peasants came out and attacked it with pitchforks because they didn't know what it was. You have people in your community who are going to do that. Any change, whether it's good or bad, they're just going to be out there with the pitchforks because it's change.

Very quickly you learn to identify your canaries in the coal mine. If they get quiet, if they go away, if they are usually positive and they suddenly say something negative, those are your measuring sticks. Those are the ones that you pay attention to. The other ones you kind of grade on a curve. But those canaries in your coal mine are very important and easy to identify. You don't have to be Dick Tracy to know who those people are. And those are the ones that you stay in touch with.

Lizzie Mintus: And you identify them because it's just obvious when you're so deep in your community. Let's say you're a new, you're a new community manager. And you're trying to figure out the lay of the land.

Valerie Massey: It don't take long, girl. Like I said, you don't have to be Dick Tracy to find those people. I promise, I could go to any message board right now. Games I've never played, communities I don't know.

I could spend maybe an hour on those forums and tell you who the canaries are. I can identify the tree, the three types. I can identify the people I knew and everything you say people with the pitchforks in their hand. I can identify the super fans who are just go along with anything because they're just happy and they love everybody and I can identify the canary. It's not that hard.

Lizzie Mintus: When,you have people that will poop on everything or whatever you want to call them.

Valerie Massey: Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: How do you deal with these people? Do you recommend having the 'yes people' engage with them and that can build engagement? What point do you advise booting them out of your community? How do you handle that?

Valerie Massey: It's, I started to say it's on a case by case basis, but again, after some time, you don't even have to have years of community experience. You do have to have some experience with your particular community. Like I said, so that you know who the pitchfork holders are and who the happy ones are and who the canaries are.

But there does come a time. So you have somebody who's a pitchfork person, and they're just going to attack everything. And they attack other people in community. There've been instances where I said, look, I appreciate that you've joined us in our journey. I appreciate the time you spent here. We obviously are going to have to agree to disagree. We can't make the changes that you've asked for. We've explained why many times. You're unhappy. It's costing us a lot of time that we could be spending with other people in the community. I wish you well. Goodbye.

If they're disrupting, if they're just tearing up the room and you've tried the standard things of muting them and that sort of stuff, sometimes you just have to cut bait. There've been times when I said, you know what, I will pay that person's subscription fee for another game if they would just go play something else. And then I would recommend to them a game that I knew was being run by people I didn't like. Here, go play this game. Here's 20 bucks. Here's 50 bucks to buy it. Vaya con Dios, mi amigo. Yeah.

There's been times like that, but other times I can think of a specific person, this guy in real life, he was a lawyer. He would get on the message board and we had rules. You have to have rules on a message board just so that it's welcoming for everyone. This guy would argue with us, with other players. He gets real mean and personal.

It's one thing to tell somebody that's a dumb idea. It's another thing to say you're dumb. And you're a grown ass man, you're an attorney, you know the difference. You use the language every day and court cases. You know the difference between those two things. Don't plead ignorance with me. Anyway, so we went around and I knew any time he got even a warning about something he said on the message board, it was going to be two days of emails back and forth with this guy. His name was Wes.

And I knew it. And I had to go on vacation once and had to entrust someone else to watch the message board. And of course, this guy, Wes, took advantage of that and thought ha. The Val pan is gone. And now I've got Max and Max isn't used to me. So I'm going to double down and give Max some grief. And I'm on vacation with Max texting me going, I don't know what to do with this guy.

And I was like, give him a time out. By the time he gets off of this time out, I'll be back. And it was horrible. It was bad. But at the end of the day. I will say that on a personal level, Wes and I had a good relationship. It was like a cat and mouse game and we both knew that we were just tweaking each other's melons, more like brother and sister. He would do things just to instigate and I knew that, so it was never personal. You can't take any of this personally. And he did settle down after some time.

The bad news is, he died. He was. Oh. He was on a boating trip with some friends. He was standing on a pier. He was talking to his buddies in his guild and texting them saying, yeah, the boat's coming back. I'm about to get on the boat. And that was the last they heard from him until they heard from, I think, either his best friend or his fiancee, that right after he had sent that message to them, he had a heart attack all of a sudden. He was a young dude. Boom, he was dead. I'm happy to say that I got a clear conscience, we had a good relationship.

And that's another thing. Even if sometimes it's a contentious relationship, you do get close to some people. And sometimes people die, and you have to learn how to deal with that. That's happened several times in my career, that I had a player who passed away. It's like losing a friend. It's not so strange now that more and more people are on the internet, even outside of gaming. You've got these communities on Facebook and whatnot. We may know somebody who gets seriously ill or they pass away or they have a family member that they lose. But back in those days, it was really weird. Like somebody who was my friend, but we never met in person. So those feelings are just as real as if it was somebody that you knew in real life.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. How do you recommend you deal with that from a community management standpoint?

Valerie Massey: In the early days, and I saw this happen in Ultima Online when players would die. They would have a little end game ceremony. In fact, my husband, his older brother died when they were doing, I think, beta testing for Ultima. This was before we were married. They had done this little memorial in the game for his brother. And that would happen early on where if a player passed and they heard about it, they would do this little in game memorial.

More and more people would pass away. And then there were several cases. where someone faked their own death. They put the rumor out that they had died, but they didn't because they wanted to see what the reaction was going to be.

Lizzie Mintus: That is so twisted.

Valerie Massey: Yeah. I knew some cases like that. I knew one of the guys who did it and he swore up and down. He's I was feeling really bad about myself and I did plan on self deliverance, but I backed out. But by then I had already said that I was dead. I told them that through somebody else and they had done this big ceremony for him. And I think that's when the makers of Ultima Online, which was Origin, that's when we're like, no, we're not going to do this anymore.

So in Eve, I faced that situation. Sometimes I did know the person involved. There was one guy in particular, his name was Jeremy. I get emotional talking about Jeremy. He was a quadriplegic. And he didn't even have the use of his hands to be able to use a trackball like some other paraplegics that I knew. He didn't even have that limited use. And Jeremy's father was retired from the CIA. He was a technology guy in the CIA and had set it up, had done some programming to make it where you could use voice commands to navigate throughout this one system called Katmandu. And because Jeremy, his character's name was Tax, and he would call that Taxmandu, because that's where he hung around was in this one place.

And Jeremy passed away, and his father let me know. I wanted to do something to honor him, but I didn't want to do it publicly. This relationship to me was very personal and very private. So I went to the developers, and I said, Hey, can we just put a character in Taxmandu? It doesn't say anything about Jeremy. It's just named Jeremy's character, a character named Tax, where you could go and get a quest or get quests from him and that would be a way to honor Jeremy.

Nobody knew who it was. We didn't draw attention to it, but we did that.

Lizzie Mintus: That's so sweet.

Valerie Massey: I think it's important to encourage the players to honor people that they knew and that passed. In Eve, again, and this one time, Ningal, probably one of the most famous players in game was Vile Rat. You can Google him. He died in Benghazi. He was in the Benghazi attack. And the last thing that he said to his mates in the game was, hey, there's something that is happening. Let me go see what's going on. I'll be right back. And he never came back.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. So I never thought about this whole world of community management and dealing with people.

Valerie Massey: It's community and it goes beyond a game. For some people, it is just a game. There's the guys who worked their nine to five, they'd come home, crack open a beer, go play World of Warcraft for a while. They might go do some kind of dungeon or something, and then they're done. They got their mates in the game, but they don't think anything else about it. But then there are other people, not even necessarily shut ins, like I was when I was taking care of my grandmother, or like Jeremy was, because he was quadriplegic and Eve was all he had. There's some people like that's their social life. That's what they do for fun. It's their hobby and they are more emotionally invested.

And people who are in community management already, none of this is going to be new to them, none of it, and they've all got their own stories too, but new people, or people who think that they might want to be in community, these are things that they probably hadn't considered. But when your game is in development, one of the conversations you need to have is what are we going to do, what are our policies if we have a player who threatens suicide, which I've also had to deal with.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow.

Valerie Massey: If somebody dies, would, what's our policy. Somebody just contact you and say, Hey, I was friends with Joe Blow and he's dead, so I should have his account. Yeah, policies around that. What documentation do you need? And it's hard to ask somebody. If a mom contacts you and says, Hey, I see the recurring payment in my son's bank account for this and I don't know what this game is. You have to explain it to them, but then you also have to ask this grieving parent for a death certificate to prove? Do you need some kind of legal paper, some kind of message from the executor, which we did have to do in Wes' case. The one that I was talking about that died on the pier. We had to get information from the executor of his will to know who to give his account to because it did have value. It had real world value, couldn't just give it to anybody. Those are things that you don't think about when you're just like, I'm going to make a Twitter account and we're going to sell this game. , there's a lot more to it.

Lizzie Mintus: Anything else people don't consider that they should consider?

Valerie Massey: Yes, banning people, that was a big one. Like how much do you let someone get away with? To quote Prince, forever is a mighty long time. You hate to tell somebody you're banned forever, it's permanent, you can never come back. So what I would do is tell people, we've tried the time out for a week. We've tried to temporary ban for 30 days. So now we're at the point and you can't just keep giving them chances because it's a waste of time for you, and time is money. Money that you could be spending, paying attention to somebody else, and you've got this little problem child.

As my mother used to say, you didn't take them to raise. They aren't your responsibility. You don't have to hold their little hands forever. This is a business transaction, and they are costing you money.

So eventually I would say, okay, we are at the point where you're banned for 60 days. When that 60 days is up, it is now your responsibility to contact me and say, I would like a review of my case. Then I'll go pull up all of this stuff that I was smart enough to save, things that you said in public. Nasty things you might have said to my customer support staff or to my team. We'll review all of that. And most of the time, I can only think of one or two isolated incidents where I didn't say, okay. We're going to give you another chance, but here are the conditions. Number one, you will acknowledge this message from me saying, yes, I've read this and I understand your terms and I agree to it. And the term that you have to agree to is that if you do anything that breaks any of the rules, not just the ones that you got in trouble for this time, but if you break any other rules. That's it. You're done. Account closed. There's no coming back from that. So go and sin no more, little child. But if you do, this is what's going to happen.

Like I said, I didn't have to do it that often. And of the infrequent times I had to do it, I can only off the top of my head, think of one person who just could not keep himself in check. And I was like, okay, we're done. That's it. And of course, they go and buy more copies of the game and then they play again and that's fine.

We almost always knew when it was them, but you know what, if you've got this new account, if you love the game that much, that you can't stay away from it. And it brings up these burning passions in you that you can't control. That's awesome. As game designers, you want people to be passionate about your product. If you can just go and behave with your new account and your new persona, I'm going to let you live your new life. Jason Bourne, you just go be a new version of yourself, but if you start reverting to your old behaviors, I'm going to call you out and say, Hey, I know that's you. We've had this discussion before and you're gone. It's a matter of learning your audience and knowing who they are and it's not hard.

Lizzie Mintus: As a mom of a three year old, I feel like everything you said, it was just like parenting. Here's what's going to happen next. If you don't do this, we're going to have another chance after this.

Valerie Massey: I actually did a presentation a few times, this presentation, and you can find it online everything I needed to know about customer support and community management I learned from Jurassic Park. One of the things I say in there is that gamers and children are like velociraptors. They test the fences and they remember where the weak spots are.

Now, I have people get very offended. Oh my gosh, she's calling, she's comparing this to children. No, children are smart. If you think that's an insult to be compared to velociraptors and children, you haven't been paying attention. Children are smart. The raptors are awesome and it is entirely true. They will test the fences and they will remember where the weak spots are. I'm a mom. I know I've got grandkids now. My grandchild Sophia, she's crafty. I adore her 'cause she's smart 'cause she will test the fences.

Lizzie Mintus: That was me. I wasn't allowed to stick out my tongue. That was a rule, right? This great video, I had this blanket and I'm making a tongue with my blanket and they told me after a while, they're like, what do we do with this kid?

Probably a similar situation. I had Don McGowan on, who is the chief legal officer for Pokemon. By the time the listeners are listening, it may or may not be released, but Don has a great story about how they had a person threaten their player in real life, and what they had to do there. He didn't care about anything, but what really made him receptive was being kicked out of the game.

And that was like the finale moment. Big fines? No. Straighten orders? Don't care. Kickin out of the game? Game over.

Valerie Massey: That is it. That was another thing back in the day. When I first started working as a community manager, I would hear these stories about a guy who had worked on Ultima Online. One of the developers there, Richard Vogel. I had heard of this story about Rich and I heard it from more than one person, but I didn't know Rich at that time. What I'd heard was they were making a change in UO that was going to affect the people who were bad people in the game, the player killers.

They were dreadlords and they were talking about making a change to the reputation system that would undo that. So the people who had worked to become dreadlords were now going to have to start all over again to get their dreadlordness back. They were unhappy about that. And the story that I was told was that Rich came home from work one day and there was an Ultima Online box on his front porch before the days of digital downloads, kids.

There's this Ultima online box on his porch that had a knife, a note that was attached with the knife. And the note said, I know where you live, and if you F up my character, I will kill you. So I always heard this story about Rich and then the day I met him. I was like, Hi, nice to meet you. I got to ask you about this because I'll go for the tea and shade. And he said, yes, that story is true. And what you didn't hear was that I immediately got back into my car and went and bought a gun. So the whole reason for most of us in the industry, especially in those early days of having like our GamerTag names or our DevTit names. Was to try to hide our identity to make it a little harder for people to find us.

And security was always very high at these offices because you'd have players that would just show up. But over time, as the players became to know more and more about each other's personal lives, the players stopped hunting us and started hunting each other. With the swatting and stories like that where they were threatening each other's lives. And some people did get physically assaulted and killed for things that happened in online games. And you're just going, it's a game. So you go back to, it's a game for some people and for other people, it's more than a game.

Lizzie Mintus: And the players are velociraptors.

Valerie Massey: And the players are velociraptors and they're where the weak spots are at the end. But there's wonderful things too.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, tell the best stories like people getting married, people meeting each other. What is the highlight?

Valerie Massey: And that was one of my crusades early on. I've told this story before. If people Google me, they're going to read about it. Sorry, old news. So way back when in my former life, I had a little boy who had muscular dystrophy and he died when he was two. And every year for Christmas, cause you had this kid and now you don't and it's weird and people ask you how many kids you have and you feel if I overshare, it makes them feel bad.

Anyway, so every year at Christmas, which was also about the time of year when it was Nick's birthday. His birthday was December 30th. I felt like he's not here, but he is here. I should do something. So I buy an angel ornament. And I would put an ornament on the tree every year. I would write the year on the back of the angel when he'd been gone for 20 years.

Newsflash, I'm old folks. I'm a grandma. Okay. So yeah, my son's been more than 20 years. It just got to where I had this tree full of angels. And instead of being comforted by that, it made me really sad because he'd been gone for so long. I was like, okay, I can't do this anymore. I've got to find a more positive way. And that's when I read that the guys at Penny Arcade, the website about games and stuff, they were starting a charity called Child's Play, where they would put game equipment into children's hospitals.

Research had shown that playing games, helps people heal faster. I could do a whole thing about that. And my brother was a board of directors for the Starlight Foundation, which was an offshoot of Make A Wish. And their mission was the same, put game equipment in children's hospitals for kids. I was like, that's it. I barely even knew they put guys at Penny Arcade, but I read that they were trying to get things for auctions and raise awareness and raise money.

I just started emailing people and getting donations for these auctions and making that my new quest. I saw such an outpouring of support and money, and if somebody couldn't afford to donate anything, they at least donated their time. To see that happening and to see the healing that comes.

I met a guy who had started a charity called Get Well Gamers, which now has rolled into the Able Gamer Charity. I had helped him get stuff for his charity. And then got to go with him. He lived in Michigan, I think, but came down to Austin for something. And I got to go with him to deal with children's hospital to deliver donations. I got to be a part of that. And that was huge for me.

So to see people who do that, who hear more about others, again, it's still in the context of gaming. Gaming unites us all. Another friend of mine had misdiagnosed type one diabetes, and it wound up costing his vision. So a bunch of us that had been together playing games since Ultima Online and EverQuest. Somebody said, hey, let's buy him a Kindle, because he could make the text really big, because he loved to read. And within 30 minutes, this small group of players, we just had a Google group, where we would email each other. 30 minutes or less, not only had we all raised enough money to buy Temple this Kindle. It was hundreds of dollars in gift certificates so he could buy books that he wanted for it. I would have maybe 12 people.

So it's those kind of stories that I love. And the last company that I worked at, Consortium 9, was founded by Brooks Brown, who had gone to Columbine, and that's Columbine High School, which was friends with the guys. Google Brooks Brown, you'll find out more than you ever wanted to know. Brooks, was friends with the two boys who committed the assault. But he also was friends with people who were killed. And he became a suspect himself when he was like, I saw Eric right before they went into the school, and he told me to go home. So then Brooks was accused of being an accessory. So he spent years trying to get out of that mess. But at the same time, he was very vocal about the fact that people want to blame video games for what happened. Eric and Dylan played Doom. So that made them violent. And Brooke said in one interview, it wasn't the video games, it was the bullying.

I remember his exact words in this one particular interview was it was easier to kill the kids at Columbine than to get along with them. Especially because I knew him by that point, and he had the interview years before, but it really hurt my heart to hear him say that. But again, video games getting a bad rap when that wasn't it. It was just kids being mean to each other and I've been a victim of bullying and that's why that's one of the zero tolerance things on my message board.

Again, there's a difference between telling somebody, Hey, your idea is dumb or telling somebody you're dumb. You're not going to call somebody dumb in front of me and say they have dumb ideas all day. Because sometimes people do.

Lizzie Mintus: That's a parenting thing too. That's good. I like that you have rules Expect people to follow the rules. You have to. .

Valerie Massey: In anything, that's why sometimes I got called into HR. Valerie, you can't tell people you're going to kill them. Oh, sorry, okay. I'm not gonna kill him, but I'm just gonna tell him when he's being dumb. Yeah, we had a guy on the Eve team who cheated, who did some sneaky stuff behind the scenes and blew up in our faces. I wasn't there when he did it, but I came back to the company as all of this started to blow up. The CEO came to me and said, I need you to help him dig himself out of this hole that he's in. And he was such a little jerk about it.

I didn't really do anything wrong. Yes, you did. And at one point I told him I was going to grab him by his little ponytail and swing him around my head and throw his little Belgian ass into the Eve office was right there on the bay in Reykjavik, right there in the harbor. I told him I was going to throw him in the harbor and feed him to the shark that hung around in that little bay. HR talked to me and told me I wasn't supposed to say that.

Lizzie Mintus: Probably no, that's a community management lesson for you. I

Valerie Massey: Vincent. Sorry. Not sorry. You're fun.

Lizzie Mintus: Lots of tea has been spilled in this interview and it's been a blast. I have one last question. Let's say you're at a game awards banquet and you're being offered or honored, awarded, that's the word, a lifetime achievement.

Who would you think, who has helped you in your career that you would want to give a shout out to?

Valerie Massey: I would have to thank all of the players for every community I've ever worked on.

Lizzie Mintus: A lot of people.

Valerie Massey: A lot of people, so I wouldn't even try to name them by name. But in every interaction, there's a valuable lesson to be learned. What is it that line? Some people enrich our lives by coming and some by going. So I learned valuable lessons from all of them.

I would have to say, Jess Mulligan, happy birthday again, Jess. I didn't meet Jess until maybe halfway into my career, but I read things that she wrote. And just a huge fan of her unvarnished take on things. Jess is not afraid to call a spade. And again, somebody who doesn't sugarcoat, she's gonna, she's going to say things at face value. She's smart and God help us all that she continues to use her powers for good instead of evil, because if she ever decided to be an evil mastermind, she could crush the world.

Gordon Walton, another guy who was a mentor very, for a very long time until I went to work with him. I learned a lot from Gordon about how to treat people and how not to treat them. Mostly how to treat people.

I'm a firm believer in don't burn bridges, but there are some bridges that I would drop napalm on. . The hands down worst boss I've ever had in my life. I would thank her for making me tougher and smarter and more self aware and more certain that's the kind of person that I would never want to be, that I would never want to be that kind of boss, that I would never want to be that kind of parent. There you go.

Lizzie Mintus: There you go. I think I've worked for good people and I've worked for bad people and you learn a little bit in both scenarios.

Valerie Massey: You learn more from the bad ones. I really do think you learn more from the bad ones. Like I said, you really found out to be.

Lizzie Mintus: Bad boss. Bad people in your life. Absolutely. Thank you for the tea. We've been talking to Valerie. Massey, who is most recently head of community at Consortium 9. Valerie, where can people go on the internet to find out more about you, listen to your velociraptor talk?

Valerie Massey: I have a twitter slash x account. I don't check it very often. LinkedIn is a good place to find me, Val Massey on LinkedIn. And I'm currently unemployed. I don't know if I want another job, like especially right now with the way that the game industry is. I've tried working outside of the game industry. It's not fun. Those are my people. That's what I'm used to. It would depend on the job and who it is.

I have been there. Eve is the only game I ever worked on that still works. up and running. So I know what it is when your studio closes or when they do cutbacks and I know that even though it's a little bit better when you're still standing after a layoff, you have that survivor's guilt.

And I've often compared it to that scene, which Lizzie won't get this because she's probably never seen it. That movie, The Ten Commandments, when it's Passover.

Lizzie Mintus: You know I've never seen it, yeah.

Valerie Massey: Okay, so it's Passover, and all these families are huddled together, and there's this green myth rolling down these stone streets, and between these little hovels where people live. And you just hear these screams as the eldest son has just fallen over dead. You hear the screams and that's what it feels like to me to be sitting in the conference room or wherever they've gathered the survivors. And these are your friends, and sometimes your friends, your office mates, your work wife or your work husband, you're closer to them than your actual family. All you can do is just sit there and listen to it.

You still have a job at the end of the day. So there's that to celebrate, but it's still a survivor's guilt. Being somebody who has to decide who gets cut, there's nothing funny about it. And how many people is it now? 60,000 people that are suddenly out of jobs?

Lizzie Mintus: There's a lot of people. There's a lot of new studios. There's a lot of great people who have been laid off by no fault of their own, but they're going to go out and start something new. And I think now is the time to watch companies and the way in which they execute the layoffs. There are companies that do that do it on a Sunday night and refuse to talk to anybody.

That's not a good way to do it, for instance, right? But there are companies that have to do it and write recommendations for their employees and share that they had to do it publicly and why, and here's the contact list, here are the errors that I made. So I think at any point of distress, we talked at the beginning, you see your spouse's true colors, people's true colors, and company's true colors. And this is time to pay attention.

Valerie Massey: It is. Learn lessons from it. Don't be that kind of person. If you have to make a list of who's going to get cut. Be kind and smart about it. And like you just said, you're watching how other people do this. That's how you learn to do it better. Oh, they did it really well. They did a bad job of this. I don't ever want to do it that way. If you're unemployed, what's that line from the crow, it can't rain all the time. It can't rain all the time.

Lizzie Mintus: Nobody heard this before the interview, but I didn't have a TV growing up. So if you chat with me about movie references, I'm just not going to get them. Sorry about that.

Valerie Massey: Yeah. And that's half my conversation. My brother and I will have entire conversations that just made me quit.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, fact about me, my, my family has never ever said, let's have a family movie date. That didn't exist. We just didn't do that.

Valerie Massey: Do it Lizzie. Anyway, I hope that Something I said helped somebody. And like I said, get in touch. I'm happy to talk shop, even though I don't have a shop at the moment. I have a home and I'm grateful for that, but yeah, if you have questions, if I can help with anything, just, Reach out. I'm your Huckleberry.

Lizzie Mintus: You're awesome. Thank you so much.

Valerie Massey: Thank you, Lizzie. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.

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