How to Handle a Crowd: The Art of Creating Healthy and Dynamic Online Communities by Anika Gupta

Author:Anika Gupta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiller Press
Published: 2020-08-17T23:00:00+00:00

Sorina started playing WoW in 2005, when she was stationed in Nebraska with the military. One evening when she went to visit some friends, she saw they were playing WoW on two PCs set up next to each other. She was hooked. “I fell in love with the looks [of the game] and the social opportunities,” she said. She bought a PC, signed up for internet, purchased the game, and has been playing with those friends ever since.

All Together, Now

Considering how visible they are, it’s easy to think that highly experienced players make up the majority of WoW players. They don’t, although they tend to be the most active in WoW’s community spaces, according to Eric St. Pierre, a guild leader who told me he also briefly worked as a game master (a customer support representative) at Blizzard.

“The raiders and the dungeon runners are the squeaky wheels that post online, so we make the news; we’re the ones that everyone talks about, but we’re not the majority,” he said. In his time at Blizzard, Eric helped reset bugs in the game, resurrect lost characters, and even check in on reports of players who’d threatened—either in public chat or other WoW forums—to harm themselves. In his private gaming life, he leads Terminus, where several of those raiders and dungeon runners gather. Terminus is large, as guilds go. They have about two hundred guild members, who play more than eight hundred characters. (For ease of reference: a player is a single human individual. A “character” is an in-game avatar. It’s easy—and in fact common—for a single player to have many characters, with different skill sets and professions.) Twice a week, several players get together in the evening to take on group challenges together. They’ll meet up at a predetermined place in the WoW universe and hop into a Discord voice-chat channel. Before Discord came along, players had to organize their own private voice-chat servers in order to play together, which was time-consuming. Discord makes the process a lot easier, and has swiftly dwarfed many of its competitors in the space. It now claims fifty-six million monthly users, and is spreading outside the gaming world.7

But the guild’s activities extend beyond the twice-weekly group raids; players can contribute in a variety of ways. Eric says he has one person who “hands out care packages when we get a new player: a backpack, a minipet to keep them company, and a couple hundred gold to get you started. That’s her thing, that’s what she does in the game; she farms all day and night.” (In-game, of course.) He’s got another player who is “one of those hilarious characters who dresses up, and she changes her outfit every single day. She’s got one of the prettiest characters; her whole point is social and doing the minipet battles.” Then there’s a support guy: “He collects the food that our guild uses. All he does all day long is run fishing, so the rest of our group can go through and be successful.

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