Feldon Breaking News: Christine “Kiara” Renzetti is hopping the fence from EverQuest II to a new role as EverQuest Community Manager.
More after the jump…
Kiara has been EQ2 Community Manager for nearly two years, one of the longest tenures of any past EQ2 Community Manager. After previous EQ2 Community Managers have tried to bluntly “shape the message” of the EQ2 forums (by deleting thousands of critical or even slightly negative posts and banning hundreds of users), Kiara has been controversial both to players and EQ2 developers by allowing (in sequestered areas and specific threads), almost completely unfiltered discussion of key issues affecting EQ2.
The position of Community Manager is an impossible job, and some people will always be unhappy with any censorship. Moderators of all forums (I’m an Administrator of 2 forums and moderator of 2 others) are eventually accused of being “Nazis”, regardless of how much negativity we allow.
However under no previous EQ2 Community Manager have such heated debates and open discussions been allowed. In the end, Kiara’s willingness to allow players to vent on a variety of topics can’t have made friendships with EQ2 developers easy. Players who abandoned the EQ2 Forums due to extreme censorship and who helped to swell the ranks of EQ2Flames have come back to the EQ2 Forums under the new regime to share their concerns about the game and participate in trying to shine a spotlight on issues that have previously been ignored.
No doubt there will be crude celebrations from jaded players “happy to see her go” and tawdry rumors in the wake of this announcement, but for those of us who gave up on the EQ2 Forums and came back, this is a sad day. Our sources indicate that the subscriber numbers of EQ and EQ2 are pretty much neck-and-neck, so reassignment is probably the most accurate term here.
We wish Kiara luck, just as we wish good luck to Amnerys, who is stepping into the EQ2 Community Manager position. We also hope that the EQ2 Forums will remain a place where the hard issues can be discussed.
Good riddance. I never cared for her ability to censor any if not all types of posts and suggestions. To say she was a “friend” to the masses is incorrect if not blasphemy. She was basically two-faced in regards of saying one thing and doing another. I’m sure there will be people who will miss her, but I will not.
I agree with Zizzu. I’m shocked to read you say she allowed so much unfiltered chatter. This is simply not true. When I see her name, I have always associated it with censorship and lies. She’s the reason why hardly anyone bothers using the EQ2 forums and mostly everyone is on EQ2flames. Good riddance indeed.
Its pretty obvious that you never read the forums under Moorgard.
Gage,
As you well know, I started playing EQ2 just after Echoes of Faydwer came out. So I never had the experience of the almighty Moorgard, whose legend you keep alive to this day.
My experience with forum moderation was Gnobrin and Grimwell, who made the EQ2 forums a living hell.
http://www.eq2flames.com/general-gameplay/11719-eq2-forum-mods-go-crazy-official-najena-board.html
http://www.eq2flames.com/general-gameplay/21709-gnobrin-his-nazi-ass.html
http://www.eq2flames.com/lucan-d-lere/10228-excessive-negativity.html
Ditto to the above, she was pretty censor happy.
Folks,
I’m completely open-minded to problems you guys had with Kiara. I would always rather know the whole picture, instead of just one distorted side of the story. I’d be curious to know what posts got people banned from the EQ2 forums.
Kiara did close a lot of threads. A point I made her aware of.
Kiara also moved a lot of threads. I challenged some of the threads she moved.
I’m anxiously awaiting a “smoking gun” — a post that should have been allowed that wasn’t.
I’m mainly sad to see her go but a trifling happy to see her go.
Here is why:
She once let me state my views on a topic which wasn’t very popular with the majority of forums members, they screamed, they flamed and told me they were all going to have me banned. Well they tried to have me banned but it backfired huge on them all. Kiara banned them for spamming SOE to have me banned, lol, she even took it further and made a few posts during the thread that when someones view isn’t the same as theirs is not a bannable offense.
Another time (way back) she wrote me a warning letter, i wasn’t banned, but to this day i’m still miffed to what i said was wrong, she never gave me a reason. Like i said It was way back (maybe she was new), it was like she was on a rampage. That incident kept me off SOE forums for months as i didn’t want to bother if something so small or invisible could get you a warning letter i said F’it, flames here i come. Over time i came back once it didn’t seem so militant.
Overall i think she was a good for the forums, people came back to them.
Personally, I thought Kiara was the best community manager that EQ2 has ever had: kind, tolerant, and responsive to the players. The trolls who “clap” or whatever because they were slapped around a bit, well, they needed to be handled. They would never agree because they were clearly angels made out of pure sugar… Quite frankly, I think they’re just unable to turn their microscopes on themselves. Too much (undeserved) pride.
FYI: This was purely a management decision.
1. Draakull left SWG for another position at SOE.
2. Greeblen reassigned Zatozia from EQ1 to SWG.
3. Greeblen reassigned Kiara from EQ2 to EQ1.
4. Greeblen promoted Amnerys to EQ2.
EQ2 must be Hell Week or something. 😉 Given that some players are willing to dig into the personal lives of these people, completely invading their privacy, or at least spread very nasty rumors, that’s probably an understatement.
A Community Manager needs the respect of the people who develop the product they’re covering, and the customers. It’s not surprising that there have been some changes.
I can honestly say I empathize with any person filling the Community Manger role for EQ2 particularly during a period like we’ve had over the past couple years.
That being said, I have definately disagreed with some of the things Kiara did – moving posts to random un-related areas of the forums, accusing players of being paranoid and needing tinfoil hats when in most cases the rumors people brought to light that she accused people of being paranoid over were later proved true (New Halas not launching with expansion among others).
If you’re going to be in an unpopular role such as this, you need to be very careful and squeaky clean with everything you do. Misinformation breeds distrust and hatred and there was a good share of that going around under Kiara’s regime.
That being said, I’m a tad sorry to see her go. Not because she did a perfect job all the time, but because compared to other CMs she did OK and we can definately do worse. Kiara is a known factor at this point – people generally know the limits. With someone new, who knows?
This is the thing that troubles me about SOE. They keep moving people around. I mean if you find the right person for the job, you should keep them there.
At least, that’s what we (and they) want to believe. The fact is that “community management” doesn’t mean managing a community for the community; it means managing a community for the company. If it’s in the interest of the company that some consumers spread out to other avenues, such as EQ2Flames, that’s what community managers will help make happen. Most don’t want to believe that they serve their employer first, however; many have an idealistic, poetic (even noble!) interpretation of their jobs. But consumers don’t do direct deposit.
Community management isn’t like advertising where your relationships with individual clients adds value to your employment. Why? Because community managers manage groups of individuals, not individuals. Their particular skills are just as useful to managing one group as they are with another. Technically, you could have a team of people working under one name and nobody would know the difference. Things get tricky when the community folks are assigned to PR activities, like representing at events.
You know, the only people who seem to ever have a problem with the moderation on SOE’s fora are those who don’t know how to provide constructive criticism. It’s the people who post a new thread on the same topic as five other threads on the first page, the people who say nothing more than “XXX class sucks, fix it!”, the people who can’t comment on someone else’s post without commenting on the person rather than the content.
Not to say that some thoughtful, mature posters haven’t had the occasional run-in with moderation, but that’s simply human nature; sometimes people misunderstand other people. But those thoughtful, mature posters understand that and don’t let it damage their experience on the fora.
The vast majority of EQ2 players, if they read the fora at all, are just there to get information, not to complain that X class parses 3% higher than Y class. For that majority, all of the EQ2 CMs have done just fine.
Powers &8^]
Funny. I was actually permabanned from the SWG forums because after posting FAQs with developer answers about the SWG TCG, prior to its launch, I was so tired of people asking frequently asked questions in the FAQs thread that I started lashing out at them, personally, for not reading the FAQs. 😉 In retrospect, I agree with the ban. I needed to be stopped. But the permanency of the ban was excessive. That said, it’s the SWG forum. Who cares?