Week in the Life of RS CM
Hey, I’m Mod Kalaya and I work in the RuneScape community management team. I work on creating initiatives to engage the community as well as helping support updates as they come in the game. I’m typically busy over on the RuneScape forums, and that’s where I’m most visible. Read on to see my week in Community Management!
My mornings start at just gone 8 and it always begins with the daily admin tasks, which are normally (hopefully) done before 10am. This daily stuff includes things like checking on the forums, reddit and twitter, answering emails sent to one of our two mailboxes and dealing with troublesome users on the forums, but there’s always something new in each day to deal with too, which definitely keeps it interesting!
Monday is one of the busiest days of the week – Update Day. Once the update hits, the entire team turns to our social channels and forums to engage with the players. We primarily look to take on feedback, pass bugs on to QA, and determine how well the update has gone. Mod Neena creates what’s called a sentiment report, where we rate how well the update has been received. All CM will send our individual bits to her for compiling and sending to the wider RuneScape team. After sentiment pulling, our second job is to make sure the players know they’re being listened to for any complaints, to reassure them that the team is taking on board what’s being said.
Typically, the entire Monday will be taken up by the update. Any spare time I have might be taken up by an in-game event checking out the update, some “start of the week” catch-up meetings with the wider team or, this week in particular, preparing for another week of the Forum month.
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Tuesdays are a less intensive version of Mondays. The Monday sentiment report from Mod Neena is the 6 hour report, but on Tuesday’s we’ll create the 24 hour version, which gives a more rounded opinion and allows the feedback from those who have played overnight. Whilst mostly the sentiment will remain about the same as it was in the 6 hour report, we sometimes find that opinions have soured overnight or greatly improved after initial bugs are hotfixed. So, the first couple hours of my day are spent looking through the forums and seeing how it’s gone overnight. Assuming no major issues need to be dealt with, I’ll get on with my Tuesday.
The biggest thing on a Tuesday, after the sentiment, is the developer livestream. Though I haven’t had a big part in this in the past, circumstances have dictated that the entire CM stream are getting more involved so I spend the majority of my afternoon with Mod Jon, going through setting up and running a stream. Then, it’s stream on with a Raids Q&A, and I’m in charge of the camera shots. It’s fun, especially trying to capture those epic Kelpie-cams!
Wednesdays are probably our quietest days of the week, so I tend to fill them with the weekly tasks. I’ll do the community playlist on Wednesdays (when I remember!
as well as change the quick poll on the website front page. They’re also a good day to have an in-game event, or do a playtest for some upcoming content. We also have all of the sprint reviews which you’ve no doubt already read about. The CM team split those up between us and share the info afterwards – so there’s only one team review per member of CM. I’d tell you which one I go to, but so far it’s been a different team each time, swapping around depending on who’s free when!
This week I also take a chunk of Wednesday to work on the flights@runefest mailbox – we’ve had many, many more requests than last year and it’s pretty time consuming! Several hours a day have been required so far, with lots of communication required between me, the player, the mod booking the flights and her external contact who helps find prices. For interesting stats, last year we booked flights for ~12 people, and this year we’ve had requests from over 150 people. The cheapest price offered so far has been 45 Bonds for a return trip, and the most expensive was a whopping 550 Bonds.
Thursdays are TAPP day. When I have time, I’ve been teaching myself a bit of video editing, which is something I’ve been keen on since my school years but not been able to properly practise before. Thankfully with the TAPP program I was able to get good software, and I’ve been dissecting the RS3 dev livestreams with the intention of making them into 3 or 4 minute highlight videos. It’s been trickier than I thought! Not sure whether this would be something that’s actually released in the near future as I’m pretty slow, and something like that would need to be a regular thing which I don’t have time for yet. But I keep working at it every TAPP day and I’m enjoying it
Fridays is the wrap-up day, so lots of reports going round! My own reports consist of a reminder round the team about what the Solomon’s Store update will be next week, as well as what I’ve seen in development from that team. I’ll also report how many forum posts the team has made in the week, with Mod Matthe generally leading the scoreboard and Jon, Neena and I battling it out for the following places. Though I have trumped Mod Matthe once, and he didn’t like it!
We may also spend some time preparing for Monday’s updates, organising events and wrapping up the week. And sending prizes. So many prizes.
Though is by no means a standard week for CM, and new things crop up or drop off almost every week. I kept it to mostly what the week is as a standard, but understand.. no week is the same in this team! Hope you enjoyed
Mod Kalaya |
Zarosian
Product Manager | @JagexKalaya
24-Jul-2015 14:38:51
