How hard is it for Kabam employees to hop on the forum and answer burning questions and problems

Is it that much of an inconvenience to take 2 minutes to put out a response or statement. Is that not what you get paid to do?

Comments

Gentsy12

@DNA3000 You’re joking right?! Any job I’ve been in has AT MOST a 90 day onboarding / probationary period where you can get away with “I’m still ramping”. I’m not calling for anyone to be fired but it’s been 6 months since Jax left, so let’s stop using the ramping excuse.
While there are such jobs, I am unaware of any job of any professional consequence for which employees are not still ramping up after 90 days. In most game studios I have any knowledge of, the ramp up period is six months to a year for most jobs. The same is true in the financial sector, the healthcare industry, most software development teams I've seen, NetOps is usually six to twelve months, business analysts are typically four months, financial audit is 90-120 days minimum. I know someone in human resources who tells me the typical recommendation for onboarding policy is three months minimum for entry level positions, and six months to a year for higher level professional positions.

The only job I'm directly aware of that has a shorter than 90 day onboarding is McDonalds. But I wouldn't call that a profession per se.

Absolutely not, I’ve run multiple sales teams, everywhere from $50M-$20B, you get 1 quarter without a quota then if you do achieve quota the next quarter you’re on a PIP. I’ve worked with private equity deal teams /boards where as an operating committee member if I missed my numbers 6 months after deal closed I likely don’t have a job in 3 months unless something turns around. Do you think if a resident of 4 months misdiagnosis someone, they won’t get sued cause they’re “ramping”? I want to work with you have a year plus where I can be awful and say “oh I’m new”

DNA3000

@DNA3000 You’re joking right?! Any job I’ve been in has AT MOST a 90 day onboarding / probationary period where you can get away with “I’m still ramping”. I’m not calling for anyone to be fired but it’s been 6 months since Jax left, so let’s stop using the ramping excuse.
While there are such jobs, I am unaware of any job of any professional consequence for which employees are not still ramping up after 90 days. In most game studios I have any knowledge of, the ramp up period is six months to a year for most jobs. The same is true in the financial sector, the healthcare industry, most software development teams I've seen, NetOps is usually six to twelve months, business analysts are typically four months, financial audit is 90-120 days minimum. I know someone in human resources who tells me the typical recommendation for onboarding policy is three months minimum for entry level positions, and six months to a year for higher level professional positions.

The only job I'm directly aware of that has a shorter than 90 day onboarding is McDonalds. But I wouldn't call that a profession per se.
Absolutely not, I’ve run multiple sales teams, everywhere from $50M-$20B, you get 1 quarter without a quota then if you do achieve quota the next quarter you’re on a PIP. I’ve worked with private equity deal teams /boards where as an operating committee member if I missed my numbers 6 months after deal closed I likely don’t have a job in 3 months unless something turns around. Do you think if a resident of 4 months misdiagnosis someone, they won’t get sued cause they’re “ramping”? I want to work with you have a year plus where I can be awful and say “oh I’m new”

If you've actually done what you're claiming, then you know most sales doesn't require all that much competency beyond basic sales skills which are transferrable, at least initially. And you can make quota like that. But the guy that's been on the job for one quarter, everyone knows he's only been there for a quarter and no one asks him any serious questions. They almost always have back up in the form of sales engineers (in the tech space) or sales support (everywhere else). They aren't actually *good* at their jobs until much longer.

In areas like private equity, people aren't just "onboarded" in the normal sense. They don't have proscribed jobs with job descriptions that they have to fit. They are almost always recruited explicitly for their job experience, and they are doing essentially the same job as what they were doing in the place they were recruited from. The normal hires are just support people who just have to not block access to the elevator until they know what they are doing.

I've seen literally hundreds of sales people in the technical space. Not a single one was what I would consider to be competent after only 90 days. They could make quota, because most of quota is dealing with customers who already know what they want and just the salesperson to find SKUs for them. But they don't actually have the faintest idea what they are actually selling in only 90 days.

If that's what you want, people who are really good at talking but have no idea what they are saying, we can fill the forums with that sort of information tomorrow. Actually, now that I say that...

Average_Desi

@DNA3000 You’re joking right?! Any job I’ve been in has AT MOST a 90 day onboarding / probationary period where you can get away with “I’m still ramping”. I’m not calling for anyone to be fired but it’s been 6 months since Jax left, so let’s stop using the ramping excuse.
While there are such jobs, I am unaware of any job of any professional consequence for which employees are not still ramping up after 90 days. In most game studios I have any knowledge of, the ramp up period is six months to a year for most jobs. The same is true in the financial sector, the healthcare industry, most software development teams I've seen, NetOps is usually six to twelve months, business analysts are typically four months, financial audit is 90-120 days minimum. I know someone in human resources who tells me the typical recommendation for onboarding policy is three months minimum for entry level positions, and six months to a year for higher level professional positions.

The only job I'm directly aware of that has a shorter than 90 day onboarding is McDonalds. But I wouldn't call that a profession per se.
Absolutely not, I’ve run multiple sales teams, everywhere from $50M-$20B, you get 1 quarter without a quota then if you do achieve quota the next quarter you’re on a PIP. I’ve worked with private equity deal teams /boards where as an operating committee member if I missed my numbers 6 months after deal closed I likely don’t have a job in 3 months unless something turns around. Do you think if a resident of 4 months misdiagnosis someone, they won’t get sued cause they’re “ramping”? I want to work with you have a year plus where I can be awful and say “oh I’m new”

There is no qouta that community managers have like sales. Sure there must be KPIs,but not like sales. At player judgement of failure will not result in PIP

leviddleton

In all seriousness though, trying to increase our presence on forums, happy to have holes or things we're missing pointed out though!
Somehow it was great when there was only two primary mods (jax and miike). Now we have like 4 (you, crashed, karathe Mike, and our guest appearance dork) and still we're short on communication. Why?
First of all, the term you’re looking for is community managers or community rep, not forum mods. The forums have mods, and they moderate the forums. They have no ability to answer questions or make announcements. Neither Miike nor Jax were forum mods.

Neither Crashed nor Mike are community managers. Crashed is the live game lead, and he monitors the forums for his own reasons and to try to pitch in where he can. Mike is, well I don’t know exactly precisely what his title is, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a community manager. He mostly does work In The Battlerealm. It is not his job either to make announcements or answer questions, that’s also something he does voluntarily and as he has time for.

If there is a serious problem happening in the game, Crashed should not be spending any time on the forums notifying people of it, because his attention should be on the problem itself. It would not be Mike’s job to inform us either, and the only way he could get pertinent information would be to bother the people actually working on the problem, unless he was himself working on the problem. So it would not be his job to inform the community either.

Pinwheel and Dork are essentially replacing Miike and Jax as community managers, and are still ramping up in those jobs. And while there is certainly lots of room for them to continue to improve in their management of the player facing communications channels, in the case of the Sigil client breakage this morning this was a sufficiently fast paced issue that it would be difficult for anyone to figure out what was happening quickly enough to alert players about what was happening and answer questions before it was all over anyway.

DNA3000

@DNA3000 You’re joking right?! Any job I’ve been in has AT MOST a 90 day onboarding / probationary period where you can get away with “I’m still ramping”. I’m not calling for anyone to be fired but it’s been 6 months since Jax left, so let’s stop using the ramping excuse.
While there are such jobs, I am unaware of any job of any professional consequence for which employees are not still ramping up after 90 days. In most game studios I have any knowledge of, the ramp up period is six months to a year for most jobs. The same is true in the financial sector, the healthcare industry, most software development teams I've seen, NetOps is usually six to twelve months, business analysts are typically four months, financial audit is 90-120 days minimum. I know someone in human resources who tells me the typical recommendation for onboarding policy is three months minimum for entry level positions, and six months to a year for higher level professional positions.

The only job I'm directly aware of that has a shorter than 90 day onboarding is McDonalds. But I wouldn't call that a profession per se.
Absolutely not, I’ve run multiple sales teams, everywhere from $50M-$20B, you get 1 quarter without a quota then if you do achieve quota the next quarter you’re on a PIP. I’ve worked with private equity deal teams /boards where as an operating committee member if I missed my numbers 6 months after deal closed I likely don’t have a job in 3 months unless something turns around. Do you think if a resident of 4 months misdiagnosis someone, they won’t get sued cause they’re “ramping”? I want to work with you have a year plus where I can be awful and say “oh I’m new”
There is no qouta that community managers have like sales. Sure there must be KPIs,but not like sales. At player judgement of failure will not result in PIP

In general, I believe the community managers are in fact good community managers. They aren't being taught how to manage communities. But the specific thing being discussed here is direct communication about technical or controversial topics, basically the hot topics that affect players strongly and immediately that players want timely information about. That requires very specific information about very specific things about the game that go beyond just "well, this happened." They have to be able to answer questions about these topics as well, which requires an understanding of the hows and whys, and because these things are in fact often controversial topics any mistake in communication is going to be amplified, and any miswording is going to be picked apart.

Sometimes they just don't know and can't guess. Sometimes they do know but are limited in what they can say. Sometimes they aren't sure and don't want to be fast but wrong. Anyone can do the mechanics of posting messages or updating forum banners. The thing that takes time is getting it right every time. Both Miike and Jax used to get hammered just for making what I would consider to be a colloquial misstatement. That is not easy in a hostile environment.

BloodyRose

@DNA3000 You’re joking right?! Any job I’ve been in has AT MOST a 90 day onboarding / probationary period where you can get away with “I’m still ramping”. I’m not calling for anyone to be fired but it’s been 6 months since Jax left, so let’s stop using the ramping excuse.
While there are such jobs, I am unaware of any job of any professional consequence for which employees are not still ramping up after 90 days. In most game studios I have any knowledge of, the ramp up period is six months to a year for most jobs. The same is true in the financial sector, the healthcare industry, most software development teams I've seen, NetOps is usually six to twelve months, business analysts are typically four months, financial audit is 90-120 days minimum. I know someone in human resources who tells me the typical recommendation for onboarding policy is three months minimum for entry level positions, and six months to a year for higher level professional positions.

The only job I'm directly aware of that has a shorter than 90 day onboarding is McDonalds. But I wouldn't call that a profession per se.
Absolutely not, I’ve run multiple sales teams, everywhere from $50M-$20B, you get 1 quarter without a quota then if you do achieve quota the next quarter you’re on a PIP. I’ve worked with private equity deal teams /boards where as an operating committee member if I missed my numbers 6 months after deal closed I likely don’t have a job in 3 months unless something turns around. Do you think if a resident of 4 months misdiagnosis someone, they won’t get sued cause they’re “ramping”? I want to work with you have a year plus where I can be awful and say “oh I’m new”
If you've actually done what you're claiming, then you know most sales doesn't require all that much competency beyond basic sales skills which are transferrable, at least initially. And you can make quota like that. But the guy that's been on the job for one quarter, everyone knows he's only been there for a quarter and no one asks him any serious questions. They almost always have back up in the form of sales engineers (in the tech space) or sales support (everywhere else). They aren't actually *good* at their jobs until much longer.

In areas like private equity, people aren't just "onboarded" in the normal sense. They don't have proscribed jobs with job descriptions that they have to fit. They are almost always recruited explicitly for their job experience, and they are doing essentially the same job as what they were doing in the place they were recruited from. The normal hires are just support people who just have to not block access to the elevator until they know what they are doing.

I've seen literally hundreds of sales people in the technical space. Not a single one was what I would consider to be competent after only 90 days. They could make quota, because most of quota is dealing with customers who already know what they want and just the salesperson to find SKUs for them. But they don't actually have the faintest idea what they are actually selling in only 90 days.

If that's what you want, people who are really good at talking but have no idea what they are saying, we can fill the forums with that sort of information tomorrow. Actually, now that I say that...

I've worked in software dev for over 20 years, albeit not gaming, but, the level of customer-focused communication we have here is leaps and bounds above what I am used to. Community managers can't possible know what's going on in the dev shop. They are like level 1 support.

What people are forgetting, or are not aware of, is that since 2022 Kabam had several layoffs (7% in 2022 and 12% more in 2023) that included "mostly creatives, QA and liveops" (and some Devs) in order to "invest in new growth areas while also streamlining our existing development teams." Where I worked, the result of this devs getting burned out working overtime to write the code and support the code in production. Notice I didn't say testing. In any place I worked devs never tested. And it seems that holds true Kabam.

Toproller89

Let them ramp up, when they hit 999 days in the job, every question will be answered immediately when you ask and problems will be instantly solved and they will brute force your accounts with compensation the minute any bug is found in the contest.

True Aegons of Kabam.

KDoggg2017

The only burning question I've ever had in my life involved a cheating wife (now ex).
One revive in Raids sucks, and the game is full of bugs... but I'm pretty sure I'll sleep like a baby tonight anyways. 🙃

Gentsy12

@DNA3000 You’re joking right?! Any job I’ve been in has AT MOST a 90 day onboarding / probationary period where you can get away with “I’m still ramping”. I’m not calling for anyone to be fired but it’s been 6 months since Jax left, so let’s stop using the ramping excuse.
While there are such jobs, I am unaware of any job of any professional consequence for which employees are not still ramping up after 90 days. In most game studios I have any knowledge of, the ramp up period is six months to a year for most jobs. The same is true in the financial sector, the healthcare industry, most software development teams I've seen, NetOps is usually six to twelve months, business analysts are typically four months, financial audit is 90-120 days minimum. I know someone in human resources who tells me the typical recommendation for onboarding policy is three months minimum for entry level positions, and six months to a year for higher level professional positions.

The only job I'm directly aware of that has a shorter than 90 day onboarding is McDonalds. But I wouldn't call that a profession per se.
Absolutely not, I’ve run multiple sales teams, everywhere from $50M-$20B, you get 1 quarter without a quota then if you do achieve quota the next quarter you’re on a PIP. I’ve worked with private equity deal teams /boards where as an operating committee member if I missed my numbers 6 months after deal closed I likely don’t have a job in 3 months unless something turns around. Do you think if a resident of 4 months misdiagnosis someone, they won’t get sued cause they’re “ramping”? I want to work with you have a year plus where I can be awful and say “oh I’m new”
There is no qouta that community managers have like sales. Sure there must be KPIs,but not like sales. At player judgement of failure will not result in PIP
In general, I believe the community managers are in fact good community managers. They aren't being taught how to manage communities. But the specific thing being discussed here is direct communication about technical or controversial topics, basically the hot topics that affect players strongly and immediately that players want timely information about. That requires very specific information about very specific things about the game that go beyond just "well, this happened." They have to be able to answer questions about these topics as well, which requires an understanding of the hows and whys, and because these things are in fact often controversial topics any mistake in communication is going to be amplified, and any miswording is going to be picked apart.

Sometimes they just don't know and can't guess. Sometimes they do know but are limited in what they can say. Sometimes they aren't sure and don't want to be fast but wrong. Anyone can do the mechanics of posting messages or updating forum banners. The thing that takes time is getting it right every time. Both Miike and Jax used to get hammered just for making what I would consider to be a colloquial misstatement. That is not easy in a hostile environment.

Do I expect a community manager to be able to talk about the back-end code? No

Do I expect them to communicate with the player base frequently about updates and other issues? Yes

When was the last time Dave posted anything in the forum? When was the last time before today pinwheel posted in the forum? It seems as though karate mike has posted more than both of them even only being in the role officially for a month or two.

If the issue is that Dork/Pinwheel (who has done a great job today) don’t know enough about the game to understand the player sentiment, maybe kabam should have hired people who actively play the game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence DLL has designed the best champs recently, or Mike hasn’t had a 6 month ramp period, or Crashed responses always seem well regarded and appreciated by the community.

World Eater

They have been

As hard as it is for you to see a guardian make a post stating the game team is aware of the situation….
Many people are starting many posts about the same ONE problem. Kabam can't and shouldn't be expected to respond in all the redundant posts.

Kabam mods used to combine threads about the same issue into one. It’s been yeeeeears since they did it. It’s called moderating the forum …

DNA3000

If the issue is that Dork/Pinwheel (who has done a great job today) don’t know enough about the game to understand the player sentiment, maybe kabam should have hired people who actively play the game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence DLL has designed the best champs recently, or Mike hasn’t had a 6 month ramp period, or Crashed responses always seem well regarded and appreciated by the community.

Is this a serious post?

Personally, I think DLL does a pretty good job with champion design. He's thoughtful and knowledgeable, and even when I've disagreed with him I've never seen him without a valid explanation for his thought process. But he's been doing this for quite a while now, and a lot of his knowledge comes from being a very high level player before he became a Kabam employee. He's been "ramping up" for a long time. And while I think his designs are good ones, he also gets a ton of flak from players as well. There's no unanimous agreement his designs are always well-regarded.

Ditto Mike; he's been building his knowledge base for a long time, and he started off slowly. He did not go from zero to whatever he's doing now instantly, and moreover in this very thread someone was complaining about why he couldn't be more responsive. In case you missed it.

Don't even get me started on Crashed. Crashed's posts are always well regarded, only in the sense that players say how well regarded they are before calling him a lying ignorant nincompoop. Crashed has been in charge of the game economy for over three years, and players still think he has absolutely no idea what he's doing.

In fact, I'm questioning the validity of this line of discussion altogether.

unknown

This content has been removed.

DNA3000

If the issue is that Dork/Pinwheel (who has done a great job today) don’t know enough about the game to understand the player sentiment, maybe kabam should have hired people who actively play the game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence DLL has designed the best champs recently, or Mike hasn’t had a 6 month ramp period, or Crashed responses always seem well regarded and appreciated by the community.
Is this a serious post?

Personally, I think DLL does a pretty good job with champion design. He's thoughtful and knowledgeable, and even when I've disagreed with him I've never seen him without a valid explanation for his thought process. But he's been doing this for quite a while now, and a lot of his knowledge comes from being a very high level player before he became a Kabam employee. He's been "ramping up" for a long time. And while I think his designs are good ones, he also gets a ton of flak from players as well. There's no unanimous agreement his designs are always well-regarded.

Ditto Mike; he's been building his knowledge base for a long time, and he started off slowly. He did not go from zero to whatever he's doing now instantly, and moreover in this very thread someone was complaining about why he couldn't be more responsive. In case you missed it.

Don't even get me started on Crashed. Crashed's posts are always well regarded, only in the sense that players say how well regarded they are before calling him a lying ignorant nincompoop. Crashed has been in charge of the game economy for over three years, and players still think he has absolutely no idea what he's doing.

In fact, I'm questioning the validity of this line of discussion altogether.
So crashed should be able to tell us why the game would have died if they didn’t get rid of those 6 revives in raids!!!!! Right right right ?????

It would depend on when his next bathroom break was.

Gentsy12

If the issue is that Dork/Pinwheel (who has done a great job today) don’t know enough about the game to understand the player sentiment, maybe kabam should have hired people who actively play the game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence DLL has designed the best champs recently, or Mike hasn’t had a 6 month ramp period, or Crashed responses always seem well regarded and appreciated by the community.
Is this a serious post?

Personally, I think DLL does a pretty good job with champion design. He's thoughtful and knowledgeable, and even when I've disagreed with him I've never seen him without a valid explanation for his thought process. But he's been doing this for quite a while now, and a lot of his knowledge comes from being a very high level player before he became a Kabam employee. He's been "ramping up" for a long time. And while I think his designs are good ones, he also gets a ton of flak from players as well. There's no unanimous agreement his designs are always well-regarded.

Ditto Mike; he's been building his knowledge base for a long time, and he started off slowly. He did not go from zero to whatever he's doing now instantly, and moreover in this very thread someone was complaining about why he couldn't be more responsive. In case you missed it.

Don't even get me started on Crashed. Crashed's posts are always well regarded, only in the sense that players say how well regarded they are before calling him a lying ignorant nincompoop. Crashed has been in charge of the game economy for over three years, and players still think he has absolutely no idea what he's doing.

In fact, I'm questioning the validity of this line of discussion altogether.

I think you missed my point. The three names I mentioned are doing a great job, IMHO. Obviously you are never going to please everyone but I think it would be almost unanimous that Mike and Crashed are more valuable to the community than Dave.

If it truly does take 9-12 months to effectively ramp up to be a community manager, which I still think is extremely debatable, Kabam should hire players rather than people with no connection to the game (or no recent connection in the case of Dave).

BringPopcorn

What's OP obsession with toilet time... Are Canadians so superior a smoke break is out of the question? Or a small trip to the water cooler?

Kabam (Osaurus) Rex

In all seriousness though, trying to increase our presence on forums, happy to have holes or things we're missing pointed out though!
Somehow it was great when there was only two primary mods (jax and miike). Now we have like 4 (you, crashed, karathe Mike, and our guest appearance dork) and still we're short on communication. Why?
First of all, the term you’re looking for is community managers or community rep, not forum mods. The forums have mods, and they moderate the forums. They have no ability to answer questions or make announcements. Neither Miike nor Jax were forum mods.

Neither Crashed nor Mike are community managers. Crashed is the live game lead, and he monitors the forums for his own reasons and to try to pitch in where he can. Mike is, well I don’t know exactly precisely what his title is, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a community manager. He mostly does work In The Battlerealm. It is not his job either to make announcements or answer questions, that’s also something he does voluntarily and as he has time for.

If there is a serious problem happening in the game, Crashed should not be spending any time on the forums notifying people of it, because his attention should be on the problem itself. It would not be Mike’s job to inform us either, and the only way he could get pertinent information would be to bother the people actually working on the problem, unless he was himself working on the problem. So it would not be his job to inform the community either.

Pinwheel and Dork are essentially replacing Miike and Jax as community managers, and are still ramping up in those jobs. And while there is certainly lots of room for them to continue to improve in their management of the player facing communications channels, in the case of the Sigil client breakage this morning this was a sufficiently fast paced issue that it would be difficult for anyone to figure out what was happening quickly enough to alert players about what was happening and answer questions before it was all over anyway.
The only slight tweak I will say is that Mike has joined us on the community team, in addition to all the very many things he does in the battlerealm haha.
Well, then it's his fault.

Obviously, along with everything else

DNA3000

In all seriousness though, trying to increase our presence on forums, happy to have holes or things we're missing pointed out though!
Somehow it was great when there was only two primary mods (jax and miike). Now we have like 4 (you, crashed, karathe Mike, and our guest appearance dork) and still we're short on communication. Why?
First of all, the term you’re looking for is community managers or community rep, not forum mods. The forums have mods, and they moderate the forums. They have no ability to answer questions or make announcements. Neither Miike nor Jax were forum mods.

Neither Crashed nor Mike are community managers. Crashed is the live game lead, and he monitors the forums for his own reasons and to try to pitch in where he can. Mike is, well I don’t know exactly precisely what his title is, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a community manager. He mostly does work In The Battlerealm. It is not his job either to make announcements or answer questions, that’s also something he does voluntarily and as he has time for.

If there is a serious problem happening in the game, Crashed should not be spending any time on the forums notifying people of it, because his attention should be on the problem itself. It would not be Mike’s job to inform us either, and the only way he could get pertinent information would be to bother the people actually working on the problem, unless he was himself working on the problem. So it would not be his job to inform the community either.

Pinwheel and Dork are essentially replacing Miike and Jax as community managers, and are still ramping up in those jobs. And while there is certainly lots of room for them to continue to improve in their management of the player facing communications channels, in the case of the Sigil client breakage this morning this was a sufficiently fast paced issue that it would be difficult for anyone to figure out what was happening quickly enough to alert players about what was happening and answer questions before it was all over anyway.
The only slight tweak I will say is that Mike has joined us on the community team, in addition to all the very many things he does in the battlerealm haha.
Well, then it's his fault.
Obviously, along with everything else

I don't think we can blame you for everything yet, unless you've been getting some codebase cross training in which case you can be the first Kabam employee we can literally blame for everything. It would be nice to have a one-stop shop. Maybe DLL has some free time.