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How Trion Worlds’ Community Team Executed RIFT’s Free-To-Play Transition [Interview]

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Trion World's RIFT Free-To-Play

If you’re making games or even playing them, it’s very likely you saw the transition that Trion Worlds’ fantasy MMO RIFT made on June 12th of this year into a free-to-play game. Here at SuperRewards we watched the process closely, as it was the first transition of its scale and notoriety. It’s a delicate matter to introduce big changes into a large and established gaming community, especially with regards to the game’s monetization model.

What we saw leading up to and during their transition day was impressive. The move to free-to-play was controversial with the game’s core audience, with fears ranging from an influx of new free players to an overall affect on gameplay dynamics. Nevertheless, the Trion Community Team, led by Elizabeth Tobey, executed a responsive and transparent campaign to make sure that players and wider gaming community was informed and engaged at every step.

We reached out to Tobey once the dust had settled a bit and asked her if she’d be willing to share some learning from her hectic summer, and see how things shaped up in the end. She graciously accepted!

Below we talk with Tobey about her role at Trion, what makes for a good community manager, and how she planned for and executed on RIFT’s big transition.

First of all, tell us a little about yourself and your role at Trion…

My name’s Elizabeth Tobey and I’m the Director of Community at Trion Worlds. What that functionally means is that I’m the person responsible for all the direct interactions between gamers and our devs. The Community team is the hivemind behind all our official outreach channels: blogs, social media, forums, contests, livestreams… That’s all us.

We also are in charge of making sure that everyone in the company hears what the players are saying: that means we sit in the middle of a giant venn diagram of development, customer service, marketing, and PR.

4-Circle Venn - Plain

What’s it take to be great at building and managing a gaming community?

When I’m building a community team, I look for someone who is passionate about not just gaming but about building real and meaningful dialogue. Community Managers need to have a very thick skin and a good head on his or her shoulders, but they also have to be able to balance humility, ego, and grace at all times.

What does a community manager/builder do at a gaming company like yours?

We just recently went through a massive restructuring and have rethought the way community management functions, so the team is drastically different than other places, particularly other MMO companies.

We work across all titles: each person has a specialty, be it a skillset or a title, so we all support each other but all work together as, essentially, a human community machine.

Our core duties revolve around making sure gamers have the information they want and that they have access to the support they need. We are the player’s advocates and voice.

In terms of projects: we really like being able to show what it actually takes to make a game and what goes on in the office. We’re doing a lot of behind-the-scenes type articles and updates for the community. Our livestreaming program reflects this philosophy as well.

RIFT Free-To-Play Transition Twitch Livestreams

How did you prepare the community for RIFT’s transition to free-to-play?

A lot of coffee. Seriously, though. It was a carefully orchestrated program across all our departments. The community team was very involved in crafting the messages and talking with the players to make sure they were prepared and comfortable.

We were monitoring the situation closely right up to the moment at which when we flipped the proverbial switch. Beyond the transition, we focused on making sure that everyone, from devs to veterans to brand new players, knew what was going on and had the tools to make things work well.

A transition like this always creates a lot of expectations from current users, which you guys seemed very prepared for. Can you outline some of the specific efforts you made as a team that helped the transition go smoothly?

We did a lot to make free-to-play as awesome of an experience as possible.

First off: we needed a solid model. So many people do free-to-play half right, or worse, really badly. Trion’s made up of gamers, so maybe we had a leg up on how we built our model, but it was key to us to have an experience that was fair and fun for everyone and made people feel like they were getting value out of the experience – whether that value came from currency, time, or anything else.

Beyond that, it was about making sure everyone who was already playing the game (as well as the new folks we were expecting) understood what was going on and got excited about it. For that, we had to coordinate customer service, marketing, PR, and community to all work together.

By doing all that, we got people excited and empowered gamers to help share what was going on in their own words, and created a sort of frenzy around our transition day. Actually, our livestream during the downtime while we were switching everything over to the free-to-play model was one of the most successful broadcasts we’ve ever had. We had thousands of people watching RIFT (the game was actually one of the top 10 most watched on Twitch at the time) and you couldn’t even play the game!

People were so excited for what was coming and what we had to say about the new model – and I have to thank the devs a lot for that success, too – not just for that one livestream but leading up to and after the transition. They gave us so much of their time to speak frankly with our gamers. That was huge.

Did anything about the transition surprise you when/as it completed?

How smoothly it went. You’re always preparing for the worst, but technically things went very well and in terms of the community, people were very happy.

Have you noticed a difference in the nature of your community now that it’s free for everyone to try?

Yes and no. We’re very focused on keeping the community one cohesive unit: that can be challenging when you are bringing brand new people en mass into the game alongside a lot of gamers who have been around for years and know the ropes really well. That said, our community is pretty friendly and very helpful.

RIFT also has a lot of different things to do and a lot of ways to play: you might spend all your time in Dimensions or PvP, for example, and those experiences are vastly different. So diversity was always part of the game and I think that makes it very approachable for the larger audience.

What do you think other developers and teams can learn from your experience?

There’s a balance you have to strike between listening to data, your gut, and your playerbase – but if you spend a lot of time looking at all three you’ll probably end up with a far more rewarding and fun experience. Free-to-play still has a stigma, so I’m excited for people to keep improving the reputation of the term and creating awesome stuff.

Thank you Elizabeth!

We’re very grateful for the time and insight Elizabeth shared with us. If you or someone you know is involved in free-to-play or freemium development and has a unique story to tell, we’d love to talk with you! Email Derek at derek@superrewards.com or ping us on Twitter!

The post How Trion Worlds’ Community Team Executed RIFT’s Free-To-Play Transition [Interview] appeared first on SuperRewards Growth Blog.


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