Shooting yourself in the foot with an RPG
The loyal members of this community are a real, valuable, monetisable asset for CD Project Red. We act as ambassadors and salesmen for the game all over the Web; we provide new content in the form of modules; we support users here; and we build fansites and other resources for players of the game. One of the biggest such resources - one into which a number of people have put a huge amount of dedicated, unpaid work - The Witcher Wiki. Not only have we written a great deal of content, we've worked hard to make that content look good, to make the site look smart and also easy to find information in.Whatever the merits of the new 'skin' - however it relates to CD Projekt's corporate colours - the fact is that it has inevitably broken a huge amount of that careful work, so that pages which were crafted to look elegant and work well are now more or less unreadable. And, frankly, it all looks a mess.But changing the skin and making the site look a mess is not the problem. The problem is changing the skin without consulting. If you had said to the people who put most work into the Wiki, "Hey, guys, we want to change the colour scheme, here are our ideas, what do you think?", you'd probably have had a bit of discussion, you'd have ended up getting most of what you wanted, and you'd have kept the people who voluntarily spent their time supporting your product on side, supporting you, providing more content, and SELLING MORE COPIES OF THE GAME.Instead, you've made a number of people very unhappy indeed; it's going to be hard to win them back, they're going to drift away to other projects and you'll have lost a key part of your best sales team. And this is so needless! It doesn't take much to keep the community on board. We don't need money. We don't even need mousemats and medallions (although they're nice). All we need is for our contribution to be recognised and appreciated, to have our work not changed out of recognition without consultation.And, finally, if you're going to wantonly upset members of your community, don't attack the ones who are well liked and respected by other people. Because doing that creates widespread unhappiness and disaffection, so that, instead of getting support and praise all over the net, you risk getting grumbling.
The loyal members of this community are a real, valuable, monetisable asset for CD Project Red. We act as ambassadors and salesmen for the game all over the Web; we provide new content in the form of modules; we support users here; and we build fansites and other resources for players of the game. One of the biggest such resources - one into which a number of people have put a huge amount of dedicated, unpaid work - The Witcher Wiki. Not only have we written a great deal of content, we've worked hard to make that content look good, to make the site look smart and also easy to find information in.Whatever the merits of the new 'skin' - however it relates to CD Projekt's corporate colours - the fact is that it has inevitably broken a huge amount of that careful work, so that pages which were crafted to look elegant and work well are now more or less unreadable. And, frankly, it all looks a mess.But changing the skin and making the site look a mess is not the problem. The problem is changing the skin without consulting. If you had said to the people who put most work into the Wiki, "Hey, guys, we want to change the colour scheme, here are our ideas, what do you think?", you'd probably have had a bit of discussion, you'd have ended up getting most of what you wanted, and you'd have kept the people who voluntarily spent their time supporting your product on side, supporting you, providing more content, and SELLING MORE COPIES OF THE GAME.Instead, you've made a number of people very unhappy indeed; it's going to be hard to win them back, they're going to drift away to other projects and you'll have lost a key part of your best sales team. And this is so needless! It doesn't take much to keep the community on board. We don't need money. We don't even need mousemats and medallions (although they're nice). All we need is for our contribution to be recognised and appreciated, to have our work not changed out of recognition without consultation.And, finally, if you're going to wantonly upset members of your community, don't attack the ones who are well liked and respected by other people. Because doing that creates widespread unhappiness and disaffection, so that, instead of getting support and praise all over the net, you risk getting grumbling.
