A crash course in crisis management (for all creatives)

gamedeveloper.com:

Whether you're a front-line community manager or just a developer tuned in to your community, player feedback can be rough. And it can get rougher when an out-of-nowhere bug, unwanted feature, or other five-alarm fire fills your mentions and inbox with unwanted awful messages.

In this business, those moments can make it especially difficult to separate the worst, most hateful comments from the valid feedback your team is receiving. It's easy to let emotions run wild and lose sight of why you're making games in the first place.

Community-facing experts like Stephanie Bayer, a veteran community developer with experience at companies like CD Projekt Red, Blizzard Entertainment, and beyond. Last week Bayer presented an in-depth session called Death By 1000 Keystrokes - Surviving a Crisis of Comms at the very first Game Developer Talks—a webinar series coordinated by Game Developer, and our colleagues at sibling organization GDC.

Bayer's advice spanned from the practical to the tactical—and might save you from your next crisis.

Any community crisis is led by a set of circumstances that you as a developer cannot control. You cannot control how players feel, you might not be able to control how your game works, heck, you might not even control what decisions were made that landed you on the front page of Kotaku (or here on Game Developer).

Bayer's first guidance was that before any crisis takes place; developers and community managers would do well to prepare themselves with learning basic relaxation techniques and by knowing who they could turn to for a source of venting.

"Make sure you limit the venting time," she said. "It can really go into a very downward spiral if you just make it all negativity all the time."

Both techniques