Talking About Encouraging Interaction on the Site

Continuing a discussion in a dedicated thread that doesn't have HP in the name because, ahem, fuck that heap of trash.

Quote From KANSAS

Quote From Erodos

Lastly, I would like more incentives for discussing decks. Every expansion release cycle you guys do a great job in incentivising users to discuss the newly revealed cards, with titles and stuff. I think if you would add similar incentives to regularly voting and commenting on decks, that would drive up engagement with them. Even if just one person is incentivised through this to comment on a deck, that would lead to more people commenting as a result, since people are more likely to comment on a deck on which already has been commented. The precise implementation of these incentives I do not have a developed idea for though.

It would be cool if you could earn the new currency by voting on a commenting on decks. I don't know exactly how this new gold system is going to work, but it would be cool if once a week we had a sort of "quest" to comment on at least one deck and vote on at least 3. Really, the best way for the decks on this site to get more attention is for us to simply give them more attention. 

Quests are going to be a thing! I don't want to get too far into it all just yet but Daily, Weekly, and Seasonal Quests are going to happen. There will also be larger quests that will require the entire community to participate in to complete that will equally reward everyone that took part in them.

Seasonal? What the Flux?

So, yeah. I'll talk a bit about that now but don't expect anything on that until next year. Even staff members don't really know the whole plan behind this yet because I don't know it all yet.

The idea is that we'll have a few themed seasons during the year. It might be 4, it might be 6 (either every 3 or 2 months, likely trying 3 to start) and during that time, there will be exclusive stuff to earn and special themed content sorta like Oozefest. The idea is to try and change it up every season so things don't always feel the same but there will definitely be some kind of repeat content. I've always wanted to do something similar to a Battle Pass on the site, even during the HP days but nothing was ever approved to get worked on, so we'll have some form of specialized, seasonal progression.

There will 100% be something exclusive for premium members during each themed season.

Encouraging interaction on the site remains tough though. We can't encourage people too much because that could lead to fatigue or it'll lead to a whole lot of nonsense. One point that has been brought up in the past with encouraging voting and commenting on new cards is that we get low-quality discussion. I both agree and disagree on that topic, something I know I've talked about a few times in the past on the forums. The main issue is how do we avoid that in general.

I can't really create a quest to go and upvote something. It might work for the forums and comments, or even news articles themselves, but asking someone to go an upvote a deck is going to cause problems. Maybe limiting something like deck voting to once a week would help, I don't know. It could also be interesting to try and establish a "new queue" for deck guides and to ask people to go through it and provide feedback. Maybe you'd have to have some form of "certification" before you would be eligible for quests like that, like having a certain post count or account age. Again, I don't know but it is something we need to tread carefully on.

I do like what having the Shop and Gold will do for us though. We can give out rewards a lot more freely to people without giving out a big reward. Letting everyone save up and buy what they desire will be nice. The hard part will be having enough stuff available that people want to actively spend their gold. I have 3 additional ideas for site cosmetics/customization that we'll roll out in the new year, with one of those things coming with the Holiday event.

I also want to give all the staff a weekly amount of currency to freely give out to posts they deem appropriate. It might only be 10 or 20 Gold, but they'll have the option to give it out to decks and comments that they find meet their own special criteria. Maybe it was funny, maybe it was high quality. Having more personalized handouts adds some fun to the system, especially if people know who is giving it to them.

^ That, I also want to let some community members do too, once we figure out a solid criteria for enabling it. Maybe we'll start by giving premium members an allowance to hand out each month and see where that takes us.

I also want to put together a feed so everyone can see what comments are earning gold. I guess its sort of like Reddit Gold if you are familiar with it, just with a different ultimate purpose.

The hardest part about all this though at the end of the day is having the time to work to implement everything. So damn few hours in the day and I already don't push enough content onto our homepage, love everyone on the staff that does that for us!

Anyway, here's a new thread to talk about encouragement stuff. GO!

Quote From Thraxus

I think this thread got lost a bit due to the card reveals starting. I have no experience with community management so I can't say much on the topic itself. Just wanted to say thank you. Your ideas sound pretty neat. Regarding implementation I would start slowly and run a pilot project on a single idea or so. Based on feedback and site statistics this could be expanded then (or not).

Oh, this is definitely several phases of implementation! The most important part is making sure people understand how stuff works, which I think we did well with when it came to Oozefest. We're going to need some sort of introductory experience for new users though once all this fun gets added because it might be overwhelming for some.

<3