I read that article yesterday, too. It's... tricky. Because in a lot of senses, Vogel is absolutely right. This sort of community shouldn't really work, and in most circumstances doesn't.
Elukka is right that some part of this is the forums being smallish, but on the flip side I've seen many smaller forums that were as bad or worse than the WoW ones. So while I agree that this sort of community wouldn't scale up indefinitely, I also don't think that it's a primary cause of why the community is able to exist at even a small scale.
My... tentative belief as to why this community works is the following list. I think that these factors contribute to varying unknowable degrees to make it work:
1. Keith and I are here, and do respond to as many posts as we reasonably can. We take people seriously, even if we don't always wind up agreeing.
2. When someone does come in and post in a tearing rage (which happens), rather than responding in kind, we treat it as best we can as if it had been posted without the emotional overtones. Some of our best forum members originally came over and posted something moderately nasty in a real fit of anger. When they were responded to with humanity rather than with defensive rage in return, their attitudes completely flipped and they became awesome long-term community members.
3. We don't try to please everyone, but we also don't try to make the game one single thing. With all the various options and configuration ability, players can get the varying experiences they want. This is key. For someone like Vogel, who is trying to make one specific experience (a story-driven RPG), it's of course largely play-the-game-as-it-is-or-don't-play. With an RPG, to some extent that's needed if the story is going to be linear.
3.a. With a game that is more open-ended, we're able to "please most customers most of the time" by providing varying options. Even when we aren't able to please someone completely, they often don't get in a rage at us because we explain why we can't accommodate X at the time, and they at least therefore had an acknowledgment of their issue. That, plus the fact that they can see we're trying to please customers and not just ignoring them like most companies, wins us a lot of brownie points.
3.b. But, sometimes when there is emotion involved, and it's a fundamental issue that we and a customer just can't agree on, there are indeed rage blowouts. There was obviously one recent one that was rather public here, but that wasn't the first. There have been... I'm not sure, maybe 3 total in 2 years? Our of 800-something posters, that's not too bad for a forum like this. But, it's one of those examples of how everything isn't perfect, even in a community like we have here.
4. Keith and I are willing to eat a certain amount of humble pie. We're not trying to ensure that every good idea in the game comes from us alone. That means that when a good idea from a player comes up, if it's feasible and there is time, we just implement it and credit them with thanks, no questions. This isn't a competition, after all -- we all want this to be a good game. I've seen other designers, both in the games arena and out, where it's actually a competition that they only "win" if the game conforms to their ideas and only their ideas. This sort of problem goes far beyond forums, and actually is often a problem for employee relations and morale inside the company itself.
4.a. Going along with this, Keith and I have to endure basically constant suggestions about ways our ideas could be better, or ways in which they are not working properly but should be working. Most people's reaction is to get defensive here. Mine sure as heck was, especially at the start. But early on when the forums had a few dozen members, I made a gut-wrenching decision to just keep the emotion on my side of the keyboard and deal with each issue as if it was something I had thought up myself (in other words, without the prejudice against it that results from not having thought of it myself). You may be surprised to learn that is harder than one might think.
4.b. At any rate, after a certain number of weeks there, which were pretty unpleasant for me, two things happened: I got more used to the process, making it not an unpleasant thing anymore; and players started to trust that I was actually listening, and started making suggestions in a more respectful manner. That in turn caused a chain reaction that the forums got this reputation for being respectful and places for good and serious thought about the game, and most new members had read enough posts to pick up on this culture and respond in kind. Those that didn't, and who posted angry/rude first posts, were easier to bring into line because of having this huge community at Arcen's back (and those angry/rude posters wound up happier for it, and Keith and I are spared the emotional turmoil... largely).
5. Also, I think this has to do somewhat with our fanbase. They are similar to us, they recognize us as one of their own, and we all share a love of the genre as well as a tendency to think about things in extreme depth. Dealing with the fanbases of certain other kinds of games... well, sometimes there are folks you just can't have rational discussion with. By nature of the genre and the type of game, or just sheer luck I guess, we almost never run into those folks here. Or maybe there aren't as many of those folks as I always thought, I don't know. But at any rate, whatever caused it, the composition of our fanbase in these forums makes all this easier.
Despite all the above, there still wind up being unpleasant events with the way the community has evolved, and things that make myself or Keith (or various community members) mad. But, you know what? It's on par with what I've observed in office environments. Even in a small 20-person company I've observed worse. In larger 400-person or 80-person companies that were clients of my former employer, I ran into significantly worse. People are people, anonymous or no.
My big beef with Internet discussion has always been the anonymous nature of it, and how people feel entitled to heckle and have no real stake in groups they join into. Through whatever combination of luck and circumstance, I get the impression that -- in a good way -- people don't feel anonymous here, even though they technically are. They become a known presence by their mind and ideas, and seek to maintain a good reputation simply by instinct, the same way we do in social circles in the real world.
Will this withstand the test of time? Hard to say. But it will be two years this June, and so far things are better than ever, really, in terms of the nature of the community here. If AVWW is majorly popular, I don't know what will happen to the forums, but we've seen some significant growth periods as AI War got more popular, and we weathered each of those okay.
So, I'm in the super odd position of thinking that, largely, Jeff Vogel is exactly right in all his analysis there... and yet, on a daily basis, I do the exact opposite and so far it works incredibly well. I'm not sure how other companies could really duplicate what got created here, because I'm not sure what all the primary factors were in creating a community of this sort, but for myself I intend to keep doing what I've been doing here for as long as it works -- hopefully indefinitely. For everyone who is a part of community, keeping things positive even when offering constructive criticism or bug reports, they make the continuation of this possible as much as I ever did. So kudos to all!
