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This week’s MMO Manager insight is somewhat reversed from the usual. Instead of MMO lessons applying to business, here’s a business post that applies beautifully to the world of MMO guild management.

Dumb Little Man’s “50 ways a manager can get employees to quit” post lists several ways a mis-managing manager can manage to alienate those he or she works with, and many of these apply to the world of WoW. There are a few key lessons any guild leader can learn from this list, notably in the form of don’ts:

• Giving people the wrong sort of reward (usually none at all)
• Talk more than you listen
• Reprimand people in front of the whole group
• Disproportionately rewarding those who are fun personalities but shoddy players
• Disproportionately rewarding females over males or otherwise showing favouritism
• Ignore complaints
• Give advice on topics where you aren’t the expert
• Hold irrelevant, long, over-frequent meetings
• Insist people do pointless tasks

This leads into some dos:

• Do treat everyone from an equal footing…
• …but be sure to recognise merit.
• Do listen to others and acknowledge that they may know more than you
• Do communicate that you’ve received feedback, and make internal processes (officer discussions) clear to everyone
• Do recognise when people go the extra mile for you
• Do take interest in your guildies and take action when needed

Obvious? Probably, but it’s always worth stepping back and checking you’ve not let little idiosyncrasies or habits slip in. Always prefer your favourite tank? Giving specific rewards to officers but not the proles? Ignoring feedback and finding yourself in the middle of long waits while officers discuss issues but members have no idea what’s being discussed? Maybe it’s time to patch up a few of those management skills.

This MMO Manager observation is by no means limited to MMOs, but it is related. Members of top guilds, clans and syndicates often work together using voice communication such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo as well as text-based chat. As a result, players are unknowingly trained in how to use online voice communication effectively, something which has direct relevance when it comes to teleconferences in the business world.

A few things your average MMO player, possessed of a microphone, an active guild and some degree of the desire to participate, might learn without realising:

• When to be quiet on voice chats
• How to get heard when you have 30 other people all with an opinion to share
• How to manage groups of people in a voice channel
• How to communicate effectively in real-time (i.e. when trying to accomplish something time-sensitive)
• Combining voice with text and written followups
• ‘Voice language’ cues such as when silence is silence, and when it’s a prompt to speak. Hard to describe, but you do get a feel for it.
• Greater comprehension of non-natively spoken English
• General level of comfort with talking into a headset

That’s by no means it, but it does strike me that the teleconferencing skills your average online gamer possesses are going to be surprisingly strong. I picked MMOs in particular since guild organisation is so similar to business management, and you run the gamut of social voice chat, small leaders’ meetings, large groups all trying to kill a dragon, etc. The only real difference between gaming voice and teleconferencing is the magic ‘push to talk’ key, something which makes gaming voice a little slower than proper telecommunication and may make you seem unresponsive until you get used to the difference.

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle recently amongst the WoW-playing community, since an upcoming content patch is currently live on a special test realm — something which is a fairly regular occurrence in Blizzard’s development cycle. Having defeated all the current bosses in-game, new content on the test realms gives players something to do, and a reason to get excited (and continue paying Blizzard subscription fees) until the patch is actually released.

However, there is a lesson to be learned in here about expectations, and whether releasing unpolished content is necessarily a good thing. Imagine, if you will, that you’re a seasoned dungeoneer just waiting for the next big challenge to come out. Then you get a chance to have a shifty at it before you have to pay. Instead of the tough encounters, the epic battles and the fantastic rewards you were expecting, all you see is disconnections, crashes, bugs and woefully simple fight mechanics. Are you likely to stick around to pay for all that, or will you saunter off into the distance, confident that if you quit now you really won’t be missing much?

This doesn’t just apply to WoW among MMOs. Before becoming a paid subscriber to Blizzard’s magnum opus, I beta-tested literally tens of games, including — much to my shame — an entire Christmas holiday spent in the joint throes of glandular fever and The Sims Online. None of the developers for these games ever got a penny off me, and I’m still amazed at how Blizzard managed it. Having logged in, levelled up and seen what there was to see, my natural gaming boredom threshold (usually around five minutes) kicked in and I was happy to drop the game, knowing I wasn’t missing anything.

Games are perhaps a slightly special case compared to software products as a whole. The consumer itch you are trying to scratch is merely the need for entertainment, and that by its very nature is a far more fickle desire than wanting to do something better, faster or in a new way. Still, I believe some of the lessons learned from MMOs setting up expectations and then allowing customers to experience disappointment without paying can be applied. If a customer can get everything they want for free, they aren’t going to pay, so look at models that will leave money in your pocket as well as satisfy the customer. For example, games like Guild Wars front-load their costs by charging an upfront fee but no monthly subscription. Others are entirely free to play, making money from microtransactions, advertising, currency exchange or corporate clients.

Practically, we can learn a little about the freemium model and its parameters by looking at successful examples, as well as take lessons in when and what to release as beta. The ideal situation: you get your customers hooked with what they can get for free, but not entirely satisfied; the carrot of paid-for outweighs the discomfort and limits of free, and not using the software isn’t an option. MMOs manage this with lock-in; you can’t transfer your level 80 warlock from Azeroth to Norrath, nor can you fly an EVE spaceship into Second Life. Once you’ve invested time, money and learning into one virtual world it becomes harder and harder for you to leave, especially if you have a social presence there (games have been ‘doing’ social networks for ever).

This is some of the thinking behind userbase lock-in on sites like Flickr, Twitter etc. While the spirit of Web 2.0 and CC sharing means we have some delightfully open platforms, flexible APIs and lots of happy data sharing, I’m not going to leave a service where I have over 1,000 photos stored for some new upstart. I also pay for extra features with those photos, after being gifted a premium membership and then finding it very difficult to go back to the limitations of free. (It’s also a reassurance, of sorts: if I pay them, then the chances of them losing my photos seem lower.)

But fundamentally, there’s no point locking people into your service if you make it easy for them to walk away, providing them with glimpses into a future where they no longer want to use your product. This is the mistake Blizzard have been making, and surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be impacting their gargantuan customer base (yet). Unpopular game design changes, new content that fails to live up to expectations, and the promise of the same again in a few months still hold no weight when compared to the investment players have in the world and their guilds within it. Which is perhaps the ultimate lesson: if people can’t stop using your service, you can do very little wrong.