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“Shielding our colleagues from unnecessary toxicity”

with Florian Rohde

The Community Lounge Season 1 Episode 7

Today I chat with Florian Rohde, currently Community & Player Support Lead at YAGER.

We talk about how as a community manager, you can support your colleagues to do their job in the best way possible while shielding them from all the unnecessary noise.

Games mentioned in this episode: The Cycle, The Cycle: Frontier, CrossFire Europe, Summoners War, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Yakuza series

Find Florian on:

Florian’s blog posts on being a community manager:

The Community Lounge is brought to you by Feature Upvote: Painlessly collect feedback from your players. More insights, less noise.

Transcript

Steve McLeod
I’m Steve McLeod and you are listening to the Community Lounge, the podcast where community managers from the video games industry tell their story, talk about the challenges they face, and share tips to help other community managers do their job better.

Today I chat with Florian Rohde, currently community and player support lead at YAGER. We talk about how, as a community manager, you can support your colleagues to do their job in the best way possible, while shielding them from all the unnecessary noise and toxicity.

Welcome to the show, Florian.

Florian Rohde
Welcome. Thanks for having me.

Steve McLeod
Tell me about this poster behind you. Look, we’ve got video recording here, folks, but we’re not actually publishing the video. But I can see on the wall behind you, Florian, is the map. Tell me about the map.

Florian Rohde
Yes, so the map that you see behind me is a very nice drawing that I found of Azeroth, because I am a big World of Warcraft fan.

Played it actually, since it was released with like a sort of on and off relationship with the game. So there were times where I couldn’t like stand it and touch it. Because there’s so much stuff that happened during the Classic era that actually impacted me as well, with not only shaping me and myself in the sense of becoming a better person or becoming a better leader, which is actually quite nifty for working purposes. What you don’t see though, is like all the other stuff around me, because speaking of Pandaria, right in front of me there is a big poster of Chen Stormstout.

On the right of me there is a big poster of the pantheon, like with all the different layers, where reality is, and so on from the Chronicles books. And on some shelves around me there is like huge piles of board games.

Steve McLeod
That’s awesome.

The Azeroth Story. I think a lot of people who are in the gaming industry have had a big World of Warcraft time. I certainly did. Just ate up my evenings after work for longer than I’d like to admit.

Florian Rohde
I mean, I was like in that time back then, during Classic, I was still in school.

Steve McLeod
Okay, you’re making me feel old now.

I think in my research for this episode, I see that you actually wrote a blog post for your company, YAGER, for the company you work for, actually talking about how World of Warcraft helped you become a leader and develop certain skills that you use. Let’s talk about your role as a community manager. What exactly is it that you do these days at YAGER?

Florian Rohde
My official title is Community and Player Support Lead. I was responsible for two games at YAGER, for The Cycle and then the revamp The Cycle: Frontier and after these got sunsetted, I was part of the ideation process of what we going to do next basically. So helping with also writing my own pitches and all that stuff just to see what does a community manager or someone in the community field think of. Like okay, what should a game incorporate from the get go and all these things?

And right now I’m doing a lot for our brand, as you mentioned, writing blog posts and supporting our people and culture team with coming up with social media posts.

Steve McLeod
So if I understand correctly, you’re currently a community person, but you don’t actually have an active community for a game. At least nothing you can talk about. I’m pretty sure you can’t tell us what you’re working on, right?

Florian Rohde
No, and that’s a bit sad. But interestingly enough I still work in parts with the community of the old game that we had, that is sunsetted, because there’s still a bunch of players talking about it, wanting to stay in touch with the company or with me just to keep engaged with, like, hey, actually we really liked what you did in the past. We want to see what you’re going to do next.

We honored that with an Unreal Engine for Fortnite project recently where a part of our team recreated parts of the old game within Fortnite so players could drop down on an island and play a very stylized version, so to say, of the last project that we had. They could shoot some of the mobs that we had in the game and so. Which also was then in terms of communication, okay, how do we bring that towards the players that they don’t feel okay, we’re stepping on their toes. Why do we do this? And in the end, it was really just about a project of honing your skills because that’s what you do when you’re in the games industry, right? You always try to become better at what you do and always try to improve. And especially for us as a studio that’s very deeply rooted into Unreal or with having close ties with Unreal, that was very important for us to check out. What does this do? What can we do with that? And so on. And overall, which is good that most of the players were pretty happy with the tone that the messaging had. So in the end, right, this is why it’s important to have someone that is still very active with the player base. Because the Discord server that I was managing had like almost 400k players at high times.

Steve McLeod
400,000 is a lot for one server and I think it’s great that you guys are actually aware that this becomes very important to some players, to a lot of players. And you can’t just cut it off. If you just cut it off all of a sudden, it’s almost cruel to do that, I think. So that’s really nice that you are keeping the resources there.

So tell me about your path into becoming a community manager would actually be.

Florian Rohde
Like with being interested in gaming since I was born, basically. Which is silly, but my parents are gamers, my sisters were gamers, and I grew up with people around me gaming. And whenever there was a new RPG, suddenly we had a Mega Drive at home or Genesis, depending on where you’re from. Super Nintendo, the same. And so on and so on. So there was always this connection to gaming.

And then in school I realised I was a very social person. So I liked working with others and also like trying to improve the work of others, interestingly enough. And I wanted to become a teacher, but I was too lazy to do that. So in regards to that, I would have become a teacher, would have tried to become a teacher for history and English.

And then I started thinking about, okay, what do I actually want to do? And then I worked in the field of pen and paper RPGs, tabletop. So I did an internship or apprenticeship as a retail salesman. So that’s actually what what I learned.

But the focus was online shop hobby stuff, working with other people, direct contacts with other companies and so on. And due to the nature of this being such a nerdy hobby that is sort of niche, but sort of also like very like, interesting for a lot of people. So you learn about a lot of characters, you interact with a like, new group of people that shares the same nerdiness as you.

And that taught me a lot about like, okay, I really can work with people. And I can, of course, because retail is a stressful situation, work very well under stress, especially during Christmas time and all that stuff.

And after that was over, I was like, okay, what do I do now? And then I dropped for some time at GameStop, which was my first contact in like, oh, this is like working in gaming.

Steve McLeod
So this is in Germany.

Florian Rohde
Yeah, it’s like, I think it was EB Games in some other parts of the world.

Steve McLeod
Okay, okay. So this is a retail physical.

Florian Rohde
Yeah, it’s a physical retail chain, I guess, comparable to game in the UK and so on.

That was like the most stressful situation. There was the Diablo 3 release because I worked during the time period there. And then I just was like, wait, why don’t I try to actively get into gaming itself with something that I enjoy doing, so working with people. And then I checked, okay, what do you actually need to do as the community manager or in player support and all that stuff, and realized there is no unified thing of, okay, this is what you need to do to become a community manager. And then I saw a job opening at a company called Aeria Games that was later bought by Gamigo and just applied there. They invited me for an interview and we immediately clicked and so I got the job and that was 10 years ago. And I started my journey in the games industry.

Steve McLeod
Starting as a community manager.

Florian Rohde
Or so it was called Game Master at that company, which incorporated community management, player support stuff, supporting with sales stuff, so setting up shop offers and all these like things. So super jack of all trades role that –

Steve McLeod
That’s a typical community manager story, isn’t being a jack of all trades.

Florian Rohde

This also means, of course, learning. Oh, this is how you use Photoshop. And what’s interesting about that is not a lot of people are confident enough to actually ask for help. And I was always one who was like, okay, how does it work? Can you show me how this works? Same with sales. I am not big when it comes to math because I simply don’t like it. Of course, it’s nothing that I’m like, I’m bad at it. No, it’s just like, I don’t like it. I don’t want to do that. However, when it comes to sales stuff, it’s like, okay, how do we set this up? How can we influence this? How can we influence that? So you just try to improve yourself and you have this like, willingness to, okay, I want to become better at what I do. Because you want to make yourself invaluable in a sense, right? Because we all know how volatile this industry is. And this is like one of the interesting things. As I started, I was already like, hey, this industry is a volatile industry. I should enjoy this ride for as long as it lasts and make the best out of it because every day can be very fun because it’s a cool industry. You work with cool people and you also broaden your horizons when it comes to your skill set. But also to how you view the world and the people around you. Because with such an international working field surrounding you, it just, when you want it makes you become a better person.

Steve McLeod
And that. That took you to YAGER.

Florian Rohde
Yeah. So after Aeria Games, I left for Smilegate Europe to work on a game called Crossfire Europe, which was back then a super huge game, mostly in China. It’s like sort of like Counter-Strike with additional modes, which was cool.

Amazing team, amazing people that I worked with. So it was basically a group of Aeria Games employees that founded that new office with some additions to the team from other companies.

They closed the office down though from HQ site after I think one and a half years. That was then I landed at Com2uS, a mobile gaming company, which is very interesting because it’s such a stark contrast of how PC or console gaming is.

And from there I joined YAGER five years ago and since that time period almost I’m their community and player support lead.

Steve McLeod
Hey, we’d like to hear more about the difference between being a community manager for a mobile versus a more traditional console style game.

How is it different?

Florian Rohde
For me it’s a lot because of the mindset of the players.

So for example, and this is actually an example that is very, very interesting. So I hosted events for Com2uS.

Steve McLeod
Us, which means this is the mobile game.

Florian Rohde
This is the mobile company. Yeah. So the game was called Summoners War. It’s like a gacha collection RPG where you collect new heroes, then fight becomes stronger. It has a strong sense of community because you need guilds to do certain things and so on. And there I hosted events for them. So one of them was in Berlin, Germany, one was in Cologne during gamescom, one was in Stockholm in Sweden.

And these events were always such a huge pile of interactions between the players themselves and between you as like representative of the company and the other employees. So your colleagues with the players. So it was really like a family gathering in a sense, right. It was like immediately this like people click, people do stuff together, people play the game together because of course they can play it on their mobile device.

I hosted an event for the last game I worked on for The Cycle: Frontier for YAGER, same location and it was completely different because the people were much more reserved. We had some gaming stations so they could actually check out one of the new maps that we had for the game.

And they were far more like, most of the groups that joined the event were far busier or far more busy to talk to themselves about all this stuff. Instead of like mixing up and talking to others, trying to get new friends and all these things. They were more reserved in a way.

Steve McLeod
That’s a fascinating insight. So the mobile players tended to be more social and the desktop or console players tended to stick to their own group they came with if they understood that. Must be really hard when you come by yourself and stand there in the corner. Fascinating. Hey, I have this quote that I’m going to read out. I did warn you in advance.

It’s from an article you wrote entitled Community Management at YAGER, or a blog post.

“Managing negative feedback and criticism with openness and understanding fosters an environment of open thought and idea exchange. This plays a vital role in safeguarding the mental health of our colleagues because as community managers, we act as a filter for feedback, ensuring that constructive criticism reaches the appropriate teams while shielding our colleagues from unnecessary toxicity.”

It’s quite a long sentence. Maybe I should have shortened to two smaller ones, but I’d like to hear more about that. What is it like having to shield your colleagues from unnecessary toxicity? That means you’re getting the toxicity, it’s hitting you.

What’s that like?

Florian Rohde
I think we saw a shift in gaming communities for quite some time now.

It’s less about, “I really like that”. It’s more about, “I really hate that” when it comes to what players are vocal about.

And we also see that with a lot of creators recently in the recent weeks. And I mean, we also have the best example right now with the new Dragon Age game where there’s already so much talk about it.

Steve McLeod
I really don’t understand why people have to make such a point about not liking something. Like if you don’t like it, just shut up. But that’s not the reality we live in, is it?

Florian Rohde
Yes, absolutely. But it’s also much more healthy to talk about things that you really like. And for me personally, before diving into that quote again, it’s all about when I don’t like something, especially when it’s about a game. So there are games or series that are super famous and everybody loves them. And I’m like, I can see why you like it, but it’s not for me, so whatever.

And that’s it. So there is nothing more to it for me. And it’s super nice because you can like just like push it away from you and not get into unnecessary discussions or be unnecessarily toxic about it.

So what I, what I do when it comes to this, this quote, I did a presentation for my colleagues once and I also do, coming up, a new presentation for the foundation of digital gaming culture in Germany where I throw quotes at them. And these quotes, for example, are like, “I really hate this feature. The person who designed it should be fired.”

And then I asked them, okay, what does this do to you? Most of them are like, hey, this really feels bad for me because I poured my heart into that feature and the person doesn’t like it, which is fine, but why do they need to get personal? And then as a community manager, you read that and you try to figure out, okay, how many people do actually hate this feature, then you work with sentiment trackers or tools like the one that you’re creating.

Steve McLeod
I didn’t put you up to say that, I have to go on the record.

Florian Rohde
That’s the important thing. Because for us as community managers, stuff like this is super valuable.

Because suddenly you can quantify things and then you can go to the team and tell the team, hey, we introduced a new feature in the last patch. This new feature is perceived relatively negative because of the following reasons. And then the person who designed or worked on the feature can put like, okay, this and this and this is stuff that I maybe expected that the players already don’t like or whatever. But how, however, they are shielded from this, like, okay, you should be fired, or even worse, because of course, death threats and all these things are also the same old story. And you can completely, in a completely neutral manner in that sense, deliver feedback to them, which helps them to do their work in a better way, or actually to make them think about the work that they’ve done in a completely neutral way without having them overreact or go downwards in a negative spiral. Because if you see this all the time, and this is also why doom scrolling for employees is not a good thing.

So just ask your community managers to gather feedback on something that you like, because they will be able to present it in a way that is good for you, or not necessarily good for you, but in a neutral way.

I guess that’s the most important thing, right? You support your colleagues to do a better job or to do their job in the best way possible, while shielding them from all the unnecessary noise, in the end, it’s noise. And noise is always a very distracting thing. And noise can also be overwhelmingly positive stuff, because then you focus on like, oh my God, this person said this is the best feature ever. And you just like, disregard everything else.

Steve McLeod
Hey, listeners, a short interruption.

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Steve McLeod
So it’s very nice that you are shielding your colleagues like that and helping remove the toxicity and just putting it down to a neutral message. But how does it feel as a community manager having to be the one to shield them?

Florian Rohde
I almost expected that you’re going to ask this because the same thing was asked from colleagues when I talked about this topic.

At times it doesn’t feel good.

At times it can be unnecessarily stressful or draining in a sense, because what I always teach the juniors is you strive for positive interaction loops because these positive interaction loops feed your energy. So you can just walk through that negative stuff.

And this is like, also important in a position like mine where you’re like, okay, we have, we have this negative stuff, there’s so much toxicity flying around and so on. But where actually the things that I can do in a positive way or where I can have positive interactions and positive impact to draw or pull me out of that negative slump, for me personally, I can easily just brush it aside, which is good. But not everybody is able to do that. And I’m well aware of that.

And this, of course is also coming – and this is something that we also need to be very aware of in the field of community management and so on – from a position of privilege. Not everybody is as privileged or like, can look at it from a privileged perspective with like, okay, white male cishet guy and so on.

And you just need to try to improve it for everybody around you and then it will be much easier for you to work through that as well.

Looking at it from the 10 years that I work now in this field, the recent years got more toxic. However, moderation tools also improved and especially when you have the freedom to do so, like I have at YAGER in my position, you have to make sure that you moderate in a very efficient way and you also moderate from the get go. So you don’t want to create a, like, toxic environment, because a toxic environment, as we all know, attracts more toxic people.

But you just want to make them aware of like, hey, this doesn’t fly here. So make sure to have a good moderation team around you that also supports you and make sure that you also have people that you can talk with. And even if you’re a single community manager for a project, you still have other people in the company around you that you can talk with when you have, like, situations that were stressful for you. And so on.

Just make sure that you don’t just eat it all up, because then it just will get worse over time.

Steve McLeod
Okay, I heard some really good stuff there. I really like the idea that when you’re starting the community, you can choose the direction you’re going to shape it, and you can choose the tone, which is harder to do when you come into an existing community.

So I guess you should have really clear guidelines or maybe even write down how you want it to be and how you’re going to respond in certain cases.

And then having someone to talk to is really good, too.

A recent episode of this podcast, I talked to Gabriel Sanchewski, who runs a private Discord server, which I think you’re familiar with, The Break Room. And even something like that, finding colleagues there from other – not colleagues, but acquaintances – from other companies in the same position, I guess even that can be helpful. Just somebody to talk to who understands who you’re coming from.

Florian Rohde
The Break Room is a great source of not only information, but also of like, talking through issues or problems that you have with people that understand these exact problems or issues.

I’m pretty lucky because I can also just go to our, like, founders and company owners and talk to them and say, like, hey, there was this situation that might backfire a little bit. So don’t worry if you get an email about X or Y getting banned.

We had that recently, actually. Somebody got banned on our social channels after behaving like crap.

Which is funny, as you mentioned at the beginning, right, because I don’t have a project that I’m working on right now and then sending a message to our contact email, which then goes to people like our communications director, for example, and so on, and they’re just like, oh, what did you do this time? I was like, well, nothing. I mean, like, even in his emails he’s admitting to the stuff that he did.

But yeah, like, it’s always good if you have the backup, especially from the higher ups, or if you are in a position where you are sort of like high level with the higher ups. Right. Because for me, that’s something where I’m also super happy about. And I know that this was also a damn privilege because I was part of the leadership team of the last project.

So they always had like someone from community sitting at the same table with the creative director and so on and talking about issues in the game, community mood and all these things.

Because that of course, also helps so much to get your points across and also to get, like, the backup you need when you have an EP or creative director having a good connection to you, because they know, okay, I can really rely on that person and their team because they are part of this bigger thing of this group of people wanting to push the project forward.

Steve McLeod
That’s fantastic. It does sound like you’ve already found yourself in a good company there. That’s maybe a good time to segue to any tips you might have for people wanting to become a community manager. For example, you actually chose yourself to try to become a community manager.

Florian Rohde
I think it’s a good example that I can actually give, which might be better than giving some dumb tips from me.

For the last project that I worked on, I hired three juniors who were Discord moderators for me.

So they supported the moderation of our server. They had an NDA with us.

They had a lot of good ideas for the moderation and for, like, changes in the server and so on from the experience that they brought from other moderation jams they had. So one of the guys was supporting Ubisoft in moderation for some of their servers and tackling some of that stuff.

Another one was coming from a completely different field, but was having customer service. So all these small little things in a moderation team at that point, there was like 12 people, I think, or 14 people was making me think, hey, these guys would be a really good fit for community managers because they know how we work, they incorporate our values, they’re eager to learn. Which was pretty good because it was not just like doing standard moderation.

They were always like, hey, is there something that I could improve on? And all these things. So they were really eager to actually understand what it means to manage a community and what other tasks happen around that and so on. And as the time was coming up, I was like, hey, we need community managers from North America split through different time zones. But I know three people who would be perfect fits. And they got the job because they already knew what we expected from them, not only in my team, but how the whole company ticked.

And that was pretty good, because if you apply for a job in a company, always make sure that you understand what does the company stand for? How do they tick? What games do they make? How is the current community management working, if you want to become a community manager? Do you realize what could be improved from the experiences that you had in the past on other projects or in other jobs that you had?

And I think one of the most important things for me when it comes to that is always, don’t make yourself bigger than you are. Don’t lie. Because this happens often when you have people applying for junior positions that suddenly have experiences that don’t even exist. Because of course we talk to our colleagues and we check with them, hey, like there’s this guy applying and he says he was actually your boss.

And they were like, no, this person never worked here.

Steve McLeod
That’s actually happened?

Florian Rohde
Yes.

Steve McLeod
Wow.

And the fact that you got to the point of actually looking into the references shows that for other reasons the person actually had a chance and they ruined it there.

Florian Rohde
Yeah, absolutely.

It all boils down to be authentic, right? So just make sure that everything you do and say that you mean that and make sure that. Because this is also something that happens in interviews where people suddenly talk about completely different things that are not related to your game while thinking, oh, this is actually part of their community management or part of the game loop, which is always so puzzling to me.

It’s like, okay, you managed so much time to apply, you managed to get through the interviews with people and culture and now you’re sitting here with the people that will work with you and you completely have to bullshit them because you don’t know anything about the project or anything about the ways the community management works.

So good indicators always like a good tip would then be to be informed, try to figure out if they have a Discord server, if they have social media, what’s their style? Will you actually be able to work in that style? Because that’s also important because some people think, hey, there is a game that’s just memeing super hard, that everything is like for them in their social appearance or social media appearances and so on. Is it joking? And has a very joking tone to it and, and all that stuff. And then they have a hard time to adapt to that because they are more serious people, right? They, they are more like factual stuff that works with numbers and so on. And the last thing I think that would be important for me, especially when I look through, through to the past and all the hiring that I did over the years would be try to figure out what makes you stand out.

Because of course community management, as you also said earlier, is a very jack of all trades position. You have to do a lot of different things, but there’s always room for this is what I’m really good at. So one of the juniors, for example, was excelling at structuring Discord servers, working with the moderation team for improvements, figuring out which bots to get from where, what can we improve with this? How can we make that stuff better?

One of them was really good at customer support tasks.

And then you have people, which is very interesting because I’m a bit older now in the job that I do, but the younger generation of community managers might excel at working with TikTok.

Steve McLeod
That brings me perfectly to the next question, perhaps the second last one we’ll have time for today.

Where and how do you learn to do your job better?

Florian Rohde
That would be, as you mentioned, The Break Room earlier.

Steve McLeod
Oh yeah.

Florian Rohde
That would be the stuff that makes you better at your job when you’re like engaging with your peers, when you talk with others that do the same job as you do and like share new tools, share ideas, share things that you did or ask for improvements or for example, like, hey, is there any way, because the Steam forums, for example, are a very negative thing that you can’t really work with that well.

However, in The Break Room, for example, there were some people sharing cool ideas of, hey, this is actually how you can make Steam forums much more nicer and much more clean for people that visit them.

Another thing of course is like visit conventions, visit things like the Game Quality Forum, for example, where you have a community track, where community management tools are shared, where people from community management share their experiences in talks or panel discussions. The recent one that I was attending there, the panel discussion was where is our place in game development? So sharing the experiences actually of, I’m a community manager right now in a position where I don’t have a project. Which can be helpful for others that might face this situation at some point or have them think about, hey, this is actually something where I can approach my company or my teammate because I can do that as well. I can impact things that are beyond my current job position or job description.

Steve McLeod
Good answer.

Final question. What game have you been playing lately?

It’s a question I ask everybody on the podcast and the answers are varied and interesting. What’s your one?

Florian Rohde
Well, besides the typical World of Warcraft, League of Legends reply that I have to give because it’s stuff that keeps me busy all the time, I am playing the campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 right now because for whatever reason, sometimes you just need this simple turn your brain off, play through an action movie that is sort of well written most of the time.

So, so that’s that. And I also have to get back to the Yakuza series because the Yakuza series is some of the best written stuff in gaming, period.

And currently I need to finish the third one there. So I stop the playthrough for Call of Duty and then go back to Yakuza after that.

And as soon as the PlayStation Pro is released, the PS5 Pro, I will start my Final Fantasy VII Rebirth playthrough because I didn’t play that game yet because of the visuals were super blurry in performance mode and I was like ha! Pro is coming out and everything will be fine and fixed.

Steve McLeod
On that very good note, let us end the show. So Florian, thank you again for being on the show.

Florian Rohde
Thank you Steve for having me. It was a pleasure.

Steve McLeod
Where can listeners get in touch if they’d like to know more about what we discussed today?

Florian Rohde
They can get in touch with me on a platform that I don’t like anymore that much. That would be Twitter. So they should just get in touch with FeraFlox there.

But the same profile name also on Bluesky Social, which is sort of exactly the same as Twitter was in the past. And of course my LinkedIn profile florianrohde.

Steve McLeod
I will make sure I have all of those in the show notes and also a link to the blog posts we talked about that you wrote for YAGER.

Bye Florian.

Florian Rohde
Goodbye. Thank you so much.

Steve McLeod
Bye everyone.

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