Oswald Rant: Managing the Mod: Part 4
Management Issues
There are a number of key management issues which are useful to detail. These are management of team members, management of team morale, and external management, or management of the community.
Management of team members is crucial, and has a number of facets. One aspect is trying to ensure that ideas get implemented evenly, and all team members get equal credit for their work and ideas, since credit is really the only currency in which an amateur team members gets paid for their effort.
Another aspect of team management in any mod team, is managing the way people join and leave the team. Urban Terror has had many more than 27 people on its team throughout its development history. When someone joins the team, they need to be eased them into the mod. They must be introduced to team members and to the culture of the team. New members also need to be screened to some degree: are they going to cause undue team friction? Do they possess adequate technical skills? Although Urban Terror has not yet experienced anyone being forced to leave the team, there are significant issues that would need to be managed in such a circumstance. Passwords to secure parts of the team’s development would need to be changed, for example.
Of course, dispute management is an essential requirement of any team, and any team with more than one person will have disputes. Disagreements between team members need to be handled carefully. If handled well, then the experience can be very beneficial to the team, but if handled poorly, disputes can escalate and destroy the team. One of the most potentially divisive issues within the team was a debate which revolved around the overall game feel of the mod; this was essentially an argument over whether the game was to be more a simulation or arcade-style game.
Due to careful management of the debate, and well selected team members, the debate did not escalate to personal attacks. The resolution gave Urban Terror one of its primary features, and carved out its niche in the realism first-person shooter (FPS) scene: a fusion between the pace and fun of Quake and the strategy and team play of slower FPSs.
Management of a mod team is also critical when one considers that people’s time is variable. Team members cannot always be available every day at a predefined time, and real-life commitments must sometimes take priority. One extreme example is the case of a team member who has had much of his spare time take up with national service.
A critical management issue for Urban Terror in the past has been that of team morale. Maintaining team morale through negative patches in development is crucial, because low morale can easily spell the end of a mod team. For Urban Terror in the past, competition from other mods with a similar theme could sometimes see morale really falter. It was often tempting to imagine that other teams were close to releasing something so brilliant that it would render your mod obsolete.
Similarly, morale can become a major issue when a release is about to go public. The large buildup often leads to high expectations which can be crushed in the face of inevitable bugs and the even more inevitable hate mail from disappointed fans that can accrue in one’s in box.
Morale management is a matter of trying to focus the team on positives and to try and put the negatives into a more reasonable perspective. For example, negative comments tend to have far more impact than positive comments. One negative comment can completely reverse the work on ten positive ones. Focussing on the total number of downloads and the responses from informed or trusted sources can help to place negative comments in their proper perspective.
This leads to the issue of community management. One of the key aspects of Urban Terror has been the team’s focus on the community. Development and feature ideas have always been driven by the community, and team members have put a lot of effort into being very accessible to the community. The mod playing community can have very high expectations; which can keep the team going at times, but can also be very damaging. As mentioned above, criticism can hit the team’s morale quite hard.
Part of managing the mod has thus been managing the community. The team wanted to encourage a positive community that welcomed new players and provided thoughtful feedback to the developers. The team has tried to foster this environment by being very active in the community forums, answering threads intelligently and at times, moderating discussions on public forums. The team has also attempted to manage community expectations before release. While we need to make sure messages about the upcoming release generate some interest in the community, the team attempts to downplay the hype where possible. Expectations that are too high can sometimes be very damaging.
