Guild Wars 2: This is how you do community management

“The [Guild Wars 2] community team took to Reddit to provide an example to the community of how these supposed unfair bans were far from the truth. It was after seeing the positive reaction to this interactions between developer and community that ArenaNet realized that a full post on Reddit may be the best way to deal with the issue.

As part of the full post, the team responded to angry players who believed they had been banned for no good reason. “I would love to know what I was banned for,” says one Redditor, after which the ArenaNet representative pastes the exact crude chat which led to the ban, complete with vulgar, racist and sexist terms.”

Lots of people were banned early in the game, and lots of them went to their favorite social blogs to yell about what appeared to them as unfair treatment. What most of them didn’t know was that ArenaNet (the company behind GuildWars 2) had kept rigorous records of each ban, and posted this information publicly to anyone that was truly upset why they got banned.

Read: Guild Wars 2: This is how you do community management (gamasutra.com)

Quick Reference Posters for Google Web Fonts

If you design web pages, you can now download three posters covering 500+ Google Fonts in a poster format which you can put on the wall.

Read: Quick Reference Posters for Google Web Fonts (labnol.org)

Analysing a Top Grossing Game: Rage of Bahamut

“Here’s my attempt on breaking down some of the key elements that make it such a monetization monster.”

Superb and in-depth analysis by Simon Newstead of the game Rage of Bahamut. Don’t miss it if you’re into free-to-play games.

Read: Analysing a Top Grossing Game: Rage of Bahamut (iteratingfun.com)

Funcom shifts to smaller online games

“Funcom is laying off employees and shifting its focus away from giant, expensive MMO projects, as it tries to recover from the recent disappointing launch for The Secret World.

Though over 500,000 users registered for the subscription title’s beta, only 200,000 consumers have purchased The Secret World since the game launched two months ago, which the Norwegian developer admits is below its expectations.”

When over half of all beta testers don’t want to buy the final product, it’s not a good product. I was quite disappointed by Age of Conan myself, and would never buy another Funcom game without reading through at least a couple of good reviews.

Read: Funcom shifts to smaller online games after The Secret World setbacks (gamasutra.com)

iOS and Android Adoption Explodes Internationally

“The rate of iOS and Android device adoption has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history. Compared to recent technologies, smart device adoption is being adopted 10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption.”

It’s a tough market for Microsoft to begin competing on with Windows RT and Windows Phone 8.

Read: iOS and Android Adoption Explodes Internationally (flurry.com)

Windows 8 thoughts from the web

Personally I like Windows RT and the new UI. I do believe however that Windows 8 is a big stepping stone for Microsoft, their “new Vista” if you so like, to get an upgraded architecture in the hands of both developers and users while waiting for the “killer” OS to come along that everyone will enjoy using.

Here are some thoughts from the web I have collected the past week.

“For the first week the most frustrating thing about Windows 8 was getting to anything that was power-user-like. I was literally pissed at my computer because I was so used to clicking the Start Menu, then right clicking on My Computer in order to do things like Device Manager, etc. For things like the Event Viewer or Admin Command Prompts I was pressing Start, then typing “Event” and hitting enter. It was fine but it wasn’t as fast as it should be.

Then I discovered the Number 1 most powerful Windows 8 shortcut for the Power User. It’s Windows Key+X.”

Read: Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is. (hanselman.com)

“It also appears that desktop applications can no longer register themselves as default (even if you want it) or certain file types too. The only way around this is to open the Control Panel (or Start screen) and search for Default Programs, wait for all your installed software to load and appear in the left pane, then select your preferred program and click the Set as default option. An added bonus is that you can set different file types to open in different applications, but Windows will keep reminding you that “there are other apps that can open this file type” as well.”

Read: Why Windows 8 still isn’t my idea (neowin.net)

“After spending much time with Windows 8, I can’t recommend it for advanced desktop users unless Microsoft makes interface tweaks to make it more desktop-friendly. I don’t plan to upgrade my desktop from Windows 7 to 8 at launch because Windows 7 works so well.”

Read: Why Windows 8 is terrible for desktops (venturebeat.com)

“Users will need to remember two different interfaces. They will learn Windows 8, but won’t be able to forget Windows 7. And they will need to keep track of which app goes with each framework. [It's] definitely a cognitive burden”

Read: Usability Expert: Windows 8 on PCs is Confusing, a Cognitive Burden (laptopmag.com)

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Windows 8 is the worst computing experience I’ve ever had. As a desktop operating system, it’s annoying, frustrating, irritating, and baffling to use. I’ve tried on many occasions to explain exactly why it’s so awful to use day-to-day, and most of the time, smoke starts pouring out of my ears.”

Read: Why I’m uninstalling Windows 8 (pcgamesn.com)

“At the moment, Windows 8 is two competing operating systems that don’t always play nicely together. Going to desktop in order to make programs run, and to be able to use more than one app or even more than one browser tab at a time, feels in many ways like having to boot to DOS and then launch Windows did, twenty years ago. Apps that are installed in Metro can be uninstalled with a single right-click in Metro, but don’t show up in Control Panel’s Programs and Features listing. Launching an app that goes to desktop mode prevents you from seeing easily if one (or two, or ten) apps are still running in the background over in Metro.”

Read: Windows 8 Is Not Good For Gamers (kotaku.com)

The fall of Angry Birds

“Right now, 18 of the top 25 grossing of all apps are Free To Play Games (72%). Also, it should be noted that 22 of the 25 top grossing apps are in the games category (88%), confirming the fact you need to be into games if you want to have the biggest potential payout. The reason for this is people have a stronger emotional attachment to games than any other type of app, therefore they are more likely to spend money.”

In case it isn’t clear to everyone yet – don’t make a game that users need to pay for up front.

Read: The fall of Angry Birds (treysmithblog.com)

Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS

“So while utilizing web technology has allowed us to support more than 500 million people using Facebook on more than 7000 supported devices, we realized that when it comes to platforms like iOS, people expect a fast, reliable experience and our iOS app was falling short. Now that our mobile services had breadth, we wanted depth. So, we rewrote Facebook for iOS from the ground up (I really did open up Xcode and click “New Project”) with a focus on quality and leveraging the advances that have been made in iOS development.”

The new Facebook app is an amazing experience compared to the old app. The rewritten Facebook app has drastically changed my view of choosing HTML5 for dynamic views in apps.

Read: Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS (facebook.com)

WhatsApp now delivers 10 billion messages each day

Amazing figures, in October last year WhatsApp announced a volume of 1 billion messages per day.

With a volume such as this their company better get purchased soon, or they will have to start charging for the service. No way that they can keep these volumes for free.

Read: WhatsApp now delivers 10 billion messages each day (bgr.com)

Nearly one in five Android users plan to switch to iPhone

In a survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users, Robert W. Baird analyst William Power shows that 17% of all Android smartphone users plan to buy an iPhone as their next phone.

Read: iPhone 5 ‘Poised For Lift-Off,’ 50M+ Sales Possible (barrons.com)