#IAMTSW, a look back

[Tomium]

As you all reflect on your experiences in the #IAMTSW competition, we, your humble Community Managers, wanted to give you a glimpse behind the scenes. As many of you know, this has been a labor of love from us from as far back as November of 2014.

We’d like to take a look back and share with you our experiences with the #IAMTSW competition. We’ll post each day and talk a bit about different facets of the contest so you can get an inside look of what #IAMTSW was all about for us.

So keep an eye on this thread and stay tuned for some fun facts about designing, organizing, and running a contest of this size for a MMORPG. Oh, and we’ll be sure to throw in some intriguing photos here and there.

[Tomium]

Our initial timeline was, and remained, around Issue 11, and the EPE. We wanted the community to have something to do while experiencing the new stuff, and a way to welcome the new people without intimidation. We wanted to see new forum names, to get the community involved in something big, and a way to say thank you.

With a timeline in hand, we now had to determine the actual contests. 8 weeks meant a lot of contests, and a chance to truly represent every facet of the community. From Social to PvP, from Hardcore to RP, we wanted everyone to feel as if there was a way for them to contribute. While it was difficult, we’re confident that we succeeded; we set about determining the key populations in TSW and thought of ways to best represent them. For me, the hardest was PvP. I thought that a montage would be great, but would be increasingly difficult if you had no idea what FRAPS was. We didn't want to alienate anyone in that contest, and felt that screenshots just didn't convey the PvP experience well enough. We had our rough categories. We set about how we would present these to the players, and created a dust storm of ideas. And then, after the dust had settled, Tilty came up to us.

He suggested we talk with Scrivnomancer, and begin an Alternate Reality Game to help hype up the contest which was going to be announced at the end of the ARG. Taking the name "The Conductor," we put puzzles together to try and get the brain moving and set things in motion. Tilty volunteered to make a hat for the winners of the ARG, and Scriv would help us write things up so that they made some sense. The ARG was born. The clues were set. The community was starting to get a buzz about something "Big" happening.

Once all of our meetings were out of the way, we determined that every single person who entered would get a participation shirt. Additionally, The Prize from each of the rounds would include a shirt with the winners name on it. I instantly wanted to enter. I mean, I have played some MMOs in my time, but could you imagine being so cool that you had YOUR OWN SHIRT? Not like a group shirt either, which are very cool- no- this was YOUR NAME. You'd be the only one who had it. If that didn't get people psyched up for the contest, I wasn't sure what would.
ANYHOW, once we got the initial info out of the way (including a fine PowerPoint presentation), we set about organizing our thoughts. How would we get you, the community, involved? What would ensure that people knew about it? Would it be fun? Would we get enough entries? What was "enough?"

And then, we had a breakthrough. “The Cabals.” I use this term to mean all groups, (GSP would say they aren't a Cabal, and they'd be right) because saying groups/cabals is tedious. Anyhow- we wanted to get as many on board as we could, but there was no way to do it and still keep it a secret, was there?

There was.

[Tomium]

We asked the cabals to all sponsor a contest, that they had no idea about.

The idea is that we want you to make this EPIC. We know that everyone and every group has different strengths and interests- I can assure you that every one of our Community Interests (PvE, RP, Social, PVP, etc.) are represented in this contest, so don’t be afraid to give prizes for your specific interest if that applies! We also don’t want you to bankrupt yourselves over this, so make it something that you, a player, would enjoy and love.

What were we asking for was blind faith. Faith that whatever we were working on would be big, and that it would be worth everyone’s time. We weren’t disappointed in the response.
The responses started flowing in. We had 20 groups so far, and if we had stopped there, we'd have more than enough prizes for our contests. However, we wanted to ensure those "groups" I talked about got represented. We put an open call out to the player base, and again, got overwhelming response. Now we had the task of organizing 30 separate cabals, prizes, contest weeks- all without letting everyone know what was going on!

Sending out about 100 PMs each time, we were very careful to try and keep the groups in the loop as much as we could. Somehow, we managed to get everyone in, we got those that volunteered accounted for, and given the amount of people involved, it went VERY smoothly. Questions came in like “is it ok to send someone something that’s real,” to “we’re not very big, is PAX ok?” Never having done this scale of contest before, we welcomed every single prize we could, eventually limiting it to 5 “prizes” per group. This made my spreadsheet a lot happier, and made it a bit easier to organize. My spreadsheet was overflowing with love and support- it was great. I have to say I was amazed at how easily we were able to wrangle everyone, despite a special missed step that I'll talk about on Friday. Getting the groups involved was also fun, as I went to their websites, posted in forums, chatted with them, and tried everything I could to get the word out about the contest before anything had even been announced.

Then, with all of that ready to go, we started the ARG.

Some very clever cabals put two and two together, and knew what was going on. Something BIG had to be this "contest" that Funcom was talking about, right?

Indeed.

We let our Cabals know that we were ready. We let in a few cabals to see the new forums, and the structure of things. We set about getting a template for each of the things we needed, and let the doors open up. As many could attest, there had been posts in that section from at least December. We had to then bifurcate our time (oh yeah, that's a $5 word!) between the ARG and the contest itself.(and all of the logistics that go with that).

The ARG was winding up, and the #IAMTSW hashtag was born.

[Tomium]

This all started as a social media project. Our team was tasked with coming up with something social media related, and that could garner some support from the community. We had the idea of a contest that would somehow involve a hashtag, but we weren’t sure what that tag would be, or how we would relate it to a contest.

We started thinking in one of our brainstorming sessions, and we threw everything at the wall. What was the contest ABOUT? Who are we talking to? What are our internal measures for success?
These were all things we had answered on the periphery, but had not given solid answers to. What was it about? Simply put, it was about community. Who are we talking to? Mostly players who are already in the game, players who may have stepped away, and we also wanted a way to get new players in too. We knew that if we got a tag trending, and had entries for every category, we’d have something big.

So, we answered the questions more definitively, and began thinking of what we wanted to represent in out hashtag, and the way we wanted to present this to everyone. Things like “TSW Contest,” and other not so stellar names were given, but it was our own sezmra who said “What about something like #IAmTSW?”

It was like the air was sucked out of the office.

It was perfect. It encapsulated everything we were saying, and wanted to see from the community. It was a statement to the world that, whether you know it or not, #IAMTSW, and I am proud of that!
Having players not only jump headfirst into the contest, but to proudly proclaim how much they love the game, meant that we’d see the hardcore players jumping in first. What we didn’t expect is that people would sign up on the forums, or post for the very first time, simply because of the contest.

We also sat back and enjoyed watching #IAMTSW become #WEARETSW for some, a sentiment we wholeheartedly agreed with. Though this was an individual contest, we knew what they were saying-
“We like this game and community!”

While the contest is over, you can still see the tag being used for TSW themed events, RP chats, streams, and more. The tag quit being “a hashtag we came up with” and truly has become the community’s tag for all TSW related things, and we couldn't be happier about that.

[sezmra]

Naturally with any big contest such as this, there's going to need to be assets galore.

We needed images for the contest itself, for the in-game prizes, for advertisements. We had a good idea of what we wanted to do, we just needed to make it happen. Once we had our preliminary image for the audio round, we agreed that we should do similarly for the following rounds. Featuring some iconic TSW artwork, we threw in a microphone which is a real world object. We were onto something! We'd continue to feature a real world object in the round's artwork when possible, keeping the iconic TSW art in the background. Using a central theme with consistency really helped I think. The procedure was perfect -- we'd have an image for each round and that image would be used across the whole round, including the winning t-shirt associated with it.

I admit that this was a lot of fun for me since I dabble in art in my free time. Plus, it was great having this kind of creative freedom; we could really flex our art muscles on this one. I might have spent some time at party or costume stores finding just the right pieces for our weekly images. Knowing that these images would be immortalized in game was pretty heavy too.. no pressure right?

Some of my favorite contest images were from the backstory and cosplay rounds. These both featured a cameo from our own scrivnomancer!

original image here!

The horsehead is pretty awesome, right? I mean, it was just too fun NOT to use this one! I really appreciate scrivnomancer taking a few minutes out of his day to model for me. I almost didn't use this image, I thought it would be too cheeky for the in-game t-shirt. I couldn't resist at least using it for the round's header image. You probably noticed the official image instead included a black hat. That hat is STILL sitting on my desk somewhere. Maybe we should give it away.

I also took some pics of scrivnomancer's personal journal for our backstory round. It worked out really well as our final image. I also might have wrangled our QA Manager into letting me take photos of his hand for the handcrafted round. There really is a lot of "us" in this competition.. and to me that speaks volumes.

[Tomium]

Judging entries was certainly a daunting task. With some rounds having over 150 entries, we had to go through each single one and determine what the best entry was, for us. We had to establish some criteria, and in most cases, we in Community Management made a top 5 list. We also worked with developers to get their input.

The way we had structured things, we would get the first choice of winner, which is why the groups gave us their top 5 winners. This would ensure we wouldn’t have to go back and forth on things, and that one list from each group would handle all of the judging needs. The groups were very helpful by providing us with their answers by Friday (Wednesday in one case!), and very gracious to help congratulate their respective winners.

The hardest round to judge was the “hand-crafted round,” since we had such a varying amount of entries. From food to digital art, to sculpture- it was intense, and quite difficult to determine a winner with all of those entries. We had to enlist some help, and Drivek gave us some very helpful words. In hindsight, we could have done that differently- but this was the first time we were doing something this large, and we honestly had no idea how popular that particular round would be.

We knew that the backstory round would be filled with love from our RP and even some non-RP community members. We, again, had no indication that it would be around 130 entries. We had to get some help to pour through the entries. Clearly, the way to go here was with Scrivnomancer. Enlisting the aid of the dark one, we could at least get a top 10 list, and then go from there. We had an internal deadline on all of the contests of Friday by 10 AM EST, and on this round, we barely made it. The entries were fantastic, and the styles were so varied, that we had to find the best fit for what we were looking for.

We got help from our QA team and our Customer Service team to wade through the other rounds, and got input from anyone willing to provide it. We wanted a bunch of opinions, and to make sure we weren’t missing something important. They came through, especially in the Screenshot round, where we had so many entries that we were worried about our deadline.

After the closing of each round on Monday morning, we had until Friday to choose our winner. That gave us one week, keeping in mind things like the Enhanced Player Experience and Issue 11 came out during the contest. We had our work cut out for us, for sure. Thankfully, we had some help from players who were willing to step up and assist us. They know who they are, and they get our sincere thanks.

Though not everyone could win, we wanted to ensure that everyone would get a prize for participating. That’s why we had the special #IAMTSW shirt made. We wanted everyone to celebrate this contest with us, and to enjoy the unique spirit of community that this game has.

*ps-The shirts will go out soon!

[Tomium]

With something that takes up your work days and your off-work hours, it is hard to say goodbye. We started this project as an experiment. We wanted to energize people playing the game, and celebrate their creativity. While we certainly have a lot to reflect on, the overall success of this project was because of you, the community. Every plan can crumble with no interaction or participation.

As we have looked back, we now invite you to do the same. Tell us about your experiences with #IAMTSW. Tell us what surprised you. What prompted you to enter a certain round? Why did you decide to go with the direction you chose? Tell us about your process.

We want to hear your stories!



p.s.-If you’d like to provide feedback, we invite you to check out this thread instead.

[Ani Taneen]

My greatest regret was not learning about the backstory stage in time.

maybe email notifications? I don't use twitter.

[thechosenone]

I really loved every minute of this contest. Browsing through all the great entries that the community has made and seeing people win all those amazing prizes... It's been a fun ride. My only regret is that I didn't have more time for enter in some of the other rounds, but luckily the huge amount of entries by other people more than made up for that. This contest has once again shown why our community is so amazing and I love you guys.

I am TSW. We are TSW. Together we can survive these dark days.

Keep being awesome!

[Auroris]

I happen to be in a Skype chat group with a couple of other people. I remember a time earlier this year, I think it was January, when one of those people posted a link, and said Look at this!

As it turned out, Tomium had made the top level IAMTSW forum invisible, but not one of the sub-forums. We found it, read through everything we could (There were no specific details at the time), and then we started a new topic, where we proceeded to hilariously troll Tomium about the fact we'd found his little secret hidden forum.

It didn't take him too long to notice, of course, and we rather quickly lost access. On account of Tomium being awesome, and with an excellent sense of humour, none of us were banned, and we all got nice little PMs from him thanking us for 'pointing out the error'.

It's a combination of 'If it exists on the internet, someone will find it', and 'This community is so nice, we only troll you a little bit'. It was very funny, and we spent some time afterwards trying to work out what it was.

Thank-you for this contest, Tomium. It was awesome.