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From Discord to Durable: Scaling Player Support and Community Without Burning Out
43 Plays1 month ago
📖 Episode Summary:
In this episode of Player Driven, Greg chats with two standout voices in gaming operations—Heidi Christine, CMO and Head of Community at Pixels, and Conor McGinley, Customer Support Lead at Twin Harbor Interactive. Together, they unpack what it really takes to grow and sustain vibrant communities while also delivering high-quality support at scale. From automation and self-service to the role of Discord and the realities of Web3 toxicity, this conversation delivers actionable insights for studios of any size.
Whether you’re trying to balance support load with growth, make Discord less chaotic, or simply empower your community to help itself, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for.
🔑 Key Topics Covered:
- Why support and community must be separated—until they’re not
- How Pixels scaled from chaos to structure using Discord, Intercom, and "Farmhands"
- Conor’s take on automation, AI, and when bots actually make sense
- Handling burnout in small teams and building flexible support flows
- How Web3 changes the intensity of player behavior and expectations
- Empowering internal teams and community leaders to move fast without asking for permission
- Why retention starts with understanding why players spend their time with you
💬 Notable Quotes:
“When you’re growing, Discord becomes chaos fast. It’s not built to handle 100 tickets a day.” – Heidi Christine“Automation works best when you still own the voice. My bots sound like me.” – Conor McGinley
“Why are players spending their precious hours with us? That’s the question we need to ask every day.” – Heidi Christine
👥 About the Guests:
Heidi Christine is the CMO and Head of Community at Pixels, a Web3 studio known for its vibrant MMO-style farming sim. She’s built a thriving, global player base with decentralized strategies, high player trust, and real-world crypto integration.
Conor McGinley leads customer support at Twin Harbor Interactive, creators of longform strategy games like Supremacy 1914 and Call of War. He’s known for his analytical approach to ticket flows, bot frameworks, and scalable support systems.
📌 Resources & Mentions:
- Pixels Game
- Twin Harbor Interactive
- Community Clubhouse
- Imagine Island - Magic Potion Games
- HelpShift
🎯 Who Should Listen:
- Support and CX leads looking to improve efficiency
- Community managers overwhelmed by Discord
- Indie and Web3 studios scaling fast with limited headcount
- Devs interested in retention, LiveOps, and community-led growth
- Anyone balancing automation with authentic player connection
📣 Call to Action:
Enjoyed the episode? Be sure to follow Player Driven for more practical takes from the people who power the games you love. Share this with a community lead, support agent, or founder who could use a smarter way to scale.TBD
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to PlayerDriven. Before we kick off today's episode, I want to let you know that these next few episodes are going to be sponsored by Community Clubhouse. Community Clubhouse is a free learning and networking hub for gaming community and player experience professionals.
00:00:14
Speaker
Community Clubhouse hosts in-person events at Gamescom and GDC that feature expert panels, AMAs, and networking opportunities across the
Guest Introductions and Community Building
00:00:21
Speaker
globe. It's a really great group. We'll have links to their Discord and their LinkedIn page in our show notes.
00:00:26
Speaker
You should really check them out. And this episode is featuring Heidi Christine. She is the CMO at Pixels. And Connor McGinley. He is the CS lead at Twin Harbor Interactive.
00:00:37
Speaker
And we talk about all things community. It's a really fun educational episode. We talk about how community is a new retention engine and how you can start to nurture your community to make sure that they're returning back to the game.
00:00:49
Speaker
We talk about support that feels human with this age of AI coming in. How do you make sure your support is still human and has a human element to it? And we also talk about the difference between Web 3 and Web 2 games and how they're different worlds. But the thing is, they are all
Strategies for Community Engagement
00:01:04
Speaker
games. And at the end of then the day, they all face the same core problems.
00:01:09
Speaker
Heidi and Connor are fantastic guests. It's a really exciting episode. And big thanks to the Community Clubhouse team for putting it on. And we hope you enjoy today's episode.
00:01:24
Speaker
Good morning, good afternoon. Welcome to the Player Driven Podcast. Greg here. Today we are going to kick off a really fun group of episodes. They're brought to you by Community Clubhouse. Community Clubhouse is an amazing event that is brought on at GDC and Gamescom. It's a big community event.
00:01:41
Speaker
day where you can come, you can see different sessions, you can understand what the best practices are in community. And we'll have a lot of information about Community Clubhouse in the next coming episodes. But this episode is a really exciting one.
00:01:53
Speaker
I'm joined by two friends of mine. First, I'm joined by Connor McGinley. He is a CS lead at Twin Harbor Interactive. You may have seen him on the podcast before. We've done a bunch of conversations, Connor in the past. I'm excited to kind of dig into...
00:02:07
Speaker
him for this year and see what he's working on. And we're also joined by Heidi Christine. She is the CMO and the head of community at Pixels. And we're going to hear all about how she built up this community at Pixels. And I'm really excited to hear and share the best practices around
Support and Automation in Gaming Communities
00:02:20
Speaker
that.
00:02:20
Speaker
Before we dive too much into it, let's let's hear from them. Connor, thanks for joining me today. How has your day been? been good. The weather's super nice. There's a lot of pollen, hence the watery eyes. I apologize for that, but nothing I can do with it at the moment.
00:02:36
Speaker
And I'm looking forward to it. Awesome. I thought you were just crying because you're happy to be back, but we'll take the pollen it as well. And Heidi, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing today?
00:02:48
Speaker
I'm great. um And I was going to talk about weather too, because i springtime is like one of those days. Today was one of those typical spring days where it was sunny and then it was pouring with rain and then it was sunny and then it was pouring with rain, which is why my hair's frizzy. So here we go, Connor. We are looking like the weather today.
00:03:06
Speaker
Hey, you know, pollen in the air mixing up weather, that means there's go be a lot of flowers blooming soon. I'm a big gardener. I love it. So as much as I don't want it to rain, it's all for the the greater good here.
00:03:19
Speaker
um I'm excited to hear both of your stories and and how they play well
Transitioning Platforms and Support Systems
00:03:23
Speaker
together. You're you're both working on community and and marketing and and CS side of things and kind of building what I think has kind of changed in gaming. We're seeing a lot of social first support these days. We're seeing kind of how games are even being marketed by helping build communities. So I want to understand how both of you kind of are taking a look at these social platforms that are arising.
00:03:46
Speaker
And how do you think about them? Do you come up with strategies on how to either support them on these channels or to market them on these channels? And I guess focusing on kind of these new channels like Discord and Reddit and social, how are you guys taking a look at this? And maybe Heidi, you want to kick this off?
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah. So... My opinion on this is meet your community where they already are. If you're trying to create something totally new on a new platform, you're going to be probably a lot less successful and it's going to be a lot harder.
00:04:20
Speaker
So for instance, Pixels is in the Web3 space, right? So where where do crypto people hang out already? Twitter, mostly, x if if you will.
00:04:31
Speaker
And of course, Discord. And so those are our two main channels. Now, as we've grown, Telegram groups have popped off here and there. And we've um we've worked with the community leaders that have just naturally built these platforms to legitimize them as like an official platform for Pixels.
00:04:50
Speaker
I know that we have lots of Facebook groups out there. They're really big in um Southeast Asia and... and There's a lot of our Filipino users live stream on TikTok.
00:05:04
Speaker
And so going back to your original point, we have done that. We have met them where they are. um For instance, Instagram, we haven't even tried. It's just...
00:05:15
Speaker
We're a small startup, so you also have to be very strategic with your time and capacity. I would absolutely love to launch on Instagram and do like a whole social media movement on Instagram. But the reality is it's not worth my time with the payoff that we but would probably have.
00:05:33
Speaker
agree. I'm a big fan of that. And it's something I've seen a lot recently is, you know, different genres of games, different style of games hit differently depending on the market you're trying to approach. ah And I've been doing some research on countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, and i was shocked to hear how engaged they are, how much they spend in game, how how much they just love gaming. And it kind of blew my mind that, you know, and I'm you know I'm an American, right? And I think, hey, everyone plays games in America. you don't look outside of it. And then you see, wow, it's significantly bigger in different countries. And when you start thinking about marketing spend and how do you support these people, right?
00:06:09
Speaker
I know America is up there list, but there's so many other countries that are worth looking into and figuring out how you tap into those markets, right? It may not be Instagram, like you said, or maybe it is on Twitter or X, right? And you have to understand your audience and where they live and and how they operate on those channels.
00:06:25
Speaker
Connor, do you have any visibility? oh I'm sorry. I don't know. and Not so much regarding support in social media. I like to keep these areas a little bit separate. I think the social media communities, I think Discord, especially when we're talking about gaming and live services, Discord is vital.
00:06:46
Speaker
uh but these are more areas where you want to reach out to the community you want to organize events you want to be present you want them to be able to see that you're listening to them while they are chatting mostly with each other as a support person i prefer then to have this separate area the sort of serious zone where now it's not so much ah fun community interaction now which we take you seriously um we're not here to have fun anymore we're here to help you out and get you back into the fun zone as quickly as possible so that's why I like to have this divide between discord and reddit and everywhere else and then the support space
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah. it Just to go off that, sorry. I 100% agree with you on that. And I actually think that is, it's not necessarily a mistake, but it's something that a lot of smaller companies don't realize soon enough.
00:07:39
Speaker
We did, ah I feel like most small companies or small startup games always do their support and ticket management in Discord to start with. Our whole company was managed in Discord when I joined.
00:07:50
Speaker
We quickly moved to Slack and then we quickly integrated Intercom. And obviously services like that, they're quite expensive, but for us, it was like night and day. And now we're able to do support correctly versus um you know Discord, which can be absolutely chaotic.
00:08:07
Speaker
However, ah ah We do a lot of community focused support on Discord. So we have like volunteers and then also just big gamers in our game are helping other ah new users or longtime users or they're building guilds or they're doing and that's like where the community side comes in.
00:08:24
Speaker
um Not to jump the gun. But yeah, I fully agree with you on that side. i think I love hearing that. And I'm curious, Heidi, from your perspective, how did you know you got too large to be able to handle this solely in Discord?
00:08:38
Speaker
oh my gosh, ah when we were just having a meltdown. like i you know um Our community management has really grown in response to what our community needed at the time. So I remember um we had typical moderators on our Discord when when I first started. And then um I was hired originally just to like write tweets. so um But you know as it goes, I quickly took on more roles. And at one point, I remember having the conversation with our founder. He's like, OK,
00:09:13
Speaker
You're officially head of community. i was like, great. And I immediately, refused to use the word moderator for our team. I always said, okay, you're all the community team now. youre You are a community leader. You are a community team. You are not a moderator because I have higher expectations than you.
00:09:28
Speaker
of a typical Discord mod, basically. um And then a few months later, we blew up in ah the Russian community and suddenly we had thousands and thousands of more people on our Discord. And I have such strong memory. I was in Mexico City at the time.
00:09:45
Speaker
And I remember being at the Mexico City airport creating a new role called the farmhands. So our community team were paid um and we needed, but there was only like five of them and we needed more. So I created a new role called the farmhands.
00:10:01
Speaker
The farmhands are much more akin to a moderator, I would say. They still do a lot more than just a moderator, so that's why we call them the farmhands, not mods. um But they kind of became community support.
00:10:15
Speaker
And there's like 26 of them So so just going back, to i forget what your original question is, if I'm being honest, but um like I said, we've kind of like grown in response to how big um our community needs were at the time.
00:10:33
Speaker
Oh, right. Your original question. So yeah, throughout this process too, we were doing ticket management on, actually, I think it was when I was in Mexico city too, we were doing ticket management in discord and okay, this is kind of funny. I actually let go of one of our community team leads cause he was just not performing. He was also maybe just just not the culture vibe that we wanted.
00:10:54
Speaker
And he was doing all of support. So suddenly we had to take over support and we saw how it was being managed or how it was not being managed. And that's when we were like, oh my goodness, we need to change this. So we implemented like folder types and all this crazy stuff on Discord, but Discord is just not simply built for the capacity that you need um when you're getting like 100 tickets
AI in Customer Support
00:11:16
Speaker
a day. Now, we try not to get 100 tickets a day, but it happens sometimes, right? And so, yeah, I would say it was like we were learning as we were going, but we weren't ignoring it because when you ignore it, that's when, you know, yeah things can really...
00:11:32
Speaker
That's when things backfire, right? Yeah. No, I think that's great. I think identifying that, hey, we can't scale at our current needs. i love the fact that you are finding your farmhands on Discord and you are finding these other people that can help you on Discord. ah And I want to jump back into that a little bit later. But I know Connor...
00:11:49
Speaker
ah I love the makeup as of his team and he focuses solely on automation, right? So Connor, can you talk about about a little bit about how you take a look at kind of when you start to get overwhelmed and support, what are the processes that you may follow or or what types of solutions do you look for when when you start seeing, hey, there's a abundance of a certain type of ticket coming in?
00:12:09
Speaker
So one of the main reasons to come away from Discord and go into more dedicated actual support tools is primarily categorization and automation.
00:12:22
Speaker
Whenever you get, let's say, if you got a thousand tickets in a day, 950 of those tickets could be simple one line answers, information that's already out there, information that is already front loaded, that if the player were to click in the right place, they'd see it, for example.
00:12:39
Speaker
And 50 could be tickets that need an actual person to sort them out. The problem is you don't know which tickets are going to be which until you've opened them and already spent time reading them, understanding them, and sending the reply.
00:12:52
Speaker
So the systems that I worked on via HelpShift was to have first three a way for a user to select from a list of categories my issue is going to fall into this it's an account issue a payment issue uh i want to report somebody being abusive i want to report somebody cheating that assigns the label to it then that says which category this is There may be, depending on that category, a question, an invitation to def define the subcategory. If it's an account problem, what happened? I want to change my username. I forgot my password and so on.
00:13:29
Speaker
So by the time the ticket reaches the system itself, it will say on it this is an account issue. It's a forgotten password. And that lets me then have an automatic response that says, well, if you've forgotten your password, go here, click here. This is how you can reset your password.
00:13:47
Speaker
If it doesn't fit into any of these categories, the player you can pick it's something else. And you do that often enough, it will go to a human agent who can then see already the summary that says it's an account issue.
00:14:01
Speaker
It's not one of the usual ones. And here's a summary of how the player describes it. So it turns the investigation that could be five or 10 replies between the agent and the player into one summary, one answer, which is much, much smoother though and easier.
00:14:17
Speaker
I Love that. And I like the automation aspect of it. I've always been a fan of automation. I have a ah question following that up of, you know, in this age of ai some people are are having backlash. i don't want to work with bots. They say, hey, ai is taking jobs in the industry. But in reality, it's helping helping people accomplish more with less.
00:14:40
Speaker
Did your player base have any feedback when you first implemented a tool like this that made them do a little more self-service before getting to where they wanted to go? So initially, yes, there was a a fair bit of backlash. A lot of people would say, I hate this. I want a human agent straight away.
00:14:59
Speaker
And over time, it softened. Once people got used to it, once people stopped seeing it as a blocker to getting a person, because if you really do need a person, you will get to one. That's a guarantee. There's always going to be a person at the end of the chain.
00:15:16
Speaker
there's just going to be a lot of little pop-ups on that chain to make sure that you can help yourself first uh because a lot of the time and especially the way things were handled before where we've relied a lot on volunteers you could get an answer whether the answer was correct or professional was up to the volunteer but you would definitely get a human answer and that's what i wanted to professionalize and fix so initially yeah we don't like bots we want humans but think about but the bots they're not like generative ai the bots are handwritten by myself i know exactly what they're going to say and how they're going to respond to player of inputs and i can make sure that this is as designed
00:15:59
Speaker
a system that will benefit the player like if you're playing an RPG you get conversation trees this is the same concept just applied to something more practical there is a plan I say there is a plan as though it's not me coming up with the plan uh i have a plan to implement and experiment a bit with the chat gpt step at the start ah my only real concern here is now this will draw from my f faq so the chances of it hallucinating are very low but i find chat gpt has a very specific way in which it writes and it will be recognizably chat gpt i am expecting players to not like that too much which is why there will be an option for them to say i don't like this answer
00:16:45
Speaker
take me to the regular bot flow. And then they get the the bots that sound like me. Which, fun fact, players have accused me of being a bot multiple times. Their exp explanation being, you sound like the bots.
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, at least we know bots don't cry ah and Connor was happy to be here with some tears in his eyes in the beginning. So we know Connor is not a bot. Heidi, have you looked into automation at all? Are you doing anything with automation?
00:17:09
Speaker
We have all of that. um So ah without repeating everything Connor just said, I'll add to it. um We found ourselves in a bit of a struggle with capacity, which is something very common once again in growing companies.
00:17:26
Speaker
So we had all of the systems set up, but it gets stale quickly. And so this automation, it needs to it's it's a work in progress always. You're always updating it. So I think, Greg, you asked um at the beginning, um what do you do when you're getting a ton of the same question? Okay, well, clearly we need to make a support article about this. We need to make a specific flow within the automation for this.
00:17:52
Speaker
And then we also try to prepare ahead of time. Okay, we've got this big launch coming. Like on last week, we launched staking, which is a very crypto thing, which I can speak to later if you'd like.
00:18:03
Speaker
But
Web2 vs Web3 Gaming Differences
00:18:04
Speaker
we launched staking and and participating is very simple, but fully understanding it is a little bit more complex. So Um, within, you know, my role, my goal is okay. I need to prepare all of the support articles or I need, sorry, i need to prepare my support team who will then implement the flow.
00:18:24
Speaker
Um, as ah you know, as part of the, the bot that is interacting with our users and then also. okay, we need articles for our content creators to be able to spread the word on how this works. And then a press release, and then our, you know, KOLs, or sorry, influencers. And then there's also the farmhands, and there's also um our announcements, our our blog posts. There's so many different pieces that that go into um teaching and preparing our community for big updates, right? So Yeah, going back to specifically support, we have all the automation, but it needs to be continually updated. So we did bring on a head of support and she is my favorite person. I bluntly tell the rest of the team, she's my favorite person on the team. i She's so strong.
00:19:09
Speaker
And so having someone like that in that position is incredibly important. Yeah, that's awesome. Something you really said there that kind of piqued my interest is that you have articles specifically for content creators.
00:19:22
Speaker
And I think before we jump into that, I think it's important to understand the types of games each of your studios make because because they are a little bit different. So, Connor, what type of games are you guys making today?
00:19:35
Speaker
We are, as we call, long-term strategy games. So build your empire, you fight all the players, and it all takes place over a span of hours and days. and Games can run up to a month.
00:19:48
Speaker
So we have historical war games, primarily. ah We've got Supremacy 1914, set during the First World War. ah We have Call of War 1942, set during the Second World War, and World War III, which is more...
00:20:03
Speaker
button And the principle is pretty consistent, but it usually means that players are going to be in that game together competing for a fairly long time.
00:20:15
Speaker
Okay. So we got, i'm not going to call it RTS, but similar type of community type of game where you're building up and kind of supporting it over over time. And Heidi, what are you guys building at Pixels? So the Pixels core game is an MMO. It is a multiplayer farming game, very wholesome,
00:20:32
Speaker
it's pixelated obviously. So it has this kind of nostalgic feel to it. And i yeah, throughout a community has been very like a core component in the building process.
00:20:44
Speaker
Now we are shifting into a slightly more, um more of a, it's not necessarily a hundred percent publishing, but for lack a better word, a publishing model. So we have Another game called Pixel Dungeons that we recently launched, which is, um it is a multiplayer game, but it's fast. It's like two minute games of trying to mine, you mine as many pixels as you can. And pixel is our token.
00:21:10
Speaker
um For those that don't know what a token is, it's like Bitcoin or Ethereum. So we have a pixel token. So through this publishing model, basically we're building out a pixel economy. So bunch of different games that utilize the pixel token.
00:21:24
Speaker
um And today in a few hours, we have, this is not a publishing deal. I ah can't think of the correct terminology for it. um More like a partnership and they're going to be launching Pixel as a reward in their game.
00:21:40
Speaker
So building out more utility for the Pixel token and more opportunities to get your hands on it. um So yeah, we um we've got lots going on basically. yeah you're creating a whole currency here, huh? You're going to kind of spread it throughout the games here and just all sudden kind of work your way into all these other games.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yep, yep. Pixel the gaming token. Well, it will be. I'm curious, and I don't know the answer to this, but you are a Web3 game. Do you think, Connor, you're more of a traditional Web2 mobile game, right? And Heidi, you're more of a Web3 game.
00:22:15
Speaker
Does that play, from your perspective, the support side of things, is that a difference? Yeah. don't know who wants to start off that one. Well, i'm going to start by saying I have not worked for a web two game. So my perspective might be totally incorrect, but I can tell you that having a layer on top of everything that has a direct relationship to of like a dollar value makes people a lot more passionate, very invested,
00:22:48
Speaker
um And there are external forces at play that we cannot control, i.e. the market, the global market that does affect ah value.
00:23:00
Speaker
And people can be very, very mean, and and but but also passionate. goes both ways. They can be very happy passionate or very angry passionate.
00:23:12
Speaker
um So you need thick skin, I would say, in Web3. Yeah, I could imagine so. Again, you're messing with people's potential money or currency, right? And people are are going to be protective of that.
00:23:26
Speaker
Yes. Connor? and Now, to start, I haven't worked in Web3 at all. But I imagine there are going to be certain foundational elements that are going to be quite similar between supporting a Web3 community and supporting a traditional Web2 live service community like ours.
00:23:45
Speaker
But I would imagine though that as you've said, it's more the extremes are a little bit more extreme as when you're talking about people's money coming in and then maybe not getting what they want out of it in terms of virtual currency. That's one thing.
00:23:59
Speaker
But when it's a token that could in theory also be ah transferred back to real your money in future, i imagine they're going to take that a whole lot more seriously. You get a whole lot more upset if that doesn't work out.
00:24:13
Speaker
I would say so. However, i do also think that calling a game Web 3 versus Web 2, like I say it because I feel like it's a good way to explain it to people, but it's just a game, right?
00:24:29
Speaker
I think there are black markets for every Web 2 game out there. Like the reality is if you're in Fortnite and you get a really cool skin, you can sell that, you know? Well, I think you can. I've never actually played Fortnite. But, you know, there are black markets for all of this. Everything has an inherent value, even if it's just your time, which I think a lot of people um don't think about in Web 2. And tell me if I'm wrong, but a selling point of Web 3 is the more time you put in, like you get like a direct...
00:24:57
Speaker
value feedback loop for that. And people in Web2 might not have that exact same feeling, but it's still, there's still value, it's your time, right? so Yeah, and I'd say time is like the most valuable currency of us all, right? I mean, there's a certain point where you have the money to to purchase all the gaming stuff that you want. The problem is I only have an hour left in my day. And what am I going to do? Am I going to download 100 games? I can play the one game I've been playing. i think people don't look at time as a currency. But the truth is, it's it's the one finite currency that we have that we can't change.
00:25:31
Speaker
And I would love to build on that also. Sorry, I'm taking over here. But um one thing i say probably in every interview that I have is going back to community building um and retention, which is what I truly think community building is all about.
Player Engagement and Retention
00:25:48
Speaker
um We only have 24 hours in a day and we have to work, we got to eat, we got to sleep, we got to do all these things. So we only have a few extra spare hours of our day. So why are our users spending those precious hours with us?
00:26:02
Speaker
I think that is really the goal or like the target answer to figure out um when you are building community and retention metrics.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, I just took that note. I love that. Why are they spending their hours with us, right? This comes back to when you're creating game, how do you find that fun, right? If you don't find the fun in the game, people aren't going to want to come and play the game. and And we always talk about community and community is important gaming. But the truth is at the end of the day, if you have a game that's not fun,
00:26:31
Speaker
doesn't matter if you have a community or not. The game's got to be have some element of fun to it, whether it be a Web 2 game or a Web 3 game. At the end of the day, those terms are going to go away and it's just going gaming again.
Web3 Gaming Challenges
00:26:40
Speaker
I remember years ago, because I'm older, Web 2 coming in. Everyone's like, oh what's Web 2 going to be? Blah, blah, blah. Eventually that term went away because it just got so integrated into what we're doing, right? And I see that coming for Web 3, right? It's just...
00:26:51
Speaker
People are in the early stages, people were piling a lot of stuff onto it. It's just like, all right, it's got to format what it's going to be. It's going to take a little bit of time. Web3 will be a thing. The question is what will it be in the future? And that's what we got to start learning today by by starting to put it out there.
00:27:06
Speaker
i got a very quick yeah i got I gotta to protect i gotta to protect Greg from the Fortnite players. You can't sell skins directly in Fortnite, but one thing that does happen that support over there has to work to prevent and something that I have had to deal with on my end as well.
00:27:22
Speaker
is account sales, people selling accounts to each other after padding them with skins, with progress. And i have very briefly a fun story reported to me by a couple of our volunteers who found out that a couple of players were planning to sell an account.
00:27:40
Speaker
And the volunteer asked me if he should go and physically prevent this sale because these two players were planning to meet up at a restaurant near where the volunteer lived.
00:27:52
Speaker
And he said that he could go and like intercept them because they were writing the user ID and password on and on a napkin and exchanging that for money. And I had to tell him, please, under no circumstances, approach people in and in the real world. Do not go.
00:28:10
Speaker
It's enough that I know now that the account is being sold. I can look out for strange behavior. I can ban the account if necessary. Please do not put yourself in that situation, whatever you do.
00:28:22
Speaker
That's passion, though. and Yeah, you got like a James Bond on your team there, willing to go undercover and ah stop the handing of a briefcase over from one person to another. but it's It's amazing the situations that come out of this black market, that it's not just people on Discord sending messages to each other to evade detection.
00:28:41
Speaker
They were going to do this in person, which is wow but fantastic. Mass commitment. Yeah. People try to sell accounts also, but we always just say, please don't do that because you know there's always sketchy things happening around that. And with...
00:28:58
Speaker
pixels and in Web3 games, there's crypto wallets involved. And if assets are moved around, like people can be drained and rugged and all of those crypto terms. um this is So yeah, I always ask people, please don't do that. I beg you.
00:29:14
Speaker
So that always boggled my mind because I was always a big clash of clans player and people would sell those accounts for so much money. And I know that the studios are trying to stop and I i think I understood why, right? Because people are going to be cheating and maybe cheat to get to that level, then sell it. But is that the major issue is just, you don't know how that person got to that level and you don't want them to, if they cheated, you don't want them to share that account with someone else.
00:29:36
Speaker
There's a bunch of different reasons for it. Primarily, it's down to the terms of service, the agreement that the other player signed by creating the account. The account is how we recognize the player. That is their entity within the system. That is how we know who they are.
00:29:55
Speaker
We don't have their real names necessarily. we don't you know We don't know who they are in the real world, but we know this username is this person. So when the account is sold, we now have a big question mark over who has access to this account um there is no legal structure within the terms of service to or allow for a transfer of account ownership so the buyer of the account is not the account holder they are not the person who signed the agreement so they have no rights over the account so if the person who sold it then says to us my account's been stolen get it back for me we have to that is the person that we signed the agreement with that is the person
00:30:38
Speaker
who is entitled to that account. So that's, I would say, the primary reason for it. The others being it's generally unhealthy to... And I would say this is a major difference.
00:30:52
Speaker
um ultimately i don't think there's that much between web 2 and web 3 i would say the inclusion of real world money is the the biggest difference here in terms of how the community interacts with each other for us for traditional live service for traditional publishing having money going between players that you have no real oversight over or control over or doesn't involve you is quite dangerous for us it ah involves uh you can have players who are at each other's throats over it agreements between them that involve real money uh if a community organized tournament has a cash prize and
00:31:37
Speaker
there's cheating or unfair or unsportsmanlike play in that tournament. It's no longer, well, whatever, it's just a video game, it's just a a tournament with fake money or a fake prize.
00:31:50
Speaker
Now it's real money. People have mentally spent that money. They are very, very angry it's been snatched out from under them and they don't believe it was justified. So that's the, the two big reasons we would keep like the black markets at bay in, in my area of things at least.
00:32:09
Speaker
Similar on your side, Heidi. Yeah. I was just giggling there because it turned into a web three game. It sounded like at the end and there. um So yeah. a All the above. um And I would say in crypto and web three and,
00:32:26
Speaker
There are a lot of bad actors out there and they can do some shady things, especially with crypto wallets. And and what happens a lot of the time, too, is the person that builds up this account, it's a bot, they've cheated, they've done something, they've done something that goes against our rules.
00:32:45
Speaker
They sell it to a player who probably doesn't have as much experience in computer engineering or whatever they did, or in crypto. They simply, they're just here to have a good time and they have no idea. And then we ban the account and they have no idea.
00:32:58
Speaker
All their investment is gone and they're really upset and sad. It's just, there's so many icky situations that happen. And so I beg users like, please don't do that. No, that's fair. Right. I mean, just protect yourself at the end of the day. Right. You don't wanna to get banned for something you didn't do.
00:33:13
Speaker
But that's a super common thing. Like, I'm quite resilient. Heidi, I imagine you're quite resilient. We're quite hard to get something out of. We we know what people are going to try. We know the tricks.
00:33:25
Speaker
Other players, not so much. Other players don't have that experience. They don't have that kind of training. And so being tricked or coerced into selling your account can happen. And that can be quite and unpleasant situation for everyone involved and so on.
Personal Interests and Hobbies
00:33:43
Speaker
All right, let's jump to this fireball round. I got a couple of questions for you. We'll start with Heidi can answer first. What game did you last play? And I know it's not Fortnite.
00:33:56
Speaker
It's not. I'm actually a huge mini game player. um When I, when I first started at pixels, I did not define myself as a gamer because I don't fit into the stereotype of gamer.
00:34:09
Speaker
When you think gamer, I would say at the highest level, a gamer is usually male, right? They're playing on Xbox or some, or wow, or like some, you know, League of Legends, that kind of stuff. I've never, I never participated in that.
00:34:25
Speaker
And then our founder CEO. So I was the first full-time hire. So I became pretty close with Luke. And I remember him telling me, i I, my level on Candy Crush is like 3000 something.
00:34:37
Speaker
And he was like, Heidi, you are probably one of the biggest gamers at this company. And I was like, what do you mean? No, I'm not. I don't, I've never owned a game console. Anyways, back to your question. um The last game I played is a game called 1010, which honestly, ive I've already destroyed it. So I don't know why I'm even bothering. My highest level is 24,000.
00:34:57
Speaker
But it's like, um but it's like Sorry, my light is blocking it. Can you see? It's like one of those games where you fill it up. and It's kind of like Tetris, but not not like moving.
00:35:09
Speaker
Anyways, big fan of this game. Kanek. and pen
00:35:14
Speaker
kind So I, Amayo, on my Xbox, but ah I've been playing most recently. So I tend to have two things going on, my single player game and whatever I'm playing with other people.
00:35:29
Speaker
So with other people is at the moment Space Marine 2 and The Division 2, because made a clan. It's going quite well. But on Xbox on my own, I've been playing Expedition 33, which is excellent. This is one of my favorite games of The past few years, it is just brilliant.
00:35:49
Speaker
why What is it about it? That's so good. it I am a sucker for presentation. You give me proper ah musical score, you give me really good visuals, and you give me melodramatic dialogue that's going to have me tearing up during certain scenes, and I am there for it.
00:36:12
Speaker
The Like a Dragon series is one of my favorites for this because it's over the top. It's very dramatic and Expedition 33 is essentially a French JRPG so it's turn-based combat with some quick time events some reactivity all of the spells all of the actions the costumes the environment is all very it's had a lot of effort put into it And normally when I play JRPGs, I really like the visuals. I really like the combat. I like thinking my way through these challenges. i like the way the world looks. I like the way the enemies look.
00:36:50
Speaker
But I never liked the dialogue very much. i always find it very surface level, very anime in the way it's presented. exp Expedition 33 has everything that I love about the JLPG genre, but the writing is fantastic. I have the French dub on because I didn't actually like the English voice acting very much. But it is really, really strong. And I do highly recommend it.
00:37:13
Speaker
Even if you just see a little bit of it on YouTube, you'll see why I love it. Connor's getting paid by Microsoft to ah to to push that review. And now Heidi's going have to go buy an Xbox. And unfortunately, the price just went up 80 bucks for the Xbox. so yeah It is a good game. I never got into JRPGs, but I am enjoying Claire Obscure.
00:37:37
Speaker
it is a and not a type of game I normally play, but but it is quite enjoyable to your point. It's all about the atmosphere. You you feel it. It's very well done. All right, next question is, what was the last movie or show you binge watched?
00:37:54
Speaker
How do we define binge watch here? More than two episodes at a time. came this close to watching all three of the the new Andor season episodes all at once, but I only watched two.
00:38:09
Speaker
And when I watched the last one, when my partner gets back, because Andor is just, I don't even have words for it. It's just the best, not necessarily the best.
00:38:23
Speaker
I say not necessarily the best. No, it is the best Star Wars stuff, but it transcends that. It is it is beyond. i love that show. And or one vote for Connor. Heidi.
00:38:34
Speaker
Okay. I don't really have an answer, but I have a good excuse. All right. I moved to Spain in December. And so I only got a TV like a month ago and my couch a week ago.
00:38:47
Speaker
And I haven't really had access to a television or anything like that. For a long time. And so my answer is actually, i rewatched Gilmore Girls when I was living in my parents' basement in December before I moved to Spain.
00:39:01
Speaker
All right. Go Gilmore Girls. Yeah. um The last one I'll have here is if you aren't working, what is the hobby that you're doing in your free time? Heidi. um i love just kind of, ooh, okay.
00:39:19
Speaker
i love exploring towns and cities and i did just move to a new place so I've been doing a lot of that. I, so I basically, i start working at around 3 p.m. because I match North American hours. So between around nine and three are, i will, you can find me either in the mountains, walking on trails with my dog, walking up and down the streets of the of the city or in coffee shops. I love cute coffee shops. And every morning I'll sit in a coffee shop and do Wordle and Connections.
00:39:52
Speaker
And then there's all those, actually, that's the last game I played, Connections, because play that every day. um And there's actually a third game that I play on top of that, which I think most people don't know about, but it's called World, Worldle.
00:40:05
Speaker
So it's like Wordle with an extra L. And basically, it's that you see the shape of a country and you have to guess what it is. And I'm pretty good at it. Heidi really is the biggest gamer on this call here, huh? Love mini games.
00:40:16
Speaker
Connor, what's your hobby? So that sounded all really, really nice and you know social and going out and and doing things. My hobby is a little less well known. I am at the moment the vice chairman of my local fencing school in in my town.
00:40:39
Speaker
And we do historical fencing rather than Olympics. So this here is my fader, my training longsword. I also recently... I had this made, which is a messer for one handed dueling It's very very cool, I mostly have them back here because they look cool and to show off I hope my fencing instructor does not see this because I've been injured and not been to training for a little while so he's going to be looking at this and saying you say your hobby is historical fencing and yet you never seem to be historically fencing
00:41:19
Speaker
so uh that's so cool what's that what's that movie where that kid goes and plays and then oh i'm gonna butcher it don't remember there's like two guys they get community service and they have to go be big brothers of two kids and then one of them is grown-ups yeah i think maybe that's what i think of but there you go grown-ups with the dude from always funny anyways it's a great movie no it's not grown-ups i don't know.
00:41:48
Speaker
I'll have to figure it out. But anyways, that's really cool. That beats Wordle. Come on. and Nothing beats a good coffee shop, though. Even for people with swords and fencing. What is it? Sabers?
00:41:59
Speaker
but so defenseences No, no. The saber is over here, Greg. Pay attention. Now, what's the this name of the fencing sword? Is it like an opie? ah You mean the epi? Epi. Oh, it's close. Saber fencing is also in Atlantic Touration.
00:42:15
Speaker
All right. Well, that's an intense one for us, Connor. it's ah As gaming folks, ah that's a lot to go outside and start swinging swords at people. um
Community Clubhouse and Professional Development
00:42:25
Speaker
All right.
00:42:25
Speaker
One of the first questions I have is both of you are in kind of the community side, the CS side of the world. When you wake up in the morning and you're going to boot up your computer, start working for the day, what is the part you're most looking forward to?
00:42:40
Speaker
Does my cup of tea count? Sure. That's it. Go for it. No, um so silly answer aside. I am ah very much a solutions-focused person. I really, really enjoy being able to get this whole process, right?
00:43:01
Speaker
And having an issue happen, being able to identify the pattern as quickly as possible to then be able to say to QA or to whoever needs to fix the issue, I know exactly what is causing this because I have 10 different players describing it 10 different ways. And the one thing they all have in common points to this.
00:43:22
Speaker
And getting that fixed super quick is is wonderful. And on occasion, I have had, you know, when you're not quite dreaming, you're half awake and you are not That sounds weird, right? You are dreaming, but you're kind of awake. It's it's when you fall back asleep after your alarm and you end up in the weird space, the weird zone.
00:43:43
Speaker
Sometimes I have had whole systems sketched out for me in that moment. And then I sit at my desk. Now I have to try this out. I put it all together. And you know what? It works, which means sometimes our customer support has literally come to me in a dream.
00:44:01
Speaker
It's better that happens to you in the morning than at night because when that comes to you at night, you just can't fall asleep. You're just sitting there thinking all night and it's just building out. That's funny. Our head of support.
00:44:12
Speaker
ah So her and I were working on like a side initiative, as you do. um And she actually messaged me last week saying, hey, I had a dream about this thing and I think we should build it. So happens to everyone.
00:44:28
Speaker
you know you got a real one. Yeah. um That's a really hard question. Every day is so different. ah Everything is always changing.
00:44:39
Speaker
the tasks I have to get done every day are different. um If I had to think of something that was just super high level, may honestly scrolling Twitter and just seeing what our community has been up to.
00:44:52
Speaker
um what we're What are people posting about? What community events happened over the weekend, like planned ones and not planned ones? And just seeing um everyone's messages hopping in Discord and just getting a sense of what's going on.
00:45:09
Speaker
um i would say most of the time, that's my favorite part. If there's something bad going on, then it's my least favorite part. It makes the day go quicker though, sometimes.
00:45:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So in a similar question, I want to talk about Community Clubhouse. so So again, you both... know Community Clubhouse and you found Community Clubhouse through the events and seeing all the things.
00:45:32
Speaker
Again, for those listeners, Community Clubhouse is kind of a free learning and network hub for gaming community and player experience professionals. It was founded when we saw that conferences were really developer heavy and we wanted to put more of a focus on customer experience individuals, people who are in the community, people who are doing support, people who are doing that.
00:45:51
Speaker
Can you tell me how... two of you continue to learn while you're on the job? And from my own experience, I remember being the young tier one support guy that in between tickets would browse tech forums and understanding what the latest news was. And as I got older, I had less and less time to focus on my own personal research for growth because I was focusing more on whether it be teams or growing growing kind of the work I've been doing. So how do you continue to learn about the best practices that happen in the customer experience world?
00:46:25
Speaker
Connor, you want to kick that one off, or is it too much to think about first?
00:46:31
Speaker
It depends. i can i can think and talk. that That helps it move along. I'm not a big... researcher, I like to try things out and see what the impact is. I feel like, and this is quite, I guess, specific. This is something that I think a lot of people are either going to vibe exactly with or be dead against. But I feel like in the customer support space, there's a lot of established wisdom. There's a lot of things that we do because that's how it's done.
00:47:04
Speaker
And I don't feel like that is always the most effective way to do things. I'm not going to name any names, but there are certain thought leaders, I guess, who a lot of departments, a lot of people will will follow and recommend to me.
00:47:20
Speaker
And I found as an agent that the the things that I was told to do the way I was supposed to do things, created a very sort of stilted environment that really only benefited If you didn't want to think about your work, it was great because you had this this template, you had these guidelines, you were essentially able to just generate a script to write from.
00:47:49
Speaker
And i always found that quite chafing. I found that quite frustrating. So in a in my leadership position, I do my best to facilitate creativity among my agents and give them boundaries to work within, but not a script to follow.
00:48:05
Speaker
And what i what I have to do then is go through their work, see which answers have the better impact. Which tones did the players respond best to?
00:48:17
Speaker
does it Does it matter between languages? Do they get used to specific agents talking in a specific way? do they ah I want to say develop a bond here because that's not something we want to encourage when it comes to contact and support. Ideally, they will build bonds with each other and with our community people, not with us. We just had to fix things.
00:48:37
Speaker
So while I don't go out looking at external sources very often to find ideas or to research, I monitor our own work a lot. I look through our own analytics a lot. I always try and find what visualizes visually speaking, sorry, which sliders can I adjust to get the most impact out of the different things that we're going to do?
00:49:04
Speaker
So you're empowering your team from within and you're taking best practices that you're noticing from what they're doing and helping incorporate those depending on the results, right? It's almost like internal A-B testing in a way to kind of see how are people reacting, what's something we should learn from this and and kind of incorporating it from there. Does that sound accurate-ish?
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah, nothing's a bad idea unless I've seen it before and it was a bad idea. Love it. Heidi. Yeah, ah everything Connor said. um I would say i wish I had more time to research, but I simply I don't have capacity for what I currently need to do. So unfortunately, spending a lot of time researching just isn't viable for myself at the moment.
00:49:43
Speaker
But um really listening to our community and seeing what works best I have definitely taken inspiration from other companies and games if I see something that um I think, oh, that's a great fit for our community. And I think that's also a really important point. Know your community first.
00:50:04
Speaker
Don't follow the status quo. That's something we've never really done. We don't follow trends just because, oh, we should hop on this, especially in Web3. Oh, my goodness. There's always like something that's popping off, something that's like, this is the alpha. this is the This is the thing you have to do. and You really just have to take a big step back and go, is this right for us?
00:50:23
Speaker
And it's not always right. So just knowing your community really, really well, your company, your game, all this fits for any any part of the company. Like, does this work for us in this circumstance? So we do that a lot.
00:50:35
Speaker
And empowerment, absolutely. Like Connor said, I empower. If are one of our community leaders, one of our farmhands, one of our content creators has a good idea, um do it.
00:50:47
Speaker
You know, I think it's sometimes funny to my team when they're like, Hey, Heidi, like, can I do this? Isn't this? and this and I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. And then they'll follow up with it later. I'm like, just do it and Don't ask me. i don't have time. like It sounds great. You're smart. I trust you. Let's go. You know, and you know, it's like always, it's always great.
00:51:04
Speaker
Um, so yeah. We, we, uh, A lot of the indie developers I talk to, it's the same same attitude as you know if you have an idea, if you have this passion, do it. but Don't ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness if you need to. right like ah That's like my motto. you know Even with like my boss and I, the founder of our company, where I've worked with him so closely for a few years now. and A lot of the time I'm like, I just do it.
00:51:29
Speaker
You know, someone on our team will be like, should we ask him like, no, just do it. we don't have time for that, which, and you know, maybe that isn't the way that you your company runs, but just to backpedal on that point there for a second, not telling people to just go rogue, but, you know,
00:51:46
Speaker
um yeah, empowerment such a huge tool that we have. Yeah. I think maybe from an employee perspective, if you, if you get the permission or the, okay, to go ahead and do something, right. You don't have to sit and wait for it. Go get it. I mean, obviously follow company guidelines and stay within your lane, but like the only one that's going to make something happen is
Support Trends and Economic Challenges
00:52:07
Speaker
yourself. So if you don't empower yourself, someone's not going to come along here and do it for you. So, so take the bull by the horns.
00:52:13
Speaker
Yep. Yep. And honestly, Once again, all my my experience in these areas is with a small company, but like every single person on your team needs to have that mentality or, you know,
00:52:26
Speaker
Like maybe there's not space for that person or maybe this isn't the right fit for that person on your team because, um you know, my title is CMO and and head of community and I am doing the most random things you could imagine that a traditional CMO would not be doing.
00:52:44
Speaker
actually don't really know what a traditional CMO does because I don't even like the word marketing because I think it encompasses way too many things. um So, yeah, that's what I would say to anyone looking to work for a small company, being a generalist, having your eyes open and, you know, being very independent is so strong and will take you very far.
00:53:07
Speaker
So I'm curious from both of your perspectives, you've both been in your position for a bit of time now, right? And we're almost halfway through 2025, which is just crazy, but that's a whole different issue. ah Are you seeing any difference in support trends this year than you have last year? Are you putting more focus in one specific basket compared to the other? Is everything just still kind of staying above water?
00:53:27
Speaker
The emails I get, the cold emails, have gone from we can get you really, really cheap services to we have an AI startup to provide customer support.
00:53:41
Speaker
And that's cool. There are 12 different AI startups that can do my support at this point. And i think... Now, I'm not an expert on AI, not against AI. I haven't put too much thought into, no, I'm coming at this from the wrong angle.
00:54:04
Speaker
Generally, I like to solve problems with the most effective tool. And I believe for customer support, the most effective tool is going to be people. people don't scale fantastically well, unfortunately, they they need to eat and and be paid and all of these terrible things.
00:54:21
Speaker
So you're not going to be able to match one for one your customer support team and your player base. right that's That's not really feasible.
00:54:33
Speaker
But The services that are being offered a lot this year seem to be dedicated to removing the human element entirely and providing this third-party service that is exclusively seemingly generative AI, which I find a little bit strange as something to offer as a sole service.
00:54:56
Speaker
But that's been quite common this year. I imagine it will continue to be common this year.
00:55:02
Speaker
Yeah. Heidi? Um, I think, so I'm going to speak fully from the perspective of Web3 game once again.
00:55:14
Speaker
Um, Right now, the market is terrible. It has absolutely crashed. And we are in a place where, you know, our daily active users have gone way down and people are extra touchy and passionate.
00:55:31
Speaker
And so we've been here before though. um So it's all about
00:55:41
Speaker
making sure that your team is supported and can be resilient through these times, I would say. um Yeah, that would be my best answer. I don't have anything hyper-specific for how how this year is different from last besides more tickets but angrier ones. Or sorry, fewer tickets but angrier ones. Yeah, you know, I think the economy plays a whole role in this and that itself is alone just to say, hey, we're just trying to stay afloat right now. There's there's turbulence in the whole space, right? It's not just us, it's the whole space. And right now what we're trying to do is just make sure that we're getting the the, I know you're not in this part, but like getting the water out of the boat right before you sink. Like you want to just make
Future Plans and Gratitude
00:56:23
Speaker
sure everything's shored up. You want to make sure everything's working as it's supposed to.
00:56:28
Speaker
Great answers. I appreciate it. Last question I have for you, and then you're both free for the day. um If the founders of Community Clubhouse could come to you and say, what session would you like to see Gamescom?
00:56:40
Speaker
Would there be a topic that would be most exciting to you and be like, I need to go. i need to make sure my butt is in that seat.
00:56:49
Speaker
so when So I went to Community Clubhouse three years ago, and i We were very small back then. We had a very small community and I had no idea what I was doing, or at least I thought I didn't know.
00:57:07
Speaker
In retrospect, I had a lot of experience that I had. i think legitimizing community as an industry was something That is is something that is happening more and more now, which is incredible. But back then, i didn't even like think of community management as a thing until suddenly it was my job title, right?
00:57:25
Speaker
And so I was just looking for anything. um And I found Community Clubhouse on a list of things and I went, it was pouring with rain and I sat front row and I asked a bunch of questions. There's a, there's a photo of me from three years ago where I'm asking a question and, oh, this is funny. This relates back to the beginning of this, uh, this podcast where I was soaking wet. My hair was insane in this photo and I was asking a question and I was taking notes.
00:57:55
Speaker
And, um, so think for me, it might not relate to me right now, but it would really help others of like, uh, community 101 where there's literally like step one this is what you should be looking at and this is what you should be doing and this is what you should be caring about when you are just starting out.
00:58:16
Speaker
Because I was going like, ah you know, what's the saying? Like chicken with your head coming off. You don't know what you're doing, right? um And so I would love that for newbies in the space to have access to something like that from people that are experienced.
00:58:31
Speaker
Yeah. Beautiful. Love it. Thank you for that. Connor. I'm going to be very sadly very predictable here, which is I would love to meet with and hear from other bot builders.
00:58:48
Speaker
A lot of these suggestions now involve generative AI, which could be really, really cool. But they do seem to stop at that first step of just incorporating it. I would love to see what more imaginative and creative people can do with it than me. I want to see
00:59:08
Speaker
I want to see what nightmare trees other people have made so that I can steal from them to be blunt. I could tell you, connor From speaking with you and my time at HelpShift, you are probably one of the most advanced but bot builders I know.
00:59:24
Speaker
And you take the craft very seriously. So unfortunately, if we have an event like that, you're you're probably hosting it. So you you can put it on the top, Greg. um But there's learnings from everyone, right? Something that just forts first starts building a bot is going to have an idea you never even thought about, right? learning doesn't need to come from the smartest person in the world. You just need learning from a lot of people and understand what they're doing. and i think Same thing with the community of gamers, right?
00:59:47
Speaker
What are they doing in the game? We built it like this, but they're playing it like this. You don't change them. You change the game to kind of fit that mold, right? So i think there's learnings there, right? Yeah, you just said something. oh I'm sorry, Connor. You just said something huge, and that is you don't need to learn from one person. You need to learn from everyone.
01:00:05
Speaker
Everything you do is all about finding the perspectives from every single person. I don't really care what someone's job is. i don't really care who they are, what their experience is. If they have an idea or an opinion about ah about community or whatever it is I'm working on, like tell me, what do you how do you feel about this? like What are you thinking?
01:00:23
Speaker
um Because their opinion is valid and it's a valid perspective. So um talk to everyone. Don't just listen to one single person as like, this is correct. Listen to everyone.
01:00:35
Speaker
two were To add to Heidi's point there is have a lot of experience in doing what I do, but that also means I'm very, very ingrained in a specific way of thinking. this is This is how I got here. This is how I perceive the world.
01:00:51
Speaker
So someone who's just started, who's experimenting a bit is going to have ah hundred ideas and maybe 99 of them i already know is a bad idea. But one of them I probably didn't even consider and it's probably really good.
01:01:04
Speaker
So it's always, always good to get people involved in your sphere if they want to. I think them wanting to is really the only thing that matters. They want to have an opinion and they're prepared to think about it properly.
01:01:17
Speaker
That makes their opinion super valuable. This goes back to what you were mentioning earlier, Connor, of how do you keep your learning going while you just take a look at your team internally and see what they're doing and how they're responding, right? ah It's learning from the people rather than from best practices because best practices are good at a certain period of time, but those also have to adapt and change over time because games change the way people interact with change. I mean,
01:01:41
Speaker
I imagine from Heidi's perspective of doing the marketing side of things, that has changed a lot over the past five years from not including TikTok to including things like TikTok now, right? where Where you just have to understand where they're coming from. So it's it's a continuous learning process. You can never be content at where you are because things are going to change. And if you're content, that's when you're going to start to fall behind. Yeah. it's It's like consistency is key in ever-changing systems, basically. Yeah.
01:02:10
Speaker
Well, Heidi, Connor, this has been ah an awesome conversation. this I mean, player experience pulls at my heartstrings. and And just hearing their approach you both take, first of all, thank you so much for sharing and sharing with us.
01:02:23
Speaker
First question I have here is, are you guys going to be at Gamescom? I'm awaiting an invitation from a certain somebody. then Then we will see. We'll make sure he gets it.
01:02:39
Speaker
I'm not sure. i mean, right now I have no plans to be, but when do when is it again? What are the dates? It is the usually the last week of August, like one of those weeks.
01:02:50
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I've never been, so it would be fun. And I do live in Europe now, so it's not as hard as it was when I lived in Vancouver. and I have no plans to be, but maybe. as long as the weather's raining and Heidi's hair is poofy or frizzy. Then I'll be there. Yeah.
01:03:05
Speaker
Well, first off, a big thanks to Community Clubhouse. They they helped me kind of get started with my podcast and it helped me introduce you to Connor and to Heidi. This has all been great. It really does have some great practices. We'll have information about Community Clubhouse afterwards, but mostly thank you so much, Heidi and Connor, for coming on.
01:03:20
Speaker
ah We will have all the information available so you you can figure out where to find Heidi and Connor. We'll links to Pixels. We'll links to Twin Harbor Interactive. Before we do go today, is there anything else that you want to say and just shout out to? And Connor, we'll start with you.
01:03:36
Speaker
ambush me with this. See, if I say I've got no shout outs to make, there might be people in the audience who like, after all we've been through, you had nothing to say to me. So, ah yeah, okay. I guess if my team happens to watch this, and I will specifically hide it from them, but they tend to be smarter than me sometimes, and they'll probably find it.
01:03:57
Speaker
Then, no, I actually haven't got anything to say to them, but they know they've been acknowledged, and that's the important part. This should be required listening for onboarding for the record, but I appreciate your your take on it, Heidi.
01:04:11
Speaker
I mean, you can always shout out your mom, Connor. Like, come on. I don't want to have that conversation. like So you've ah called me out on the internet in front of many, many people. What you just trying to embarrass me or?
01:04:27
Speaker
All eight listeners heard your name. yeah um Yeah, mean, shout out to my team. They're incredible. We wouldn't be here without them. Shout out to our community, obviously, wouldn't be here without them.
01:04:40
Speaker
um And ah yeah, um there are big things ahead ah in Pixels as we're building out the Pixel ecosystem. It's going to be Pretty incredible. I mean, we have a huge launch today. We had a huge launch last week. There's there's a lot in the works.
01:04:55
Speaker
um So i'm I'm very excited about the future of Pixel um and the economy and and all of that. So yeah, big things ahead. Awesome. Well, again, Heidi, Connor, thank you so much for joining us today.
01:05:09
Speaker
Hopefully I see you both of you at Gamescom. If not, we will be in touch. And for people listening, if you want to learn more, again, we'll have links to Pixels and into Twin Harbor on our our blog, I guess it is.
01:05:20
Speaker
ah Thank you so much again and and have a great rest of your day.