As part of White Nights Helsinki 2016, Supercell’s Community Manager, Marika Appel, sat down for a "fireside chat" with Nevosoft’s Julia Lebedeva.
"If we don’t have players, we don’t have a game" said Appel, who is one of just two community managers who work on Clash of Clans.
A wide reaching community
This two-person team looks after 25 million active users across all Supercell’s platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and the company’s own forum.
"YouTube is our most important, most active channel" said Appel, stating that there are 27,000 channels creating Clash of Clans videos, which have a collective number of approximately 5.7 billion views.
But Supercell’s own YouTube presence isn’t particularly prominent, so Appel works with the larger YouTubers to see how Supercell can support them and help promote Clash of Clans.
You can't please everyone
Responding to a question on how to respond to negative feedback, Appel said that the first thing to do is "listen".
"If you can provide a solution, or good news or bad news, do that immediately", she said, though if players are upset about something being changed that you think was a good decision, you just need to be honest and ride it out.
There is also a very vocal minority who make complaints against the game when these updates happen, so it's important to remember that the majority of players don't mind.
People who take the time to write long complaints are the best guys.
But it can be hard to read negative comments, and Appel says "community managers can't take this personally."
Millions of different voices
She also said that the people who take the time to write long complaints "are the best guys", as they are the ones who truly love the game and want to see it be perfect.
In terms of looking after the game as a global community, Appel handles the majority of communication in English, because the game mostly uses its own specific jargon.
There are other community managers who look after the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean communities, purely because the majority of players there don't speak English.
