When you want to build and manage a worldwide community, you have to define your official channels, being for top-down announcements or both-sided discussion with your community.
And things get more complicated when you want to use different languages, as the main social networks change depending on the countries.
In Earthium we decided to organize our discussion channels this way:
- Discord as a central point, in English,
- plus one major Social Network by area / language, for example Facebook for US/EU, WeChat for CN, etc.
This way, we will propose two options everywhere: the main local social network in the local language, and Discord in English.
But anyway, if there is never anyone from the Team to discuss with the Players and answer their questions, what is the use of all these discussion channels? And if the Team spend its time to discuss with the Players in the discussion channels, how will they work on Earthium?
We have enough experience in Internet and even in this kind of platform to know that naming Mods is far from enough to solve this dilemma. We need a way to make the Team ubiquitous.
And that’s what we’ve done in Earthium. We invented Metathrons!
Metathrons are proxies from the Team. The have access to internal classified information and accreditation levels of this information. So, they are able to answer the Players’ questions the same way the Team would, including “I can’t explain this yet, but we have a plan to manage that, and it’s expected to be implemented next month.”
It’s a very different role from Mods, Organizers, Ambassadors or any other official Teams of Players.
Our objective is to have at any time between 3 and 6 Metathrons, living in different Timezones, to be sure at least one of them is always online on the official Discord in English (then their answers can be transmitted by the Mods on the other local major Social Networks).
On Earthium, after a few weeks (the time to hire or choose the first Metathrons), you will never again wait for several days with rising anger or anxiety before receiving an official comforting answer. 🙂