Part 3: Online Warmachine Communities | Warmachine & Iron Kingdoms Manifesto

Talking to the community, about the community. We’re getting meta, folks.

Community is probably one of the most important aspects of any miniature wargame. It’s a big topic, so today I’m specifically going to focus on online spaces for Warmachine.

If you missed the last updates, I’m Mat Hart, founder and CCO of Steamforged. I’m writing these posts to give you a behind-the-scenes look into our Iron Kingdoms journey. If you’ve got questions or just feel like hanging out, I’ll be in the Warmachine subreddit from 7:30pm BST next Thursday.

The Role of Online Communities

As I said, community is a massive topic for miniature games because, to put it simply, they’re not made to be played solo.

Wargamers are great at creating their own community spaces. They reckon nature abhors a vacuum, but that’s never more true than wargamers looking for somewhere to find local players or ask rules questions. Search ‘Warmachine’ on Facebook and you’ll see what I mean.

The Warmachine subreddit is another really good example. I’ve done two AMA’s in there already and will be doing another next week. It’s been genuinely great having a space to hang out with players directly and get advice on painting schemes.

All of these unofficial spaces are massively important for letting players connect on a micro level. As a publisher, though, we can’t let the community do all the hard work. We need to put our (not insignificant) reach and platform behind official spaces that are easy for new players to find, where players can congregate if they want to, share constructive feedback, and where we can share official updates and answer questions.

Official Facebook Group

Facebook is still one of the most active platforms for wargamers in general, and it’s where Privateer Press focused a lot of their community growth efforts. There’s already an official Warmachine group that we recently took over, which has 9000 members, so that’s one of the spaces we’ll be focusing on.

Updated Rules

We don’t just need to provide official spaces, we also need to make sure they’re places people actually want to hang out. One of the things we’ll be doing to support that is updating the group rules to better match the rules we have in the rest of our groups, and our general approach to community support and moderation.

It’s a bit [REDACTED] but the principle we try to stick to is ‘constructive, considerate communication’. That doesn’t mean everyone has to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, it just means members need to think about how their activity contributes to the group when they’re posting.

At the end of the day, we (hopefully) all have the same goal, which is to grow Warmachine. A massive part of that is making it a community people want to be part of. It’s up to us to drive that forward but we literally can’t do it without you.

Our mods won’t be mega strict and we’ll never ban or kick someone unless it’s an absolute last resort. I’d say it’s best described as common sense… if you wouldn’t say it to someone in the street, it’s probably not something you should post in a group.

For our part, we’ll be hanging out in the group to chat and share as much as we can. Because we’re a business, there are sometimes things we can’t talk about upfront, but overall we want to be accessible and as open as we can, without giving the marketing team an aneurysm.

When you boil it right down, pretty much all of us are tabletop gamers who actually want to hang out in the groups. I want everyone to be having a good time, including us.

Blank Slate Amnesty

On that note, we want to give everyone the chance to start fresh. If you’ve been kicked from the group in the past, now’s your chance to get back in with a clean slate. We’re not interested in rehashing why you were removed, we’re just extending an olive branch for those who want to take it.

If you’re one of those people, please fill out this form.

Migrating the Community Hub to Discord

Moving on from Facebook, there’s one other key online space we’ll be focusing on for Warmachine, which is Discord. In the next month, we’ll be migrating the community hub over to the Steamforged Discord server.

Why Migrate?

The community hub has been wicked for getting answers to rules questions and posting guides, and that value is something we don’t want to lose.

From experience, if you try spreading community management over too many platforms, you’ll get information and attention problems in the long run. There’s only so many places we can be at once and Discord is somewhere we’re already incredibly active on the daily.

Putting that aside, though, the only reason this works is because of Discord’s new forum feature.

I totally understand people have reservations about Discord’s normal format. There are tons of messages in a short space of time, it makes things hard to find, details get lost. ‘Normal’ Discord is definitely not the right format if you’re trying to create a space that has lasting references for players to find.

Discord’s new forum feature, however, works like a forum. You can post threads, search for content, filter. It’s split into sections, so there’s a space for FAQ’s, for guides, battle reports, painting. I’d love to hear what spaces you think we could add.

For example, here are the forum sections, which have the speech bubble symbol instead of a hashtag (hashtags are for regular channels):

You can filter a forum using the tags:

You can change your view within a tag to sort by posting date or whatever’s most active:

You can even get really specific by searching terms within tags, to find exact content:

If you want to post, just hit ‘New Post’:

You can tag your post and upload multiple files, including PDF’s and images:

Migrating Valuable Content

We definitely don’t want to lose the resources that are already on the community hub, especially as people have put a lot of time and effort into making them and other players are finding them useful.

We’ll keep the hub open for the next month until July 31st, to give people a chance to move over and for any creators who want to, to move their stuff to the relevant spaces on Discord.

You can join the Steamforged Discord here.

If you need any help with moving your content, or if you’re not planning on moving it yourself but don’t mind us doing it for you, please get in touch with Loren on the community hub or with SFG_CF3PO on Discord, who can help you out.

Feedback and Rules Questions

We know this is a change for you and we want your feedback on how it’s working. If there’s a missing feature that used to be useful in the community hub, or something you just want us to look at adding, you can tell us about it in the Warmachine channel.

One of the great things about Discord is a lot of the SFG team are already active in there and regularly answering questions, so I hope you’ll find it a helpful resource. I’m happy to confirm we’ll have Infernals joining us in Discord from the hub, to help with rules questions and gameplay FAQ’s.

There’s also about 9,000 members in general, so it’s not a bad place to be if you just want to hang out with other tabletop gamers.

Community Survey

Last but not least is the community survey. In the last Manifesto update we introduced you to the Steamforged team, and now we want to get to know you better. Keep an eye out for the community survey we’ll be sharing next week.

Join the Community

I think that just about wraps up Part 3! Like I said at the start, today’s post focused on online community spaces. We’ll cover in-store events and organized play in a future update.

If you’ve got questions or want to hang out, you’ll find me in the Warmachine subreddit next Thursday from 7:30pm BST. And of course, don’t forget to join the Discord, Facebook group, and sign up for the newsletter if you haven’t already.