Internship at EVERYDAYiPLAY

Everydayiplay Object: third year internship
Duration: from 04.11.2013 to 04.07.2014
Subject: Community Management

customer relationship on Facebook and by email
creating and managing an external forum
creating and managing a public beta

During the research for my third internship, I had the opportunity to leave France for Poland, to join the startup EVERYDAYiPLAY founded by Vincent Vergonjeanne, previously co-founder of Kobojo. The company's game, Vikings Gone Wild, created few months before, had already reached 800 000 players and needed a Community Manager. I enjoyed the game, the idea of going in something totally unknown too, I applied.

I didn't know any Polish word, but with some help from the French Game Designer before going, and from the Polish System Administrator after arriving, my installation was not much more complicated than moving to Paris 2 years earlier. I came in Poland one week before starting to work to find an apartment, to open a bank account and to get a Polish mobile phone number, and I was ready.

Vikings Gone Wild is easy to understand: you start with a town to upgrade, buildings to raise, units to recruit and upgrade as well. You first have access to single player Adventures where you must destroy with your units pre-made bases, managed by the computer, and win resources. It's a kind of training for the real Player versus Player mode which you will have access to after a while. You will then be able to attack other players to steal part of their resources and by doing so progress faster. You can also be helped by your Guild, as well as you can help it to evolve, or by your friends, from whom you can ask for Beer and Gold, the in-game resources.

Vikings Gone Wild With its cartoonist and very humoristic (some towers fire leaving animals on the opponents for example) universe, it's a very sympathetic and addictive game. Some players spend several consecutive hours on the game each day. Beer

I started a few days before the launch of a big new update in the game: the Guild Wars. As this feature was really changing the game profoundly, we needed to test it with more players than usual (other updates were only tested by the team). So we recruited about 200 Beta testers, that we invited to a brand new external forum created for that purpose.

They didn't know it at this point, but this forum was also in Beta test. There were two official Facebook groups before, one as Forum and the other one as Support, but they were not convenient enough anymore: hundreds of thousands of players can't decently discuss in a Facebook group, the publications are always hidden one by each other.

As the test succeeded, the forum was officially launched few days before Christmas. New members registered every day and it was growing progressively. Many discussions about the game took place on it. It allowed us to reduce the number of private messages that we received each day, which was really too high and for repetitive tasks: reply to the same bugs, to the same questions... A forum was absolutely necessary so that the community could take care of itself, at least partially.

With the time we saved like this, we had enough time to start a new project: an external Wiki. Vikings Gone Wild was first made to be played by casual gamers, but in reality it was played by many hardcore gamers, who were searching for the best subtleties that the game was offering, like the precise damage values of the defence towers (only the damages per second are displayed in game).

This internship was the start of a very interesting journey and career in Poland.