Direct Community Management is probably one of the most misunderstood processes in user support. Where the Management is for an existing game, AlienPants actively recruits people from existing game communities in an effort to centralise information and user involvement in a game, or around a Game Service Provider, or around a series of services. This means that the people we employ are not only an integral part of the community surrounding a game, they also act as avatars for the game, and as a managed interface between the users and the developer or publisher.

Where a game does not already have a nascent community, AlienPants actively seeks out and encourages people to take an interest in the game, and actively creates a community of people surrounding a game. This core community can become incredibly influential among their peers.

Large Communities
One of the core skills that AlienPants has is the design, creation and ongoing management of very large communities bound to a single genre or title.

AlienPants has been involved in the creation of two of the largest Games Service providers in Europe, with founder members of AlienPants being part of the original team that built and managed BarrysWorld prior to commercial funding, building the user community to a peak of more than 300,000 customers.

AlienPants was contracted in 2002 by British Telecom to create a brand new Online Games Service to complement their acquisition of the Games Domain website, and during the period from 2002 to 2003 AlienPants built the community and service from nothing to more than 150,000 customers.

AlienPants has also been heavily involved in building and managing QuakeNet, the world's largest Internet Relay Chat (IRC) service, which averages more than 200,000 concurrent connecdted users spread across Europe and the US every night. Tom Gordon, CEO of AlienPants has been an Operator on QuakeNet for more than three years, helping to guide Community Support and policy-making across the network. The non-commercial, volunteer-run QuakeNet itself is the home to the largest concentration of Online Games players in the world, providing an organised and safe chat environment for more than five times as many gamers as its nearest commercial rival, as well as being the largest Internet Relay Chat network in the world. QuakeNet is now home to the chat-based online support services for most of the major Game Service Providers in Europe, including BarrysWorld, Blueyonder, Tiscali Games Gmbh, Wireplay, Thrustworld, ShellEurope and Game Server Profis Gmbh.

Email Answering
Answering support emails is boring and time consuming, however AlienPants has put together a team of people who love nothing more. They will happily answer emails personally all day, ensuring that when a customer has a problem with a game, they receive personal support. Email support is also easy to provide as it does not require the person answering the email to be in any particular place - they just need access to the email system.

Email support also serves the dual purpose of providing a visible means of contacting the developer or publisher of a game if a customer is having a problem. More and more the relationship between customer and creator is being eroded by the high demands placed on support lines. By providing a number of people who's sole aim is to answer these emails, the developers are freed from the burden of this support. Since all AlienPants Support Providers are dedicated game players themselves, when queries get escalated back to you, they are of a very serious nature that may impact

Telephone hint lines/support lines
By negotiation AlienPants will provide premium-rate hints, tips and support telephone lines.

FAQs
FAQs are often the lifeblood of the continuing success of a game. Players often find them selves stuck in a particular area, or trying to perform a particular task, or may have difficulties with certain hardware configurations. This is where FAQs come into play. By collecting and placing in one place the answers to the most common questions - over and above basic answers - a series of FQAs can quickly become the primary means of support for a game, reducing the need for telephone or email support.

Printed
AlienPants does not in and of itself create printed guides for games, rather we create the content that is then licensed to third party publishers for reprinting. Writing guides is a very skilled process, as there is a fine line between giving too little information and frustrating the reader and giving too much information and removing any challenges presented by the game. In addition, guides need to be written so they are useful, yet not patronising.

The guides authors AlienPants uses are all veteran journalists or guides writers, and not only have a lot of experience on writing guides, actually play the games they write guides for. Often this is the key factor between the success or failure of a guide, both in printed form or online form. A guide written by someone who actively enjoys playing the game will always come across better than one written by someone who plays the game enough to write a basic game guide.

Online
Online Guides are nowadays an entire genre of their own. Unlike printed guides, online guides need to be accurate, information heavy and actively maintained as the techniques and tricks in a game are discovered and spread through the gameplay community.

That said, online game guides can be as simple as a single page of information that gives simple instructions on how to get a game up and running with minimal effort, including pointers to the latest patches (if any) and additional resources (fan sites, the official website and so on).