True community is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. So much of it is based on the chemistry between groups of members and their goals, and even on the chemistry and emotional energy contributed by individual members.

It’s easy to say the community’s owners and moderators set the tone for the entire community and to some extent that’s true. But over time, communities morph to suit the people in them, and those same people are also being morphed by time and change.

If you’ve participated in a community for a long time, you’re a frog in gradually-heating water. When something happens that upsets the stability of the community—whether it happens directly to you or to someone else—it drives you to think critically about the water temperature.

That type of emotional chemical reaction is happening on an individual and small group level all the time in every community. People are driven by those reactions to decide whether they like the water temp, and if not, how to respond.

This is true for communities of all sizes and shapes. The only difference between the typical small community (like around an indie game on Discord) and Facebook is that Facebook spends a lot of time figuring out how to hook you so you stay despite disliking the water temp.

Most communities generally don’t want someone there who hates the water temp. You want them to either quickly come around to liking the water temp or you want them to self-select out.

Facebook and Twitter want you to stay no matter what. That has a profound effect on community.

If you’ve participated in a small, close-knit online community for years, the frog-in-water effect becomes both more relevant and less relevant.

More relevant because now there are years acclimating to the water.

Less relevant because you have individual relationships in play.

We absolutely know how profoundly community drives retention in online games. It’s directly related to churn behavior patterns too. So everything I’m saying about the chemistry of online community is also true for the chemistry of your online game.

A player without strong community ties will leap from the pot as soon as the water temp changes (or when another pot has a more appealing temp).

A player with strong community ties pauses, and thinks about all their friends in that same pot with them. See the opportunity?

Understanding your game’s community—or building one in the first place—is essential to make sure your community is enjoyable and sticky for players. This isn’t about artificially hooking players who hate the water temp: it’s about understanding the water temp your players want.

Fallout 76 is a great example of this concept. It launched as a full-on PvP game... but that’s not how the community wanted to play it. That was super clear if you were paying attention, if you were listening... If you took the water temperature.

And so over a year, they changed the water temperature of the game entirely. It went from PvP to PvE. That was a huge, risky and costly change to a game already released with an established player base. Most F2P game pubs would have shut it down instead.

But IMO there is a strong understanding of the power of community at Bethesda. Building Fallout 76 community ties and happiness means those players stick around and buy expansions. It means they are waiting in line for the next Fallout too!

These thoughts were prompted by thinking about a community I was in for years, left, and now miss. I’m making those individual hot-water vs. relationships decisions.

I encourage you to be aware of similar moments in your life, to think about how they model larger-scale behaviors