Spiral Knights - Spiral Knights desperately needs a dedicated Community Manager

Spiral Knights desperately needs a dedicated Community Manager

5 replies [Last post]

Thu, 08/27/2026 - 19:59

Fangel

I wish I could be making this post under better circumstances, but the Mysterious Spikes event, and issues surrounding recent updates, has made it clear that the Spiral Knights community needs and deserves a dedicated Community Manager.

As much as I appreciate and respect the wonderful work our Game Masters provide, they are clearly juggling too many responsibilities at once. When issues arise within the game, they are expected to not only resolve the issues in real time, but also piece together the issues, all on seemingly limited work hours... Not to mention they support more than just Spiral Knights.

Now that Spiral Knights is receiving actual content updates, Grey Havens needs to reconsider how they manage the community. Critical issues - reports that inventory items are losing heat without refunding materials, and costumes and gear vanishing from inventories - cannot be simply ignored or left unaddressed. Grey Havens cannot expect pockets ran by the community, such as the subreddit or Discord servers, to identify and communicate critical infrastructural issues. Spiral Knights players need to know these issues are noted, being worked on, and receive real-time feedback on the status of such fixes - Directly from Grey Havens.

The revival of Spiral Knights is still in its early days. It will be very easy to fumble this opportunity and lose the returning players, especially when there's an issue with their inventories. I've worked in Customer Support for over a decade now, inspired directly by the wonderful support team here in Spiral Knights. A critical lesson I've learned from my experience is that the angriest customers are those who have had their health, or their money meddled with. In Spiral Knights, that translates to the player inventory. Any issue that results in incorrect or lost inventory items should be treated with a boosted level of care, and must be addressed publicly.

I'm sure there's many capable individuals who would be excellent Community Managers. Even just having an on-call individual or consultant who is in-tune with the community and can ask the right questions to relay to them would be huge.

Please consider this request, Grey Havens. Communication wins hearts, while silence brings apathy. If you can't have a dedicated community manager, community leaders need to have a direct line of communication within Grey Havens so we can fulfill that duty to the community.

There's only one Spiral Knights community. It's important that you keep them.

Thu, 08/27/2026 - 21:08

Holy-Nightmare

I would very VERY much

I would very VERY much appreciate Spiral Knights also taking a more transparent stance when it comes to updates...

And yeah, the issues with inventory honestly have me very spooked, and I'd assume a lot of others as well, especially on the heels of such an event with a dedicated time sink among other frustrations as the wrinkles get ironed out... scary to think about potentially losing something you've spent days trying to acquire

Fri, 08/28/2026 - 17:56

Pdtopgun

What frustrates me a bit is seeing these almost-daily updates that prompt server restarts, but never getting any patch notes to explain what's being worked on. I know a lot of them are probably chipping away at the same issues, but even a quick one-line "Fixed this weird bug. Again. For good. We hope." would be nice. Maybe I'm just used to other games where even the tiniest and most mundane changes get dutifully reported. There's a running gag in the TF2 community that every patch is just an excuse to "update the localization files" again.

Fri, 08/28/2026 - 19:28

Zosu

Nah, it's not just tiny games

Usually, someone with access to the versioning repo (git, subversion, etc) can just type one command to get a list of commit messages from the devs. They can then delete everything secret from it and copypaste the rest to a release note or changelog or whatever. GH just doesn't do it. Maybe they are in distress or whatever, idk.

The last update re-added spike spawning for retrodes in many areas without adding it for zombies btw.. Something you'll notice immediately when playing a spike arcade map, because many more spikes appear.

Sat, 08/29/2026 - 03:13

Gonnamad

Arrr, speakin’ as one pirate to another, I’d say…

A community manager? We free pirates need no such luxury - we’ve got the open sea, blind luck, and absolutely no idea what’s goin’ on!

Sat, 08/29/2026 - 18:37

Vyre-Acidlashed

Who's going to do it, though?

Who's going to do it, though? The responsibilities aren't just about who is willing to collate notes and front them to the audience, they've also got to be willing to take the heat and deal with liaising between both GH and the playerbase. It doesn't so much address the problem as it does funnel it through a tube, and we're sidestepping the reality that whoever gets appointed to the CM position has to be trained by GH on what's appropriate to say or address. If they're acting in secret because they don't want to make promises they *actually* cannot keep for whatever reason (up to and including simply running out of opportunities to deliver what's been stated) then a CM could end up being appointed only to end up having nothing constructive to do.

I also have my suspicions that there'd be a pretty rigorous screening process to ensure that the player involved will act responsibly and responsively to other player concerns, be able to reflect those tersely to GH and put out fires in their absence without any guidance, and that feels like it has the trappings of a paid position.

I mean, it'd be nice to just say, "I'll do it," even on a voluntary basis, but the issue with that is, Does GH Want That. They'd have to invest a lot of trust into a third party actor and they'd have to do that with the presumption of some kind of security from them - if it's important that future plans be kept hush or that this user doesn't abuse their position (to whatever extent is even possible) then that's yet another piece of administrative overhead they have to concern themselves with.

I mean, everybody wants to be important, even me in the past, but what matters is whether you want to be responsible. Who wants to be the guy who people say "well where's [Knight] when everything's going wrong? why aren't they forwarding our concerns!?" of?

To be completely sincere I think Fangel makes a good case for *themselves* being appointed (given stated experience), but anyone willing to be a friendly face and a helpful player could POTENTIALLY hold that mantle - with the looming reality that it'd change the way they see and interact with the game they love being something they just have to willingly put themselves beneath the shadow of.

Who's going to put their head on the block?

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Spiral Knights desperately needs a dedicated Community Manager