In the last couple of days Renegade have been taken to task over on their Vampire the Masquerade Rivals discord server for (and I’m paraphrasing here) not showing much love to the official website and forums (there was other issues with the card database but I think that’s a subject for another post). Which in turn gives a misleading impression about the game being unsupported.

It’s fair criticism.

Now we know that Renegade staff are busy folks. They probably wear many different job hats. The world wide shipping problems can only be adding to their work load. Plus add on top the ever changing, fluid even, global event and all the curve balls that throws at businesses and it’s staff. Life at Renegade (and many other companies) must be stressful and interesting at best.

Before I go off on a “rant” I would like to praise Renegade for how accessible they are on discord and twitch. They really do engage with the community on those platforms really well.

However. There is always a however. Not everyone is on those two platforms. Despite being on the other platforms, users of those platforms are left feeling at best second class and at worst ignored. Considering one of those platforms is their own website and forums, it’s shocking.

Let’s face it new and prospective players to the game their first port of call on line isn’t the games discord server. It’s more likely the official website (or bgg), which has been pointed out above that impression isn’t good.

For me the template or example websites Renegade should be looking at are the Wizard of the Coasts ones for Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, plus the D&D Beyond site.

Here are the sort of things I’d like to see going up on a more active official website.

• Articles about game play, such as new mechanics (extra actions for example), deck building, how to play the precons (I know it’s rough and not well written but something along the lines of my Toreador deck post, and yes I need to write the others).
• Articles about the Prince of the City events. Not only a tournament report but a follow up article breaking down the deck stats gathered at the event.
• Articles sharing and summarising rules and faq videos like the one that went up this week.
• Articles highlighting community groups.
• Card errata articles (often covered in twitch streams and discord!).
• Articles on lore.

Granted this sort of thing is a lot of work. But it’s work that can be shared around. It’s work that the community manager could be co-ordinating, and creating some of.

Why some-one is not actively monitoring and responding on the official forums is beyond me. If they can do this for discord, then not doing their own forums is shocking, and they have no excuse. You either up the game on the forums or close them down and direct players to discord.

In an ideal world I’d like to see Renegade streaming Vampire Wednesdays to Twitch and YouTube simultaneously (it is possible, others do it). Or have the Twitch feed uploaded to YouTube within 24 hours of streaming (something that rarely happens). Plus actually interacting with comments left on their videos. Do you know how quickly the Facebook live videos Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games streams get put up on YouTube? Granted they are unedited. But usually within one or two hours.

This isn’t a job application. Although for myself and many in the Rivals community it’d be a dream job. It’s an open plea to Renegade to up their game for a game I and many others love playing. It’s a call to action for Renegade to engage with players on other platforms. To treat them the same as those on discord and twitch.

Hopefully they will listen.