Keeping up with your game, what are the daily tasks?

[Digital]

What do the daily tasks look like for a game owner? What do you have to do daily in order to keep your games up and running? I kinda always wondered after the opening of the site happened what daily things started to happen instead of the planning (which I can understand is still there).

Maybe some of our game owners who have sites open to users can offer some insight into their daily to-do's with their live sites? @Anoua @Pepper-Head @Regnant @runeowl

 

[runeowl]

There's a good bit to do from the day-to-day, depending on how involved you are vs how many staff members you delegate tasks to. Examples would be social media posts, responding to modbox tickets / logging and fixing bugs, writing news posts, mediating issues between players, etc. just off the top of my head. 

 

[Digital]

There's a good bit to do from the day-to-day, depending on how involved you are vs how many staff members you delegate tasks to. Examples would be social media posts, responding to modbox tickets / logging and fixing bugs, writing news posts, mediating issues between players, etc. just off the top of my head. 

Do you limit these tasks to specific blocks of time, or generally just work though them no matter how long they take? On average how long do these tasks take you?

 

[Aminirus]

Since mine is still in development, I can't really say much. Most of my current daily things are making sure I save up enough for each month to pay for the hosting and for each month, I try and plan out what I personally need to do. I'm not only the owner, but also the artist, writer, and overall mastermind, so I have to make sure that ideas are up to date and reasonable, payments are made where need be, and continue to always prep for the next updates or future ideas. 

Right now though, for me, it's mostly doing artwork of the characters, items, and mock-ups for my coder so things can translate easier between my vision and how it can be coded. 

 

[runeowl]

@Digital It depends on the day! I'll check for new messages or tickets several times a day as I work on misc. art and development tasks, and generally sit down to do uploads, news and other tasks for several hours in a block of time when needed, so it varies wildly. 

 

[Anoua]

Minimum I like to make sure I am checking up on things, seeing if there are any reports (thankfully this is usually no) and checking out the forums for new posts, responding to those I can right away or need to. I also check my email and try to respond to that right away. If there are any major bugs I try to get to those right way, others I usually respond and mark to get to them later.

On Animal Acres specifically I sometimes have to remove spam posts and ban the user since some bots tend to get in right now. There really isn't much checking on there. There's also a chat on Animal Acres so I check things there and the logs.

I don't check social media that often, I mean I normally get any direct mail right away, but other than that I just post when I have something note worthy, and sometimes less. But I'd like to post more, just depends on time constraints. 

 

[hurricaneviolet]

Kind of digging up an old topic here, but I usually get on, respond to messages/emails and resolve anything there, then I go and respond to forum posts and mod forum posts, and generally sit in the game's chat while I work on whatever else needs to be done that day (which varies greatly by day, it just depends on the current projects or events happening, but this can include anything from talking to programmers/artists, working on new plans, organizing events, changing the layout, fixing any issues, etc.), and I try to flip to the online list to send welcome messages to new players when I see them online.

We have a social media manager, so I don't do any of that stuff, and the mods generally take care of the mod stuff, but I will also do any mod stuff if I see something that needs to be done.

Edit to add: I used to have to do a lot of data entry type of stuff as well (just an example, but handing out prizes from contests takes hours, or if a bug causes points to manually be adjusted or something), but now I am at the point where I can pay one of the admins to do that stuff to give me more time to focus on other things. But that was a huge part of daily game ownership for me for a long time.