plaguelands.comMMOG dev community shiftings
Ugh, yea. Well, since my new duties include rummaging through more sites than a never ending pron popup that crashes any super computer, I made a few discoveries. No, I don’t recommend watching 5 elves, 1 dwarf and a goblet. You will be changed for life if you even watch it for five seconds, brain damage occurs after ten seconds.
20 year online gaming veteran, Jessica Mulligan gets around. She was spotted alongside Richard Bartle at the EVE Fan Fest held over the weekend in Reykjavik, Iceland. Bartle and Mulligan who both took part in a panel that discussed player/dev relationships. It looks like Bartle was fairly cynical about the whole thing, and more or less told the leaders that were selected to attend and represent their corporations that their so called power of influence with the EVE Online developers will more or less a facade. I’m sure the players were more or less wondering who the hell is Richard Bartle and does he even play EVE Online? I know he plays WoW and has a level 70. *laughs* I haven’t found a transcript, but I’m sure it was shown on EVE TV and will be available for viewing again sometime in the near future.
I got a small surge (nonetheless a surge, is a surge! aha!) in traffic from people searching for Tiggs. Well, Tiggs, aka Diane Migliaccio in the real-world, who was the former Director of Community on Star Wars Galaxies, you know the one that blew the whistle on SOE and more or less said, I’m out! Anyway, to make a long story short, she’s working as a customer service analyst at Flagship Studios now. You can also check out Gifts from Gamers, a charitable organization she runs that distributes games, dvds, books, and magazines to deployed American troops.
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You’re currently reading “MMOG dev community shiftings,” an entry on Plaguelands
- Published:
- 11.03.07 / 8pm
- Category:
- MMOG community
No, I don’t play EVE. I don’t play any virtual worlds, in fact; as a designer, I don’t really need to play for more than a few hours to get a good sense of what a virtual world is about, and most of the time I can build up a picture from watching others play and reading up on it.
The reason I have a level 70 WoW character is because people don’t believe the previous sentence and think that if I don’t play then I have no right to comment. I played 3 characters to L70 in Wow to show that I could play, and that no, I didn’t in fact need to play it to death to gain insights into how it works. I stopped as soon as I made L70 with my 3rd character and haven’t played since.
With EVE, it would take me 6 months just to get into a position where I could actually have any kind of impact. Its learning curve is steep and its social acceptance curve is long. Now this is great if you’re a player, but it’s painful if you’re a designer who isn’t playing for the same reasons as everyone else. As it happens, I’m often asked which is my favourite current virtual world in design terms, and for the past couple of years have been replying that it’s EVE Online; I may not have experienced it as a player, but I have as a designer, and in places the design is quite beautiful. It has a clear vision, and it’s stuck to it.
The players are perfectly entitled to wonder who the hell I am. They shouldn’t wonder if I played EVE, though, because no-one who did would have been able to stand on the stage and say what I did for fear of what the in-game repercussions would be. They should have worried if I did play EVE…
Richard
Tiggs is cool. I’ve seen her work in the Mythos beta forums a bit and rather like her. Good community folks with personality and who don’t just parrot what the marketing people tell them (ie, the players feel they can trust them) really help to build up a good community.
I’d love to get a Mythos beta invite if you ever get any extra to hand out to the starving MMOG vagabonds. *nudge-nudge* haha.
If I get any I’ll definitely keep you in mind!
I got mine courtesy of Bildo.
Yes! Thanks for keeping me in mind. I’ll have to repay the favor.
Hah, three level 70s isn’t playing it to death? I played it to death by level 43. I guess you’re better at being a zombie than I am, for that I commend you.
laughs, yea 3 70’s is pretty hardcore in my book. As for the rest of Bartle’s post, I’ve been meaning to reply to it with another post, I haven’t got around to it yet. I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about EVE and use the oft to familiar excuse of well I would have to play it for two years before I was even effective to avoid playing it.