Methods and madness
Published March 20, 2009
Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.
Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.
I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control. Continue reading →
Bye-bye, Lighthouse
Published November 17, 2008
This was a surprise. Looks like it took place end of last week, but with my ear very much not pressed to the ground regarding these things, it’s no surprise Massively was the first I heard about it. (Also shows how much of a WoW-obsessed press we have when this took days to surface; everyone’s busy reporting the most intimate of details from the frozen north.)
Straight off, I’d have to say it’s a shame; just because it’s always a shame when someone moves on from a job that they most probably loved and enjoyed, because of internal pressure or because of a mistake they might have been able to weather. You can probably sense my ambivalence here though, and that’s simply because I didn’t know Alex (AKA Lighthouse) as well as others did. (Not to be confused with Alex AKA GhostRaptor, EU Community Team Lead, by the way.) Continue reading →
Quest for GC: Behind the Scenes, Part 5
Published September 3, 2008
When I originally started writing these, I thought I’d be finished in this part. Clearly I can’t count: at a rate of two episodes per part, with eleven episodes to talk about, I won’t be finished until part six.
The fact that I can’t do simple division won’t be a surprise to my mother, but it is a continuing source of disappointment to my secondary school maths teacher, Mr Chenery. Sorry, sir. Continue reading →
Posted in Community, Jobsworth, MMO-related, Rockjaw | Tagged behind the scenes, Community, Quest for GC, video
Quest for GC: Behind the Scenes, Part 3
Published August 30, 2008
Now this is where it gets complicated. Why? Because we started to shoot out of sequence, that’s why…
Episode 5: Looking forward to…
This was supposed to be an easy episode. In fact, it was supposed to be the throwaway, edited quickly, filler episode between other episodes – hell, it was practically supposed to be a clip show. (Hmm. Could I do a clip show? Very possibly….)
Brief was simple; loads of people who are going to the Games Convention telling us what they’re most looking forward to. In one word. Or one sentence. Or one paragraph just please don’t monopolise the camera as there are others who need to be part of this thing thank you.
So I gave the camera to Spaff and off he went. On his first pass, when I downloaded the footage, I couldn’t help but notice something.
“Why… is Volker on the toilet?” Continue reading →
Posted in Community, Jobsworth, MMO-related | Tagged behind the scenes, Community, Quest for GC, video
Some Aion and GC-related links
Published August 29, 2008
A few links ‘n’ things I thought you might be interested in….
Couple of Aion previews
Pre-Leipzig we gave an exclusive Aion preview to PCGZine, who visited the office and got loads of ‘stuff’ from us that they’ve put together into a six-page preview. In case you didn’t know, they’re a PDF-based online magazine, so you don’t even have to go to the shops to read it.
Anyway, you can grab the PDF file right here and have a peruse. It’s supposed to be ‘interactive’ with rollover videos and stuff, which might work in Acrobat, but I’ll tell you right now doesn’t work on a Mac.
If you’d prefer a preview that isn’t in PDF format, you might enjoy this look at Aion from The Escapist, who aren’t generally known for their hyperbole. They like what they saw at the recent press preview in San Francisco, which is all good news.
The things fans do…
We spent a lot of our time during GC on our feet, but we never made the commitment to distance that a few of our more dedicated Aion fansites did. A number of them banded together to basically walk the length and breadth of Leipzig (as in, the town) and get pictures of every Aion billboard we had there. Continue reading →
Posted in Community, MMO-related, Press | Tagged Community, events, Games Convention, Leipzig, Links of Others, MMO-related, pictures, press, Quest for GC
Quest for GC: Behind the Scenes, Part 2
Published August 28, 2008
Okay, here we go with Part the Second of my look into the hellish, never-ending… ermm… fun experience I’m in right now called Quest for GC. Nah, it’s all good. Just busy. (I won’t go over the chronology stuff again… suffice to say I’m writing this contemporaneously. At least, I think that’s the right word….)
Episode 3: Languages
This was one of the earliest ideas, and came entirely from Martin Rabl’s brain as I recall. He wrote the first draft of the script, including the Ikea gag and – I think – the headbanging stuff. I might be wrong. Then I wrote the final draft, and tweaked it here and there.
Shooting this was as close as we’ve gotten to a ‘film’ so far (at time of writing, Episodes 4 and 5 are in the ‘virtual can’). We shot it almost completely out of order, except for the first group shot, which was done first just for ease. Jen, the American voice you hear first of all, really isn’t a fan of being filmed up close, which is why in part we sat her at the head of the table and shot from such a high angle. Boy, it was hot up near the ceiling.
We got the whole thing wrapped in about two hours. What I learnt quickly was that when shooting out of order, try and shoot everything for one location in one go. Even though all we were doing is moving a camcorder around on a tabletop, it was a pain to keep doing it. Continue reading →
Quest for GC: Behind the Scenes, Part 1
Published August 26, 2008
Right now, despite what this post is telling you, it’s July 22nd where I am. The Games Convention in Leipzig is just under a month away, and we just released Quest for GC – Episode 3: Languages.
If all goes according to plan, by the time you read this, we’ll have released all fourteen episodes.
Of course, I just need to make the other eleven, first….
A note on chronology
It might seem a bit strange to you, from your privileged position in the future, to read me talking here in the past about stuff I haven’t done yet. Hell, it is to me, and I’m writing it. However, I figured it was smarter to talk about this stuff while it’s happening, or just happened, as opposed to waiting until it’s all over and I can’t recall the salient details.
Besides, between here and where you are, there’s the Games Convention itself. That’ll obliterate any memory before it.
So, forgive me as over the next few posts – which I’ll be writing in my future – I talk about stuff that hasn’t happened yet. In your past. My future.
No wonder paradoxes happen. Continue reading →
The coolest thing out of GC
Published August 24, 2008
It’s weird, because I didn’t realise this before. It just hit me.
The coolest thing that came out of GC, for me – and that I had a large part in making happen, which really is part of what makes it so cool – was to let four people give great performances.
Twice after performing a ‘Set the Stage’ piece, our actresses came off buzzing with happiness. High-fiving. Punching the air. Doing the sort of thing you do when you hit a home-run, or a hole in one, or scored a perfect on some game.
The fact that I helped that to happen is brilliant. It might have been an odd audience and strange circumstances, but they got to feel it, even if just for a moment.
Now: sleep. In fact I may be asleep already. Continue reading →
Quest for GC 5: Looking forward to…
Published July 29, 2008
Less of a knockabout comedy this one, more of a farce. I kid! I kid.
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Posted in Community, MMO-related | Tagged comedy, Community, Games Convention, Leipzig, MMO-related, Pimpin, Quest for GC, video
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