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.

That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.

If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.

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.)

I did meet Alex once, a good while ago when he made a quick visit to the Brighton office to get to the know the EU team, just as he was starting in the job. He seemed enthusiastic and excited about what he was doing, and the fact that he lasted two years means he must have liked it. That he’s moved on at this point doesn’t necessarily mean he was pushed, or that he wasn’t valued, but I can’t really comment as I don’t know the situation.

I do know, however, how much developers can sometimes be swayed by an angry community, and how sometimes (just sometimes, and this may not be one of those times) that can backfire on the community managers. Remember people (and I’m talking to devs and players here) community guys aren’t always there to give you good news; sometimes they’ve got to give you the bad. Even if you don’t want to hear it.

Anyway. I’m not going to soapbox. I hope Alex lands on his feet somewhere, and soon.

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.

Episode 9: One More Thing

This was always supposed to be the second-to-last episode, and on the release schedule (believe it or not, I did have one) was supposed to go live on the Monday before Games Convention started. However, due to other episodes taking waaaaay longer than I hoped to finish (I’m looking at YOU, Episode 8!) I realised if I didn’t bump the release of this and Episode 10 up a bit just to fill the gap, there was no way I’d be able to finish Episode 11 and release it pre-GC. Hence, we lost a bit of impact with the central gag.

Said gag being, obviously, “Oh noes, we’ve only gone and forgotten the game we’re demo’ing” (nudge nudge, wink wink). In case you’re wondering, no, Martin wasn’t responsible for making sure Aion was on our demo PCs… that’s IT’s job, amongst others. Nor indeed do we use DVD burners to make installers for the PCs. In fact, it’s all done with magic.

This was a pretty easy shoot, especially considering it has a grand total of two shots in it (Medium two-shot; single close-up). We did it all after work one night, which again meant that Martin had to run around shouting in an empty office, but by this point people were used to it.

Martin’s close-up acting was fun, but was something of a pain to edit – not because of anything he did, but because of background people in the shot during his close-up. I only realised on editing that there were two people standing at the other end of the office behind his head; so to eliminate them from ‘continuity’, short of doing a George Lucas-style digital removal, I had to cut very carefully away from him as he half-exited frame. I really like being able to cut on a frame-to-frame basis, but man, sometimes it’s a pain. Of course you guys never notice it either – it should, rightfully, be seamless if it works.

I should mention how good Jörg was in the ‘unflashy’ role too; he improvised his little “Uh-oh” at the end, which a lot of people enjoyed. A great straight man, which is why of course he was cast in Episode 10…

Episode 10: Subliminal Messaging

The idea for this episode was thrown together fast after Martin and I saw the stand renders, and heard they were supposed to be ‘top secret’ until very close to GC. We immediately decided it’d be cool to do a video where we were lamenting that we couldn’t show fans the renders, but that they were great, and if only we had some way… so the script was practically written right then.

This was shot directly after Episode 9 – we just upped and moved into our staff room, Monkey Ranch, and set up. Shooting it was easy-peasy, except for sound issues – the vending machine you can see in the background, plus the coffee machine that you can’t see, both intermittently decided to make noises that would probably have appeared on the soundtrack. (I have to guess at that myself, because we can’t monitor sound on our camcorder. I know, crappy.)

Anyway, apart from that it was all easy. I loved Martin and Jörg’s ending stuff – especially Martin’s voice after I suggested it should be more “Scooby Doo like” (by which I meant ‘more cheesy’ not ‘more like a cartoon dog’). In fact I liked it so much, I decided to film it right there and then, deliberately framing it to look like it was ‘behind the scenes’. Something I came back to… or will come back to… ah, this timeline stuff confuses me.

Those were two simple episodes, easily shot, easily completed. Editing Episode 10 was a little trickier than I imagined – doing the ‘subliminal’ stuff in particular was fiddly – but it didn’t take too long. The problem that became apparent later was the scheduling.

Originally this would have gone out right after Episode 9, which itself was supposed to debut on the Monday of GC week; so the first gag would have been “Ooops, we almost forgot the Aion demo” followed swiftly by a tease of the stand. Unfortunately, things changed, and our PR department decided to release all the renders before the show began. That meant when Episode 10 debuted, the gag was sort of null and void, as anyone who wanted to could find the renders. Luckily for us, no-one seemed to complain too loud. Not even you, loyal reader, so ta for that.

By the time both of these were shot and in one case edited, Episode 11 was still far off in the future – along with other episodes beyond it. Could I manage to shoot everything I’d scripted?

Kind of a redundant question, now. But hey, read along and find out next time in Part 6.

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?”

“He’s just sitting on it. He’s not really.. you know.”

Sure enough, he wasn’t. He was sitting, but not sh… you get the idea. But hey, that would make for good comedy, so bless ‘im, in he went to the rough cut.

First pass wasn’t enough though. Too many people rambling on camera, not enough good answers. So off Spaff went again, looking for more people; amazingly he didn’t even film everyone who’s going to GC (not even close). I knew I had enough material for a decent roundup though, so I started to cut.

I wanted a kind of upbeat, jangly, country style of track to go underneath the visuals; don’t ask me why. I just figured some brooding piece wouldn’t work, and I didn’t want some overused advert track that we’d all recognise. The track popped into my head near instantly – Western Skies, by Canadian country-rock group Blue Rodeo. I knew it had the right beginning, and a number of pauses that’d make editing to it quite easy.

Oh, how wrong I was. The problem with editing to a music track is that the beats start to obsess you. You think you’re cutting to them – but you aren’t, not always. Are you cutting to the beginning of the drum beat, when the stick hits the skin, or the end, when the sound sort of… reaches you? These things can drive you a little crazy.

After a few hours of work, however, I at least had what I thought was a serviceable beginning. I just knew this wasn’t a quick-and-easy filler project any more, though.

Luckily, I got saved by Marek. Having given us a pure comedy answer to work around (“Leipzig…? What?”) I started to build around that, and got inspired to add in the back-and-forth between the subtitles and what people were saying. When I noticed Jörg’s comedy eyebrows, that helped even more suddenly I had plenty to work with, and cutting it was just a matter of time.

With that done, it was on to the next one. Which wasn’t actually the next one. But just to ease confusion, let’s talk about the next one anyway…

Episode 6: Costume Competition Auditions

This was about where things started to get crazy. I mean, Episode 4 had been longer than the others, but this one was downright ambitious by comparison. We had props, we had costumes, we had a rap planned. I had no idea what I was walking into with this episode… although it got much, much worse later.

We shot this on a Wednesday, edited it on a Thursday and released on Friday, which is a crazy schedule, and just proof of how much I wanted it to happen. The original impetus to do this episode was Martin’s, who even came up with a script involving Solid Snake, Hiro and the Bling Gnome… James and I read it over though, and decided we could beef it up a bit. As we’d done a sort-of audition thing with Setting the Stage, we decided to go all-out with episode 6.

The script was pretty much a mish-mash of different ideas thrown in by just about everyone, including some that came together during the shoot, and others during the edit. The basic structure and many of the lines were mine, including The Shark (You gotta love continuity gags), Jörg’s desire to wear the Ghost Widow outfit, GenericHero235 and the Bling Gnome doing a rap – although full credit to James, he can rhyme and I can’t, so he handled the lyrics. (Well, with the possible exception of ‘street’ and ‘excrete’, which was mine.)

One thing I will say about the script is that it has – to date, considering we’re not finished yet – my favourite line of the entire series, which is The Shark’s aborted origin, “Born of fish and man…”. It helps that Martin’s delivery of it reduced me to helpless, take-destroying laughter on more than one occasion. You’ll hear that on the (eventual) Blooper Reel.

As you’ll see, we ended up remarkably close to the written word. Feel free to read along:

Download: Quest for GC Episode 6 script

As normal, we shot out of sequence for this, starting off with filming all of the audition stuff. It was a fast shoot in a timeslot in the middle of the day, taking over a much-needed meeting room, so we were against the clock on it. Jörg came in first, doing his bit in a bath towel (somehow, we forgot the furry cape; the towel was funnier) and then, after a few fluffs, his Ghost Widow piece. Honestly, beyond that I can’t remember the order we shot in, so here’s just a few thoughts from each bit.

Martin, as The Shark, had been thinking about how to do this for a while and was raring to go when we filmed. The ‘helmet’ he wore was brilliantly constructed by Chris that morning, and probably sold the gag more than I ever expected. I started laughing the minute I saw Martin walk into frame with it on. Then when he did the lines, I literally had to stop filming I was laughing so hard. More than one take spoiled there….

Alex actually suggested the “But I do have a knife” line, which was better than my original; he’s always up for terrible Australian gags, it seems.

Loic also had loads of ideas for his GenericHero235 thing, but most involved props (and time) we didn’t have, so all we ended up doing was his entrance, which was priceless. He did the jump you see in the final film on the first take, and the framing (by accident) was so perfect, I didn’t see any need to do it again. Unfortunately, he then took about ten takes to get his lines right, so that balanced things out….

The Orange Box isn’t a reference to Valve. It’s actually the real writing and design seen on the infamous boxes in Metal Gear Solid, which is of course what we were referring to in the ‘exclamation point’ shot. Tom Kiss made the box, which actually only started with three (of, I guess, five) sides, but was subtly positioned so you couldn’t see the missing sides. Oh, and that’s Tom’s eyes, too. By the time you read this you’ll have seen Tom front and centre in Episode 8.

Volker, of course, stole the show as the Bling Gnome. We came up with a lot of stuff on the day for him; walking in on his knees, taking the microphone, even the entrance. A lot more got added in the edit which wasn’t in the script, either. To make the rap work we had Volker do the audio a few times, and then shot lots of ‘coverage’ of him doing lines which I then cut together. The only problem was, he kept forgetting what the lyrics were, which we covered (a bit) by having him hold the microphone in front of his face.

As for James and I, we were of course consummate professionals, getting everything in one take… ahem… well, I’ll save some surprises for the blooper reel. As you’ll see from the script, us dancing at the end wasn’t scripted – I wouldn’t script myself to dance!

Post-production on this was a nightmare, although in comparison to later episodes it was almost easy. I actually got all the footage into Final Cut Express that day, as I recall, and started to hack away. What I figured out early on was that (a) I was going to need music and (b) that Volker’s rap was going to be near-impossible to edit.

By Thursday morning I had a workable Bling Gnome rap, basically made up of the few takes I could actually match in speed and recognisable lip movements, and with plenty of gaps between. Thank God for our dancing stuff, which I could easily slip in-between. By the end of that edit I had a lot more respect for music video editors; so much footage must be shot just so that you can get that fast-cutting style. I also found that stupid transitions can cover up some sins, too….

The next step was pasting over some cracks with music. Luckily, Chris is a huge music fan (and a composer, to boot) so he slapped together some clever cues that play under Martin and Loic’s respective entrances, and really helped to sell the gags I think.

There’s actually quite a lot of clever editing in this one too, although you wouldn’t/shouldn’t know it. That’s kind of the point. But I know it’s there, and I’m proud of it.

Six episodes down. Potentially, eight to go. Did I make it? Right now even I don’t know….

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.

Apart from being proof that yeah, we spent a bit of money on the game’s promotion, it also proves undeniably that our fans are mad, crazy people who we love to bits. See the photographic proof of this true ‘Quest for GC’ in this Flickr set.

Yep, that’ll be Martin with a shark tank, as presented to him by a fan during the show. (Our Marketing Manager, Mirko, is on the right.) That’ll be a direct reference to my dialogue, then….

Last but not least – AionSource‘s t-shirt of GC, featuring fan art based on The Shark, as modelled by Martin, constructed by Chris, and conceived by me in Episode 6.

Fan-made merch. Love it.

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.

Toughest moments to shoot? Probably Peter’s Spanish bit – he kept fluffing the lines, so it took a lot of takes – and the opening shot, just in terms of wrangling everybody. Easiest? Jörg’s headbanging, actually. I practically didn’t even need to prompt him; just turned on the camera and let him go. He actually ‘banged’ to his own personal beat… I had to try and find something afterwards while editing that sort-of matched in rhythm.

Speaking of editing, it was a hard one (lots of shots) but quite rewarding. I think I turned a corner with this into feeling more in control of the edit process, especially when I was doing the subtitles (which had to be different for each version, as French and German subtitles weren’t needed on their versions). Thing I’m most proud of in the editing, weirdly, is sound; the tap-tapping of the typewriter at the start, and the timing on the record scratch. Good stuff.

After the first two videos – which both had the same core idea, and were also pretty broad – I was a little worried about how this one would be received… but it went down pretty darn well, internal and externally. So onwards we went…
Episode 4: Setting the Stage

Hands down – my favourite episode so far, and that’s not just because I’m in it. (Hopefully I’ll have another favourite before we’re done…!)

This came about out of necessity, because we decided we wanted one of the videos to promote the ‘Set the Stage’ competition during Games Convention. The idea of that competition is (was?) to have players write dialogue for our ‘real-life characters’ from Aion: The Tower of Eternity and Guild Wars to speak on stage. Essentially, for them to write a scene with them in. Naturally, the idea that we tried it ourselves and failed lent itself to a teaser pretty easily.

James Spafford did the first pass on the script for this, and he came up with the three biggest gags – Tia’s Guild Wars speech, Jörg’s ‘lorem ipsum’ routine, and the idea of quoting Star Wars. I just expanded on each of them, and of course added in the ‘terrifying judge’ bit which I have to say, wasn’t exactly hard to act. (Honestly. I am nice in real life. Hopefully the blooper reel will show this… a bit.) James’ humour is just perfect for this sort of thing, and we riff off each other to build the ideas up, so it’s a good combo.

Filming this was a doddle really. I think our German actors, in particular, are getting a bit used to it now! I only needed a couple of takes for almost everything, and after we had all of their shots, we reversed the setup and filmed me. I of course had given myself the biggest ‘speech’ in the thing (“You’re providing dialogue” etc) which wasn’t deliberate, believe it or not… that was the hardest thing to get down in one take. I managed to do quite a few different takes on my various lines too, which gave me good choices in the editing (and a few bloopers).

Editing this was quite fast, probably because I had good material to work with… because the rough cut assembled so fast, that let me tweak a lot more while editing. There’s a few tricks in there I’m really proud of, where I managed to piece together separate takes to form one seamless piece, or where I have sound coming in under another shot (the clicking pen is the best example of that). Editing’s a crazy-powerful tool, it has to be said. You can’t fix everything but with enough material, you can fix a hell of a lot.

A few extra boosts really put this over-the-top for me though. Chris (AKA Aero) found the music for the ending, which I think it’s fair to say, was perfect. As I said, James’ original gags were spot on, and I couldn’t have asked for better performances from everyone.

Best of all – it’s practically word-for-word identical to the original script. Don’t take my word for it though – download and have a read for yourself, and you too can see what direction I gave myself in how to click a pen.

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.

The crazy fool idea

I can’t quite remember why we decided to do the Quest for GC videos. I think, perhaps, it was a chat between myself and Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl, where we said it’d be cool to do some videos teasing our Community team’s presence at Leipzig. It’d get the community interested in our booth there, it’d be fun, it’d show a different side to the team – all the usual reasons why applied.

While we riffed on what we could do in these videos, somehow we got around to the idea that Martin playing an incensed organiser would be kind of funny. In the initial chat, I said something like “We’ll have you being like ‘What, we can’t have a shark tank?’” and that was pretty much that… at least, for the initial idea.

After that, the ideas for the other videos came pretty much naturally, most of them promoting stuff from the show (all of which, I hope right now, will actually happen) and some just promoting – well, us.

As for how each episode came together… here’s the first two.

Episode 1: The Weight of Water

This was the initial idea taken form, and in actual fact, was sort of supposed to be a ‘pilot’. We shot this thinking that if people internally didn’t like it, we could just give up then.

It’s basically just the one gag, so it was easy for me to write; I put Martin and, er Martin in it because I knew we wanted to also shoot a second version in German (after all, our primary attendees at Games Convention will be / were (!) Germans). Sebastian only had one line in German, so that was easy too. Besides, he had to be the guy opposite Martin – that’s where he sits in real life.

We shot the whole thing after work one night. Martin took a few takes to warm up, but got into it remarkably quickly. The funniest thing for me was trying to direct him to shout “Lose the shark tank!” ever louder, which was interesting as one person in the open-plan office was on a conference call at the time.

Sebastian, to his credit, actually did the entire line “What is it this time?” in German, which didn’t just translate to “Was?” as you see in the German version – but frankly, his “Was?” was funnier.

Martin knew from the script that he was supposed to get water thrown over him (yeah, that was my idea; hey, you can’t go wrong with a good pie-in-the-face gag). Martin came up with the idea of him ‘saying goodbye’ to the shark, and once we had that agreed, all we had to do was soak Martin.

As Martin had no change of clothes (he lives really near the office), we decided we had to get it right in one take. We moved everything that’s out of shot out of ‘splash distance’, Martin Kerstein stood to the left of shot with a big glass of water and I called ‘action’. Thankfully, he got it right on target first time, and we all managed to stifle our laughter until I’d stopped the tape. But only just….

Episode 2: Damn those Bureaucrats

Thanks to the magic of editing, if truth be known, this was actually shot just before the glass of water got thrown in Martin’s face; if you look, he’s wearing the same clothes in this video.

Again, the idea was the same one – Martin gets upset when an idea of his for Games Convention gets turned down. We’d written ‘wall of flames’ on the whiteboard you see in Episode 1 as a bit of an in-joke, but were surprised to find that a few people apparently hoped it was going to be at the show… ah well, there’s always next year.

We didn’t intend to shoot this all in one master shot, but after four or five run-throughs, the guys got it, which was pretty darn impressive to me. The one problem which I didn’t notice until afterwards was that the microphone, which was hidden under the desk out of shot, picked up every fingertap very distinctly (you can hear it at the beginning). Lesson learned there.

I love Martin Rabl’s delivery in this; I had a feeling hearing him say “Why must I compromise my artistic vision?” would be funny in a Bavarian accent. The music was a lucky find too; it’s an Apple loop from Garageband, which is just what I wanted for that ‘freeze frame’ moment.

We had no idea when we shot this if it would actually see the light of day, but figured we might as well shoot it anyway, just to have it in the bag. The reality was that everyone liked Episode 1 so much, releasing this was a no-brainer.

I just knew that glass of water would be a hit.

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.

Stacks of MOO boxes

More MOO cards

Stacks and stacks and stacks

Cards being sorted

Saturday cards, lined up

Less of a knockabout comedy this one, more of a farce. I kid! I kid.

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