Community

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 →

Posted in Community, MMO-related | Tagged champions Online, City of Heroes, Community

Eurogamer Expo: the new gig

Published September 22, 2008

The future revealed – well, the short-term future anyway.

Thanks to the contacts of the man in the photo above, and my own (ahem) smooth talking, James Spafford and I will be working part-time for Eurogamer.net for the next six weeks or so, helping to promote and then ultimately run the first ever Eurogamer Expo. Continue reading →

Posted in MMO-related, Pimpin, Rockjaw | Tagged Community, Eurogamer Expo, events, freelance

Saturday night’s alright

Published September 15, 2008

Just a quick one here. First things first: man, Judge Dredd does not age well as a film (it’s on TV as I type). Although I still do think the costumes are… kinda good, at times. Screw it, it’s an excuse for a picture of Stallone:

Wait: did I say the costumes looked… good..?

Second: Saturday’s looking good, unlike that codpiece. We’ve got a couple of potential venues, all in easy walking distance of Brighton station. Also, we’re going to investigate the possibility of an all-nighter at a gaming cafe, which could negate the need for people to get a hotel, assuming you can stay awake… we should know more on that tomorrow. Continue reading →

Posted in Nerd Alert, Personal, Rockjaw | Tagged Community, events, pictures

Set the Stage videos

Published September 13, 2008

Almost the last hurrah, this. Below the ‘cut’, if you will, you’ll find two videos that I edited and subtitled (well, except for the actual translation). Both were shot by Jörg ‘Kerensky’ Koonen during the Games Convention in Leipzig.

They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)

The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)

As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal… Continue reading →

Posted in MMO-related, Nerd Alert, Rockjaw | Tagged Aion, Community, Games Convention, Guild Wars, Leipzig, video

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

Four – no, five new podcasts

Published August 27, 2008

In the heady rush of content from Games Convention, you may have missed that we slung out four new episodes of the Official NCE podcast. All of them were recorded live off stage, so you’ll find that there’s German and English in there (translations from the crowd to the stage, and then back).

As well as myself yabbering about getting into games, we also have the Aion community team, Izzy and Mike from ArenaNet and Tom Potter from Destination Games to listen to. Pretty good line-up really. You can listen to all four of ‘em online, subscribe, get the MP3s etc all right here.

Credit goes out to Chris for editing these at real short notice.

I said five podcasts though… and the fifth is a new kid on the block. John AKA Shuttler of TabulaCast fame, along with his co-host Matt, have moved on from talking about Tabula Rasa to talking about everything superhero – whether it’s comics, movies or indeed City of Heroes. I expect we gave ‘em something to talk about yesterday. Continue reading →

Posted in MMO-related | Tagged audio, Community, podcast

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 →

Posted in Community, MMO-related | Tagged Community, MMO-related, Rockjaw, Rockjaw in Community